I had an idea a while ago on how you could lightly regulate social media platforms.

Require them to:

• Group users into cohorts of a size greater than X. ie, individual level targeting isn’t allowed. The higher this number the better.
• make available to users the cohort they are in
• publish openly every single cohort and their size
• make it possible to view feeds as if you were in a specific cohort.

Will this stop them funnelling customers into rabbit holes? No, probably not.

But it would make “targeted indoctrination” harder as they would have to try and indoctrinate multiple people at once. And it would make it more transparent just how many people are being fed propaganda or whatever you want to call it.

This. But Pandas and Numpy.

Pandas and Numpy and Bash.

But can it run a degoogled Android rom well?

Ah silly us.

We spent a decade hating on IE, it’s slowness, poor support for any standards, plugins that fuck your shit up, etc.

But it was obviously the best because it had that huge market share.

Could you imagine the enshittification cries if they did this. “Mozilla to add subscription model to your browser”.

They have other products that have subscriptions you can pay for to support the company.

Instead of using Mullvad, use Mozilla VPN (it is literally exactly the same, you just pay Mozilla not Mullvad)

If you’re a web developer, Subscribe to MDN Plus.

Hate spam? Firefox Relay.

I don’t believe Mozilla doesn’t have the best interests of the browser at heart, I believe that they do think their browser is the their number one product.

But that’s the problem. It’s free software, going up against a juggernaut whose browser is just another side project to drive engagement with their core product.

A juggernaut who just so happens to be one of Mozilla’s primary source of income. All it will take is a little bit of legislation somewhere in the world to make that deal less attractive and Mozilla could be dead in the water. And it will take all of those forks with it, paving the way for Google to become the true web Hegemony.

Mozilla needs to diversify to ensure they can continue to provide stewardship to the browser.

But trying to make money in 2025 just seems to summon the enshittification brigade.

Free software is not free. Someone has to make it.

He didn’t say anything about regulating them.

Tax revenue is small fry compared to the harm they can (and do?) cause.

Further: the Canvas API doesn’t have any requirements on rendering accuracy.

By deferring to the GPU, font library, etc, tracking code can generate an image that is in most cases unique to your machine.

So blocking the Canvas API would return a 0. Which is less unique than what it would be normally.

Iirc, Websites can’t query addons unless those addons manipulate the DOM in a way that exposes themselves.

They can query extensions.

Addons are things installed inside the browser. Like uBlock, HTTPS Everywhere, Firefox Containerr, etc.

Extensions are installed outside the browser. Such as Flashplayer, the Gnome extensions installer, etc.

And Lenin said, “the best way to undermine society is through its music” — Bob Duvall

It’s a fake quote from Lenin, but suitably apt.

I have a theory that the key hit boxes slowly have error introduced to them over time.

Sort of like “my phone is slow” except not, because there’s no perceivable performance loss on iPhones other than battery degradation.

One of my devices uses three keys because out of the two local servers I have, they seem to go down every other month, so I need a failover.

It’s obviously enough of a thing to warrant Google to crack down on it in both chrome and YouTube.

If it’s such a small problem, why spend the effort?

Newzbin.

Yay!

Does NZ count as Australia too? Or are we stuck with parallel importers, or picking one up on holiday?

You appear to have eaten an Onion OP.

The Civilian is a satire site.

Imo, the term “buy” for all goods should pass some sort of litmus test. Eg:

does the product being sold have the same properties as a brick?

• can the product be resold privately?
• can the product be lent to another user temporarily?
• would the product still perform its function when the manufacturer stops supporting it?
• would the product still perform its function if the manufacturer ceased to exist.

if the product does not pass all these tests, the customer is not buying. Consider using terms such as ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ or ‘subscription’

Because that’s the way the legal system works.

“Oops, had some harmful/illegal content on there? Nobody was /really/ hurt, or at least, we weren’t directly causing harm. I’ll take it down and eat a small fine.

Vs

“Oh I’m sorry, I’ll take down the 30s clip of your 90s movie. it has caused you 3million in damages? I’m so sorry, here’s some tools that will automate detection and removal of your property. I’m so sorry”

Is “The Algorithm” just “we stuffed all our GPT responses into a Lucene index and look for 80% matches”?

Because that’s what I’d do.

Take what HR says with a grain of salt.

If they’re gaming H1B, They’re not gonna say “yeah we’re faking it to get cheap indentured immigrants to work for us”.