monopoliessuck

My favorite is the question and answer area where they answer "I don't know".

Agreed, and that's if they review the product at all.

Lots of reviewers talk about the delivery, how Amazon Prime bungled the return or even a completely different product; all completely unrelated to the actual features of the product you'll be buying. Pair that with how Amazon allows companies to put completely different products on the same offering with "variants" that are again abused by companies to transfer reviews from a well received product onto a poorly received one. Most users just look at the five start v. one star ratio in the end anyway so an electrician going over a wire gets the same final weight as someone that confusingly put a question in the review box.

I've put up good quality critical reviews too and had them silently removed. Amazon may be an okay place for getting an item, but too many people use it as a discovery and curation vehicle and that's where the manipulation starts and ends. I get better product recommendations looking almost anywhere else than the Amazon search box.

Right, thanks. Fixed

Oh, of course. You can compare external product numbers, but often these aren't updated when things change. That's not even getting into buying Levi 501's from Kmart will get you an inferior product compared to buying them from levi.com despite being marketed as the same product. Companies too will often abuse their brand and former good will in order to ship sub par products today that look almost like their products of yesteryear -- doubly so after an acquisition. I have a friend that is into Rubiks cubes and when asked which cube I should buy he just said.

> Any of them are great, except if they come from Rubiks

I still think being defeatist about this isn't helpful. More information, even if it's not complete and timeless is good. I think if this kind of information proliferated too, companies would have a disincentive to update what is loved, works and isn't broken.

Also, I realize the chip shortage is a real issue and has had genuine effects... still companies will find any external boogie man for why their products should get weaker, their turn around times longer and their products' sticker prices higher.

You can't forget the "but verify" part of "Trust but verify"

There are some good reviewers out there yeah. Sadly, they often rely on the creator's passion moreso than getting paid by their audience to provide a service. Youtube ad revenue and Amazon affiliate links are keeping these people's lights on more than the "thank you's" of their most ardent "supporters".

Google tightening the belt on Youtube monetization is probably, strangely, the best thing that could have happened to mostly-direct payments to content creators. Patreon and the like have made viewers at least somewhat more willing to pay out to access content. On the flip side, it seems to have also led to an explosion of more biased reviewers pushing their own discount codes and affiliate links to make up the difference.

There's a cultural misalignment somewhere. Journalism still hasn't cracked the nut nor has scientific peer review. Information curation and verification isn't cheap regardless of how much we'd like it to be so.

We really just need a group like ConsumerReports, Labdoor, WireCutter or something that actually digs into the quality and claims of devices. Very few people are going to buy 30 competing options as well as a known good control and compare and contrast them in a scientific context, but that's what's needed.

I remember looking around for a Radon sensor for way too long. An electronic device, a litmus-like strip test, some analog crystal ball -- hell a mail-in lab kit bag of carbon -- but they all seemed inaccurate. The few people that "bought two" always showed heavy variance while the majority that bought and got a number *loved it*. Even buying two that agree often just means the products are consistently and predictably wrong, but most products don't even check this box ffs.

Reviewers that try and apples-to-apples all products by comparing cost, size, advertised features and ergonomics are doing no better than you or I opening up a package and appraising it. For awhile this Google dev was putting up extremely detailed amazon reviews for USBC cables based on their purported features v. reality and it was wonderful, but tucked away and undiscoverable.

The world needs multiple parties providing unbiased in-depth reviews, but there's very little will to pay for even one group to do something like this. Ironically, paying for information in the information age seems almost comical to today's consumers and while there's demand for good information, no one's willing to open their wallets. Labdoor moved from subscription-only memberships to "certified products" and affiliate links because everyone wants to know what's in their multivitamin, but no one wants to pay for an indepth review. We aren't cultivating a supply-side that works for us, but against us.

The result of this is shilling and fake reviews running wild. I mean hell, consumers will buy a product knowing full well they might get a shoddy knock off and yet it's $5 less and they can get it tomorrow so they'll roll the dice. Sadly, we don't live in a world where people are intimately concerned with quality and accuracy in their purchases.

edit: USBC not USB3

It was a slow boiling. Today, there's no way to install an unsigned extension in Firefox at all, you now have to use Developer Edition binaries. For a company that says the end user should be the decider and hold the keys, Mozilla sure likes limiting our options. There was a way to place them in a directory for awhile, then a cli flag, then an about:config flag, then a few other inconvenient options that ultimately ended up being snuffed out.

Even Chrome has a flag you can flip and install an unpacked extension from file. Sending this stuff up to Mozilla for them to grace or relegating developers and corporate users to some unbranded or esoteric dev binary is offensive to the end user IMO. I mean, it's not even federation, just centralization. Sure you can host it on your webpage, but it needs to be signed by the mother ship either way.

Firefox removed "about:config" from Firefox on android as well. Maybe we'll get a cli flag escape hatch for a year when they do the same on desktop. Not trusting the end user in the name of security is not a Google-only play despite all the Moz Marketing.

I mean, it's not just Google that does this nor is this an Alphabet invention. This is merely Assimilation 101. The "Chinese patience" towards heterogeneous minority groups and their customs is a commonly referenced one, but this "boiling the frog" is really the only way to guarantee things change while mitigating serious rebellion.

Another good example is how the Rashidun Caliphate granted conquered Zoroastrian Persians Dhimmi or "people of the Book" status. I'm sure it seemed kind at the time since Zoroastrianism is obviously not "of The [Abrahamic] Book". This merely postponed persecution of the unconverted until such a time as they were disperse, weak and with less sovereign resolve. They got a worse and worse deal as the centuries wore on.

I'm not justifying Google here, but this is really every hegemon's SOP: corporate, tech or cultural.

I'm just as mad with Microsoft forces me to use a Windows account after juggling the slow creep Mojang deprecation, when Mozilla gives you fewer and fewer ways to install apps outside of their extension store until it's a Nightly-only feature, or when [your favorite app] is acquired by [your least favorite company] and starts down a path you'd *never expect*. It's all garbage.

This is great. I encountered a few bugs, but overall this was just fun to use.

I particularly liked getting this prompt a few volleys in. The AI decided she was done with speaking Spanish... except, not really.

> her (translated): Wow, I'm sorry, I don't understand Spanish that well. Do you mind if we speak in English?

> me (translated): No that's fine, let's speak in English please.

> her: Me llamo Sarah y soy de Estados Unidos. Tengo dos gatos a los que quiero mucho. En mi tiempo libre, me gusta leer y hacer senderismo. ¿Y tú?

Firefox supports (many) browser extensions.

I've been using this[0] which works with regex patterns. It doesn't work on Firefox mobile, but then neither does OP's extension.

0: https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector

Historically and for most people, pies were baked as a way to stretch foodstuffs. "Sugars" were added to make meat and other ingredients that turn sooner more palatable. Lots of baking before refrigeration was done with an eye toward food preservation.

Sugar as a fungible and fiber-free isolated ingredient made dessert baking more economical and of course we love sugar naturally so demand skyrocketed. The Caribbean slave trade and the decades of indentured servitude that followed was really pushed by new high demand for sugars. Pies got sweeter and more decadent. People aren't today baking turtle or rabbit into their pies with a few dried apples for flavor. They're wrapping syrupy fruit in fat and flour -- or in some cases just making pies with sugar fluff alone.

Grandma herself is generations removed from the original rationale for pie and we're even more so. You're right, pie is a blight today despite being oh-so-nostalgic. You don't need to seek out something so obviously sickly sweet as grandma's cherry pie to find issue though. Pasta sauce, bread and even processed meat contain far more sugar than at any time in history. Fruits and vegetables are even sweeter due to our crop selection and our meat contains more fat per gram of protein because of our farming methodology.

Just by eating an ordinary American lunch today, we probably take in in something more nutritionally similar to our former generation's special weekly indulgence than their evening meal; literal pie is just the cherry on top.

There's lots of practical implications to measuring in halfs indefinitely. See my response to the sister comment. Hex exists because binary switches are simple to manufacture and simple to reason about, but we've been halving measures since time immemorial and will continue to do so, even if our systems make it a bit difficult.

Binary search trees aren't just base two because we liked the number. Base ten, on the other hand, is just a number we picked and it happens to check a few boxes too.

Sure and I agree with you, except base 16 is binary reducible all the way down which isn't a small thing.

The Imperial or US standard systems of measure rounded the horses on halving in an awkward way because halving is intuitive. 1/2, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 of an inch etc. and it's proven very useful. Splitting a meter into ten is less useful than splitting it in half and that half into half.

Base ten doesn't half indefinitely across units bases. 1000cm, 500cm, 125cm, 62.5cm, 31.25, 15.625, 7.8125, 3.90625, 1.953125, 0.9765625...

4096cm, 2048cm, 1024cm, 512cm, 256, 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1 (which of course looks a lot better in base 16 notation)

1000, 800, 400, 200, 100, 80, 40, 20, 10, 8, 4, 2, 1

We could have had the best of both worlds. When SI was getting standardized there was a proposal for extra glyphs for base 12 and 16 that would have obviated our overloading of A-F too. Measuring in 1/256 of an inch would have been crazy simple while also getting the other metric goodies, IMO.

I use uBlock Origin to block all Javascript by default with custom rules for websites that need it. IMO, articles aren't websites that need an exception, but that's changing more and more every day. I'm definitely not their target audience, agreed.

Thanks for the archive.ph tip! That's a pretty neat trick. I'll try that out going forward.

Tangential, but why is it so hard in 2022 to make your simple article load without JavaScript? No reader mode either.

Just install GrapheneOS on your Pixel and call it a day. You'll be better of than anything browser based on iOS, talk about software limitations...

I agree with you, but think 16 would be a better base than 12 as it's binary reducible all the way down. It doesn't have a factor of three, which can be useful, but being able to natively understand and do math in a hex base would be such a boon, especially in the computer era.

The Babylonians base 60 was quite a practical decision we partially inherited, but the metric 10 and Aztec 20 were probably just cavemen looking at their fingers (and toes).

If you use your thumb to index the interphalangeal joints of your hand, you also get 16 which is super slick. A4 is a nice standard, but we really missed out on realizing base 16 metric.

You can do this with uBlockOrigin. It provides a drop down for disabling js per domain. I run with js disabled by default just via uBO alone.

GrapheneOS has "Network" as a permission you can disable per app like any other permission. This is such an obvious and purposeful omission in stock Android's permission model.

I see NetGuard was mentioned in a comment, but if you have Graphene you can just install an app and never let it call home via the App Info permission menu. I do it for Google Camera and Snapseed, the few non FOSS apps on my phone.

I love your app's fidelity. My main issue with healthcare/nutrition software is always ads, trackers and selling of healthcare data. I'd seen the multi-seat Pro version before that makes promises, but stupidly hadn't noticed Cronometer Gold (ad-free). Taking another look now.

The fact that you lurk HN is also awesome. Cheers

I use this[0] on fDroid. And there's a fork[1] you can build from source with macros. It's minimal and pulls from the OpenFoodFacts db. No profile and zero mothership.

OpenFoodFacts supports barcodes, but it hasn't been implemented here yet, but this still works for my needs.

[0]: https://github.com/SecUSo/privacy-friendly-food-tracker

[1]: https://github.com/SecUSo/privacy-friendly-food-tracker/pull...

> If there were proper protections in place to protect privacy it doesn’t matter whether the violator is a government or commercial enterprise.

Legislative privacy protections make it impossible for you to sign certain things away contractually and/or make it impossible for someone else to ask you to do so contractually. The right to sell certain data to certain people at certain times, even if you have consent from the user, for example, can render a contract void. Of course legally limiting the things you can agree to in this way would limit the effect of these contracts. Don't sign shitty contracts though and you can get all of this today.

The government isn't bound by optional contracts though and as long as congress grants the government jurisdiction over everything not constitutionally interpreted to be covered by the fourth, government snooping is completely legal.

I agree with you. Congress should limit the government's data mining jurisdiction, but it seems hellbent on doing the opposite with things like PATRIOT, PRISM and wiretapping legislation. I think users should also stop being flagrant idiots with their data if they supposedly care about it so much. Users can effect change in the market by deciding not to do business with bad business practices. Meta says it's going to mix WhatsApp data with Facebook data and people boycotted, Meta backtracked (for awhile)... more of that, we can do both.

> Secondly, the courts have repeated ruled that the fourth amendment has nothing to do with privacy.

Privacy from whom? The fourth sets a bar for "unreasonable" searches of an individual by requiring a warrant for public access to "persons, houses, papers, and effects". The government can still ask you for information without a warrant and definitely will ask Google for information about you, which does not itself need to demand a warrant on your behalf. As stated above, everything that isn't explicitly enumerated as protected is fair game as well.

The constitution curtails the relationship between the government and the governed. The fourth says nothing about privacy from other private entities, corporate or otherwise.

I realize this.

I'm not saying I avoid the bot net completely -- no one does and it's only getting harder to do so. This is a result of people I know installing LinkedIn on their phones with my number in their contacts. It's still a consumer-first problem and awareness is lacking. Every dollar, click and eyeball you give to some product is one you're divesting from another and we should consider our market engagements endorsements of corporate behavior because that's what they are.

How much awareness will get people to reconsider though? People are paying out of pocket to install microphones in their own homes and cameras on their front doors. Even if dumb TVs were on offer for 2X the price, statistically no one would buy them. Privacy is only a concern if it's novel and studies show generations born into surveillance are numb to it. I feel like people need to be more aware AND more discerning in their consumption; awareness alone isn't enough. We should discriminate with our wallet more on these issues today while we still have some alternatives available.

People don't have a choice about giving information to governments. There's a fourth amendment for a reason so I'm obviously anti dragnet. Private parties though may opt into providing anything legal to other private parties at their sole discretion and that's the nature of things. Despite the fact that the majority of Americans are making market choices that many of us would consider "not privacy respecting", that does not make these interactions "public" de facto.

I don't have a Google account. I don't have a Facebook account. I don't take commercial genealogy tests, I'm not an Amazon Prime member. I would prefer to not have the government use the ubiquity of this kinds of behavior as a lever to usurp more information.

I agree that people that bitch about corporate overreach should just not interact with bad actors instead of bitching to the government to somehow safeguard themselves from contracts they sign. At this point, it's not even an information asymmetry situation. Lots of people know Facebook and Google are untrustworthy stewards of this kind of information, but to them the ends justify the means... and that's their market decision I guess.

Perfectly?

There's no "download video" button on Firefox, but there is one on Chrome. Looks like the minified source is checking the userAgent in a few spots. I don't know if that's genuinely an issue with Firefox's canvas to mp4 support or something, but it's not completely one to one unfortunately.

I agree though, it is creative and entertaining regardless.

That's up to the individual. I mean if you exclusively buy Jif peanut butter are you "boycotting" Skippy? For me, there are just better options with better track records and less drama -- like it's not even a contest. Taking a second look would require quite a rebound, honestly.

The only real benefit of Manjaro, as I see it, is a somewhat easier install path, but with the nascent archinstall script, that benefit is mostly gone anyway. If we're looking beyond the Arch-sphere, there's of course a healthy smattering of options with more on offer. You don't have to jump to Debian or Red Hat for quality and stewardship. Just because it's FOSS certainly doesn't mean there isn't real competition.

It's not just an "open-source dev team". They're maintaining a distribution. They've decided to manage their own packages in parallel to upstream and provide a user-script install helper they expect you to use.

Convenience-after, sure, but this whole distro is built around convenience-first and sometimes convenience-only. I mean we're also not talking about first offenses here. Ensuring you SSL key is valid is table stakes for an operating system hosting packages, but falling down four times? It's just obviously not a priority which is unsettling for a product that installs and maintains all your software.

If this was a group of devs building a digital egg timer, I'd agree with you, but this is your *operating system* we're talking about.

I was burned pretty hard by Purism and no longer trust the company. Pine64 though I loved. I have an original PinePhone, the postmarketOs community edition unironically. I have been cheering Pine64 for a long time since, from the outside, they have been doing everything right.

This is sobering and saddening. I have a Pinebook Pro too and Manjaro is pushed heavily. Manjaro is just not a very good distribution and their security awareness is wanting, but even if they were the best of the best, the fact that they get special preference flies in the face of a FOSS phone. I don't know why Pine doesn't see this, what they were doing with community editions was golden!

I think Pine has their eyes on market capitalization at this point with Purism floundering, they probably think they can capture the niche. It's sad to see the shift. Hopefully they can course correct.