axolotlgod
Joined 5 years ago
Karma
64
Submissions
21
Member since
Apr 1
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Wow, that's a strong claim. There are various counterexamples to this, so I'd say it's definitely not a law of nature. And anyway, nature by nature (lol) is essentially lawless. It's all random collisions of tiny molecules.
So, if anything, I'd say the one law of nature is that there are no laws of nature. Thus, no, there isn't always a ruling class. It doesn't have to be that way.
Comment · 3 years ago
First off, I think everyone deals with this at some point. I think, also, since you are always changing as a person, what helps you cope at one point of your life might not work as life goes on. Various things have all contributed, in some way or another, to helping me in the past and present. Most recently, I came across a VSauce video from a year ago:
"Do Chairs Exist?" by VSauce [1].
Now, the thrust of the video deals with mereology [2]. However, the final line from Michael at the end surprised me a lot, and in the days since watching it, has been an extremely strong comfort for me:
"I am not a thing that dies and becomes scattered, I AM death and I AM the scattering."
I think it is worth spending the 40 minutes to watch the whole thing, as makes this line make more sense and extremely impactful. Anyway, this helped me recently, maybe it can help someone else :)
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXW-QjBsruE [2]: https://plato.stanford.edu/Archives/sum2005/entries/mereolog...
Comment · 3 years ago
https://write.as/cannonalexander/
have been trying to do a writing challenge for this year, it's going ok. I write about whatever interests me, trying to do at least three articles a week
Comment · 3 years ago
Does Chrome really use significantly less resources than Firefox? Are there numbers there?
Comment · 4 years ago
No. Ableism (not sure why the quotes, comes off as a little sarcastic) is expecting and demeaning individuals--either purposefully or implicitly due to environmental design--for not achieving some arbitrary standard of “normal”. No one advocating for better treatment of people is suggesting a Bergeron-esque reality where those who are performing must be handicapped for equality. It is more about making social systems and attitudes welcoming for those who were traditionally seen as worthless (especially in a system that valued productive work above the health of the individual). Making room for others doesn't mean dragging others down, you know?
Comment · 4 years ago
I agree. There are enough substantial features in Firefox that push it over the top for me.
For one, scrolling is just so much better than in any Chrome browsers, which I have noticed tend to drop frames and lag, regardless of the machine. Is it extreme? No, but for me, it is noticeable and Firefox just has that silky smooth scroll feeling.
Another big one is Manifest v3. I think Google may alienate a minority of their audience when it is implemented in January, and Firefox may see a bump in users. Having a kick-ass ad blocker like uBlock Origin work robustly will be a selling point for some people.
Another one I see people don't often mention is design. I may be in the minority of hardcore Firefox users, but I really have enjoyed the redesigns, and Firefox is still customizable enough for me to feel some joy using it.
Overall, Mozilla is definitely mismanaging and leadership needs to be turned over, but the browser is still in a good spot. If things turn around, I could see it becoming more and more popular.
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
Personally, I put very little stock in NYT health reporting articles. I am a public health researcher, and I have seen numerous NYT articles that just get fundamentals wrong. Though my field is not sleep studies, I can tell the conclusion of this article is essentially animal models[0] and longitudinal surveys[1] provide enough evidence to support hypothesis-driven studies in the future. But that's about it.
Now, that's not to say that chronic sleep debt isn't harmful. It probably is. But these kind of alarmist articles serve nothing more than to make waves in an already tumultuous field of popular science communication.
I know this comment boils down to "trust me", but I'm acutely tired and overall exhausted of media outlets that should know better churning out articles that are unsubstantial. I don't see these pieces as value neutral; they strain the relationship between scientists who study the nuance-filled physical world, statisticians who painstakingly analyze the counterintuitive world of numbers, and the general public who aren't equipped to (and shouldn't be expected to) understand the synthesis of entire fields of scientific literature.
[0]: broadly unreliable, especially for something as complex as human sleep mechanics
[1]: which suffer from different biases, like recall bias (https://catalogofbias.org/biases/recall-bias/)
Comment · 4 years ago
Definitely very interesting. I know Google has their “Advanced Protection Program”[0] with a Titan security key which is similar. It is interesting considering that Google’s protections target the user as the weak link, as your data lives on their hardware; while Apple is obviously targeting both the user and the hardware they have. I’m curiuos what security researchers will think of this, if it’s more theater or if it is actually a innovative attempt at giving advanced privacy to people who need it. Despite their past stumbles (e.g., CSAM), it seems like Apple is genuinely in the privacy fight, even if it is just for their bottom line.
Comment · 4 years ago
Regarding the open source part, Jon has spoken about it on a podcast from last year[0][1]. Basically the only think keeping them from full open-source is the license which they think would make the company possibly fall to another competitor. It's hard being a small business, this makes sense to me. They actively encourage modding of the browser too.
I'm not sure regarding the prevention of automatic saving/filling. I use Bitwarden and in my time using Vivaldi, I haven't had any issues, though maybe someone in the Vivaldi forums[2] would know?
[0]: YouTube link: https://youtu.be/ivDiL9XeDw0?t=3410 [1]: Podcast website: https://destinationlinux.org/episode-243/ [2]: https://forum.vivaldi.net/
Comment · 4 years ago
There is a video [0] I love that explains an argument for this well. The more people you have participating and iterating in a field, and more generally in life, the better that field/life ultimately becomes. Allowing more women in the video game field will ultimately make more satisfying and novel games for you and for everyone else.
Modern video games are interactive art. People have emotional experiences from finishing games with stories and performances that speak to them. Part of this emotion comes from a deep understanding of the "lived experience" of people. There are parts of the lived experience that drastically differ for women and men, on the whole. Does that mean that men couldn't write a story that women find powerful and challenging? Of course not. But men aren't going to fully grok the little details of how society treats women, which means a lot of relevant themes relevant go unexplored if there aren't women on creative teams.
Diversity of experience translates into diversity of ideas. Hell, I always thought that was a strength for FOSS, after all.
---
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvskMHn0sqQ - Kurzgesagt
Firefox is rock solid, open-source, backed by a great organization (which has recently reinvested additional resources in it) and a joy to use imo. Also, the levels of vitriol that even the slightest bit of anonymous telemetry incurs is unhelpful and I encourage people who hold that viewpoint to really interrogate it.