Not the person you replied to, but…

What would it take Mozilla to do, to break your trust?

To move out of the least-worst option position.

Right now it’s in that position. It’s always been in that position, and IMO it has never not been in that position.

And for the record, I am not talking about Mozilla specifically, but the browser ecosystem for that rendering engine that includes any forks and derivatives… because things like Chrome’s maliciously flawed and user-hostile Manifest v3 also cascade down into forks and alternatives that are based off of it, and so contaminate many other normally-good alternatives.

I was there, during the first advertising push of the mid/late 90s, where visiting the wrong website - or even the right one on the wrong day - spawned “uncloseable” pop-ups and pop-unders… uncloseable because as soon as you tried to dismiss the window, that action triggered a half-dozen more to spawn.

Eventually, the weight of all the browser windows would cause not only the browser to grind to a halt, but even the computer as a whole (single-thread CPUs & minimal RAM, nat), such that your only possible recovery path was to conduct a hard restart of the entire system, your unsaved work be damned.

I feel for those businesses whose only possible funding strategy is via ads, but that well was lethally poisoned for me decades ago. I jumped onto the world’s first adblocker the moment it became available for Phoenix (now Firefox), and I have never looked back. The only way I will ever stop using adblocking is to stop using the Internet entirely.

8Tb optical disks don’t exist. Much cheaper to just do spinning-rust or cloud.

If you want truly bulletproof clothing appliances and live in America, look up Speed Queen. They’re built to commercial standards and are trivially repairable. Many last for decades with only minor maintenance and upkeep.

Unfortunately, Speed Queen not available outside of America. 😭 Or, at least, absolutely not available in Western Canada.

I went with LG, as Bosch didn’t have the capacity I was looking for. Pretty happy with LG for both washer and dryer, four years and counting without a single issue. Would be nice if the front-loading washer came with an automatic dehumidifier, tho, as we have to leave the door open to avoid funky smells developing.

VW really dropped the ball on software

Why bother with software, then? Late-80s and 90s Type III Jettas can be absolutely bulletproof if you find them in not-bagged and well cared for condition.

Depends on when it was produced.

My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. Plus, I can get extra-stuffed cartridges for it that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage. Even after two degrees and a quarter century I am only on my third cartridge.

My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.

Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.

Depends on when it was produced.

My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.

Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.

Antibiotics.

Their discovery and development is what has directly enabled our sudden rise from 2B to 8B humans in only about a century. Without antibiotics, we would likely still be under 3B humans world-wide. Yes, disease really did kill off a lot of humans back in the day.

Graph out the human population over the last two centuries, and you can even see the very decade when Penicillin use became widespread, along with doctors washing their hands and other basic hygiene tasks.

In most western countries any unintentional mistake made by the employee is considered a cost of doing business… after all, if such a mistake is doable, there is a problem in the business processes that needs correction.

Now don’t get me wrong, many shady business owners will still try to pin things on employees and take it out of their pay. But that is illegal here.

And there are ways of having that entry removed from the list of options entirely, and not just shifted to the drop-down menu. Makes it harder to physically shut down, but its absence can be a WTF big enough for you to realize which machine you are working on.

I don’t bother doing that to VMs, which can be trivially restarted, but their Hyper-V hosts? You betchya I do it to those.

Implying that we have a future at all is inherently hopeful

Over the last year I have done a deep dive into climate science, the capitalistic and political responses to it, the collapsing Return on Research, and how modern agriculture at scale is going to be impacted.

If humanity is either not already extinct by 2100, or at the very least caught in an unavoidable terminal decline leading towards it, I would be very, very surprised.

There is a reason why climate scientists have begun to - very grimly - start calling themselves “climate pathologists” and - for the younger ones, at least - avoiding having any children at all.

The vast majority of people have absolutely no clue how apocalyptically bad things are out there, and how on the one side capitalism is whitewashing the problem under the rug, while on the other side right-wing politics are trying to make everyone think it’s all fake.

running it in an ssd is it can speed it up

Let me be absolutely clear: due to the finite write capabilities of solid-state technology, using SpinRite on an SSD is materially harmful to that SSD, and WILL shorten it’s operational lifespan by a non-trivial amount.

This is why SSDs have wear-levelling technology: to limit the number of writes that any one data cell will receive. By using a program that conducts intensive read/write operations on sectors, you are wearing your SSD out at a much higher rate than normal, dramatically speeding up any failures in the future.

I don’t care about living longer. I see no point in doing so when beset with dementia or unable to even walk, much less run.

Give me full vitality in body and mind until my last day, and I’ll be satisfied even if it’s only 80 or 75 years.

SpinRite is only meant for traditional “spinning-rust” mechanical drives.

SpinRite IS NOT meant for SSDs. The existence of TRIM makes SpinRite useless on any sort of solid state storage.

And since almost all laptops sold within the last half a decade use SSDs almost exclusively, it is highly unlikely your advice will be useful.

I have a different take: I try to not be an unpleasant person.

I suffer from a particularly nasty Voltron of ADD and Asperger’s. High-functioning, yes. But it’s still a non-trivial level of neurological fuckery. This means that my social actions and reactions are… different. Sometimes they deviate significantly from the socially accepted baseline. So to be “nice”? What is nice? How to categorize that, measure that, evaluate that? “Nice” could be different for each person I come across.

So to avoid driving myself crazy, I have flipped things and simply concentrated on not being an unpleasant person. To not be rude, not disrespectful, not frightening or combative or creepy. It ends up being a little easier to categorize, define, and measure in that regard, because it involves not doing something instead of doing something. It is avoiding a baseline instead of trying to meet it.

trying to get him to upgrade to Windows 11?

If it’s currently running Win7, it likely doesn’t have TPM 2.0, and in extreme circumstances may not even have the SSE 4.2 that 23H2 requires (Win11 will then fail to boot).

And while a RUFUS-modded installer can remove the TPM 2.0 requirement, the SSE 4.2 requirement is kinda baked into the pie; there is no avoiding that.

So maybe it is not related, then. Or maybe only causally related, or under certain more specific visualization deficits.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Historically, before agriculture it was about two to three women having offspring for every man who did.

During the Agricultural era (12,000 BCE to 2,000 BCE) that ratio hit a high of 9 women reproducing for every man who did so, and stayed around that for most of that time.

From there it slowly declined back down to the current world-wide average of two women reproducing for every man who manages to do so.

I have no sense of direction. None.

Sounds like you are a real-life Ryoga Hibiki.

Just curious: do you also lack the ability to visualize things in your mind? For example, I am able to bring up a road map of my city in my mind, figure out the most effective route between two points, and rotate that map in all three dimensions to “look” at it from all angles. My familiarity with the city layout and geography is the determining factor on how easily I can visualize that map. I can also do the same thing with large buildings and their internal layouts.

My wife, on the other hand, has a somewhat similar (but nowhere near as bad) sense of direction as you, and a commensurate inability to visualize objects in her mind. So while she can mentally visualize a soccer ball as a spherical object, she cannot even visualize the hexagonal pattern of pieces, much less (on a traditional soccer ball) how some are white and others black. She doesn’t technically have aphantasia, as she is still able to visualize to a small degree, but I have always suspected her inability to visualize effectively was directly connected to her inability to navigate effectively. She also relies heavily on GPS and maps when navigating anywhere else other than the town she was born in.

Get back to me when an EV is released that doesn’t require an Electrical Engineering degree to do any work on it, doesn’t require $1M+ in manufacturer’s diagnostic hardware for every tiny issue, doesn’t have DRM that locks the vehicle down after any manufacturer-unapproved work, and which doesn’t upload gigabytes of my driving metrics for the manufacturer to monetize without my permission or knowledge.

About the only chance I currently have for any of this is to convert a classic car.