Tomorrow? Oh, so you already forgot the announcement from last month? Well, I mean I guess we have a lot of our own stuff going on right now…

/s?

Yup. Or anything held against them is now just fakery.

Like this gem from the news today.

Sometimes it feels technology may doom us all in the end. We’ve got a rough patch in society starting now, now that liars and cheats can be more convincingly backed up, and honest folk hidden behind credible doubt that they are the liars.

AI isn’t just on the path to make convincing lies, it’s on the path to ensuring that all truth can be doubted as well. At which point, there is no such thing as truth until we learn yet a new way to tell the difference.

“They don’t need to convince us what they are saying, the lies, are true. Just that there is no truth, and you cannot believe anything you are told.”

What happens next? A wave of even worse disregard for things.

After all, if we can bring back the mammoth, who cares if we off <insert species here>, they’ll just bring it back next rotation. /s

It’s not really because it fell over. It’s because it wasn’t supposed to fall over. Consumable launch materials don’t contend with this because failure to return is a success. This is a failure. This must be learned from and fought against/prevented going forward.

If you’ve got a VPS at your disposal, many of the homepage softwares I’ve tried over the years have some amount of caching to make them quite fast or even operate offline(“Homer” for one required me to deeply purge my cache as it would still appear when my site was offline…despite having replaced it long ago! 😂). Or, if you wanted to roll your own static HTML page, you can absolutely add a Service Worker for your own offline caching.

That’s where I’m at now. I use a custom ServiceWorker static HTML for my homepage and tab page on all my devices. This page is a bouncer, checks if I’m at home or not(or if my local dashboard is offline) and either redirects me to the local homepage which has all my HomeLab services on it, or if it fails just tells me I might be abroad or offline and lists a few public websites.

And yes, this works offline or over a shitty connection. Essentially the service worker quickly provides the cached page from the browser storage, then tries to take the time to check the live version. If it gets one, it updates the cache, if not, enjoy the offline version.

Might be a bit over the top, but I set up a custom homepage startpage, and then grabbed the New Tab Override extension so that it opens on new tabs as well as being my homepage.

So if you can think of any websites that might do what you want like cardd or link tree, or are interested in making your own little webpage and hosting it somewhere free, that might work and as a bonus will be the same across all your browsers and devices. Could even load it up on someone else’s computer if you remember the link.

Looking at it, seems not. Google store page says it doesn’t follow best practices and may soon no longer be supported. AFAIK it’s a single dev hobby project so this might be the end of it. Ah well. I’ll just no longer have as many free skins for games.

I only break out Chrome(or Edge) for two reasons:

One is access to serial ports to flash ESP devices, or update the firmware on my XR glasses. Firefox can’t do that.

The other is to automate Twitch drop collection. The addon I found to reload broken streams and collect drops while I’m at work only has a Chrome version.

Not entirely a nothing burger, I think. If there’s any truth to the anti-cheat outrage, there’s a large population of average joes handing out ring 0 access to a growing number of third or fourth party companies for the purpose of kernel level anti-cheat in video games.

Still a supply chain attack or a vulnerability in one of the A/C programs, but not as impossible as we would like it to be.

Yeah, I can see more of this happening as demand for quality products increases.

Things that don’t need replaced don’t bring in more money year over year, which means they have to keep coming up with other excuses for you to buy a new one just to stay above water.

Any time purchases reach critical mass and mostly everyone has bought the “last gizmo you’ll ever need”, they’ll have to release the last-last gizmo you’ll ever need.

One-time purchase forever mouse would just mean once sales drop they need to release the forever-ever mouse, now with an extra button, then when that one peaks, the forever-and-ever mouse, with one more button than that.

Or they’ll hit a ceiling and go the way of Instant Pot.

It feels like a choice between rental(this) or rental with extra e-waste(any time you replace a cheaply made or planned obsolescence product) and it sucks.

I once thought the point of conservatism was to put the brakes on wild new ideas and rapid changes, play advocate for the old ways and make sure we’re slow and thoughtful about new ideas. Then I realized that apparently the job is to drag everything absolutely backwards.

As it was before, so it shall be again. This is the will of the GOP it seems.

Wire coat hangers are going to be inexplicably more popular than plastic again too. No relation I’m sure.

Many don’t think he can pull it off, which is the scary part that might let him do it.

“Oh, that’s all talk. He can say what he wants but can’t do shit without the House and Congress, and if he wanted to change things to get more terms? With states majority agreement that’s required? Not in his lifetime. You worry for nothing, PassingThrough, it’s all showmanship, as it always has been. And no, the Army wouldn’t help such an obvious fool overthrow the government either.”

Which is true in context. It’s a traditional name but it is not the highest authority, if you can make your case the appeals court can overrule them, making them the highest authority.

Maybe not by name, but by job it does. That’s why it “kinda” makes sense. The court might be Supreme in name but not in duty, whoever got to write up the org chart realized that the appeals court got the final say and was the real top dog.

I mean, it kinda makes sense. Especially in this day and age an appeal is the final say, not the court ruling(feels like everything gets appealed). So, this way the place that happens is the highest court in the state. The final ruling is whether the highest non-appeals court did it right, not the original issue.

Or, put another way, if you tell me the highest court in the land has made a decision, I would expect that to be the end of it. But it’s not. From the moment the verdict is read lawyers are preparing an appeal. Therefore, whatever court takes the appeal makes the true final decision. Why not then make that the highest court in the land and better reflect the role?

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Now would be a good time to look for a .com you like, or one of the more common TLDs. And register it at Namecheap, Porkbun, or Cloudflare. (Cloudflare is cheapest but all-eggs-in-one-basket is a concern for some.)

Sadly, all the cheap or fun TLDs have a habit of being blocked wholesale, either because the cheap ones are overused by bad actors or because corporate IT just blacklists “abnormal” TLDs (or only whitelists the old ones?) because it’s “easy security”.

Notably, XYZ also does that 1.111B initiative, selling numbered domains for 99¢, further feeding the affordability for bad actors and justifying a flat out sinkhole of the entire TLD.

I got a three character XYZ to use as a personal link shortener. Half the people I used it with said it was blocked at school or work. My longer COM poses no issue.

Some would think this is horrible, but to me, it would be wholly dependent on the title/what was bought and sold.

Nothing in this world is free. Development, servers, character licensing, it all costs money and if those costs aren’t passed down, you’ll never afford to continue. So for a game, especially one with online content or continuing content, to be free to play, money has to come from somewhere.

Where the road splits is what is being sold. Things that give an edge in the game, pay-to-win? Uninstalled. Time limited FOMO triggers? Disgusting. Random loot boxes? Begone foul spirit.

On the other end, if all that is for sale is shiny baubles and trinkets, things no one needs but can have as a reward for “supporting development”? I’m cool with that. If I feel no requirement to pay up, it’s being handled right, and if I like they game, sure, I can part with a fiver to look like I’m dipped in gold or whatever the supporter pack adds to help them keep the lights on(at least until I get bored of it in a week or two and switch back :P).

I’d be curious what the divide is between the two kinds of purchases are. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed to find it was mostly P2W scum, though.

Is there a list anywhere of this and other settings and features that could/should certainly be changed to better Firefox privacy?

Other than that I’m not sure I’m really going to jump ship. I think I’m getting too old for the “clunkiness” that comes with trying to use third party/self hosted alternatives to replace features that ultimately break the privacy angle, or to add them to barebones privacy focused browsers. Containers and profile/bookmark syncing, for example. But if there’s a list of switches I can flip to turn off the most egregious things, that would be good for today.