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Cake day: January 1st, 2024

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  • Anecdotal, but I’ve never once had a problem with any function of Firefox in the decade I’ve been using it. On the contrary it’s been the most stable browser I’ve had the pleasure of using, orders of magnitude more reliable in all situations than Chrome or Opera ever was.

    This post smells of astroturfing. There’s been an awful lot of “why is Firefox so shit?” posts recently, now that Google is proving itself untrustable.



  • And if this attitude spreads, which arguably it should, the service will simply be shut down. Unfortunately I think this may end up being a great loss for humanity as a whole if that happens. Elsewhere in this thread I compared it to the Library of Alexandria for its sheer content of 20-odd years worth of nearly all of humanity’s culture, news, and technical information.

    I don’t know what to do with this. The dragon must be slain but the hoard must be preserved, and I’m not sure how we accomplish that. The contents of YouTube should be backed up and made available to a public data store outside of Google’s grasp, ideally as a public utility probably maintained by tax money, and youtube can remain as a front-end to that service. But actually getting that done in the modern day seems… we’ll say, slim. For one thing the total youtube data package is about a fucktillion gigabytes and the only people able to host it are the ones who already have it. For another, Google will argue in court that videos uploaded to their service are their property, and they’ll win that argument.

    So we can start again anew, but we must mourn what we lose, because it may be significant. Like it or not, YouTube is a significant percentage of the recorded data output of the human race. Just pray, once we kill the beast, that you never have to replace any parts on a car model year 2004-2018 - because you won’t find good repair manuals anywhere and all the good tutorials are buried in the belly of YouTube.


  • Unfortunately it is such a repository of information that it’s nearly unavoidable anymore. It’s a reference tool. Need to fix your car? YouTube knows how. Need to write a piece of code with a tool you’re unfamiliar with? A random Indian man has posted a YouTube video explaining how. Need to find a hidden item in a video game? YouTube. There are many and varied reasons I’d pull up a YouTube video outside of the intended purpose of “watching YouTube” for entertainment. Many of these things can, technically, be conveyed through different media but often poorly and with a much lower rate of understanding. The sheer volume of knowledge and culture lost if Google ever takes down YouTube’s servers will be akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria and that is not a joke. I don’t want to “watch YouTube” anymore for the most part but it is inescapable to me for several purposes as a reference material.




  • Some of those I understand complaining about but honestly Sets & Logic is a great class for a programmer. I wish that was in the standard math path so that everyone got a little of it in high school, the closest I got was doing proofs in geometry which while that is a sort of logic training it doesn’t really teach you how to make use of anything.

    Also, depending what you’re building exactly, advanced Calc and Numerical Analysis may be very useful and/or required to perform. Especially if you’re trying to accurately model something that happens in meatspace.



  • Just collate them based on edit/deletion date… Each post will have a last-edited attribute that can be used for sorting. Even more so once the AI is bootstrapped enough to start recognizing the standard protest edit messages. At that point you hardly even need human oversight anymore, because the bot will be able to recognize “that’s a fuck spez edit, ignore that; this post looks good; that’s a Shreddit/PowerDelete edit, ignore that” and so on. Can even have it fetch the previous edit automatically when it comes across something like that, to a point where a comment removed by a PowerDelete tool is nothing more than a cover letter that states “there was once a real human-generated comment in this location”.






  • It isn’t a waste if people buy it. Putting M4s in the iPad lets them market it to rubes who think bigger number is better without reading the spec sheet or understanding their own requirements, and if they’re already manufacturing M4s to put in other things, that’s one less production line that needs to run. Sure, they could release an iPad Cheapass Edition with an M1 in it and sell it comfortably at a profit for like $80, but the market for those is likely to be small, they won’t make nearly the overhead profit that the M4 iPad will, it requires an entire extra production line setup, and most importantly it isn’t flashy enough for Apple. They don’t want to release a product that feels cheap, even if it was specifically intended to be cheap. It’s bad brand optics and they care about that a lot. Let China sell a bunch of bootleg tablets to people that want them, they’re gonna do that anyway regardless if Apple gets in the train or not, and this way Apple isn’t tarnishing their product lineup with a PoorPad^TM