cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlFirefox alternatives?
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    13 days ago

    https://digdeeper.club/articles/browsers.xhtml has a somewhat comprehensive analysis of a dozen of the browsers you might consider, illuminating depressing (and sometimes surprising) privacy problems with literally all of them.

    In the end it absurdly recommends something which forked from Firefox a very long time ago, which is obviously not a reasonable choice from a security standpoint. I don’t have a good recommendation, but I definitely don’t agree with that article’s conclusion: privacy features are pointless if your browser is trivially vulnerable to exploits for a plethora of old bugs, which will inevitably be the case for a volunteer-run project that diverged from Firefox a long time ago and thus cannot benefit from Mozilla’s security fixes in each new release.

    However, despite its ridiculous conclusion, that page’s analysis could still be helpful when you’re deciding which of the terrible options to pick.




  • this meme has some truth in it, in that these six vegetables are all brassica oleracea. but, the factoid in the center of the meme is misleading: brassica oleracea can be many things but (despite brassicaceae being “the mustard and cabbage family”) brassica oleracea is not typically called “wild mustard plant”.

    edit: toned down my refutation; i guess maybe it is sometimes 👀 but i think not really







  • This headline and article are focused on antidepressants, but the line which mentions them in the executive order which this reporting is based on is actually broader.

    It also seems to attribute the authorship of the executive order to Kennedy, linking to it while saying that he “issued a statement”, despite it not actually mentioning his name and it being phrased in the first person from the president (beginning with “By the authority vested in me as President” as is usual for an executive order).

    The article says (emphasis mine):

    The government, he said, would “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, [and] mood stabilizers.”

    While the executive order says:

    (iii) assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs;











  • i don’t usually cross-post my comments but I think this one from a cross-post of this meme in programmerhumor is worth sharing here:

    The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).

    The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:

    I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey

    (there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog…)