Thanks cketti, for all your toil on K-9 and Thunderbird for Android. Over many years K-9 was the only mail client that just worked for me. When I finally transitioned to a certain secure web mail provider based in CH, I had to leave K-9 behind. But I still appreciate the challenge of making an open protocol mail client work reliably. Enjoy your sabbatical, however long it lasts, and keep an open mind about the future: the skills you've honed as a software developer are substantial and give you a head start in pretty much any field.
"Do Not Track" was a good standard, but on the today's global Internet, unenforceable without serious push back against non-compliant sites from either government regulators and/or consumers. In other words, privacy theater that misled users into thinking it made them safer. It has also been suggested that DNT signals are used by some advertisers in profiling users. But removing DNT suspiciously seems like a capitulation, and will short-circuit any existing efforts to use it to protect consumer privacy. Maskawanian is right, this was inevitable once Mozilla decided to become an ad company (as was their adding the deceptively named Privacy-Preserving Ad Attribution feature earlier this year). I think it's time for people concerned about privacy to consider alternatives to Mozilla.
Recalling when, after years of hype, the demand for corn-based ethanol as a fuel competed with corn for food, leading to even greater food insecurity world-wide.
Grifter's gotta grift, but that doesn't mean their BS gets to go unchallenged.
It actually is as simple as that. Well, if you could actually get funding. The number one problem with our legal system is that only the rich can afford to play. Before someone says, "but... public defenders", let me suggest that even a truly great lawyer (and many of the PDs I've known were) is going to have a hard time with a caseload approaching 200 files. On the civil side there's... nothing, at least since the LSC was cut to the bone back in the early 80s and put on a very short leash. So, although I'm all for eliminating all immunities, sovereign, absolute and qualified, that won't do a damn bit of good for ordinary people until free (because no one in the working or even middle class can afford a $1,000 emergency, let alone a pile up of legal fees at $200 per hour) representation is available for every and any legal matter. Once that's in place, you can set up your "light touch" triaging mechanism. Then if you also abolish all immunities, you might even get some justice.
"Developers should test their own code" is emblematic of a juvenile mindset in people who regularly fire up their "reality distortion field" to avoid the effort of educating themselves on their own operations (and that helps them deny responsibility when things go South). As W. Edwards Deming, bane of all "gut instinct" executives, once wrote, "The consumer is the most important part of the production line. Quality should be aimed at the needs of the consumer, present and future." The lack of a dedicated quality team shows a lack of respect for your customers. You know, the people you need to buy your products or services (unless you're intent on living off VC loans until you have to pull the ripcord on your golden parachute).
Meritocracy is tyranny by another name. "Natural" aristocrats are still aristocrats, and being aristocrats it is their "natural" inclination to take power in their own personal and (when they are numerous enough to be organized in a coherent group) institutional interests. Meritocracy is a another false god, like its cousin, money. It is dangerous because it is exclusive, and self-reinforcing. Technologists, of all people, should be the first to recognize how vacuous and pernicious such an anti-egalitarian approach is, and should be repelled by it: because we know how empty and meaningless our own relative merit, based on our fortuitous collection of specialized knowledge and skills, is.
Am I really better, morally, ethically, or spiritually, than someone who _doesn't_ know how to patch an Oracle database? Even the landscapers blowing leaves into the street next door know that forcibly asserting ownership of another human being is wrong, yet this seems to have escaped the superior intellect of "the Founding Fathers" (who my own ancestors, having emigrated as impoverished peasants from Italy at the turn of the last century, had no connection with: something they sadly later forgot). Jefferson was a slaver, an oppressor of the weak, and a rapist, and the majority of high society and Congress were (and are) accessories before and after the fact.
The US Civil War was an aberration, because it was one of the few times that the schemes of one part of the oligarchy coincided with the growing disgust of the commons with a horrendous institution (chattel slavery). The moral outrage over slavery seen in the diaries of Union soldiers didn't disappear with the Confederacy's defeat, but the interests of the oligarchs worked against the success of Reconstruction and the later imposition of Jim Crow (whose legal framework provided inspiration for 20th century fascism in places like Germany).
We loosely categorize ancient Rome as a civilization. It was an oligarchic slave state, as were the later European and American empires. The main difference between them seems to be the mechanisms of slavery employed. In 21st century America we still have a feudal model of governance in most workplaces, and in governments bought and paid for by unfettered oligarch cash, the will of the common people, to the extent that its expression is able to pierce the corporate media bubble, is mostly ignored or explained away.
> "Natural" aristocrats are still aristocrats, and being aristocrats it is their "natural" inclination to take power in their own personal and (when they are numerous enough to be organized in a coherent group) institutional interests.
There is one sustainable solution to that: make sure that holding power is inconvenient and uncomfortable, something that brings disadvantages rather than inherent advantages to the power holder. Much like how jury duty is viewed today, and perhaps with similar mechanisms involving random sortition. "Natural" aristocracy works well with this, because one defining characteristics of a virtuous, talented, meritorious person is that she has way better things to be doing with her life than holding tyrannical power over others.
> Meritocracy is tyranny by another name. [You then go on to elaborate with historical examples of how merit != virtue.]
As far as I can tell, the linked article in fact makes exactly the same point:
> They [the founders] also knew that merit was not enough; merit without virtue to accompany it could produce tyranny. They knew this, of course, through history.
This is an enormously important distinction: security ne privacy. Although you can make your own Chrome install insecure, by default it really isn't bad. Transforming it into something that isn't actively compromising your privacy is another matter. Flash, for all its "democratizing" impact (not that I agree it really had), didn't address either. Back then too few were seriously doing anything about security or privacy. As someone who lived through the Rise and Fall of Flash, I have to second the sentiment of an earlier post: I'm happier now being able to use a text editor in my work instead of an odd assortment of vendor specific tools. That, and HTML5/CSS3 has proven to be amazingly innovative and flexible enough to finally make the case for standards easier. Now all we have to do is keep the big boys from perverting these standards into monsters from the pit of hell. Man, is that going to be a fun ride.
Depends on the model year. The one we bought in 2003 only needed regular oil changes and a new set of tires every few years. We did have to get a rebuilt transmission just before its warranty ran out, but didn't pay a dime for that ("Not a dime? Really?" Yeah, well, I was a trial lawyer before going into tech). The 2013 is still running and other than normal maintenance the only problems we've had are with the sliding door coming off its track and one of the stow-away seats getting stuck. In both cases YouTube saved the day. Don't get me wrong, I really hate the look of that car. It definitely is not an identity statement. But given the astronomical prices of new (and used) vehicles right now, we're probably going to keep it for a while longer. Here's hoping that changes. Soon.
Totally personal preference, but not a fan of the Brave UI. At least from my perspective they (like Vivaldi and Edge) are trying too hard to distinguish themselves from the outward look and feel of Chromium. It's their right as a fork, and that of whoever finds it works for them. I'm not even bothered by (or much notice) the built-in crypto-based gamification. I just wish someone would do a minimalist fork of Chromium, maybe with a rudimentary sync service.
The gamification is a pretty out of date hot take now. They still have that crypto stuff, but they pivoted about a year ago to try to sell the built in VPN and get more value out of their search engine to raise revenue instead.
The best part is that right click is all it takes to hide the VPN and other stuff from the UI. I usually do it first thing after I install Brave and never see it again.
Honestly Firefox is way worse than brave in terms of intrusive stuff.
When Firefox updates I get full screen ads for their VPN and whatnot. Brave has never done anything like that to me. Hide the features you don’t want once, never see them again.
Yea I found there were a lot more FF config settings to disable as well.
These threads always unfold the same way tho. Brave gets lambasted by some, the people that enjoy using Brave end up being “well actually” guys etc etc.
And I use both Brave and FF in addition to occasional librewolf they’re all useful
My only real issues with Brave is 1)that when you have too many tabs open it starts stacking them elsewhere... and two, when I open settings they are terrible and I have to search Password manually to find saved passwords, but the way their UI works it first loads the password module and when I go to click it it loads something else and moves it around, it is annoying.
Piketty's _Capital in the Twenty-First Century_, cited in the article, remains a fundamental resource for understanding how we got here. It's really essential reading. Given all that, the solutions presented in his later books appear to be inevitable. As for whether we're in a new Gilded Age, I'd say the we're way past that: it's more like ancient Egypt under Pharaoh.
