Looking at it, seems not. Google store page says it doesn’t follow best practices and may soon no longer be supported. AFAIK it’s a single dev hobby project so this might be the end of it. Ah well. I’ll just no longer have as many free skins for games.

I only break out Chrome(or Edge) for two reasons:

One is access to serial ports to flash ESP devices, or update the firmware on my XR glasses. Firefox can’t do that.

The other is to automate Twitch drop collection. The addon I found to reload broken streams and collect drops while I’m at work only has a Chrome version.

I once thought the point of conservatism was to put the brakes on wild new ideas and rapid changes, play advocate for the old ways and make sure we’re slow and thoughtful about new ideas. Then I realized that apparently the job is to drag everything absolutely backwards.

As it was before, so it shall be again. This is the will of the GOP it seems.

Wire coat hangers are going to be inexplicably more popular than plastic again too. No relation I’m sure.

Many don’t think he can pull it off, which is the scary part that might let him do it.

“Oh, that’s all talk. He can say what he wants but can’t do shit without the House and Congress, and if he wanted to change things to get more terms? With states majority agreement that’s required? Not in his lifetime. You worry for nothing, PassingThrough, it’s all showmanship, as it always has been. And no, the Army wouldn’t help such an obvious fool overthrow the government either.”

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Is there a list anywhere of this and other settings and features that could/should certainly be changed to better Firefox privacy?

Other than that I’m not sure I’m really going to jump ship. I think I’m getting too old for the “clunkiness” that comes with trying to use third party/self hosted alternatives to replace features that ultimately break the privacy angle, or to add them to barebones privacy focused browsers. Containers and profile/bookmark syncing, for example. But if there’s a list of switches I can flip to turn off the most egregious things, that would be good for today.

I recommend Dockge over Portainer if you want a web admin panel. https://github.com/louislam/dockge

It’s basically docker compose in a website, and you can just decide one day to turn it off and use the compose files directly. No proprietary databases or other weirdness.

Do you game at all? Gaming on Linux has made great strides, be be fair, but for a lot of titles you still need to consider a dual boot of some form of Windows, thanks to over the top anti-cheat, DRM, and developer support.

Something to consider for the gamers out there.

Absolutely. You can even throw the telephone in there. At the start it was a great way to reach Grandma across the country or the doctor across town. Now most of the traffic on it is robots and extortionists trying to fool Grammy into giving her money for some lie or another.

I don’t even answer my phone for numbers anymore…be on a short named contact list, leave a voicemail reminding me you are someone I should put on that list, or nothing doing. Sucks for anyone putting me down as an emergency contact though…

And I feel TV being 25% ads is being pretty conservative…oh, but streaming! Swap the ads and channels you don’t want for a higher per-channel price and no ads…oh, wait, now you get a higher price and the ads!

There’s a whole lot going towards ending the web as we know it.

Censorship, consolidation, AI, greed, to name a few.

Why, I couldn’t even get into the article before it faded into a paywall.

I get people want to be paid but splashing cash on every page is not the internet as I knew it.

Getting to this article from a social site(Lemmy) was also not how I knew it, that’s the consolidation part. After MySpace, in the era of Facebook pages it started. Less personal websites, less websites in general, just get everything from Facebook and Reddit.

And sure, AI is also going to water down content, with prompts written by cheap corporate lackeys that we will still have to pay subs for after a social site sends us there.

And then there’s also the censorship and laws coming out to restrict what’s available. First to protect the children while they are young, then more to “protect” them as they get older, and eventually they will know nothing but state approved media.

To quote the article,

It’s the End of the Web as We Know It.

And I’m old and bitter about it. It had good promise, but enshittification took hold as was inevitable.

Second this. I don’t believe the chef would care.

Whether all at once, over hours, for one table or six, all you are to the chef is plates to be filled. Except for timing a table’s dishes to send out at once they wouldn’t even care what table to go to, much less if the same customer is making repeat orders or a quick table turnaround on multiple customers. He gets his pay all the same either way.

No, I think this is solely with the server. Your choices annoyed her, and if there were tips involved even more so. Quicker you are in and out is the quicker you leave your tip and she gets another customer in to tip, which depending on your location could be very important to her livelihood.

I wonder if it can be detected by the streaming apps. Some of them are really anal about ensuring you can’t record or whatever, and don’t work if it doesn’t get all the HDMI security stuff just right. I’ve had issues with bad cables and my portable projector(Anker) has to side load an alt version of Netflix because they couldn’t/wouldn’t get the device to pass Netflix “certification”.

I’m guessing this means new partnerships and money changing hands, or nobody on a Roku can watch Netflix anymore, or they put these ads at a higher level that bypasses whatever security/DRM Netflix uses. Probably the last one, but if Netflix thinks they will lost money to this they’ll probably just pull their certification anyway.

Actually, decided I don’t feel up to a political debate tonight. Sorry for the reply notices.

Actually, that leads me to another point:

One upon a time, the concept behind a universal USB-C connector was so we could do exactly that.

Laptop? Phone? Camera? America? Germany? Japan? Power? Connect the to TV? Internet?

Wouldn’t matter anymore. USB-C to cover it all. Voltage high for the laptop, low for the camera, all available just the same in every country, universal. So yes, fill the airports and hotels with them. Use them for power and to play videos on the TV. Because we weren’t supposed to have to question the voltage or abilities of the ports and cables in use.

Did/will that future materialize?

Hrmm. You might be onto something there.

Any thoughts how I might approach this issue or is it kinda moot given the whole concept is how weak our ability to connect to factual history is?

I’m sorry to have spoiled your day/feed. Thanks for commenting though! I can never tell if the downvotes are meaningless bots or not.

Thanks for stopping by!

I’m…not actually sure. You’re right it seems to just be a fact of life. I was recently in a long winded political discussion about the current times, things like the whitewashing of slavery in history and how we seem to be on a road to fascism even though we’ve seen it all before and how people can care so little.

Some alternative facts got invoked that the guy seemed like he truly believed, and when the actual facts were present their sources were challenged and…it led down the rabbit hole of what makes our sources more right than his? Because someone said so?

It clicked for me that propaganda works, he truly believed his version of history, and even my version was just books someone wrote that I was raised to believe were the right ones. I have never been a slave, despite what people are starting to call employment, I have never known a slave. I only believe slavery was a horrible tragedy because a book told me so. I will never share the same level of care on the issue as someone who is or even directly knew someone affected. And with only a different book I could have very easily ended up just like him, as so many already have, believing in race replacement theories and reversals of oppression and whatnot. How can such different concepts both exist as facts? Because neither have true substance, only belief.

I guess all we can do is keep fighting the good fight for knowledge, keep any one side from choosing what we learn, hoping that in a tenuous balance we get the most fair education we can, and, if there is indeed a biological or literal inability to emphasize with recorded history, we need to come up with different ways to teach important concepts without relying on acceptance of history as fact. And/or learn as a society to accept that apathy to a problem is OK as time wears on.

Other than that I’m not sure what we can do. It does seem rather bleak watching society self-destruct over things that seem to have historical warning but it isn’t so clear for others, despite us all technically sharing the same world history. And it’s only getting worse as politics and religions invade our educations(again?).

Depending on the channel, they weren’t wrong. And ironically, such channels are probably their favorites too.

Do as I say, not as I do and all that.

Because “protecting the children” is an easier political fight than trying to save adults from their own freedom, and the internet is not as clearly a threat as guns or drugs. And even guns are hard to restrict…

As an adult you have a right to make bad choices, as well as certain constitutional rights, and unless controlling your rights can be readily accepted as required for the public good(like keeping you from driving a 2 ton murder box without training), it will die politically very, very quickly as government overreach.

And even then there are many who think driver’s licenses are a violation of their freedoms. You think we can control their social media/free speech outlets?

I didn’t really have words for it then like I might now with the benefit of hindsight and outside observation…back then I just eventually recognized that it wasn’t making me feel good to participate, more drained and yet I had the need to continue.

Imagine a school social scene. Imagine those youthful desires to express yourself, the need to be recognized as a person and feel seen and maybe even appreciated by those around you. Maybe you decorated your notebooks or locker or dressed “weird” for expression, maybe you tried to enter different cliques and make friends, even shallow false ones for clout. Maybe you suffered under the school bully who always put you down. Maybe you were the bully, looking down on others to elevate yourself.

Now scale that up to what might appear to be the countless billions connected to the web. Now the whole world could be your friend, but also your enemy. You are now a mere speck in a sea of others begging for that same recognition. You post something, and an artificial number goes up to declare your success, but you need it to go higher, reach farther. That same number is also a testament to your failure to matter to literally thousands or millions of people instead of at most a couple hundred you could meet in school and town. You could lose hope, fall into depression that you are worthless, or try ever harder, ever edgier, ever more extreme to try and matter. In addition to your own image, you can also try to put others down, bully them and attempt to decrease their visibility, their reach, so it doesn’t eclipse yours. Just like they’ve been doing to you.

I was too meek to be the bully or the bitch, so my social media experience was trying to go beyond my means and post things that I thought would matter and get seen, while usually being beaten down by those who were not afraid to be assholes about my very existence. And always feeling that I hadn’t reached enough, accomplished enough. That I wasn’t “winning”. Made a whole MySpace page with all the cool widgets just to see a visitor counter(barely) go up. Tried to post my thoughts to a young Facebook and Twitter just to be told I should kill myself, if it reached anyone.

Kids and teens have enough trouble keeping stable in an environment where they have to work with 50-100 people a day at worst…and now they feel the need to catch the eye of millions. The struggle and burden on their mental state scales with it.

And this is before we start a discussion on today’s prevalence of malicious intent, pedophiles and abusers you can’t just walk away from and ignore, if you even recognize the threat. And before we weigh in on the corporations with their own nefarious exploitation of whatever makes more engagement and therefore money.

I’m older now and I can see this all for what it is and navigate around it to meet my needs without falling for it anymore, I don’t care at my age about the likes or upvotes aside from maintaining enough to get into the communities that set a bar to prevent spam. That’s all I need it for, so there’s an achievable goal now instead of an enduring need for ever more that kids have.