The practical problem with Chromebooks at the time was that for several years, between the debut of Chromebooks in 2011 and widespread support for Crostini (a GNU/Linux virtual machine) in 2019, a Chromebook couldn't do anything other than browse the web without threatening to wipe all your data (because "OS verification is OFF") every time you turned it on. That isn't very conducive to offline use while (say) riding a bus. I had been using my netbook for lightweight hobby programming projects.

The disadvantage of a bigger laptop is that a bigger laptop is less convenient to use in a cramped space, such as on a bus commute to and from your day job. It's also less convenient to pack in a cramped space, such as your tiny personal locker at your day job. A 10.1" laptop fit in (say) a locker in the back of a Walmart Supercenter, and a 11.6" laptop did not. That's part of why I was so disappointed that manufacturers suddenly discontinued 10.1" laptops at the end of 2012. I remember recommending that people affected by this discontinuation buy a cellular iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard case, a VPS, and an expensive data plan, and use the iPad to remote desktop to the VPS. I rejected that workaround as cost prohibitive at the time.

Is that guy a cat who needs to nap every 2 hours?

FWIW, I once participated in a coding contest at my university in the early 90's that lasted 72 hours (the first prize was a full scholarship, which I didn't get :)) I ran on coffee and speed for the full 72 hours, then collapsed on a couch and slept until someone woke me up to come get my third prize (a Solaris license).

10 hours non-stop coding sounds like a normal day at the office trying to wrap up a project.

Given that China doesn't allow everyday citizens unlimited access to the internet, we can assume the only ones allowed out are bad actors like badbot, so blocking China entirely would be a net benefit for the entire world. We'd have to get the VPN operators to cooperate, which is near impossible since they'd sell their own mothers for a quick buck.

This marketing technique is seriously long in the tooth...

YES! Many happy users of Proton on Steam Deck will answer in the affirmative for many games. This is what Valve's 30 percent cut of Steam sales pays for.

As if Windows 11 doesn't have its own host of "config issues that require an hour of reading to fix."

If you ever make a chatbot call me, you're SOOO out of my addressbook forever. Telemarketers are annoying enough to get deal with without having to deal with Google AI robocalls on top of it.

and make it worse, until it's enshittified to uselessness.

One use case for a VPN is allowing incoming connections to a home PC that is behind an ISP's firewall and/or NAT. Such a PC might be running a game server or a low-traffic web server. Another is connecting to the IPv6 Internet from an IPv4-only home ISP such as Frontier.

This guy jumps from one buzzword tech du jour to the next with nothing to show for the previous massive investment. If I was a shareholder, I'd sell-sell-sell.

The <figure> element might help with that.

I happened to be aware of the existence of a extension made by someone else that offers domain-level opt-in consent to run script in a particular web browser. I cited the extension's title and author and deliberately left out any URL. I thought that would have been adequate to imply lack of conflict of interest. A user has implied to me that it is not. What means of citing a source would have been adequate?

https://youtu.be/20TAkcy3aBY?t...

Most User-agent strings that don't contain "bot" nor "Mozilla/" were in Anubis's allowlist last I checked.

Yet. Because Anubis is free software, and because its hash happens to be the same as the proof of work of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, someone could modify Anubis to tie the SHA-256 puzzle to the Bitcoin block that a mining pool is working on.

Until someone writes a browser extension to offload solving the hashcash to WebGPU.

Laptops tend to have an always-on CPU spike monitor: the exhaust fan. So do phones and tablets: they get warm. So do older, less expensive, or small-form-factor desktop computers: they get stuck on the interstitial for up to a minute.

This already exists. Use an extension to make script-in-the-browser opt-in per domain, such as the Firefox extension "Javascript Control" by Erwan Ameil.