Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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  • 93 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Okay but they often don’t give users what they want

    You should see the state of Firefox on iPad OS. I started using it earlier this year after they finally rolled out support for multiple windows—a feature Safari added in 2019 and Chrome had only a few months later.

    Nice that they finally have this feature, but the browser itself is nearly unusable. It stutters constantly and freezes, locks up, or force reloads with some regularity. In a way that Chrome and Edge (and I assume Safari, though I have never really used that) never do.

    Or on desktop OSes, a website I frequented around 2016–2018 used the column-span CSS property, which Firefox didn’t get around to implementing until December 2019.

    It’s been very clear for some time that, whether it’s because they stretch themselves too thin or some other reason, Mozilla has been failing to continue to deliver an excellent product for their users.


  • A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.

    True, and that’s important context if you’re trying to get a deeper understanding of how Julius Caesar came to have the power he held before his assassination.

    But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.




  • I just don’t understand how someone interested in antiquity can possibly fall for Trumpism. The fall of the Roman Republic was presaged by a guy literally trying to get elected to office so that he could escape prosecution for illegal abuses of power, and the legal system standing aside and saying “yeah, we’ll let you do that in order to maintain the peace” and then falling into civil war anyway.

    How much of that sounds familiar…?


  • They’ve got options.

    • never build in forced server components to begin with
    • patch out the need for the server as part of the last update before support ends
    • give buyers access to run their own servers with an officially-provided executable and set the client to connect to that executable
    • open source the whole thing

    And maybe others. It’s about making sure that a product you have paid for actually works as it was sold to you. It’s honestly a really basic consumer protection concept. You sell me a television and it stops working within a reasonable lifetime due to your own failure, and you’re obligated to repair or replace it. The same should be true of software.





  • Tell me, when was the last time you went to a concert?

    Because you should know, it’s very common for someone to talk a little before the concert or before the piece about the piece itself, what inspired it, how it fits into the programme, etc.

    That’s what he did here. He explained what inspired the writing of this piece. No different to a conductor explaining that Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony was dedicated to the city of Leningrad, which at the time it was premiered was being besieged by the Nazis. Or explaining how his 9th Symphony was a deliberate mockery of earlier composers’ grand 9th symphonies, as a way to subvert expectations placed on him by Stalin’s regime. Or how Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony was written at first in honour of Napoleon, and then later changed to “celebrate the memory of a great man” after Napoleon went against Beethoven’s republican idealism and crowned himself emperor.

    Music has always been political, and in modern times no concert is complete without at least some discussion about the context in which the piece was written. That should be as true for a piece written to commemorate victims of a modern-day war as it is for mid-20th century or early 19th century pieces.


  • I think it’s pretty obvious how this is political. Far, far more than the other recent thread about lateness, anyway.

    The amount of free time people have is a result of the economic situation we live in, where people are expected or required to work a certain amount of hours in order to be able to afford basic necessities, and some people end up needing to work even more than others because the kind of work they do is not valued enough. That’s politics.






  • Apple tried this with the EU usb c but eventually backed down

    Umm, what? Apple was always going to move to USB-C. The EU regulations at most hastened that by a couple of years. Their tablets and even laptop computers were using USB-C before the EU even enacted that legislation. It was only a matter of time.

    But back on the subject at hand, this is nothing like that sort of bullying. This is a company being asked to build more infrastructure at their own expense, and then use that infrastructure to place its own users at risk. They’ve made a simple calculation that it’s better for their bottom line and their reputation to choose not to comply, and instead pull out of a few small markets.


  • There isn’t even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone’s age.

    It depends what you mean by this. If you mean in terms of a way to trust that the third party is doing its job correctly, that’s as simple as using the government itself to do the verification after seeing some proof of age.

    If you mean in terms of privacy, you can’t protect the privacy of the fact that someone got verified, but you can protect the privacy of their browsing after the fact. It’s a neat cryptographic trick called blind signatures. The end result is a token that the user holds which they can hand over to websites that tells the website “a trusted third party has verified I’m over 18” but would not have to reveal any more information about them than that. But even if the government was that trusted third party, and they asked the websites to hand over all their logs, the government would still not be able to trace your views back to you, because the token you hold is one they never saw.

    This is, in my opinion, still a bad idea. I am in no way advocating for this policy. There’s still the mere fact that you have to go up to someone and basically register yourself as a porn viewer, which is fucked up. Maybe if these tokens were used in other ways, like instead of showing your licence at bars, it could be less bad (though there are other practical reasons I don’t think that would work) because the tokens could be less directly associated with porn. But it’s still an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Not to mention the cost that adding all this would put on the government—or, if they charge for these tokens, the people using it—for what actual gain, exactly?

    I’m merely pointing out that from a purely technical perspective, this is quite different from when governments request back doors into chat encryption. This actually can be done. It just shouldn’t, for non-technical reasons.




  • I do think that the idea of judicial review itself makes sense. After all, what’s the point of a constitution if the legislature can just makes laws that go directly against it? The problem, in my view, is that the constitution covers too many things, and does so in far too unspecific terms, which makes for an incredibly broad range of possible political interpretations.