Firefox died long ago.

It was an engine fight, and Mozilla decided not to participate.

Things cost stuff.

Except Bio-Dome, that’s free. Basic economics says that price approaches marginal cost of production.

The issue isn’t whether the “company cares”.

It’s whether they end users fix your own problems, or force you into techno-feudalism where the only way to get a problem fixed is to hope the company cares enough to fix it for you.

The simplest example of Nvidia completely failing here is old hardware support. AMD cards doesn’t have that problem because the drivers are open source and upstream. These new Nvidia drivers don’t sound like they’ll help - they’re not maintainable and therefore not upstreamable.

That discussion tactic results in groupthink to a level that even coherent positions on the broad issues get obscured by conformance to factional stereotypes.

It’s really bad to support specific policies just because they sound like a kind of policy that you broadly support. I personally broadly support pro-density policies. But many specific policies that are proposed either have fatal flaws or are useless as long as a century worth of accumulated NIMBY policies exist that super-redundantly ban the sort of density increase that would actually be useful.

And to be clear, only allowing density increases without cars would be exactly the sort of nonsense restriction that would be a fatal flaw, at least in the US.

Many people have already done the math many, many times, and it always works out to be a lot cheaper to have dense urban areas.

I just moved from a dense urban area to a rural area. Taking everything into account - yes, really - things are unambiguously cheaper here. That’s a common result in the US. If you want to blame a single thing, I’d go with lack of housing supply in cities due to exclusionary zoning, but I hit some other weird figures like municipal water+sewer being more expensive than a well and septic system (again, yes, taking everything into account including construction costs).

It’s worth actually doing the comparisons to see whether car-centric living is a net positive or negative in practice in particular situations. Urban density should be a pure benefit, with economies of scale making everything cheaper. Unfortunately, cities in practice have some downsides that reduce that benefit. One major one is that centralizing services means that it’s more useful to try to get a cut of the cash flowing through the institution, and so some of the gains get siphoned off. As a trivial example, exactly zero percent of car commute expenses go to a bus driver’s union.

Is there some reason that wall won’t work fine?

Before the recent API purge, you could access public data from sites like Reddit and Twitter pretty easily too. I mean it’s still easy now, just not free. The same thing used to be true for Facebook, but their API purge was several years ago and their data model made less data straightforwardly public.

Personally I’d rather have my public posts be straightforwardly public than the illusion of privacy provided by sites like Facebook. Maybe a lot of people can get away with treating messages to a private Facebook group as private a lot of the time, but it’s simply a wrong mental model that will lead to wrong decisions. A message can either be private or be broadcast to an open-ended set of people - not both.

Yes, posts you make to public forums are public.

I tried nano, but none of the standard key combination would let me save or quit.

Obviously. What sort of moron wouldn’t be prepared to defend themselves from angry bees or whatever Pooh was afraid of.

What carrier? Do voice calls work?

Currently a Pixel with an anonymous custom ROM, although I’ve got a PinePhone on my desk I need to test more.

Cell phones are incompatible with privacy. Any phone necessarily constantly sends your location to your cell provider just in order to work. But even if that’s true, there’s no reason to also let someone else be the remote administrator for a sensor node with a camera and microphone that you carry everywhere. Running a mobile OS with a universal backdoor is bad times.

If you figure out how to do something in the terminal, you’ve got an 80% chance of that technique still working in a decade. If you learn how to do it in the GUI, your chances in a decade are more like 10%.

Oracle a company to actively avoid doing business with or realying on in any way.

Spend the $5 for a commodity VPS from literally any standard vendor. I suggest Vultr.

I tried doing a Mastodon user migration (to a Pleroma instance), and it basically just didn’t’ work. This is one of those thing where the code is likely to rot from lack of testing.

I’ve got a couple VPSes, hosting

• Mailcow, because email is identity.
• Asterisk, because phone #s are also identity.
• Matrix-Synapse, for personal messaging even though XMPP is probably better.
• ttrss, even though it’s junk software with a jerk developer.
• A bunch of self-developed web apps

Self hosting email is obnoxious, but it’s also one of the only remnants of the traditional distributed internet that’s still broadly accepted.