orangeoxidation

> I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government.[...] This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors.

"Silly" is a silly word for corruption.

> Google's existence has spawned a horde of SEO spam sites that dilute and push down real content on the internet

They don't push real content "down the internet" they push it down the google rankings.

And while Google search is not as great as it was, it remains a strong contender for the best way to find stuff on the internet.

I don't think the internet would be better off without it.

You can however make good arguments for Google News, "Instant Answers" in Search, and other products, taking (impressions) from the internet.(And Chrome, Chrome worries me.)

> The question is, does it fulfill a cookie-using website's requirements under GDPR without additional UI

It cannot. That's the whole point of the GDPR. It forbids tracking without informed, explicit user consent. Users cannot be informed or agree with the header setting.

Sites can, of course, not track users, or not track users who set do not track. They don't want to, that's why they try to annoy and/or mislead anyone into agreeing with their horrible banners.

(Using Cookies for site settings or even logins can be done without explicit consent and without banners)

> So what you paid for as an investor was a bunch of R&D research on how to replace natural and free sunlight with LEDs. (The fact that there are investor decks out there pitching that energy costs could be offset by investments in solar panels is laughably hilarious.).

Some of those already existing greenhouses are using LEDs to augment natural sunlight. [0]

So it doesn't seem too far fetched to me. The gamble wasn't to replace (free) sunlight with (paid) LEDs. The core idea is stacking farms on top each other, hoping the reduced land (area) requirement vs increased energy cost might pay off.

Turns out land isn't that short, transportation not too expensive and energy not that cheap.

[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/glowing-dutch-greenhou...

> I was surprised to see "sprawl" called out in the op because that is directly opposed to the flattening of building restrictions and the deregulation that is being pursued by both the state and housing activists

Strange. I understand sprawl (especially suburban sprawl) to be the direct result of housing regulations. The "natural" ("unregulated") trend seems for cities to become denser and for buildings to become higher (e.g. single family homes getting replaced by multi apartment buildings). Density being the opposite of sprawl.

More housing in an already populated area leads to denser populations leads to less sprawl.

> That's not a data protection problem, however. No data protection law forbids digitization of government services. It's a common excuse, though.

It's a super weird one as well. There's no extra special data protection rules for digital data vs. data on paper.

Are they admitting they violate privacy laws already? Or do they want to change the information flow while going paperless? If so, why, and why is it necessary to go digital at all?

There's video de- and encoding as well.

> Money, it turns out, wasn’t the point after all.

Not the only point. Asking them if they wanted to do the sales team job without compensation would get you the obvious answer. They wouldn't. Money is the point, it's just not the sole point and it cannot be stretched arbitrarily. "Money for rent", "money for retirement", "money for vacation" and "money for a second home" are not the same.

Interesting. So it only shows images that were transformed / mixed to get the output, but does not show images used to learn how to transform / select them?

Sounds very much like a human would do it.

If I 'know' how to recognize saurik and I know how anime is supposed to look like, I can check my digital photo library for a picture of saurik and than use that picture as a template to draw an anime version of saurik. If someone later asked me what pictures I used the photo is the only one I'd present. Not the thousands of anime pictures I have seen teaching me what anime looks like, nor the picture my eyes took meeting saurik.

> I write a lot of C and still find it tricky when I have to go look at some random C codebase

Absolutely. C Code is not necessarily easy to understand. Not at all.

But the C parts itself are? In C you seldom wonder what C does, you wonder what the C code does.

If you work like OP likes, single person projects, small enough to keep almost completely in your head, I can see how C is especially charming. You never wrangle with C, only with your own code.

> I am always shocked when I learn the some code I wrote as throwaway-tp-be-done-right-later 10 years ago is still in use.

That's because your "quick throwaway" code solves a real problem. It is useful, it works, it is very likely easy to understand.

In short: It's good code.

(It might not be "elegant" or "clever" or even "neat". Those things are overrated.)

> what did I miss

Mobile is eating the web. Mobile (Android - it's all Safari on iOs) Firefox is a bad experience.

Print can charge for ad placement, not impressions. But that's only possible because the number of subscribers, size and number of print runs, circulation are well known and hard to fake stats.

The web cannot do that without tracking...

> But you're also saying without that protection, the market would be more consolidated.

I read it as 'the market wouldn't exist at all'. The margins would either be a lot thinner, allowing less experimentation and players or not exist.

YouTube might be paid like Vimeo, social networks might be a lot smaller (say school or town level), and live-streaming for private individuals might not exist at all.

> One of the solutions could be to freeze and compress background tabs.

FF can do it, but it only triggers in low ram situations and detection is wonky, disabled on Linux.

I found the auto tab discard addon [0] to be a game changer on my low ram machine. It just works (though not on mobile).

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

It does not.

I find the wild, anti-competitive cross product "synergy" the big tech companies are employing just as concerning as privacy violations.

(E.g. Google search pushing Chrome and other services, Chrome sync logging users into YouTube, Android, Windows pushing One Drive, Apple music not paying the Apple store tax, Facebook harvesting WhatsApp data etc.)

Brave joining those practices leaves an ugly taste.

> I tried to, as much as time permitted, give the historical context for the math I was teaching.

This is great.

Funny how teachers generally aim for their students to 'understand' instead of merely 'replicating' (from memory). Yet math is often taught as a complex, fully formed system (especially in university).

Teaching math along the same path / outline it was historically developed teaches the 'why' alongside the 'how'.

> Advertisers are measuring the actual effectiveness of their ads, and paying for that only. Therefore falling effectiveness means falling prices and you have to increase the quantity of ads, to earn the same money (and achieve the same effect) as before.

Note there are significant uncertainties in measuring the effectiveness of ads. Measuring click-through rate is comparatively easy, measuring things like brand-recognition doable, measuring how much a specific ad or campaign influences purchasing decisions is quite a hurdle. Predicting it even harder.

There have been success stories, but online, especially "personalized", ads might have been somewhat of a bubble. Appearing better than they are?

I don't think the license is too important as there's always a chance the software gets abandoned instead.

Rather look at how many organizations are paying for contributions. If it's all resting on a single back there's increased danger.

Still, the only way to guarantee continued development is paying for it (or doing it yourself).

The article makes a decent point: Websites will have an incentive to prove their visitors are not children.

> It is virtually impossible to identify and segment your user base and apply the bill's protections to only those you can 100% confirm are under 18.

Doing this might be(come) possible by completely destroying anonymous web browsing.

How? Idk and it wasn't mentioned, but you could imagine Credit card checking, Electronic IDs, post-ident maybe backed into the browser for a one-click identification.

Though it's all a hypothetical on unwanted side-effects. I don't think it too concerning as people value random websites less than their personal data and I'd expect websites using the "everyone is a child" approach to have the advantage.

> several legal frameworks which actively oppose the idea (ITAR, IP and copyright, etc). The idea seems pretty silly to me.

IP and copyright do apply to (otherwise free) speech. That's the whole point of them. The Supreme Court famously called copyright 'an engine of free expression'.

Code is fundamentally ideas, explanations, instructions on how to calculate something, written down in rigid, formalized language. I don't see how it couldn't be a form of "speech", just like books, poems and music are.

Speech is regulated of course, e.g. bomb-building instructions are illegal to publish in the US.

Maybe you could make a case this crypto shuffling method is similar and spreading the know-how on how to do it should be forbidden, but that doesn't make it not speech.

Well... that's an old argument (the PGP book) and there's even support from the courts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junger_v._Daley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

Doesn't it make search worse though? I don't like my searches to end at paywalls and Google being able to do more of that doesn't seem an advantage.

> They continued building up their nuclear power plants well into the 1990s but failed to bring construction costs and delays down like your comment suggests.

Absolutely true. It proved expensive even at large scale and with full support of the state. I don't trust promises or hypotheticals of cheap nuclear power, at all.

But here's the thing: France succeeded with decarbonizing their electricity production. It's a pretty notable success. Yes, it was (and remains) expensive and yes those plants are now failing often, remaining expensive ober their whole lifetime. But it worked and France could afford it.

I'd argue many other countries could afford it as well. The German electricity mix is a lot dirtier by comparison.

You might even land the ultimate innovation of doing both by "inventing" AJAX! (Just call it something new, like piped hydration)

> Have a 'Gecko' module, have an 'UI' module, have a 'telemetry' module, ..... this would allow people to build Firefox 'flavors' instead of forking everything. Everyone would contribute to the same project/ecosystem, users can discover the big project, and immediately download 'vanilla', but also get info on whatever flavors there are and in what way they differ? What is the real problem here?

People are doing this. Brave and Edge are "Chrome flavors". See also https://servo.org/ or the npm and cargo ecosystems.

That said interfaces are incredibly hard to get right. They take an unreasonable amount of work to make and will often end up being unsuitable or obsolete leading to a world of breakage, inefficiency and pain.

Isn't this about the EU not being totalitarian? I.e. the laws limit government power and the courts rule independently.

> I expect this new proposal to be heavily contested as well, and I expect fundamental rights to constitute a significant part of that debate – as is already evidenced by the comments from the EDPS, MEP Patrick Breyer, EDRi and the group of security experts mentioned above.

I sure hope this will be struck down. Private communication is a fundamental right.

Yup, that seems a strange argument. Power usage varies during the day, but it doesn't really go below some "base load".

Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand. So nuclear power is only good for base load.

We need peaker plants to get the rest. Gas plants are the popular (cheap) choice for this. Carbon free alternatives are pumped hydro or batteries.

With renewables the production capacity is variable as well.

To fill possible "holes" in it we don't need more base load. What renewables need are ... peaker plants. A role nuclear reactors are exceptionally unsuited to fill.

They claim to have learned Telegram gave up IP-Addresses and/or telephone numbers

> on suspects in the areas of child abuse and terrorism. In the case of violations of other criminal offenses, it remains difficult for German investigators to obtain information from Telegram, according to security circles.

So Telegram is not giving free access or follows German law, but did help out in some specific cases.

Telegram claims otherwise and says it never responded to requests.

Yes, they are protecting their source(s), so you have to take them on faith. Der Spiegel has, however, an excellent reputation and good track record.

> It's almost like a paid version of spam.

Well put.

It seems they are trying to optimize for listener time. It makes sense for the free offering as listening time is advertisement time is income.

But for the paid version what they should strive for is costumer satisfaction.

Turns out that's a lot harder to measure and related, but not at all the same as listening time or 'engagement'.

Taking thrice as long and twice as many clicks to get where I want to be increases the engagement metric and my dissatisfaction.