Manifest V2 is not just a plugin, it touches a LOT of the code. Keeping it in the codebase will become increasingly difficult for any 3rd party.
But this isn't just about Manifest V2. It's about the very concept of choice- if Google decides you don't get something, then nobody gets it. Call it open source if you want, if all rely on Chromium then edge, vivaldi, opera, brave, etc are just reskinned Chrome with extra shit.
It's sad that Firefox and Webkit are really the only other choices. I wish there was more. Sadly these days it's all about fast javascript and that's not a super easy thing to build.
For lack of better choices, I agree that Firefox and its variants are what we should be pushing these days.
The more I think about this, the more I think it's a really big problem how much Web surfing runs on Chromium. While standards are far more prevalent now than in the days of Internet Explorer's de facto monopoly, the end result is similar- just as MS had control of the Internet through IE, Google gets a lot of control through Chromium.
The recent removal of Manifest V2 is a perfect example. A change literally nobody wanted forced upon the whole world. And while others like MS may be keeping the Mv2 code around, that won't be tenable forever.
The problem isn't Mv2 or uBlock or anything else. The problem is control. That one company has the ability to disable something millions of users want, across multiple browsers, because they say so.
And thus the more I think about it, the more I conclude it's important to get as much browsing OFF Chromium as possible.
Thing is- it's the boomers that pushed things like the 21 to drink laws and the absurdly strict enforcement of them (like sending a parent to jail if their kid has a party).
You guys spent a few decades decrying teenage drinking, making it hard for teens to drink. And now you all are shocked when kids do something else.
Don't forget- nicotine is 18+ not 21+. So chances are every high schooler has a friend or a sibling that can get them vapes.
Vapes are small. Many don't look like anything in particular to someone who doesn't know what they are. And they are easy to hide, easy to conceal, easy to transport, AND easy to use throughout the day.
So for a substance for kids to get into, it's got a lot of advantages over alcohol.
Plus which vaping is much more common to do alone. Kids are spending far less time on in-person social interactions now (probably because boomers flipped out over stranger danger).
if community allows AI contet - then whats the problem?
In that case none, but I believe it should be specifically opt-in on a community basis. IE the mods of that community would have to specifically choose to allow AI content.
some people truly dont care and will be grateful for that content.
Honest question- can you point to anyone, anywhere, that is saying they want textual AI content posted?
I've seen a lot of AI content and 99% of it is slop. The only stuff I've seen that's worth a damn is some people who are using AI to animate videos.
My problem isn't necessarily bots, it's automated or rapid manual posting of AI generated content. AI generated content is very rarely interesting or worth my time.
So yes, in your example I have little problem with Bot A but I want to get rid of Bot B.
I also think bot accounts should be required to be flagged, and bots that frequently accumulate negative scores on posts/comments should be removed.
You are correct that America is no longer a trustworthy reliable partner. And of that IMHO Trump is a symptom rather than a cause. The simple fact is that the American people have become disconnected from their own politics. So every 4ish years maybe half to 2/3 of the country opens one eyelid just enough to either blindly vote for whatever primary color they subscribe to, or to vote for whoever's TV ads sucked less. The number that do real research is sadly very low.
The result is we flip flop back and forth between the red asshole and the blue asshole. Red seems to have more assholes the last couple decades but it varies when you look at the big picture. The real problem though isn't red or blue is that the sense of national identity is gone. Go back 20 or 30 years and someone like Trump would be laughed off the stage in the first primary because rounding up immigrants with secret police squads is obviously not how America operates. Now people get so caught up in the 'us vs them' divisive narrative that they actually think the ends justify the means (or more likely, they just don't research the reality of what's going on and just say 'yeah get rid of illegal immigrants!')
The point though is that no set of policies, no matter how good or bad, can be assumed to last more than 4ish years. Look at Ukraine- Biden helped them out because defending freedom is what America stands for, Trump tried to shake them down for mineral rights then washed his hands of the problem.
So yeah, the fact that we as a nation are behaving this way is a failure. But the bigger failure is that we are so disconnected from the actions of our own government that we largely no longer care. We bitch about it online but ask anyone complaining online if they've done more than 1 hour of independent candidate research over the last decade? I'd be shocked if you get 1%.
Until that changes I'm sorry to say to anyone in the rest of the world, don't assume any USA policy will last any longer than the administration that enacted it.
Personally if the situation was reversed, or if I was in charge of Canada, I'd just set a policy that each month, there will be a flat rate tariff on all US imported goods that will, over the next 30 days, be equal to the $ value of last month's tariffs paid on all exports to USA. That money will be collected and made available to cover any tariffs USA charged on Canadian imports.
Result is the more USA tariffs Canadian goods coming south, the more tariff will need to be paid to sell stuff going north. And thus fewer people in Canada will buy USA goods because of the tariff, but people in USA will buy Canadian goods because the tariff is paid for by Canadian government.
Only works up to a point, but will definitely create a trade imbalance in Canada's favor. And we can say you want it to go away, kill the tariff on your side and it's automatically gone in 30 days.
This is a good thing and a bad thing.
I'd agree that there may well be less unity between states. I believe that's actually what our founders intended- individual states united, without local/state politics being an afterthought.
Problem is our system in concept is based on the idea that the only good source of authority for how to govern is the people who are governed taking an active interest in their own government. Sadly that kind of engaged population hasn't been the case for a while. Sadly the ones who are pushing for this are more so our conservatives- not for any useful reason but because it gives them more ability to set discriminatory policies against gay people and enforce religion based socially conservative policy in primarily conservative states.
IMHO the only thing that can save us is if the American people once again take active interest in the running of their government. This is easier said than done.
Sadly I don't think it's intentional. Our education is increasingly focused on tests over critical thinking- and somewhere along the line we decided it's more harmful socially to hold an underperforming kid back than to put him in the next grade unprepared. We're now having problems with college professors having to rework the course material to account for the fact that some students can't read well if at all (I really wish I was kidding). Meanwhile our population too distracted trying to make ends meet, and so we are easy to exploit with extreme rhetoric. And our news is corporate focused on eyeballs over education so the problem gets worse.
I'm sorry that kind of culture is spreading :( I would strongly encourage you focus on maintaining your educational systems to a high standard.
I love my country but I'm concerned it may literally be too late to save us and stop an Idiocracy-like future, especially with the onset of AI. I really hope it's not. But I see my own colleagues basically offloading their own critical thinking to ChatGPT and I see how it makes them unable to think for themselves :\ And I worry a lot.
But this is obviously going to fail, always was obviously going to fail. It's a PR stunt, nothing more.
Twitter will sue them, they'll settle for giving up the name and some token fine, and hopefully they're on the map. Or, their hail mary long shot will pay off and they'll get to call themselves twitter in which case holy shit they're golden. That's the strategy.
It's stupid- they'll lose in court and I doubt whatever they offer is more compelling than what's already out there.
Canada has always been a good friend to the US, both in peace and in wartime. When we had wildfires Canada sent us aircraft, crews, supplies. When we were at war in Iraq and Afghanistan Canada sent us some of the best sniper teams anywhere. Canada has always been a peacetime friend and trade partner and we exchange a lot of goods, services, and tourism in both directions.
And then we decide to fuck them over for no reason. We spent 3-4 decades offshoring every bit of American manufacturing and willingly, gleefully, built ourselves a giant trade imbalance because doing so increased shareholder value. Now we realize that might be a bad thing so what do we do? We fuck over our friends, one of the few countries that stood by us through thick and thin. Canada has done nothing to deserve this.
If I were a Canadian, I'd be right fucking pissed (politely of course) that our 100+ year friend is doing this. And quite frankly, I'd be right.
So yeah, while I want my country to succeed, in this instance we deserve to fail and we should fail. Canada deserves better than this.
Yeah it was started as a host for Reddit because everything else sucked. And they did stuff nobody'd have considered, like you could get a full gallery of NSFW content, and the embed link would give you a straight JPG without any ads or frames or anything. Sure it had its own community but that stayed out of the way.
It's funny really... what was the quote? You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.
Imgur was started back in the day to provide a no-bullshit image host, because all the others were too corporate / too monetized / too much bullshit/enshittification. So MrGrim started Imgur to fix that.
Then MrGrim took a bunch of VC money, and they eventually sold out, and now the result is the sad shell of what it once was today.
HBM has massive profit margins. It's also hard as hell to make, as it involves multiple stacked wafers. This vid is a good catchup on that and the rest of this situation.
China will HAPPILY flood the non-HBM DRAM market with memory 'only' 2x as expensive as last year. And every PC maker, automaker, gadget maker, etc will happily buy it because as Valve famously put it, "They give us a price every month or something, and they say 'you can buy that many' and it's yes or no, and if we say no then they never talk to us again." Source interview. If China says 'we have consistent price, we have consistent supply, we can meet your needs' and the quality is decent then it doesn't matter if it's slower or DDR4 or whatever people will love them for it.
And play that ahead.
The big 3 are focused on HBM and most of their capacity is already sold through 2027
If China can scale up production of standard DDR4/5 and sell it reliably at 200% of normal price (aka, below current market rates) then there's less incentive to build fabs. So they will let China have the consumer market with their blessings. And thus China will have made themselves essential in yet another product supply chain.
This exactly.
Manifest V2 is not just a plugin, it touches a LOT of the code. Keeping it in the codebase will become increasingly difficult for any 3rd party.
But this isn't just about Manifest V2. It's about the very concept of choice- if Google decides you don't get something, then nobody gets it. Call it open source if you want, if all rely on Chromium then edge, vivaldi, opera, brave, etc are just reskinned Chrome with extra shit.
It's sad that Firefox and Webkit are really the only other choices. I wish there was more. Sadly these days it's all about fast javascript and that's not a super easy thing to build.
For lack of better choices, I agree that Firefox and its variants are what we should be pushing these days.
Fascinating. Where are the Epstein files?

Shocking, but not surprising.
The more I think about this, the more I think it's a really big problem how much Web surfing runs on Chromium. While standards are far more prevalent now than in the days of Internet Explorer's de facto monopoly, the end result is similar- just as MS had control of the Internet through IE, Google gets a lot of control through Chromium.
The recent removal of Manifest V2 is a perfect example. A change literally nobody wanted forced upon the whole world. And while others like MS may be keeping the Mv2 code around, that won't be tenable forever.
The problem isn't Mv2 or uBlock or anything else. The problem is control. That one company has the ability to disable something millions of users want, across multiple browsers, because they say so.
And thus the more I think about it, the more I conclude it's important to get as much browsing OFF Chromium as possible.
Thing is- it's the boomers that pushed things like the 21 to drink laws and the absurdly strict enforcement of them (like sending a parent to jail if their kid has a party).
You guys spent a few decades decrying teenage drinking, making it hard for teens to drink. And now you all are shocked when kids do something else.
Don't forget- nicotine is 18+ not 21+. So chances are every high schooler has a friend or a sibling that can get them vapes.
Vapes are small. Many don't look like anything in particular to someone who doesn't know what they are. And they are easy to hide, easy to conceal, easy to transport, AND easy to use throughout the day.
So for a substance for kids to get into, it's got a lot of advantages over alcohol.
Plus which vaping is much more common to do alone. Kids are spending far less time on in-person social interactions now (probably because boomers flipped out over stranger danger).
In that case none, but I believe it should be specifically opt-in on a community basis. IE the mods of that community would have to specifically choose to allow AI content.
Honest question- can you point to anyone, anywhere, that is saying they want textual AI content posted?
I've seen a lot of AI content and 99% of it is slop. The only stuff I've seen that's worth a damn is some people who are using AI to animate videos.
My problem isn't necessarily bots, it's automated or rapid manual posting of AI generated content. AI generated content is very rarely interesting or worth my time.
So yes, in your example I have little problem with Bot A but I want to get rid of Bot B.
I also think bot accounts should be required to be flagged, and bots that frequently accumulate negative scores on posts/comments should be removed.
I don't blame you.
You are correct that America is no longer a trustworthy reliable partner. And of that IMHO Trump is a symptom rather than a cause. The simple fact is that the American people have become disconnected from their own politics. So every 4ish years maybe half to 2/3 of the country opens one eyelid just enough to either blindly vote for whatever primary color they subscribe to, or to vote for whoever's TV ads sucked less. The number that do real research is sadly very low.
The result is we flip flop back and forth between the red asshole and the blue asshole. Red seems to have more assholes the last couple decades but it varies when you look at the big picture. The real problem though isn't red or blue is that the sense of national identity is gone. Go back 20 or 30 years and someone like Trump would be laughed off the stage in the first primary because rounding up immigrants with secret police squads is obviously not how America operates. Now people get so caught up in the 'us vs them' divisive narrative that they actually think the ends justify the means (or more likely, they just don't research the reality of what's going on and just say 'yeah get rid of illegal immigrants!')
The point though is that no set of policies, no matter how good or bad, can be assumed to last more than 4ish years. Look at Ukraine- Biden helped them out because defending freedom is what America stands for, Trump tried to shake them down for mineral rights then washed his hands of the problem.
So yeah, the fact that we as a nation are behaving this way is a failure. But the bigger failure is that we are so disconnected from the actions of our own government that we largely no longer care. We bitch about it online but ask anyone complaining online if they've done more than 1 hour of independent candidate research over the last decade? I'd be shocked if you get 1%.
Until that changes I'm sorry to say to anyone in the rest of the world, don't assume any USA policy will last any longer than the administration that enacted it.
Personally if the situation was reversed, or if I was in charge of Canada, I'd just set a policy that each month, there will be a flat rate tariff on all US imported goods that will, over the next 30 days, be equal to the $ value of last month's tariffs paid on all exports to USA. That money will be collected and made available to cover any tariffs USA charged on Canadian imports.
Result is the more USA tariffs Canadian goods coming south, the more tariff will need to be paid to sell stuff going north. And thus fewer people in Canada will buy USA goods because of the tariff, but people in USA will buy Canadian goods because the tariff is paid for by Canadian government.
Only works up to a point, but will definitely create a trade imbalance in Canada's favor. And we can say you want it to go away, kill the tariff on your side and it's automatically gone in 30 days.
Disney didn't use Steamboat Willie for a while, they didn't lose it....
This is a good thing and a bad thing.
I'd agree that there may well be less unity between states. I believe that's actually what our founders intended- individual states united, without local/state politics being an afterthought.
Problem is our system in concept is based on the idea that the only good source of authority for how to govern is the people who are governed taking an active interest in their own government. Sadly that kind of engaged population hasn't been the case for a while. Sadly the ones who are pushing for this are more so our conservatives- not for any useful reason but because it gives them more ability to set discriminatory policies against gay people and enforce religion based socially conservative policy in primarily conservative states.
IMHO the only thing that can save us is if the American people once again take active interest in the running of their government. This is easier said than done.
Sadly I don't think it's intentional. Our education is increasingly focused on tests over critical thinking- and somewhere along the line we decided it's more harmful socially to hold an underperforming kid back than to put him in the next grade unprepared. We're now having problems with college professors having to rework the course material to account for the fact that some students can't read well if at all (I really wish I was kidding). Meanwhile our population too distracted trying to make ends meet, and so we are easy to exploit with extreme rhetoric. And our news is corporate focused on eyeballs over education so the problem gets worse.
I'm sorry that kind of culture is spreading :( I would strongly encourage you focus on maintaining your educational systems to a high standard.
I love my country but I'm concerned it may literally be too late to save us and stop an Idiocracy-like future, especially with the onset of AI. I really hope it's not. But I see my own colleagues basically offloading their own critical thinking to ChatGPT and I see how it makes them unable to think for themselves :\ And I worry a lot.
Sounds just like American politics in most cases.
Sometimes we pick the 'better off' sometimes we don't.
Thanks :)
I'm not claiming Twitter is great.
But this is obviously going to fail, always was obviously going to fail. It's a PR stunt, nothing more.
Twitter will sue them, they'll settle for giving up the name and some token fine, and hopefully they're on the map. Or, their hail mary long shot will pay off and they'll get to call themselves twitter in which case holy shit they're golden. That's the strategy.
It's stupid- they'll lose in court and I doubt whatever they offer is more compelling than what's already out there.
American here. I love my country.
But they should absolutely turn the screws.
Canada has always been a good friend to the US, both in peace and in wartime. When we had wildfires Canada sent us aircraft, crews, supplies. When we were at war in Iraq and Afghanistan Canada sent us some of the best sniper teams anywhere. Canada has always been a peacetime friend and trade partner and we exchange a lot of goods, services, and tourism in both directions.
And then we decide to fuck them over for no reason. We spent 3-4 decades offshoring every bit of American manufacturing and willingly, gleefully, built ourselves a giant trade imbalance because doing so increased shareholder value. Now we realize that might be a bad thing so what do we do? We fuck over our friends, one of the few countries that stood by us through thick and thin. Canada has done nothing to deserve this.
If I were a Canadian, I'd be right fucking pissed (politely of course) that our 100+ year friend is doing this. And quite frankly, I'd be right.
So yeah, while I want my country to succeed, in this instance we deserve to fail and we should fail. Canada deserves better than this.
Very gradual. One thing at a time. The site has gotten more scripty and 'modern mobile friendly web' ish.
Yeah it was started as a host for Reddit because everything else sucked. And they did stuff nobody'd have considered, like you could get a full gallery of NSFW content, and the embed link would give you a straight JPG without any ads or frames or anything. Sure it had its own community but that stayed out of the way.
Now that's the main focus.
In general I agree- the concept of red tape, environmental evaluations, etc is a good thing.
But we all know what the road to Hell is paved with.
Key is to find a middle ground- that lets a fab be built in an environmentally friendly way but also rapidly.
It's funny really... what was the quote? You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.
Imgur was started back in the day to provide a no-bullshit image host, because all the others were too corporate / too monetized / too much bullshit/enshittification. So MrGrim started Imgur to fix that.
Then MrGrim took a bunch of VC money, and they eventually sold out, and now the result is the sad shell of what it once was today.
Is this a surprise?
Semiconductor production is a national priority for China.
This 100%.
HBM has massive profit margins. It's also hard as hell to make, as it involves multiple stacked wafers. This vid is a good catchup on that and the rest of this situation.
China will HAPPILY flood the non-HBM DRAM market with memory 'only' 2x as expensive as last year. And every PC maker, automaker, gadget maker, etc will happily buy it because as Valve famously put it, "They give us a price every month or something, and they say 'you can buy that many' and it's yes or no, and if we say no then they never talk to us again." Source interview. If China says 'we have consistent price, we have consistent supply, we can meet your needs' and the quality is decent then it doesn't matter if it's slower or DDR4 or whatever people will love them for it.
And play that ahead.
The big 3 are focused on HBM and most of their capacity is already sold through 2027
If China can scale up production of standard DDR4/5 and sell it reliably at 200% of normal price (aka, below current market rates) then there's less incentive to build fabs. So they will let China have the consumer market with their blessings. And thus China will have made themselves essential in yet another product supply chain.