It really is disheartening to see so many technically-inclined people berate the one browser that is preventing Apple/Google hegemony. The expectations set upon Mozilla and Firefox are so unrealistic it's laughable.
Firefox is rock solid, open-source, backed by a great organization (which has recently reinvested additional resources in it) and a joy to use imo. Also, the levels of vitriol that even the slightest bit of anonymous telemetry incurs is unhelpful and I encourage people who hold that viewpoint to really interrogate it.
While Firefox is great, they should not sell their userbase to Facebook with such proposals. If ad companies want to know about ad effectiveness, they must pay the users for collecting the data, not collect it for free without asking the user.
Wow, that's a strong claim. There are various counterexamples to this, so I'd say it's definitely not a law of nature. And anyway, nature by nature (lol) is essentially lawless. It's all random collisions of tiny molecules.
So, if anything, I'd say the one law of nature is that there are no laws of nature. Thus, no, there isn't always a ruling class. It doesn't have to be that way.
I never understood why the "at reasonable scale" is presumed.
What happens if I reject that presumption? Why do we assume "millions of people" operating in the same social order is a good thing? Because iphones? Is that reason enough? Do we presume that having millions of people under the same social order is required to make advancements in medicine? It didn't take millions to build Linux or wikipedia, just a couple hundred to a couple thousand absurdly dedicated people.
Anyway, there are many counter examples of egalitarian and fluid societies throughout our many thousands of years of being speaking humans. David Graber's final book, I believe "Origin of everything," explores some of these. No, they didn't have iphones, but some of them lived so well that early American colonials would abandon everything they know to join the alien cultures. Must have been doing something right!
>It didn't take millions to build Linux or wikipedia, just a couple hundred to a couple thousand absurdly dedicated people.
Maybe it didn't take millions of people to build those things, but it did take millions of people to create an environment in which building those things could be considered a productive use of time.
The people who built Linux and Wikipedia didn't build it just for themselves, and indeed neither Linux nor Wikipedia would survive (in their current form) if they were not useful to millions of people.
You get a commune that has no real power, off in the middle of nowhere, which dies out when the original generation involved does. It can't be hard to understand that systems which work for a few hundred struggle to work with billions?
> Anyway, there are many counter examples of egalitarian and fluid societies throughout our many thousands of years of being speaking humans. David Graber's final book, I believe "Origin of everything," explores some of these. No, they didn't have iphones, but some of them lived so well that early American colonials would abandon everything they know to join the alien cultures. Must have been doing something right!
I read that book, and just a nitpick, it's David Graeber and David Wengrow. I'd also add that those societies described in the book weren't just pre-industrial or pre-iPhone, they were in the literal stone age.
I was thinking of millions, because that's the order of magnitude of the educational system. You could give examples of groups of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands instead if you like. I'm just trying to set a reasonable lower bound for a "society" as a opposed to a small group. Lots of organizational structures work for small groups, but break down when applied to larger ones.
What are some of those examples you're thinking of that he mentions in the book?
> Lots of organizational structures work for small groups, but break down when applied to larger ones
A key feature of many early human organizational structures was flexibility and creativity. Maybe it's time to do some more experiments. The current structure doesn't really permit that, which is a shame.
Anyway some examples come from Native Americans. One of the arguments in the book is that this idea that social complexity necessitates inequity is false and that its origins are the meeting of Europeans and native Americans. People like Kondiaronk, as depicted by an explorer whose writings disseminated extensively, had deep critiques of the European system of organization, specifically it's focus on profit motive, its punitive justice system, patriarchy, and hierarchies. The enlightenment defense was to cast the egalitarian lives of the native Americans as naive, youthful, ignorant, undeveloped etc. Notice in this thread many doing the same - "sure they were egalitarian, they lived in the stone age!" The book rejects that social inequity is a requirement to leave the stone age.
"Ok but you need hierarchy once you leave society the size of a tribe of 200 people," nope not really, they demonstrate how Teotihuacan started with a rigid hierarchy and transformed itself into an egalitarian society, demonstrating that dense urban society doesn't require inequity and also demonstrating that we can have flexible social systems.
Anyway the book offers no solution, just reflects on three major losses to our global society that we should consider investigating further: the freedom to move away, the freedom to disobey arbitrary authority, and the freedom to experiment with fluidic social structures.
Imo the current social order has already broken down. There's a class of people on this earth that wield unfathomable resources (billionaires). Throughout human history I can think of only a few individuals that had that kind of power, and they at least were responsible for running empires lest they be torn apart suddenly by a mob. Yet today we have thousands. We also seem to have created simple artificial intelligence algorithms/hiveminds and propped them up as infallible and immune-to-ethics (you gonna blame Shell for turning a profit?), and are slowly letting them supplant our liberal democracies as our new rulers (through lobbying and the like) (try to start your own ISP in certain cities).
I feel like it's as valid to say "we just shouldn't try to encapsulate tens of millions under the same social order, it leads to suffering" as it is to say "in tribes there are no iphones." We don't really know, do we? We can't really experiment anymore, can we?
The question was whether there were animal species that do not have internal hierarchies. I gave an example.
I don't myself believe that the question is relevant to social relations among homo sapiens, but it's better that people be aware of the variety of animal behavior.
I'd be interested in some of those counterexamples you mentioned, I can't think of any that weren't transient/temporary on the way to the hierarchy which normally emerges after even the most severe disruption.
First off, I think everyone deals with this at some point. I think, also, since you are always changing as a person, what helps you cope at one point of your life might not work as life goes on. Various things have all contributed, in some way or another, to helping me in the past and present. Most recently, I came across a VSauce video from a year ago:
"Do Chairs Exist?" by VSauce [1].
Now, the thrust of the video deals with mereology [2]. However, the final line from Michael at the end surprised me a lot, and in the days since watching it, has been an extremely strong comfort for me:
"I am not a thing that dies and becomes scattered, I AM death and I AM the scattering."
I think it is worth spending the 40 minutes to watch the whole thing, as makes this line make more sense and extremely impactful. Anyway, this helped me recently, maybe it can help someone else :)
have been trying to do a writing challenge for this year, it's going ok. I write about whatever interests me, trying to do at least three articles a week
According to Tom's Guide[1] Microsoft Edge beats out both when it comes to RAM utilization but Chrome just edges out Firefox when loading >10 tabs. That was in 2021. I'd be interested to see any other comparisons or benchmarks.
No. Ableism (not sure why the quotes, comes off as a little sarcastic) is expecting and demeaning individuals--either purposefully or implicitly due to environmental design--for not achieving some arbitrary standard of “normal”. No one advocating for better treatment of people is suggesting a Bergeron-esque reality where those who are performing must be handicapped for equality. It is more about making social systems and attitudes welcoming for those who were traditionally seen as worthless (especially in a system that valued productive work above the health of the individual). Making room for others doesn't mean dragging others down, you know?
I agree. There are enough substantial features in Firefox that push it over the top for me.
For one, scrolling is just so much better than in any Chrome browsers, which I have noticed tend to drop frames and lag, regardless of the machine. Is it extreme? No, but for me, it is noticeable and Firefox just has that silky smooth scroll feeling.
Another big one is Manifest v3. I think Google may alienate a minority of their audience when it is implemented in January, and Firefox may see a bump in users. Having a kick-ass ad blocker like uBlock Origin work robustly will be a selling point for some people.
Another one I see people don't often mention is design. I may be in the minority of hardcore Firefox users, but I really have enjoyed the redesigns, and Firefox is still customizable enough for me to feel some joy using it.
Overall, Mozilla is definitely mismanaging and leadership needs to be turned over, but the browser is still in a good spot. If things turn around, I could see it becoming more and more popular.
Personally, I put very little stock in NYT health reporting articles. I am a public health researcher, and I have seen numerous NYT articles that just get fundamentals wrong. Though my field is not sleep studies, I can tell the conclusion of this article is essentially animal models[0] and longitudinal surveys[1] provide enough evidence to support hypothesis-driven studies in the future. But that's about it.
Now, that's not to say that chronic sleep debt isn't harmful. It probably is. But these kind of alarmist articles serve nothing more than to make waves in an already tumultuous field of popular science communication.
I know this comment boils down to "trust me", but I'm acutely tired and overall exhausted of media outlets that should know better churning out articles that are unsubstantial. I don't see these pieces as value neutral; they strain the relationship between scientists who study the nuance-filled physical world, statisticians who painstakingly analyze the counterintuitive world of numbers, and the general public who aren't equipped to (and shouldn't be expected to) understand the synthesis of entire fields of scientific literature.
[0]: broadly unreliable, especially for something as complex as human sleep mechanics
I know you mean well but we must be careful that we do not "throw out the baby with the bathwater".
The "great unwashed public" is incapable of understanding Scientific Nuances. Hence it is better in the interests of Public Health and Safety to project a simplistic and alarmist message when needed to get them to fall in line. It has always been this way in any matter of importance. This is actually much more important with those complex multifaceted subjects like Sleep, Fasting, General Health etc. It is made worse by the fact that the negative effects of these are imperceptibly slow, gradual but accumulate toward a unknown point when the "sudden collapse" happens.
This is why the jobs of Scientists/Researchers like yourself is so critical and crucial to the "Policy Makers". Your Scientific Knowledge drives your Belief which you distill and simplify to convince the "unwashed policy maker" who can then put out a decree for the betterment of the "unwashed masses".
I get your point, but how many people are currently getting less than 5 hours a day of sleep, and more importantly, don't think it's an issue that is impacting their health ?
I'd imagine newborn parents would fall into that category for instance, and I never met anyone who just thought not sleeping isn't a big deal and it will all be fine.
Pretty much everyone in professional services for major corporations fits this bill. Working for the big 4 and getting 5 hours of sleep is pretty much impossible. Adderall is essentially a requirement for everyone. Cocaine and Xanax for the more adventurous. That's not even getting into the actual finance companies and investment banks etc.
Same for emergency services in any major city or manufacturing facility. 24 on 48 off pretty much guarantees an all-nighter every 3 days. Then you can't really go to sleep when you get off at 7AM the next morning, because you need to get a good nights sleep on the second night because your next shift starts at 7AM.
I don't know how that works for your brain, but after the first couple months you just seem to adapt and your not tired all the time like you were in the beginning.
>how many people are currently getting less than 5 hours a day of sleep, and more importantly, don't think it's an issue that is impacting their health ?
That is precisely the point. The insidiousness of Sleep Deprivation is well known. Sleep has multiple stages and some of them (eg. REM) are more important then others; thus it is the Quality of Sleep rather than the Quantity which actually matters (this is the main reason people sleep over a spectrum of hours rather than any fixed point; the body decides the amount of "restorative sleep" needed and 8 hours is just a heuristic average). Ever since all sorts of "Visual Display Terminals(VDTs)" like TVs, Computer terminals, Electronic/Neon billboards, Smartphones, Tablets etc. became commonplace Sleep Quality has suffered drastically (there is a direct correlation between VDT exposure and Sleep Quality). Almost all IT workers (in particular; Programmers) are sleep deprived. With the explosion of Smartphone/Tablet ownership Sleep Deprivation has become commonplace. I am beginning to see young children as young as 10 years have dark circles under their eyes!
Our Society and Economic Systems needs to be changed to accommodate our current Scientific knowledge about our Mind/Body w.r.t. Sleep/Exercise. The Human organism is highly adaptable and resilient but only upto a point.
Definitely very interesting. I know Google has their “Advanced Protection Program”[0] with a Titan security key which is similar. It is interesting considering that Google’s protections target the user as the weak link, as your data lives on their hardware; while Apple is obviously targeting both the user and the hardware they have. I’m curiuos what security researchers will think of this, if it’s more theater or if it is actually a innovative attempt at giving advanced privacy to people who need it. Despite their past stumbles (e.g., CSAM), it seems like Apple is genuinely in the privacy fight, even if it is just for their bottom line.
Firefox is rock solid, open-source, backed by a great organization (which has recently reinvested additional resources in it) and a joy to use imo. Also, the levels of vitriol that even the slightest bit of anonymous telemetry incurs is unhelpful and I encourage people who hold that viewpoint to really interrogate it.