personally, i always check ebay. but i know general sentiment around "used/like new" items is fairly poor. just ask grand pap sitting in florida, buying half the computer new, because "he would never buy used", aka some returned tower.
The FBI and Canada seem to feel differently enough to investigate, and have arrested a few individuals operating these types of "overseas police stations". [1]
"Chen Jinping, 60, of New York, New York, pleaded guilty today to conspiring to act as an illegal agent of the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC),"[2]
The films weren't just pulled - the festival was cancelled.[3]
How is it different? It's still not US authorities shutting down a US festival as the title would make you believe...
I understand this is pressure from China, that they were threatened and that yes this is a horrible situation. All I'm saying is the actual decision to shut down the festival was not (and cannot) be made by China.
I see what you're saying, I didn't make the assumption it was the US authorities, simply that an authoritative entity was involved. In this case, that entity applied enough pressure to directors to make the organizers feel the need to cancel the event. I consider the headline to be clickbait, but obviously we drew very different conclusions from it.
i checked. he seemingly limits his "i have a controversial opinion, let me explain why everyone who disagrees is disgusting" posts to once a month. i'm not sure they're increasing racist, but he's clearly becoming more and more enraged.
anyone so unhinged that they can't comprehend the value in not publicly attacking subsets of the population you might need to cooperate with, eventually becomes a liability for everyone.
Absolutely. It will be a while before AI is the absolute replacement, AI will enable the people in these professions to do faster, better (hopefully) work.
I've been bringing this up in every single thread about Chrome and Manifest V3 pops up. I'm been using Firefox, 100% of the time, on three different operating systems, for probably six years at this point.
I can remember a single time I had to swap to Chrome for something, and it was three years ago, and involved some flavor of WebAssembly, I believe.
If anyone can point out a current website that is acting up under Firefox and not Chrome, please post it. I just want want to know that the "Firefox is inferior" argument isn't a decade old echo.
> "Firefox is inferior" argument isn't a decade old echo.
IMO this isn't the argument. Firefox users aren't discussing superior or inferior, but sites that accidentally or purposefully break or over-optimize for Chrome, making Firefox users second class citizens.
I commented about YouTube and Google Suite on another thread, but your webassembly example reminds me of the GCP dashboard and in browser virtual machine, which is also horrible in anything but Chrome if you plan to use it day in day out. I was spending my life there for a few months, and sure enough a dedicated Chrome instance made my life a lot better.
I do agree with you about what the argument actually is, I should have worded it differently. Any time someone brings up Firefox, it always seems to be an ex-Firefox user talking about compatibility issues. Even your GCP, I've personally used GCP with Firefox with no issues, but I have no doubt you spent more time in it than I have. But it does make me wonder if maybe there are platform specific issues with Firefox.
It's still interesting to contrast my personal experience re: Firefox with everyone elses when it comes to the "Manifest V3 ! Abandon ship, but to where?" conversation.
I think having a browser managed by one of the most powerful company in the world is the core of the issue, albeit in indirect ways.
I have no insight into Firefox' technical foundations, but to your point I've been using it since the IE days and never had critical performance issues or compelling reasons to use another browser short of company specific sites: Google properties is one: while Firefox works, Google has obviously no incentive to make it work better than Chrome, and potentially incentives for the opposite.
Companies' internal sites and tools are another: fixating on one specific browser has been an (unwise) long lasting trend, and for a company Chrome being backed by Google has a lot more appeal than Firefox. That was the same dynamic that cemented IE6 in it's position.
Perhaps Firefox missed the V8/electron train that would have made it in the same position as Linux: a platform to run other things on. But I don't know the history around that.
There’s one feature on LinkedIn that doesn’t work in Firefox (you can’t reorder skill list in your profile – dragging doesn’t do anything). That was the only time I’ve opened Chromium in the past couple of years, though – apart from testing my own websites, of course.
I've been interviewed by podcasters using Riverside a bunch these last few months, and it just wouldn't load on Firefox and would scream for Chrome (and the latest Chrome version, at that). I had to use Brave in the end.
IIRC it was related to viewing vulnerabilities or integrations.
ZenDesk is another, related to their SSO logins.
Unfortunately once bitten I become twice shy. These kind of works-in-popular-browser circumstances pushed me to making my own browser navigation switcher, so I never have to worry about any one site again. Of course that also means that even if they fix it in Ff then I won't notice. (It also doesn't help that Manifest V3 has taken a while for me to support and Apple keeps changing things.)
You talk about Google as if it's a person. You should take a step back and think to yourself why the changes were made to Manifest V3 that broke backwards compatibility, weakening ability to ad-blocking. Rule set based modification is one of the first features I'd think of when developing a systems of extensibility in browser, and they removed it.
The reasoning is obvious, and "plausible deniability" is not enough to give Google charity. The more difficult you make it to block ads, the more impressions, and the more money made. Yet you believe people should be "charitable" to the same company that can't hire the manpower to defend their own users against bad faith DCMA takedown notices. Because they ran the analysis, and it wasn't worth the cost.
Best case scenario, Chromium loses market share, implements the parts removed from V2, Google likely kicks the can down the road to Manifest V4.
There's no reason to believe companies deserve charitability. Companies are systems designed to extract maximum value, and when the world around that system changes, the system adjusts itself. It's not the systems fault for trying to get more value, it's our fault for letting them.
Ad blockers still run in Chrome - just not ublock origin. Google's ads are still blocked by those blockers. If they really were motivated to stop ad blocking wouldn't they have blocked all ad blockers?
Note: I'm upset too that ublock origin stopped working. I switched to ublock origin lite and it's mostly working, though there are some ads sneaking through. I'm not sure if that just means
(1) it needs an update
(2) I should look for another blocker (IIUC ublock origin lite is not maintained much?)
(3) It's impossible in V3 to block these few things that are currently not blocked.
Manifest v3 is not going to lose any meaningful marketshare. There continues to exist working adblock and most users won't notice any difference in functionality. I sure don't.
Manifest V3 has 100% market share for all "full featured" browsers. My understanding is that just yesterday, YouTube made a change that allows them to apply DRM to videos, with even the client side buffer maintaining encryption until playback. How long until we start seeing similar applied to websites/articles?
Eventually, there will be an overstep that make enough capable people mad, and those people will get together and make/mod something better.
YouTube has been playing a cat and mouse game, disabling some accounts until disabled, randomly re-enabling them. I personally think it's so when people talk about issues like this - people say "Well, it's been ok on my end". But it's definitely some kind of A/B testing.
I'm with you. Every time one of these arguments come up, people talk about how Chrome is superior. I've used Firefox daily for minimum five years as a daily driver, and it's been atleast 3 years since I've had to install Chrome because some website specified that it NEEDED a Chromium based browser for something specific, I believe it was a Firmware Upgrade over USB - through the browser. I split my time between Windows and Linux equally, and Firefox is the daily driver on both.
Can someone in this thread who have swapped between Firefox/Chrome explain the problems they run into ultimately driving them back to Chrome?
I've seen increasing numbers of site breakages in the past 6mos. Airline websites that won't let you book, car rental websites that won't even load, the persistent PayPal bug that requires you to enter a security code. 2fa checks everywhere. I keep a chromium installed to deal with these, but when there's a decent alternative (i.e. not brave) I'll probably drop FF as a daily driver.
I'm old enough to remember an internet before non-porn ads. Being Hacker News, does someone have any hard idea on infrastructure costs in the late 1990s compared to now?
In 1997, when America Online went from an hourly rate to unlimited hours for $20/month. Besides adult ads, I remember a lot of "work from home/get rich quick" ads - and that's all I can personally remember. Almost every forum and community I can remember were serious labors of love, especially the early "hacker" communities. But, we lost that internet a long time ago. I, personally, would love for an internet that could emulate those early years of being able to log in, communicate, and make friends with random, sometimes sketchy, weirdos, all within 45 seconds of dialing up. There weren't algorithms that decided who was important and who wasn't, you just had your words and wits.
That was a tangent, but my point is - would the internet improve or decline if there was a serious "adpocalypse"?
I wonder how cheap a forum is to run now. It used to be that you could run a janky thing on nothing hardware and people would still use it and find value, but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now.
These factors have made it less economical to just run a popular forum out of your own pocket, I think, so the barrier to entry is higher.
Cheap isn’t the relevant metric. I’ve run a couple of forums, over the years. It’s entirely possible to customize the software, to make the user experience, for both users and administrators, quite good.
Moderating and managing the forum is the pain.
Also, it can be fairly corrosive to personal mental health.
I recently had an old acquaintance reach out to me, asking me to revive one of my old communities, that was killed by Facebook. This person argued that many of the old community members were now thoroughly sick of Facebook, and would want to go back to the dedicated forum.
I politely declined, and was surprised at how the idea really horrified me.
> but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now.
I'm skeptical of this. There's likely some open source software that's good enough and considering the advances in hardware likely much cheaper to run then it was way back when.
Besides the fact that many people prefer large platforms like reddit or Facebook or discord where they already have an account (don't have to make another one) I'd say the problem is the human one not software. Time and effort to popularize the forum and either paying for moderation or convincing people to volunteer to moderate and deal with inevitable shitshow that comes with moderating controversial topics even if forum isn't really related to them.
Good enough isn’t nearly good enough. You’re competing against apps, offering just a much better use experience.
One bit of feedback I got repeatedly from users on a couple communities (now dead) I helped run was how much harder posting image and video content in a forum is - true user generated content I mean, not shared from YouTube. Even that meant ricking around with bbcode.
As of 2024, there are approximately 4.88 billion smartphone users worldwide, accounting for about 60.42% of the global population. The number of smartphones in use globally is around 7.21 billion.
and
The global smartphone penetration rate was estimated at 69 percent in 2023, up from 2022. This is based on an estimated 6.7 billion smartphone subscriptions worldwide and a global...
Yeah, it should not be hard! Cheap hardware is orders of magnitude faster than it was in the 2000s, and we could run dynamic forums written in janky inefficient Perl on it, and serve thousand's of requests a second.
I've been playing NationStates(.net) for 20+ years now. They run a php forum as part of the civic simulation php site. It hasn't really changed in the 20 years. Lately the entire site has become completely inaccessible to many of us because they've deployed a cloudflare block. They say they had to do this because the increase in bot traffic was slowing down the site so much it was costing them money: https://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=562415
I never once noticed the site was slow. But now that cloudflare is blocking me and my non-corporate browser completely, no matter how many captchas I complete, it is very, very slow (dead).
It's shocking to me as someone that runs multiple websites (for the last 20+ years) that they're having so much trouble suddenly. I too see bot traffic on my sites increasing (ie, it's like 4:1 now instead of 1:1 bots:humans) but it is not a problem.
I have to wonder how much of this is a socially contagious hysteria. Computational resources and bandwidth have become massively less expensive over those 20 years. I get the feeling people are "having" to block bots from accessing their websites just because they "feel" they have to block them. They actually don't.
> Computational resources and bandwidth have become massively less expensive over those 20 years.
Your budget tier VPS provider on the other hand has only really doubled what you get over the last 10 years, and user feature expectations and AI scrapers really have caused resource usage to more than double.
The cost efficiency has really only benefited the middle end here really. HN is probably cheaper to run than it was 10 years ago. But the large sites are on cloud providers who have provided added services that you might not have used 10 years ago to keep up their margins, and the intro tier VPS that "Bob's Friendly phpBB Forum" might be on isn't getting you much more, which matters when Bob's revenue is $60/year from a handful of the most investigated regulars only.
Holy hell, I can't believe NationStates is still kicking, or that Firefox has managed to hold onto my login details for 20 years. Truly a more innocent age that we'll never be able to return to.
I remember running a semi-popular phpBB back in the early 00's. There was nothing like Digital Ocean or Linode. You can run a small instance for pocket change today.
There's still Office LTSC version, which will likely exist for the foreseeable future. I believe they require internet for activation, and are offline afterwards.
Yeah the canonical "offline" method is to use the LTSC images and activator from https://massgrave.dev/ . That's the only way to run a licensed copy of office on an airgapped network.
