TL;DR: I like my Firefox, it does the job for me across my various devices with no annoying bells and whistles that cannot be easily disabled, nothing changed for me with this update, I am perfectly happy with updates that don't break anything. Don't understand why anything Firefox related seems to always trigger a stream of negative comments on /.

Saw the Firefox article, thought I'd click to check whether comments are as negative as they always seem to be whenever Mozilla does anything, and sure enoug, they are. So I will be that guy who says I'm happy with Firefox, it mostly just works, it syncs nicely between my devices, there is nothing truly annoying that I haven't been able to easily disable, it costs me exactly nothing so value vs cost is amazing, and I get some satisfaction from getting some of my software from an underdog instead of yet again supporting the biggest global megacorporations of the world (not a fanatic, they all get plenty of my money some way or the other). I installed this update people seem to be complaining about - nothing really changed, I dug out the compact option from setting, tried it and realized I could get one more line of text in my main window, realized that currently I liked the default tab size better, and changed it back for now. And after that, I can just get back to work, with a browser that is not getting in my way, and it just works.

I wonder how many of the people who make the constant negative comments about Firefox, are actually Firefox users. If one is so annoyed, one should have switched to an alternative browser by now, there are plenty options out there.

Every day now one of the Big AI companies are out there with a "oh no, our product is becoming too good" stunt, which gets echoed for free across the world. Today it's OpenAI, yesterday it was Anthropic. Bonus effect: by saturating the news with this messaging, they are numbing the public to the issue, as our brains start filtering it as background noise. Clever! If any of these companies are touching their brake pedal at all, they do it with barely a gentle touch of the toes of their left foot; at the same time their right foot is going pedal to the metal.

First: I just burned your comment in the database, second: i just burned my burning, third: I burned my burning of the burning and so entered a pretty long loop, second to last: Eurasia is an ally and we've always been at war with Eastasia, finally: any criticism of our loyal ally Eurasia will be severely punished.

Gotta be careful, claiming words like spaceship or spacefleet are AI inventions, or that (solar) sails in space do not exist, would unleash a horde of angry trekkies. They have not yet "set sail" though, they have basically just undocked and anchored further out in the bay area. According to the mission timeline it's only after ~24 hours that they will enter a trans lunar orbit.

Just do it manually, lots of manpower is readily available at a federal level. First of all, those people currently pre-redacting anything in the Trump-Epstein Files (as trademarked by Jimmy Kimmel) to make sure any hint of a truth about dear leader and his gang never sees the light of day. Another obvious ones is those thousands of ICE agents who could use a break from inventing fake problems to pretend to work on.

I'm surprised to learn Amazon pays any taxes at all, so TIL they pay something; that's not nothing! Doing some quick maths here: Amazon put USD ~106 Mn (source: The Guardian) into the Melania movie, and their taxes were cut by USD 7.8 Bn. The Return On Investment is ~74 000 %. Not bad!

So the world has around 8.2 Bn people according to a quick search, and the US population is around 340 million. It turns out most people are not US citizens! More than 95% of us, actually. And some of us even have money! Usually not the f*** you money kind of money, but enough to shoulder the cost of vaccine and medicines, either directly or indirectly through public health care or insurance.

If the point of most of these cryptos was for their creators to jump on the hype train and make a quick cash crab, and those creators successfully executed an exit strategy to dump their crypto product somewhere near its peak - then those cryptos were a success; they did not fail in their intended purpose.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Progress in vaccine development is a good thing! But in the end that may not matter, because (a) you are not taking the vaccine because you have become prey to the anti-vaxxer way of thinking, or (b) you are getting medical anti-advice from your own government that tells you not to take vaccines, or (c) you cannot afford the vaccine, or (d) vaccines are otherwise somehow not available to you, or (e) your body does not tolerate the vaccine and there is no herd immunity as enough people around you are not taking a vaccine, and (f) that lack of herd immunity and global responses with vaccines means the need to vaccinate goes on for perpetuity.

For me living in Norway, the primary issue is price. I chose to take the flu vaccine this year and usually do, that's a quick USD 40 or more. Happy I did because the whole family came down with the flu during Christmas, and I got only moderately ill. I did not even consider the covid vaccine, that one is around USD 100 if you are not in a risk group and have to pay the whole thing yourself. We decided a few years ago to get the TBE vaccine because of increase of tick activity in outdoor areas, that's a quick USD 200 for each set of shots for the whole family (four people), which you have to take 3 or so sets in the first year, and then it needs to be renewed every few years. I'm getting middle aged and should start considering some vaccines I have not been thinking about before, e.g. pneumonia (around USD 60) and shingles (in total for the two required doses around US 500).

If there is a vaccine you cannot get, or you somehow find it hard to justify the cost/benefit tradeoff, or you are having a hard time balancing the issue of an immediate cost vs some future uncertain/unlikely potential illness (low likelihood and great consequence, the most difficult type of scenario for our human minds to risk assess), then the existence of vaccines actually only makes you feel worse. Better to not have the option than feeling bad about a desirable option that is not available to you.

The administration being "sceptical" is but a thinly veiled reminder that don trump expects a big fat beautiful golden envelope.

You still pay, by sharing all your data, thus enabling other companies to make possibly even more money off you in the end, e.g. by dynamically altering the price of some completely unrelated product they know you really need. Not judging anyone here, I use Gmail myself.

For us middle aged fathers pondering whether we can get away with spending our linen pressed cotton bills on this set, there is comfort in rule #6: Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity

Not saying opiates are never required. But I was shocked by some documentary I saw on the opioid epidemic, and how the pharma industry has lobbied towards treating pain as an illness rather than a symptom, and something that in and of itself needs to be treated. It's that casual use to "grease your life a bit" which can then lead to abuse, which I am referring to, not wanting to be inconvenienced by a bit of pain. That's something very different from disabilitating pain.

I had frozen shoulder at some point in life; it lasted several months. Forget yourself for a split second and make the wrong rapid movement - like something slips from your hands and you move to catch it - and it's instant overwhelming pain. Physical therapy involves having your joint rotated until it starts really hurting, and then some more, while you have to stay relaxed. Never took a single pill, and I'm glad I didn't.

Twice a year people feel the slight inconvenience of a couple days to adjust their sleep schedule a whole one single hour. Which is something noticeable plus you may actually have to manually adjust some clocks, so that then feels important as something that disrupts the regular routine. Now; you cannot in the same way feel the same pain of being an hour out of sync with the ideal day/light rhythm, because it's a more subtle effect - but it is there ... and it is there for the better part of 180 days! Level of inconvenience multiplied by the number of times you are inconvenienced, and the latter scenario is much worse.

People increasingly seem unable to judge tangible short term gains vs longer term losses. You only have to turn to politics to see that, people electing leaders who dangle some short term prize in front of them, like "I will bring down prices of eggs" or whatever; people elect them because of those short term narrow scope promises, and next thing those politicians start tearing down their world over the long term across the board. And then those voters start complaining about what happened, when what happens was telegraphed years in advance. But those voters seem simply ... unable ... to ... think ... long ... term. But hey, maybe they got cheaper eggs for a month or two, so that is something.

Or take pain medication with opiates as an example. You are offered addictive pills to get rid of a modest amount of pain that normally you'd be able to grind your teeth a little bit and live through it. But you'd rather have no pain at all, so you take the pills, plus the ads say pain is something which has to be treated, talk to your big pharma sponsored doctor. And you repeat that choice to take the meds, again and again. Wind the clock forward one DST or two, and you are an addict. Turns out taking the meds was a net loss for you.

It's another year of updates if you let yourself be bullied into activating backup features, putting stuff in their cloud, and fighting the OS with probably either silently enabling in the background, or nagging you about, any folders for which you have disabled backup. The offer is only free in terms of giving MS data instead of money. In a market economy, this is the kind of stuff consumers are supposed to consider protesting against by getting a different product.

For me it was a hard no thank you as I considered a couple weeks ago getting those additional two weeks for my TPM non-compliant weeks, neither being willing to go down the "let us back up your data" or getting into the community's solution that "you just have to use Rufus to install Win11" route. Switched to Linux Mint LMDE, and I've been super happy with that decision, wondering why I didn't do it already. I was prepared to give up most of my Steam gaming; turns out most of my non-Linux Steam collection seems to run nicely with Steam/Proton. Was planning on running Spotify in a browser; realized LM comes with an app. User experience is super smooth, and much prefer it to Win10 and Win11, with no nagging from the OS.