Any time I get a political ad, I assume that their position is questionable enough to require spamming me with ads, and therefore that I should probably do the opposite of what they're advertising.

Moderation is censorship by definition. So no, there cannot be ways to moderate those things without censorship.

What you mean is that governments requiring companies to censor things is bad. And in general, I agree.

Corporate-driven censorship is also generally bad, where corporations censor things to protect their interests or boost their revenue without a legitimate public interest in mind.

The real problem is that social media does not give the public control over what they consume, and subjects us to increasingly low-quality garbage from increasingly distant voices in a desperate attempt to drive interaction in spite of a declining user base. And that effectively becomes corporate censorship, as the garbage drowns out the organic content from our friends that we actually went to the site to see. Yet it is by design. Sites like Facebook appear to completely ignore our "I don't want to see this" signals and continue to shovel this garbage. As a result, I go to Facebook an order of magnitude less often than I did ten years ago, but at the same time, I know that other people find the algorithmically driven shovelware to be compelling, and they're the ones being manipulated by this stuff.

With that said, I don't want government censorship. I want government to require social media to give control to users, to publicly disclose how their algorithms shape what users see, to allow independent audits to ensure that their algorithms are working for the public good rather than just for the corporate good, etc. We need more access to information, not less, but we also need to be able to filter what we see. Because if news media, etc. is not serving as a filter to show us the most important information and filter out unverified information and clear misinformation, then we need tools to help us moderate what we see, and maybe by sending those signals, also influence what our friends see and reduce the garbage a bit.

The problem is that there are propagandists in the first place. Here's the way I see it:

• Early 1980s: The 24-hour news cycle made people demand immediate access to news.
• Mid-1980s through today: Low pay, media consolidation, newspaper closures, and mass layoffs made journalism an increasingly unattractive career, causing most of the best and brightest to leave the field or not enter it, resulting in a gradual decline in the news media's ability to lead interviews, call politicians on outright lies, etc.
• 1987: Fairness doctrine eliminated, allowing the rise of biased talking head infotainment shows.
• 1996: Fox News started broadcasting with the explicit intent to create a right-biased news source.
• 2003: MSNBC took a leftward shift to counter Fox News.
• 2009: Social media reached peak users, where gaining more eyes was impractical, so the only way to increase ad revenue was to increase screen time or increase ad count or both, and increasing ad count would reduce screen time in the absence of a mitigating factor, so sites began shifting from most recent posts from your friends to most clicked/viewed, resulting in the rise of clickbait.
• 2013: The Russian government formed the Internet Research Agency, a.k.a. Glavset, a Russian company tasked with online propaganda, including disinformation and trolling campaigns on social media.
• 2016 through 2022 or so: Social media began showing more and more content from people who are not your friends or friends of friends and groups that you have never joined in a desperate attempt to get more screen time out of a plateauing (and later declining) daily active user base.
• 2022: A far-right-wing propagandist buys Twitter.
• 2023: Glavset shut down, though it is generally assumed that other groups took up its mission.

The social media dates are based on Facebook. Other social media behaved similarly at around the same time, plus or minus a couple of years.

But ultimately, it's all about companies focusing on profit above all else, without the slightest bit of concern over the negative impact of their choices. And as long as social media companies — and media and news sources in general — are predominantly for-profit entities instead of nonprofit corporations, they will be at best marginally harmful to society, and at worst, massively so. The profit gained from using hype and propaganda and clickbait and massive amounts of slant to drive viewers/readers is simply too strong a motivation to overcome as long as the focus of an organization is making profit, rather than breaking even.

And yeah, social media is part of the problem, but the mainstream media abdicated their responsibility to inform the public at least a decade earlier, and arguably three decades earlier, creating the information vacuum that social media filled. And the fact that it's a lot harder to refute a lie than to publish the truth in the first place made social media's increasingly extreme amplification of troll campaigns incredibly harmful, but the public's tendency to repost whatever garbage they see and the ease with which people can repost things they see to broader and broader audience made that problem much, much worse.

So yes, traditional social media is a large net harm to the public as a whole. Instead of helping bring us together, it has largely driven us apart. We would be much better off if Facebook groups ceased to exist and became separate discussion forums like we had before. We would be much better off if public Facebook posts were banned going forward, requiring people to actually copy and paste before sharing other people's posts beyond the friends or followers of the original person, or at most, one hop away. We would be much better off if sites like Facebook were forced to allow us to disable algorithmic spam in our feeds, including all posts suggested from people that our friends follow, groups distantly related to groups that we're in, etc. And so on.

And I have it on good authority that you can legally print all kinds of conspiracy theories in a newspaper's opinion section if in fine print you explicitly state that you're just expressing an opinion.

So a russian satellite sees the sun glinting off high altitude clouds over the US near a known missile silo and signals a missile launch alert. The duty officer says bullshit...no one starts ww3 with a single missile...must be a false alarm...and declines to push the big red button and start ww3 himself.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

The unilateral disarmers spin this story as a reason to unilaterally disarm. The guys who totally don't have all their eggs in the defense stocks basket spin this as a reason to build more and better launch warning satellites.

I spin this the way Heinlein spun it in Starship Troopers: if you build and deploy a widget on the battlefield, you damn well better train your people how to use it properly or all you've done is fielded a magic rock.

MS Windows 95b was ok for the time.

There's the average rise, and then there's the rise at any one location. The aren't the same. I've heard (one source) that the ocean level near Greenland is actually lower. This was attributed to the loss of ice leading to less gravitational attraction. And the straits of Magellan have fierce tides, because of differing ocean heights.

>"Who can live on that? Not in 2026."

Maybe not with MS-Windows. Works fine with Linux for most use cases. I manage lots of Linux machines with 8GB of RAM, even more with 4GB. Admittedly, 4GB is tight.

Could certainly do with a bit more of a paddlin' around here. Just sayin

The trouble with benchmarks is that they are often gamed. So while this is interesting, one should remain a bit reserved, awaiting assessments more reflecting the way people use it.

>"Go to about:config and toggle browser.nova.enabled to false."

Thanks! Color me surprised... although Mozilla has always been pretty good about adding disable options for many of the changes they introduce (much better than other browsers). Of course, it is likely that config entry will eventually disappear. But maybe by then something else will happen or replace it and it won't matter.

Hmm, I hadn't noticed. Why didn't author post something in the main readme? If anyone knows which might be taking the crown, please post... Aris recommends

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FQNetITQ%2FWav...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FMrOtherGuy%2F...

Anyway, I have Aris-t2's working fine, and yes, with a separate search box, just like you, with every Firefox through now 154. Also tabs on bottom, square tabs, and other stuff. Will update to 157 soon so maybe it will break at that point. I hope not.

A very slight rounding is useful, as it makes the distinction between one tab and another easier to spot. Currently on my Firefox it's done by highlighting the active tab and putting a small icon at the start of the tab...which also wastes space, but differentiates tabs. (OTOH, the tab labels are already slightly rounded, but the "not currently selected tabs" are so greyed out that the tab margins are invisible. Not ideal. And if they do the same thing with the rounded tabs, there will be absolutely no advantage.)

Actually, they were needed around 1980. But in the last few decades they seem to concentrate on making things worse.

>"Can you turn it back to rectangular tabs in tool/settings"

I doubt that. And themes only change colors and backgrounds.

But you can make actual changes with Userchrome. It takes a bit of effort, though. I have my tabs square and always outlined and against the content, in a traditional way, using it.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.userchrome.org%2F
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FAris-t2%2FCus...