white-flame

The real problem is deeper than this. The actual question to ask is:

"What if we just stopped distributing and blindly executing untrusted binary blobs?"

A trusted compiler in the OS, and some set of intermediate representations for code distribution would solve a massive amount of security issues, increase compatibility, and allow for future performance increases and disallowing suspect code patterns (spectre, rowhammer, etc). Specializing programs at install time for the local hardware makes way more sense than being locked into hardware machine code compatibility.

I think it's more a case that browsers take security into account at the feature design phase, whereas other applications don't. That's actually a huge step in the right direction. Same thing with mobile OSes, which have a very preferable decision to sandbox individual applications, instead of running them with full user permissions & full user data access, like desktop OSes do.

Now, whether the browsers or mobile OSes actually are secure because of that, is a separate thing, but those are good steps to take.

Linux is now the best desktop OS. Not necessarily because it got that much better, but because Windows & Mac have gotten that much worse.

Besides proton/wine/VMs for gaming which are all very good, console/computer emulation for gaming is solid in Linux, including literal plug and play joystick support.

The file LRR.DRI[AM,DBL] also contains what looks like a REPL log of starting & running it.

REU is a bit of a cheat, and for some releases people are using cartridges with far higher capacities than ever sold back in the day. Cross-platform tools and emulation are also huge dev speedups.

But a big thing is that back then, games were often made on a timescale of months, and with a budget. Hobbyist dev has no limits to how much time they want to sink into doing something properly. Ideas & techniques have had many years/decades to percolate into existence.

I use onion addresses to have basically a hash-addressable socket on the internet, which can be relocated without any additional configuration. It can even work without any inbound ports on the firewall.

However, I haven't done any serious roaming with such a configuration; has anybody tried it?

Yes. I can't stand that IPFS basically took the Freenet model, stripped out all the anonymity & privacy, and added the weird "interplanetary" marketing push.

I don't even have a Facebook account. But with my relatives that do, this stuff leaks in from seeing their coworkers' & acquaintances' posts and escalates over time once there's even the slightest hook with the algorithm. Any reasonable political opinion they might have in thumbs-upping some innocuous content eventually routes into the algo feeding more extremist content.

Most people don't outright block offtopic material, they just gloss over it, and it still ends up with influence because that's what Facebook optimizes for. Plus people will still take the occasional click of curiosity to see what some posts are all about, even if they're not really into that content.

Yes, if you do have the discipline to take a zero-tolerance personal policy and immediately block even inoffensive things that just touch into the realm of polarizing, you can probably keep your feeds clean. But most people (eg, non-HN types) don't understand what Facebook is doing and don't think to actively defend against it, and just absent-mindedly consume the feed with no click discipline.

Facebook (and most other businesses in the space) is a system of manipulating and editorializing individuals' social communication in order to extract engagement-related profit.

This is not a common carrier, but an active distorter.

What do you define "social media" as? If it's communication kept within circles of family, friends, colleagues, and enthusiast/interest groups, I really don't see much problem with it, just as forums/blogs/etc before it.

The two big problems poisoning this well are:

1) monetization usually reaches for manipulating people's personal socialization stream, and

2) public broadcast of personal content to the feeds of strangers, usually the most inflammatory subset because of point 1.

> Forget the rest of the trash on Facebook

The thing is, Facebook actively pushes the trash at you, because trash content monetizes the best.

The only effective avoidance mechanism is to not use it (unless there's some facebook-specific browser plugin that strips it all out).