Agreed, but this phenomenon is as natural as wolves hunting deer. Any time you see a new invention like the web, you see a bunch of vultures businessmen swoop in and try to take it control over it as you mentioned.

Capitalism is definitely the problem, but more generally, it's the sense of creating incentives of some kind (in this case, absurd profits) without asking ourselves whether these incentives are preserving our social values. And if they are not preserving our social values, then they need to be corrected until they do, hence the importance of regulations.

As a society, we've lost sight of this fact, and it's our generation's defining responsibility to remind the world about it.

We used to call it "surfing the web" too!

When I want to, yes. I play for fun, not for some arbitrary badge of merit that the game authors decided I ought to live up to. Just because the game's authors had their own ideas about what they think is fair and fun, doesn't mean that they're right. It's my spare time, and I'll use it the way I want.

Valheim, I'm looking at you.

I only play single player games though. I would never cheat in a multiplayer game. If I felt like I wanted/needed to cheat in a multiplayer game, I wouldn't play it to begin with.

So they're openly admitting that they're using Reddit for astroturfing now? I didn't click the link because fuck reddit, but no doubt they have armies of shill accounts boosting their PR image. They probably even have reps inside PR to manage all of it, and might even be paying them for that privilege.

It's hilarious how both Reddit and Proton keep digging deeper into the holes they created for themselves.

Please remember something very important everyone: The company may have changed its policy, but the company that made the policy hasn't changed. The people that made the bad decisions are still in charge, and the priorities that made them make that decision are still the same. They haven't changed.

This is relevant not just for Proton, but about every time company pretends to step back from a bad decision.

Great costume work.

Except for the guys in the golf cart, what the hell were they thinking

Fucking idiot is too stupid to realize that local DRAM can be used for useful shit, as opposed to whatever he wants to use it for.

Yeah, I reflected on your comment for a bit and I can see what you're saying. All software uses dependencies, but how they are shipped is different for a lot of languages. If we take an extreme example, Go has a lot of the same microdependencies that Python, JS, etc. have, (probably a lot more than Python even), but since programs are usually compiled into a standalone binary, you never think about them as a user. Interpreted languages on the other hand tend to not do this because they're not compiled, and when you're installing a dependency, you're often installing the source code itself, rather than a shared library or .jar like you would in C++ or Java.

A lot of people do complain about virtual environments though, and while I don't personally have a problem with them, I do wonder why nobody uses bundlers in Python. It seems that something like this already exists, but it doesn't seem to be widely adopted or used for all the complaints I hear about virtual environments and such.

It's not a question of what other browsers would offer, that doesn't really matter all that much. From Mozilla's perspective, it has more to do with the fact that Firefox has to keep up with a behemoth that has several times the amount of money and resources that they have.

But for you and me, it's something completely different, and much more ominous than whatever Mozilla's issues are.

The truth is that, now that Chrome has monopolistic control over the web, they can make it into whatever they want it to be. And I frankly don't want to find out what that is. Maybe it's the return of AMP, maybe it's more invasive DRM, maybe it's forcing you to put your ID into the browser so they know who you are and can blacklist you from the web if they have a vendetta against you. Maybe it's the fact that they won't let you browse the web on a computer if it doesn't have a locked bootloader and rootless access to the OS the same way Android does.

These may sound like crazy ideas today, but bear in mind that the hell we're living today is the long term realization of the crazy ideas of a few decades ago. Why should we want to see what that's like? Why shouldn't we be trying whatever we can do to prevent it?

Funny you mention that: https://www.panamericandispatch.org/p/meta-ignores-brazilian-court-order

Really hope Facebook gets pounded for their interference in Brazil's election.

Google has done more for web standards than the open source community ever could

Google was a great company when they were an upstart that needed to create standards so they could compete with the likes of Microsoft and Apple. They pushed for standards, adopted them, and promoted others to do the same.

Today, they have weaponized standards to entrench their monopolistic positions. They pushed so many standards in CSS, Javascript, and other technologies that it's impossible for a competing browser to emerge outside of Chrome, which they own, and Firefox, which... they also own in any way that matters. And they also leveraged their search monopoly to favor websites that adopted the standards they were trying to push in order to force the web to adopt the standards they wrote, and therefore, their own browser.

They helped create the open web. Then they claimed it as their own.

It's a great example of how a group starts out being your friend, but then amasses all the power for itself and gets corrupted by it. They have not been our friends for over a decade now, and we can all see how bad it gets.

Who knows? Without the ability to audit that the software is doing by yourself, you just have to trust whatever it is that they say the switch does. Maybe it disables some minor functionality while still doing the majority of the privacy invasion stuff. Maybe it does absolutely nothing whatsoever.

This is the whole reason behind the Free Software movement and everything Richard Stallman has been preaching for the past 40 years. If you don't have the ability to control the software on the devices you own, they will be used against you.