• 7 Posts
  • 224 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2020

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  • Oof. I want to cheer this project on as much as anybody, but there’s no two ways around it, those terms have every appearance of being extreme and expansive. Just to copy it here for others to see:

    When you post Contributions, you grant us a license (including use of your name, trademarks, and logos): By posting any Contributions, you grant us an unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide right, and license to: use, copy, reproduce, distribute, sell, resell, publish, broadcast, retitle, store, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part), and exploit your Contributions (including, without limitation, your image, name, and voice) for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, your Contributions, and to sublicense the licenses granted in this section. Our use and distribution may occur in any media formats and through any media channels.

    This license includes our use of your name, company name, and franchise name, as applicable, and any of the trademarks, service marks, trade names, logos, and personal and commercial images you provide.

    https://loops.video/legal/terms-of-service


  • I have a handful of yearly reminders in Google Keep along these lines:

    Are you sick today? No? Then rejoice! On this day in 2016, you were quite sick and miserable with an infinite runny nose. The past version of you would gladly trade their place with you.

    Another one for it being too hot in the apartment I lived in:

    Was it swelteringly hot to the point that it was very hard for you to do sleep or even go upstairs to your room today? If not, rejoice! Because on this day in 2017 (these past 3 days, really) it was unbearably hot and dry in your room, and you had to soak a towel in cold water, and tried and failed to sleep. Also the cat got stuck in your closet and you had to let him out

    And a few others, including reminding myself not to lose an entire day to watching youtube videos. A few like that.





  • But Firefox good…?

    Yes! They are the most important alternative to major corporate backed browsers, helping sustain a diversified browser ecosystem so that no one company can monopolize the web, and push it toward standards that reinforce their monopoly. Google has tried to lock down the phone, app market, browsing experience that sustains their ad networks, and regularly pushes new standards that de-emphasize things like RSS, and that break ad blocking functionality to sustain their monopoly and invade privacy.

    Firefox reverses or mitigates most of those and are explicitly driven by a mission of sustaining an open web with standards that don’t bend the web to corporate dominance. Google’s cheeky dont be evil mantra was in reference to exactly the things they are doing now, and it’s a little too on the nose to their actual behavior so it’s no longer a slogan of theirs, cheeky or otherwise.



  • Or should I be looking somewhere other than F-Droid for Android Firefox?

    FFUpdater, on F-Droid, manages updates for Firefox and other browsers. I counted nine variations of Firefox or forks of Firefox. As well as eight variations of Chromium based browsers that aren’t Chrome. So that’s 17 options.





  • You said to not vote third party, so you can’t vote for rcv.

    Not only did they literally not say that… actually no, let’s just pause on this. This is so confused it’s actually kind of amazing. Explaining how first past the post works is not saying don’t vote third party. You could still like a third party the most independent of electoral concerns. And explaining the strategic reasoning for choosing one of the two major parties isn’t the same as saying you “should” vote for them in a moral sense.

    Voting to enact a ranked choice voting system isn’t the same as voting for a third part. You could want rank choice voting even if you favored one of the two major parties but don’t want them to lose narrow elections when they might be the winning coalition. You could hate the third party and still want rank choice voting. You can both support a third party and support rank choice voting and understand that they are two entirely separate things.

    And I suppose the cherry on top is you referred to them as “you” like it was a single person in a comment chain where it’s three comments by three different people.

    Truly a magnificent multi-layered piece of confusion, chefs kiss, five stars, two thumbs up, etc etc.



  • I genuinely do believe we’re going to look back this time as inexcusable. Right now, Netanyahu’s extreme right flank is now advocating for settlement of the parts of Gaza that have been ethnically cleansed. Specifically, they’re saying that as long as the army stays there for a permanent long-term occupation, that can be the first step to proceeding with settlements.

    It’s so much worse than even the Iraq war. I’ve seen by some estimates that the Iraq war displaced 2 million people, and the deaths, before they stopped counting, were between 100,000 and a quarter million.

    I think the deaths and displacements in Gaza probably are going to exceed those, and it’s concentrated in a much smaller area, and it’s horrifyingly closer to affecting the whole population.

    Simply put there’s no excuse for this moral atrocity.

    And here’s the but: I don’t see how a strategic attitude of indifference to who runs the State department brings it closer to an end. And I don’t see that that attitude is one of even pretending to try for an alternative. I do think supporting politicians especially in their Democratic primaries is a positive step. And I do think, as with the Iraq war, galvanizing a sea change and discrediting everyone who is associated with what happened in Gaza is necessary. I believe it is urgent to do something, and the actual channels of aid that can meaningfully do something right now exist entirely outside of party infrastructure of either party. But I also think, for how true that is, using that to lose sight a very real and very serious differences between the parties that also affect human welfare in numerous ways, would be to needlessly visit tragedy upon tragedy. I wouldn’t want to lose American democracy into the bargain, and I don’t think it’s nuanced to be in indifferent to that.


  • One of the most commonly repeated and least thought through statements in politics.

    Unions stand a better chance of advocating before an NLRB board that has Democratic appointees. The FTC is going to do more to fight monopolies under a Democratic administration. The EPA is going to fight pfas and lithium mining.

    And god almighty is it fucking frustrating to have to say this out loud in a serious conversation to adults, but Justice Elena Kagan makes meaningfully different decisions than Brett fuddrucking Kavanagh. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you can’t acknowledge things like this, I don’t know how to treat you like a serious person.

    For instance, let’s just throw out everything other than the Supreme Court. To maintain the false equivalence, you have to say with a straight face that things like the Janus decision didn’t matter, or that overturning Roe vs Wade didn’t matter, or gutting the voting rights act didn’t matter, or getting rid of Chevron doesn’t matter. If you can make any of those arguments with a straight face, I won’t agree, but I’ll at least believe that you’ve actually thought this through.





  • Wow, I feel like the most upvoted solutions here don’t work, and meanwhile some obvious and widely known alternatives are being completely overlooked.

    ❌ Inspect Element - many modern sites don’t even include the full article in the paywalled html, so this wouldn’t work. Also sitting there and mousing over elements and deleting them one by one, is tedious, it’s easy to accidentally delete an element that encloses the content you intended to keep, or to drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how elements are nested.

    ❌ Ublock Zapper - a similar to the above, won’t work on stub articles, and just janky because you’re manually zapping things

    ❌ Disabled JavaScript - Similar to the above, same problem because many articles are stubs anyway. And the HTML layers that block your view don’t have to be done with JavaScript.

    ❌ Rapid copy and paste of the article to notepad or rapidly printing the screen - similar problem to the above, lots of places just post the stub of an article, and besides nobody should live their life this way rapidly trying to print screen or copy everything. If you’re trying to do a quick copy you’re going to grab all kinds of gobbledygunk from the page and probably have to manually filter it out.

    ❌ Reader Mode - Your browsers reader mode will be hit and miss because, again, many sites post stub articles, and it’s possible the pay wall stuff will just get formatted into the reader mode along with an incomplete article.

    Archive.is - works!

    ✅ Pocket and Instapaper - amazingly, nobody has mentioned these even though they’re probably the longest running (dating back to 2007-2008), possibly most widely known, and most consistent solutions that still work to this day. They keep their own local caches of articles, so it’s not depending on the full content being visible on the page.

    ✅ Other dedicated extensions - Dedicated browser extensions seem to work, but be careful what you’re signing yourself up for.

    🤷‍♀️ Brave - It works, but, it’s a Chromium supported browser, so ultimately Google controls the destiny and can drive Chromium to incorporate fundamental frameworks supporting DRM and pushing their preferred web standards.