gentoo

No, they become the gatekeeper for all adblock features. "low-level" is a meaningless qualifier here.

> And if new api features are being requested by adblockers, who is really innovating?

Right now, adblock developers are speaking out, in droves, requesting that they don't remove the API features Chrome already has, and Google is saying "nah."

They are wiping out the current diversity of ad-blocking techniques and saying "This is the way you can build an ad-blocker now." There is also the obvious conflict of interest that many of the ads in question are served by Google in the first place.

It affects every internet-connected device purchased by the federal government. Since states usually handle their own voting, I don't think this applies.

In go, there are a minimal amount of primitives (like channels, slices) to learn. Once you know them, they're fairly intuitive.

In C#, properties can be arbitrarily complex. You can't just know how properties "work" and then do mental shorthand on them. Every time you look at a new codebase you might have to dig through several files to find out what one line does.

I think it's worth noting that this is a Media Lab award, not one presented by the regular MIT administration. The Media Lab is given a lot of free reign and tends to do more out-there stuff. You should not construe them as speaking for the same people who betrayed Aaron (if that's how you see it happening).

I don't think the point is to avoid surveillance (although self-hosting may make it slightly more inconvenient to snoop). The point is to own your own data, not depend on Microsoft/Google's benevolence.

> Glimmer brings in the entirety of Encyclopedia Brittanica, just to display the definition for the word “glimmer” in its help menu.

Quite naive of the author to assume it's just used for that one definition. Britannica is an old, experienced organization, whose mission is literally "to organize the world's information."

> It is written by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 contributors, who have included 110 Nobel Prize winners and five American presidents.

Does the author claim to know the value of knowledge better than these folks? Glimmer is wise to include such information wealth, all of which fits into a relatively tiny 100kb. In this age of "Big Data" and "Wikimedia," I can't help but lament that appreciation for true scholarship has been lost. Everyone's computer is richer for having these resources installed.