Ctrl+H to open history then!

Also, another issue with what you’re suggesting is that people have to memorize several conversion factors as well. Inherently, you only have to be able to convert inches -> cm and pounds -> kg, but unless you want to do even more math in your head, you also have to remember feet -> cm, yards -> cm, miles -> cm, square feet -> square meters, cubic feet -> cubic meters (phew, that’s just all the length conversions), pounds -> kg, ounces -> grams, pounds -> grams, cups -> grams (for every fluid you might want to measure), litres -> gallons, litres -> pints, etc.

Or you could just go through the one-time effort of actually using the metric system so you don’t have to carry this mental burden with you everywhere you go…

The problems with that are:

1. hardly anyone knows the conversion factor

2. other people aren’t going to do the math in their head

That’s on them

them == everybody in this case. Practically, nobody is going to do what you suggest - instead, non-metric users will ask metric users to do the conversion for them. And why should we be responsible for doing the work when they are the ones who refuse to use the system that 96% of the world has adopted?

How is this supposed to be considered using the metric system? If you tell someone that you weigh 80kg and he doesn’t have a clue what you mean, then you’re not really using the metric system, are you?

One is clearly more applicable for day-to-day life.

And yet, 96% of the world uses the “wrong” system…

I hated the trend of flat buttons. Then they removed the buttons. Then they basically removed the entire scrollbar altogether.

At this point, I’d happily go back to the age of flat buttons. That’s how bad things have gotten…

It’s really depressing how often I have to turn off CSS entirely just to view a webpage. I could of course always go into the inspector and turn off the bad CSS, but Gecko-based browsers fortunately have “View -> Page Style -> No Style” which is must easier and faster.

And seriously, whoever invented the font-weight CSS property can burn in hell. Ditto for whoever decided that we should only be allowed to read light grey text on slightly lighter grey background.

In case you weren’t aware, there are extensions that you can use to restore the older (better) UIs. Here are a couple:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wikipedia-vector-skin/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classic-wikipedia/

There are probably some for other browsers as well. I don’t use them though. I instead wrote myself a tampermonkey script to change it:

if (!window.location.search.contains('useskin')) {
  var new_url = window.location.protocol
      + "//" + window.location.hostname
      + window.location.pathname;
  if (window.location.search == "") {
    new_url = new_url + "?useskin=monobook";
  } else {
    new_url = new_url + window.location.search + "&useskin=monobook";
  }
  new_url = new_url + window.location.hash;
  window.location.replace(new_url);
}

You can compare the available wikipedia styles on this page to see which one you like best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=monobook

Why is it your responsibility to pay the creators? Google is a trillion dollar company and makes billions off of what people post on youtube. Shouldn’t they be paying them instead and not you?

Besides, it’s only a matter of time before Google takes more and more of the cut that you think you’re paying them.

You say that today. Give it a couple years. I’m pretty sure that by 2030, the cost will be ~100 dollars/euros/whatever per month and you’ll see 2 minutes of ads for every single minute of content you watch. (Okay, maybe the number of ads is an exaggeration, but I don’t think the monthly cost is.)

Don’t pay the Danegeld. It never makes them go away.

when it means they will not sell my data and will allow me control over my algorithm to prevent it from playing to my vulerabilities

The problem is that this will never happen. That boat has sailed - companies will never give up on their existing revenue streams. They may say that paying today will exempt you from the ads, but it’s only a matter of time before they ramp up the cost and start showing ads anyway. That’s how cable television started, and it’s how internet streaming will end as well. And as for the not selling data/controlling the algorithm, well you have no way of proving that they don’t do that so they’ll do it no matter what they say.

There’s no reason for google to do this whatsoever. They have their business model - any new revenue streams will 100% definitely not reduce the other ones at all. It’s just gonna be another giant dump into the pile of enshittification.

The net worth of tech giants also needs a severe correction.

Not just tech giants of course, pretty much all large >billion dollar companies need it too. But tech is a great place to start.

Also, if you watch a video you like, do yourself a favor and download it. Save it. Archive it. It’s only a matter of time before they either take it down or derank it because they want to push you to some other more profitable video stream. Bonus points because it doesn’t give them analytics information on it when you go back to watch it again, or watch a specific part again.

I’ve started doing this for all kinds of content - technical videos, music, funny clips, games, etc.

It’s not your responsibility to make up for Google’s shortcomings. They’re a ~5 trillion dollar company now. They could easily change their payment structure if they wanted to, but they don’t because their shareholders are more important. If a company with >10^8 times more net worth than you isn’t going to bother, then don’t make it your responsibility.

It’s sad, but unfortunately, the creators made a deal with the devil, and it’s not regular people’s responsibility to get them out.

And don’t forget, there was a time when nobody made any money for posting things on youtube - it was just a site for sharing things people found novel and interesting, with no expectation of remuneration whatsoever. I would even argue that it was a much better time to be there than it is now - back before they had recommendation algorithms pushing people to all kinds of deplorable content and pushing the biddings of far-right dictators. Rewarding Google for this kind of behavior only makes it worse.

I’m really happy to see point #2 being mentioned. From their inception, Youtube established a social contract of providing their videos free to users without ads. I don’t think Google should just be allowed to unilaterally change the contract on behalf of all parties and force it on everyone. If they had a good reason to do so, perhaps I would humor it, but “because of shithead shareholders” does not pass that bar.

Wow, these new TLDs are terrible! ICANN has really lost it this time!

Yeah, “monthly active users” does not necessarily mean “unique monthly active users”.

I would much rather see activity statistics like posts+comments or something like that. As long as those are looking good, then new unique users will continue to join gradually.

The inevitable fate of any useful software that’s not GPL.

When will people learn???

Edit: Ironically, KHTML was originally LGPL. So modifications to KHTML were required to be open source by the license, but Chrome itself isn’t required to be open source (at least as far as I understand it, I am not an expert here). Nevertheless, if it were stronger GPL, then it probably wouldn’t have been impossible to write features like DRM in chrome. So I would have been a bit of an idiot to say that KHTML isn’t GPL (because LGPL is a weaker version of GPL), but in effect, the outcome is the same - all because of that big fat L at the beginning.

Yeah, the biggest problem with Firefox is that its engine is so hard to embed. Chrome has endless clones because it’s just so damn easy to embed. And Firefox just has some weak forks like Librewolf.

I’d really rather see Mozilla focus on this rather than all their other stupid endeavors…

+1 for indie games. I really think we’re living in the golden age of indie gaming with tools like Godot, Unreal, and Unity (yes, yes, I know, but Unity is probably still the most popular engine for now). As indies get empowered more and more by tools like this, and AAA studios get greedier and greedier, I can’t find any reason to play anything that isn’t from an indie game developer.

And most, nearly even all indie games work great on Linux, often even better than their Windows counterparts.