Is it just for UI folks to enjoy?

Was this some kind of hail mary to some imagined pool of non-technical folks, who will just use the default browser anyway?

It's like one of those game redesigns that takes away major features of the game, or makes them take 8 extra steps to access - then says they did it do 'streamline' the experience.

A large portion of the top 10 downloaded add-ons for the past 5 years on Firefox have been UI reversion tools.

People tend to like being able to access the features they use.

Hiding them as a new default both annoys people - and makes it overwhelmingly unlikely new users will ever think to use a lot of often important abilities of your application.

The real incentive here seems to be refusing to make a version that will fit phones and desktops appropriately.

And only making the phone interface - then calling that innovation.

That's the stupid kind of lazy - the opposite of parsimony, that is you're simplifying PAST the point of addressing the minimally needed complexity for a large part of your audience.

You've already build a customizable interface.

Just create interface templates, and let folks pick minimal if they want.

Don't force everyone to have to go into three settings interfaces, and a deep dive into about:config, then STILL have to install a user add-on to fix basic interface UI stuff.

And really - who put the most esoteric UI designer possible in charge of everything there?

Ryan Fenton

...Thats like libertarians saying that Government services are a lie.

While it's true that money changes hands to make it work - the concept of economy of scale is doing a lot of important work in cases like these.

That is - put up enough money up front to get people in place, an infrastructure humming - and it DOES become a disregarded cost, after the regular and much lower maintenence fees to keep it running - far less than the average shipping cost for most folks.

Same thing in most modern nations for health care - get all the infrastructure in place, bypass the insurance companies in most cases, and you can consider the costs mostly disregarded, at a much lower cost to everyone over the same timeframe.

Economy of scale does a lot of work when done right and maintained.

And that's the real thing all the local shops lack.

But folks like Aldi and others have learned to take more advantage of economy of scale and holes in markets to get better deals too.

And this game isn't over, not by a longshot - larger scale automation is the real economy of scale waiting in the wings. And it will pay for itself in ways we have only faintly imagined so far.

Ryan Fenton

Government is 'enemy territory' to modern conservative ideals. Safe for any attacking actions, no matter the blowback.

That woman put human lives and public awareness of health issues above conservative ideals. Slow-walking whistleblower status, then sending armed officers to teach a lesson to anyone who would act like her is the modern conservative ideal.

There will be no repercussions, because Republicans control the levers of power here in Florida.

That's kind of why this older generation reminds me of a concept.

You can sometimes win every battle, with the biggest army - then still lose the war.

There's a new biggest generation in history - and they've been kept from power for all their lives... the real war is against them, and has kind of always been against them this past 20 years or so.

And by all polling, they're 60-40 to the older generation's 40-60, on basically every issue. Florida is the perfect example of what happens the more concentrated you get that older generation.

But the whole nation will increasingly become that younger generation - and everything will change once that balance of power shifts.

All these unconstitutional actions now are the temper tantrum that this is happening.

Which is a shame - they could have taken the approach of actively working with the younger generation writ large, conveyed more of their most important values - but no, it's been 90% a game of keeping resources away from them, and keep power away at historically unusual levels.

Which makes the concepts at the heart of modern conservative US values so weird and directly self-destructive. Not completely unseen in history - but very strange for modern times.

Ryan Fenton

We can't yet directly observe black holes in any even loose approximation of real time.

All we can do is treat what we "can't see" along with gravitational lensing as showing us where they are, confirm what we already guessed using equations, and think up experiments when we do get close enough to play with one without taking lifetimes to see any results.

The fascinating thing to me is that in theory all that matter is stuck together in basically the space of one atom, like a condensate state of matter.

That means that each of those "atoms" worth of stuff still exists - but they're all superimposed on top of eachother, each expressing and reacting to the forces the other express, stuck together with overwhelming gravity and usually crazy spin.

Like, all that energy that would make chemical bonds, or explosions, or nuclear reactions, or whatever in another scenario - all that just going off constantly, between all of it, jammed into one spot.

Folks imagine that it might be the a window to another universe... but right in that spot, with trillions of trillions of psuedo-atoms cross-interacting - that itself would be more complex in terms of interactions than most universes of the same mass, just with a much slower entropy than outside.

If you want to imagine the mind of a god, coming out of chaos - that would be your chaos. An endless stream of tightly bound interactions, possibly able to form patterns - enough complexity to "imagine" entire universes just as a side effect in a few nanoseconds as seen from the outside - and lasting far longer than the rest of the universe.

Perhaps it would be more a question of if we can properly communicate or interpret the complexity of such a system, rather than fully understand it, if we find the barriers to any of it permeable enough to test anything. We might only end up only seeing wobbles when the spin rate changes or something crude like that.

We kind of have to at least get our tools closer to figure much of that out though. Then at least we can see what happens when we play at the edge of the known or knowable universe.

Ryan Fenton

We've had Republican dominance for so long - they've gone beyond just dunking on every issue they can find - they're also doing weird performative constitutional violations just to see what the courts will do in response, so they can laugh at them.

Some county sheriffs have been the same way for a while.

This is largely one of a set of horrible side-effects of our 2-party system. Let any number of parties be viable and you'd get parties banding together to counter things like this.

As a side note - not defending Florida in general, but most states I've lived in have been as 'crazy', but haven't had the sunshine laws allowing the local media to report on the same criminal stories like you see with 'Florida man'.

Ryan Fenton

If you make it harder to get direct data on users, then you make the aggregate server-side data you're gathering more valuable.

Which is fair, I'd say - to lock more companies out of easy access to direct user data. Not the worst outcome, at least.

Ryan Fenton

This isn't a everywhere, or forever thing.

It's just the way the culture of the place is right at this time.

That is - it's considered fashionable to avoid conflict by dismissing the other person and moving on - and people that don't do that are considered prey for mockery.

It's a kind of post-rational culture on Twitter - which is why I never started with it myself, seeing how conversations went. You still can't escape folks posting links to threads, in a large percent of other media though.

Lots of cultures hit points like that, where arguments become largely intentionally useless - especially ones with an assumption of mostly anonymity and relative impermanence.

So, confrontation there isn't a matter of winning some fight - but getting out with the least complications.

It's more a commentary on the uselessness of most emotions invested into Twitter than in being able to argue for rational skepticism or something.

Ryan Fenton

Just like studies are still finalizing for children's groups in vaccine trials. Children tend to be the last group allowed to be tested on, after it has been proven safe at scale for adults, which makes sense if you think about the media reaction for any cases of children having any complications before it is tested on adults.

The same logic applies to recommendations for mask usage.

That said - I'm still going to be wearing my mask two weeks from now (just got my second dose a couple days ago), when I go to places like Walmart.

Not because it's medically necessary - but because until we get to 65-70% vaccination, it's still a good idea to consider basic considerations for others as 'normal'.

We eliminated smallpox, at great cost - this is a lot cheaper and easier than that. Polio was also mostly eliminated world-wide, at a similar great cost. Until we get a disease on our regular childhood vaccine regiment, and reduced to pockets that can no longer spread/perpetuate - it's fair to take simple precautions.

Not out of 'virtue signalling' - but out of shared spite for the lives the disease would caused if left unchecked, after all the lived it has cost us.

If we can share a cultural spite for terrorist incidents that cost far fewer lives, we can allow it to be OK to wear simple cloth on your lower face until the population is safe long-term.

No matter how willfully absurd people are - I'd rather work to make it OK to protect them where I can than do otherwise. Because really, screw COVID - fight it until it's dead.

And fight any similar illness that pops up, sooner and better than we did for Covid. Far better to do so than the alternative. looking at a huge number of instances in history..

Ryan Fenton

There was a lot of funding, at every stage for the long-standing upkeep for starting these vaccines - as soon as it was detected in 2019, it was started, and by January 2020, several vaccines were in their final stage and were onto full testing, by most accounts.

There were many, many forms of additional funding along the way - so there wasn't much unfunded work done on these things at any stage.

So yeah - in cases like those, it's fair to say that there's no unlimited rent seeking needed to make sure everyone is paid and happy for their work on this project.

This isn't one of those tasks that needs unlimited investor frenzy to need motivation to exist. This is basic survival of massive amounts of humanity - and the basis for any minimum continued existence of productivity in any field... you don't need market 'enthusiasm' to keep interests alive on this.

Not to say that we as a people won't forget this - that we won't cut back on vaccine funding over time, or forget it in budgets ... but we do fund organizations that do keep these things alive, and who have learned how to scale up their projects and industry connections when things start to flare up again - as they will.

So yeah - this is totally fair, in an financial sense. No unlimited rent seeking in a global pandemic - it's not needed, or helpful for any outcome.

Patent enforcement also would only slow down the vaccine usage in pockets of the world that will be most crucial to keeping further outbreaks from mutating and spreading it back around.

Ryan Fenton

1. This is for the Youtube TV app - that is, the pay-per-month TV replacement, not the regular old youtube videos.

2. Folks that have the app already installed on Roku keep it and can keep using it no problem. It's only new installs and account setups that are prevented for now.

Ryan Fenton

We've got African Grey parrots - one timne, one congo.

They have phone conversations, where one rings the phone, the other says a variant of 'hello' (different for different people they're imitating), then they mumble (differently each time), some uh huhs, some OKs, some 'yeah's, then one of several variants of goodbye then beep.

They also hold up food, and tell the dogs (by name) to 'sit' - then praise them 'good boy' or 'good girl' after tossing the food - they especially do it when the dogs are annoying them with noise or just being too close for too long.

Then of course, there's different kinds of escape behavior wherever I put them when I need to clean up a spot, and seeming joy at all the different approaches - then wanting to go back in to some space and try again - a real love of puzzles. Cardboard boxes become a carving project for their beaks, toys get reused in many ways, and they'll use them to encourage their humans to dance on command any time they are near.

They pick up more constantly, with phrases galore, each with their own context and playful expression.

Really not bad for smaller-than-walnut brains.

But as a programmer, I can't really picture how the information is represented in their minds, or what it means to them - but it sure seems intelligent compared to how most other creatures express themselves. At least they seem really good at picking up new ways to manipulate their environment, compared to anything else non-primate that I've seen.

Brain volume, at least, doesn't seem a giant limitation, beyond a pretty small minimum limit.

Ryan Fenton

This same kind of 'woe is me' logic I hear from various industries every time a tax issue or minimum wage issue.

But after one of those passes, you rarely hear much about them.

Logistically, I'm sure it DOES make a difference - it's less money after all for some folks.

At the same time - there's LOTS of money coming and going just as part of being a healthy business - and so long as your competition is more or less facing the same forces, the course you're charting isn't that hard to adapt.

The folks that don't get to shift with the rising tides are the leaves on this financial tree. The folks that don't own businesses, that can't pass on costs, or aren't in a position to negotiate in order to keep solvent.

What's we've been doing over these last decades is increasingly take away the shield of bankruptcy protections, social services, and financial balance that was built up after the great depression to prevent a financially brittle society... and once the greater non-business population financially collapses, then there's not really a basis for those other companies, is there?

We've been banking on the concept of investment values as a fix for that - but again, that falls apart once the confidence in the system falls, once that brittle balance is broken. And most people can't really take part in that - even at some 401k or housing market level.

The regular poor folks ARE the water everything else floats on - but they're the last ones that get any empathy in our strange media environment. Pandered to yes - but always with the emphasis on helping 'small business' as some mythical ideal, much more than giving a 'regular' person any meaningful comfort or stability compared to most nations.

Which always seemed perverse to me, in terms of consistent motivations.

You can't feed the rich or the smart/lucky for long without a healthy base below them - and it really doesn't seem smart to foster a culture that ignores most of society as hard as ours does, or with such fierce disdain.

It's a very ineffective kind of greed that ignores that - that's what bothers the game strategy theorist part of my brain.

Ryan Fenton

Looking at their production lineup for the plant, they were only slated to make, let's see:

Mirrors

Smoke

Well, perhaps that's just an initial lineup - but it's consistent with the goals of the shared strategy between Trump and them.

But hey - $10 billion on paper, right? That would have been amazing, I'm sure. Just so much numbers. Such a loss.

Just as bad as all those other proposed plants for other companies that ended up never being built for previous administrations, when it ended up not making sense to employ show Americans for token tasks outside the auto industry.

Ryan Fenton

>I chug a beer every time I see your name.

I only post about a few times a week.... so that's quite reasonable.

Ryan Fenton

https://web.stanford.edu/group...

Seems that same dynamic can be seen in most liquids, including any other beer.

Ryan Fenton