soundnote

They lost a lot of their userbase back in the day when they started getting slower and Chrome was way faster. Now, Chrome is default on Android devices and people are used to it on desktop. Edge is default on Windows, Safari on Mac and iDevices. The only place Firefox is the default is desktop Linux.

Nowadays they've caught up on speed pretty well on desktop, but are still behind on security, and years behind on security on Android.

Personally, I just like features like tab groups, and hate the Foundation's politics, so it was easy to drop it back when they said we need more than deplatforming. The competition has better features, is actually developing new features, and is focused on toolmaking instead of activism. Funnily enough, it shows up in the products.

It's definitely suboptimal.

Chromium browsers do a similar thing IME, and while I don't mind it, I don't like that the "mobile bookmarks" folder is only really accessible from the bookmark manager proper, not the bookmarks sidebar or the desktop bookmarks bar's UI.

This is a big reason to avoid Edge: They have entire categories that aren't e2ee, browsing history being one of them. Chrome, IIRC, can have e2ee but the user has to turn it on.

Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox offer complete, e2ee sync solutions.

Game balance in 3rd Edition was gone from the PHB onwards, out of like top 5-7 most broken classes in the game, 3 were in the PHB (Wizard, Cleric, Druid). A lot of stuff people consider broken (eg. Tome of Battle) isn't even really a power level boost for melee classes, just lets them in on the same move action + interesting option playstyle casters were doing since release (just at a much lower power level) vs. charge-> full attack full attack.

Not to say there wasn't broken shit in splats, but like half of broken nonsense was Core to begin with.

They burned me out of Magic. It used to be that the game had distinct spoiler seasons, and the Standard format and game as a whole used to stand still for a while and be explored at length. Even the rotating Standard format had a period where you could grow really familiar with the format as it was even if you weren't a really plugged in grinder. Eternal formats changed slowly because power creep, while present, wasn't completely nuts.

Now, the environment is a neverending spoiler season that it's impossible to keep up with unless you're one of those NYC squirrels on crack. See a graphical representation here:

https://onlyontuesdays27.com/2022/10/18/30-years-of-magic-th...

Meanwhile, power creep is out of hand, which means more releases are more relevant to more formats, the quality of the flavour has progressively gotten worse. There's more and more of "millenial writing" that substitutes being good with being sassy. When the game costs an arm and a leg, why bother.

D&D, similar deal. You have a fantasy setting, which should mean different creatures. What does Wizards do? Progressively remove more and more differentiation between different races and creatures. A 3m/10ft tall minotaur and a half-orc are both defined by strength, both get a +2STR which just feels wrong. But wait, there's more! A halfling can now decide to have the same bonus. It cheapens the setting when things don't mean something anymore.

Similarily, RPGs are generally about overcoming challenges. And we get, what. Wheelchair-accessible dungeons?? Coffee shop modules for D&D, of all things, instead of doing the concept in a more suitable system like a FATE derivative? College student representation obsession's run completely off the rails, and it means the product starts failing at its core purpose.

edition.cnn.com worked fine on Brave just now.

They at least used to have mountains of tech debt from the days when the cloud was far less standardized.

Possibly not, but multiple Chromium-based browsers have already built their own adblocking solutions as part of the browser itself, so they certainly don't have to care. Brave's especially is about as strong as uBO, Vivaldi has a decent adblocking system and the people making Arc are looking to build their own as well.

Sync is definitely great, but it isn't really a differentiating factor. Just about all of the competition has a sync service.

Features. Vertical tabs, PWA support. More technically solid browser on Android. Primarily though they should just focus on making a browser. The organization seems interested in doing anything and everything but building a tool for the user.

Why not use Brave, or Vivaldi, or Arc, which actually add features and where the organizations are focused primarily on toolmaking?

Unlikely: You can make pretty good adblockers even with Manifest v3, and there are Chromium-based options with adblockers built in.

It's not GA being malicious in any abnormal way. Some Firefox users are blocking some GA functionality, so GA can't count some Firefox users.

Decolonization is widely used for much more than simply unwinding European colonialism: It's also invoked when teachers object to simply teaching kids math (because the curriculum and terms are European/Euro-descended American in origin), desperately trying to find a way to teach evolution without Darwin because he's an old white Euro man, and so on.

Invariably, "decolonizing" a subject means systematically booting white authors out, or pivoting from teaching the subject matter plain and simple to teaching ideology and relativizing everything because Heaven forbid a minority kid would feel bad (which itself is mostly just an excuse)

What that gets laundered into:

[Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has\-a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which "white" people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one's body, in one's mind, and in one's world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts' appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness's infiltrated appetites-to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning ("never again") or as temptation ("great again"). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.]

— psychoanalyst Donald Moss https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34039063/

---

"Whites learn to be white. That suggestion by Thandeka is that whites are not born white. They have to become white. And her suggestion is that white children who were not white originally - they were born human. Little by little, they have to be abused into becoming white humans. And this abuse is sometimes physical - of being physically disciplined into whiteness, such as being bullied into whiteness. That's a phrase I like to use, whiteness as bullying, but it's also psychological and cultural, and it becomes with caretakers and guardians. Not the least of which - the more important caretakers are of course the white family, parents etc. but it extends to the white nationhood as a caretaker, the white social system, the white social welfare, the white governance system. They also discipline and abuse white humans into whiteness."

— Education professor Zeus Lombardo

as a couple more egregious examples. The extra fun part is that the terms are chosen that you can talk about white people and whiteness as horrible evils, or how Noel Ignatiev said we should "abolish the white race" and when people understandably get offended, you can say it's just a concept, why so angry. That wouldn't fly with any other ethnic group.

Because it's an exhibit of their attitude. The ADL's attitude has not changed, even if they let go of one piece of stupidity.

The funniest/saddest part is that "it's okay to be white" and the ok hand sign are literally just 4chan trolling trying to demonstrate how unhinged their political opposition is, and the hook gets swallowed every time.

> Musk appears to think Jews hate white people

I'd amend that to thinks there are Jews who hate. Obviously not every Jew hates whites, or is even the sort of leftist who typically spouts anti-white rhetoric and promotes destructive policies in Europe and the US.

But finding examples is not hard - at least until a few years ago, the ADL advocated for ethnonationalism for Israel and mass immigration for the US and Europe. Curious, no? The head of I think the SPLC keeps a tracker on his wall for when whites become a minority in the US.

There's also fun people like Noel Ignatiev who campaigned to "abolish the white race". Susan Sontag also had "amusing" opinions about the topic, if memory serves.

These people and organizations are obviously only some Jewish people, but they are prominent and organizations like the ADL do use their ethnic status as a shield from criticism.

That they exist is not up for dispute, a few searches will find all kinds of unsavoury stuff.

It's not like many US cities are really interested in prosecuting criminals in the first place.

Yes. The change is to the extension APIs used by Chromium, and thus Chrome, Edge etc.

Browser makers like Brave build the adblocker directly into the browser, so they don't have to care what extensions are and are not allowed to do on Chromium.

Just noting that openly, not at all subtly racist hatemongers somehow have jobs and are called "antiracist". And in Lombardo's case, educating our teachers this way doesn't exactly sound like a good idea.

He's claiming that the vaccines weren't tested on whether they reduced transmission or not, but that we were told they would be super effective at reducing transmission (since the bureaucrats' only concern was to get as many people jabbed as possible, so they snake oil sold the vaccines as far more effective than they were).

He's not claiming that the vaccines don't reduce transmission at all, as best as I can tell.

Yes. There are some remarkably high-quality articles on somewhat esoteric topics that don't directly touch on politics that I'd definitely recommend, but if it touches on politics, it's highly likely to be tainted and editorialized.

So when a topic like the Hunter Biden laptop comes up right before an election, could clearly impact it and... the mainstream media just refuses to report, or uncritically calls it a hoax. Wikipedia claims NYPost is an unreliable source, and social media sites blackout the topic.

Turns out, "fringe" thing that was definitely not true was true. Was the consensus better? Doesn't seem so, and it's not an isolated instance.

The point is: "anti-LGBT" is much more about politics and ideology than it is about the actual minorities - the minorities are used as a shield against criticism by activist types, who claim critiquing their ideology is hating those minorities. The typical rhetoric is also highly exaggerating, where if I disagree with the sensibility of trans identification, for example, people will readily accuse me of "denying their existence", as if disagreeing with one idea they hold invalidates their entire person (well, I guess it could if they really have no other content in their heads), when it's just one idea.

Same with being pro-LGBT: The activists aren't pro gay people, or pro black, or pro transpeople. They don't want me listening to Douglas Murray, or Gays Against Groomers, or Thomas Sowell. They definitely aren't pro Scott Newgent of "What is a woman?" fame. They're pro rainbow ideologue people. The politics is the point, the minority status simply a convenient shield from criticism and hate claims a cudgel to beat people over the head with.

Presumably: The bad sort is a diversity where people look different but all think more or less the same, so the proponents can pat themselves on the back for being good and openminded people but don't actually have to deal with genuinely different people. You can see it in how those sorts tend to despise people who look the same as themselves but have different views and how their love of diversity disappears the second the different-looking person doesn't hew to their ideology.

You don't need to be very anti rainbow ideology (which should be distinguished from simply being gay, for example: "Listen to gay people" never means Douglas Murray or the Gays Against Groomers organization, for example, because they may be gay but they have the wrong politics) to be tossed from most spaces rainbow activist types moderate.

The point is that the federation mechanism explicitly means that any server that is federated will have to follow those policies, because the admins of all the large servers hew to a certain ideology that will not tolerate dissent from key talking points. So the server can technically speaking exist on the protocol but in practice won't be federated with the broader network unless it's palatable to Californicated activist types.

> people are the gender they say they are seems to be a very simple policy.

Simple, yes, but is the policy particularily sane? Consider, for example, if I were to claim I was a duck. Should my wikipedia page pretend I have been a duck all my life? That would be preposterous, because as anyone can see, I am human.

Our science and medicine cannot change a person's sex, we can force the body to act a bit more like the opposite sex through constant medical intervention, but nothing more than that.

People's inner feelings fail the "soundnote is a duck" test: There are quite a few MtF writers, for example, whose style of communication is clearly male despite their self-identification: They physically are men, and have grown up as men, and their thinking clearly fits the male mold such that seeing a female name under their text just feels off. Just as I am not a duck, they are not the sex they wish to, even if they say so.

Imagine if the Pope started spouting some completely insane nonsense, but did it ex cathedra. Are we to treat his ravings as fact since Catholicism holds that the Pope speaking ex cathedra is infallible? The editors wouldn't, and most of us wouldn't.

Gender ideology/wokeness/whatever you want to call it is in many senses religious, and certainly their claims of TWAW/TMAM are not factual: Our science and medicine come far short of being able to actually change anyone's sex. We can, through constant intervention, force the body to change a bit into one direction, but not much more.