Chrome is already spyware on its own. That’s basically the reason Chrome exists.

Is Brave the one with the built-in crypto scheme and its own ads?

Hey, the Earth won’t last forever. Eventually all life will end. So maybe we should just let it all end asap. Keeping it going is nothing to brag about since we’ll lose in the end anyway. Is that right?

Or maybe we should make the best of the time we have. Maybe we should push back against fascism and corruption and destruction, even if our victories don’t last forever. What do you think? Is it worth defeating a fascist leader once even if fascism can still eventually return, or is it all just a waste of effort and we should just roll over and die?

edit: for the downvoters, how can I take anyone seriously if they’re not going to sit and defend their opinion.

You’re mocking someone for posting their reasoning in detail, and then getting upset when people downvote you without giving reasons. What do you want?

That could force a change in the DNC, but the change would be to push them further to the right. The issue is that the right-wing party won the election. They got more than 50% of the total votes. So the democrats aren’t going to see splitting their own base as a viable pathway to victory. If a left-wing faction splitters off, then the DNC will be forced to try to capture more votes on the other side instead.

If the democrats won the election then we’d be in a situation where we can talk about pushing them further left. But when they lose, that’s not really an option. (Most of these strategy problems disappear with ranked choice voting… but I doubt the current government has any interest in pushing for that kind of change!)

X’s supreme dictator openly campaigns for Trump. He even promised to pay millions of dollars to help people vote for Trump. So yeah, I reckon that probably had an effect.

Yeah, and although it will be painful for Mozilla in the short term - it would be a good outcome. It was always bad that Mozilla’s main source of funding was from their most powerful competitor. It’s an obvious conflict of interest. And obvious way to skew decision making. … But that money is just so addictive.

There will be some pretty severe withdrawal symptoms if the money gets taken away, but everyone will be healthier in the long run… unless the overpaid CEO continues to suck in all the remaining money and leaves nothing for the people actually doing the work. That would be bad. In that case, if the corporate structure chokes the company to death, I suppose we’d be hoping for Ladybird, or something like it to take Firefox’s place.

I love how none of these comments account for fiber, something you won’t get from granulated sugar but which you will absolutely get from any actual fruit, which at least one of these yogurts actually references in its label.

It’s definitely true that eating fruit is a very healthy way to consume sugar. But the amount of actual fruit in those fruit yogurts is pitifully small. Advertising aside, it’s not like eating an fresh piece of fruit; and it is not why the yogurt has so much sugar it in.

I saw a better version of this meme yesterday. But I appreciate the variety!

Is he still going for that? When all the different smoked fish etc. were introduced, I thought he might have to change plans. (Getting 999 of every quality of every fish sounds pretty rough.)

And as I understand it, the existence of an inner planet (Vulcan) was a reasonable explanation consistent with Newtonian gravity. (The only problem was that the planet wasn’t there.)

Also, I’ve seen a video of an experiment done in a vacuum chamber. (Although they kind of botched the point of the video by showing lots of slow-mo and junk like that.)

It’s a result that you might get if you were searching for this kind of thing. So posting it here saves the step of having to search.

Unfortunately, USA doesn’t have ranked choice voting. So voting for someone who doesn’t have a chance of winning is basically the same as throwing away your vote.

I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what’s wrong with lifetime purchases?

This thread is about subscriptions. So I’d assume that when people talk about ‘rent seeking companies’ etc, they are referring to subscription payments rather than lifetime purchases.

Jeff Bezos killed. Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris. Paper reports.

That’s a big news day.

I claim they must be irrational multiples of pi based on something I learnt from this video (the relevant part is in the last 10 mins).

In the video, Burkard shows a proof that the nice angles 30°, 45°, 60°, etc are the only rational fractions of a circle which also have rational trigonometric ratios. So then, since those angles don’t make Pythagorean triads, I conclude that no triad has an angle that is a rational multiple of pi. (Unless we allow ‘zero’.)

Yeah, I’m not really sure. I mean, we’re talking about complex numbers and naming some of them prime - so I suppose in that sense it definitely is a possible classification of complex primes. It may even be related to Gaussian primes. I know for sure that my complex representation of the triads are ‘prime’ if the hypotenuse is prime - and that’s also a condition for a Gaussian prime. What I don’t know is if it is possible to have a composite hypotenuse, and yet still be a prime triad. I haven’ investigated thoroughly enough to work that out.

By default there is a shortcut to the terminal shortcut on task bar. From memory it is one of three default shortcuts. (File browser, Terminal, Firefox.) You can also find it by pressing the menu button (the ‘start menu’). From there the terminal has a prominent special position where it is always accessible. And if you don’t notice it there, you can always start typing to search for it - as with any other installed app. I find that if I type ‘t’, then “Terminal” is the top result; and obviously I can kept typing to eliminate the other results if I want.

So if your difficulty in finding the terminal is your main complaint about about Mint… I’m not sure what to tell you. Do you want it to auto-launch or something?

When I was young, I really valued the idea of technological progress. It was almost axiomatically the goal of humanity. Getting greater abilities to do more things more easily… it seemed like the ultimate goal.

But now that I’m older, I’ve seen what happens with technological power like that, and it isn’t great. Yes, we can do more things more easily than before. And what is the result? The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world’s resources are depleted.

• People can now connect instantly and effortlessly with anyone anywhere in the world - and the result is that enormous numbers of people shun their local peers and instead have shallow parasocial relationships with strangers who’s job it is to advertise products to them.
• Clothes are cheap and easy to create - and the result is mountains of waste created by fast-fashion low-quality throw-away clothes largely made from slave labour. Similarly for many products, in particular plastic products are now choking the world in waste.
• Cars are more efficient, and production quality is high - and the result is massively oversized monsters, completely negating the efficiency benefit and instead increasing the amount of space and maintenance required to handle the increased size and weight of the machines. The streets are basically filled with cars and spaces for cars, with less and less space for people to do people things.
• Half-decent AI has finally been created. It’s a long-held dream come true… except that the outcome isn’t quite what we hoped. There’s a lot to say on this topic, but just to keep it snappy, I’ll oversimplify it by saying that people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination.

Our silky-smooth hyper-connected ultra-convenient world is not leading people to be happier, or smarter, or kinder. And it certainly isn’t helping humanity survive longer. We’re burning out fast.

A lot of what we have superficially looks like ‘progress’, but in full description it looks more like a dystopia. Things are easier, but perhaps the good things were already easy enough; and so the main effect is that exploitation and manipulation got easier. Even when we agree that we’re going in the wrong direction, the messages are still muddied enough that we accelerate rather than change course.

Anyway… I don’t agree with my younger self. I no longer think that technological advances are intrinsically good. I think taking things a bit more slowly might have been more wise. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think a core part of it is that money corrupts. Unfortunately, money is very tightly intertwined with most of what we do - so that’s a pretty difficult problem to fix. So I won’t go into more detail about that now!