Not ignorant in general, and I’m sorry if it came across that way.

But ignorant about how Topics works, yes. To assert that Topics takes away agency can only be bad faith or ignorance.

Topics is in your control. It’s all in your control. You can turn off specific topics you don’t want, or disable it entirely if you really want to. Browsers choosing not to implement it has nothing to do with agency, and appeals to that notion merely belie either ignorance or bad faith.

You don’t have to “trust” them. You can just read the spec. See what it actually does for yourself.

I have no doubt that Google did not create this out of the good of their heart. They know 3rd party cookies are a dying tech and they need a replacement. But FLoC, their earlier attempt at a replacement, received a lot of very justified pushback for being a privacy nightmare. And they abandoned it, realising their error. In creating Topics, they’ve done a really good job of coming up with something that can support advertiser-funded business models while still respecting people’s privacy by design.

It’s someone not willing to make any modest concessions in order to make the vast array of free content available viable to create. Modest concessions like your browser saying “here’s a small subset of topics the person might be interested in”. You’ve got to be pretty extremist to suggest that that’s privacy-invading.

The thing is, what Google has rolled out is really fucking good already. Sites only get to know general “topics”, and only ones you’ve used recently. It’s controlled by your own browser so you can easily opt out entirely or block certain topics you don’t want from being associated with you. They also specifically decided not to add topics for sensitive topics from even being available in the Topics API.

It’s really fucking good for privacy, unless you’re an extremist who believes there shouldn’t be anything even vaguely resembling relevant advertising. Which is the exact same group of people criticising Firefox here. And also the exact same group of people inadvertently extending the life of 3rd party cookies that Google is trying so desperately to kill off. But they can’t kill it off because the privacy extremists have meant take-up of Topics isn’t high enough.

Also you have a rather perscriptive understanding of language

Lol wtf are you talking about? No they don’t. Everyone telling them they are wrong is being prescriptive. All they are doing is saying “it’s not wrong to use a word according to an incredibly common definition of that word”. Which is precisely the opposite of prescriptive.

What German word was used there? Are you suggesting gratis is German? Maybe it is, but it’s also English. And we didn’t even borrow it from German. It’s Latin.

🤦‍♂️

Yes. Yes I do.

1997–2012 is the definition used by Pew (which also uses the oft-quoted 1981–1996 definition for millennials). Statistics Canada uses 2012 too, while the US census uses 2013.

But anyway, the earliest cutoff I could find was 2010, which is what the Australian Bureau of Statistics uses, and my point still works for 2010 kids. (The ABS’s other boundaries also don’t change the fact that I’m young millennial but my sister old gen Z, or that my parents are young boomers, either. So every point I was making still works.)

Ah shit sorry. I’ll edit that.

Still, it’s 1001 to 2001.

Young millennial here. My first memory relating to 9/11 is vaguely being told it was the anniversary of some event that happened the previous year in 2002.

It really wasn’t (at least not directly—the aftermath of it certainly was) the big generarion-defining thing Americans like to think it was. The impact on global diplomacy (not least of which is the Iraq and Afghanistan wars), the increased security theatre when travelling on planes. That’s certainly a defining generational experience. But the event itself is much less so.

Secondly, a millennium is a thousand years. Are you saying the previous thousand years (1000-1999) don’t count as a millennium that millennials… existed in?

I agree with that the comment you’re replying to is basically nonsense, but I do have two points to correct about this.

First, a small nitpick. Technically, millennia go from 01–00, so 1001–2000, with 2001 being the first year of the new millennium.

More significantly, it is obviously the case that millennials were so named because of something to do with the turn of the millennium. Frankly I don’t know what that is and it would have made more sense to name gen Z millennials because they actually span across the millenium divide and are the first generation born into the new millennium. Or if gen Y had started and finished 5 years later, they could have spanned the bridge, as well as even older genYers still being children during it, which would have been more appropriate.

Notice how it’s “Older Millennial, younger millennial, etc”. You don’t use those qualifiers with the other generations

Of course you do. I, a young millennial, have a lot more in common with my old genZer sister than she does with a young genZer born in 2011. It’s an important distinction because we both didn’t get smart phones until we didn’t have smart phones until late teens at least, while young genZers weren’t even born when the iPhone was first released.

My parents are young boomers. For my dad that means he never had to worry about getting drafted like his older boomer brothers.

It’s Pokemon games.

Ha! Good point.

I think when most people talk about trebuchets, they more specifically mean a counterweight trebuchet, which is first concretely attributed to the Ayyubids in the 12th century.

k

you ok there bud?

This might fit in mediaeval times, with the earliest possible recorded use in the 13th century, but it’s certainly not well-known until the early modern period and most famous right on the border between early and late modern.

I’m not sure about trial by combat. White collar criminals can just pay for a champion to represent them, and if they had to represent themselves they could certainly afford to switch up their schedules a bit so as to be well-trained in combat.