A great twist to this is what I call the “Garak inversion:” they’re all true. “Even the lies?” “Especially the lies.”

Nice. Yup, I learned about the Tiffany Problem from Grey as well, but picked up the tidbit about Natalie from being married to one.

Really, your headcanon has some precedent in the books. If Wormtongue had written the history, he literally would’ve called Gandalf “bad news.” And in fact, Saruman’s actual name was Curumo. …uh, or Curunir. Or Sharkey, or Tarindor, or…

I mean, part of the problem is that every person (and place, and country, and river…) has like a half dozen names depending on who’s talking and what time or place they’re in. Gandalf himself is Greyhame, Gandalf, Stormcrow, and Lathspell in Rohan alone; and Mithrandir, Olorin, Incanus, and Tharkun to other people in Middle Earth.

Aragorn and Strider and Elessar and Estel and Wingfoot and Longshanks are the same person in different contexts. Galadriel is also Alatariel and Artanis and Nerwen. Legolas is Laicolasse and Greenleaf (all three of which, in fairness, mean the same thing in different languages).

And that’s before we even talk about what their names “really” were in the “original” Red Book of Westmarch, before Tolkien “translated” them to English. The “actual” sound that came out of Bilbo’s mouth when he introduced himself was Bilba Labingi, but Tolkien decided that the name Labingi “actually” would’ve sounded like the word for bag or sack to the “original hearers.” Likewise Frodo’s name is “translated” from Maura Labingi and Sam “actually” introduced himself as Banazir Galpsi.

Not “nearly.” That’s actually his name in the “pretranslated” language that the book was “originally” written in, within the fiction.

And “Tiffany” may sound like a very 20th-century American name, but it actually dates back to the early 13th century and is based on a Greek word that’s even older. The “Tiffany Problem” is a really interesting phenomenon in the anthropological/perceptual space based on that.

Tiffany ← Tifinie ← Θεοφάνεια = “God’s arrival/appearance”

It’s also more closely related to the name “Natalie” than you might think, at least etymologically.

Natalie ←Natalia ←natale domini = “birth of the Lord” (Latin)

AOSP is still open-source. If they do, it can be forked.

The problem with banning weapons basically boils down to “weapons already exist.”

Bad actors have them and will not give them up voluntarily. It’s very simple to say “they should be banned,” but short of Star Trek-level scanner technology, it’s impossible to find all of them. If everyone else gives them up, then the bad actors essentially run the show.

If we were somehow able to ban and dispose of all existing weapons, another problem presents itself: namely, weapons can be created or improvised from other items. 3D printers can make guns (yes, really), knives are a standard and critical kitchen tool, baseball bats are recreational equipment, even pencils have been used as deadly weapons. “Banning weapons” requires banning essentially anything heavier or sharper than a balloon; and even then, you could suffocate someone with it.

Imagining that we were somehow able to do away with all things that could be weapons, as well, we are faced with a third problem: that during the time that we’re making this change, law-abiding countries and citizens will be disarmed, while criminal elements will retain their weapons.

Conservatives and gun nuts (particularly in the US) deploy this weapon on an individual level (“when guns are criminal, only criminals will have guns”), but it’s much more salient on a governmental level: to wit, when you are invaded by another country, you’re going to have to have your own weapons to counter theirs. And the promise of police (while debatably realized) is that they wield weapons to protect unarmed individuals from violence carried out by criminals with weapons.

Some people on Reddit were talking about how only dictators would want to disarm people.

They’re wrong that only dictators want to disarm people, but they are right that dictators have a vested interest in banning weapons. A resistance is a lot harder to put down when that resistance is armed.

The reality, though, is that this particular talking point was encouraged by the American NRA (National Rifle Association), which masquerades as an organization for firearm owners and users but is actually a professional organization of firearm manufacturers. It has spread to other countries from there.

I believe weapons should be banned

Should be? Yes. Can be, safely? Good question.

and that crime should not exist in the first place.

Everyone thinks that. That’s why we call it “crime.” It’s named that because it’s stuff we don’t want to happen, so we get together and assign a penalty to everything we don’t like and call them “laws.”

Okay, everything above is not my opinion, but reality. That’s the state of the world, and the logical outworking of the state of the world. What follows is my opinion. As you may be able to tell, I am a U.S. citizen, so my answer is based largely around that context.

We have to significantly ban and restrict and curtail weapons: sale, possession, and use. Dramatically. Especially firearms. Particularly especially military-grade weapons.

It should be essentially impossible for private citizens to own firearms, and those who are allowed to own them must provide a valid reason (“collecting” working, non-historical weapons is not a valid reason) and be subject to a background check, registration, psychological evaluation, extensive training, and mandatory safe storage requirements. They should be required to join and maintain good standing in their local National Guard or other defense organization. Individuals who currently own firearms and are unwilling or unable to comply with the new regulations must surrender their weapons or face imprisonment for the sake of public safety.

In line with that, ordinary police and private security firms should not be permitted to carry weapons more deadly than a nightstick and pepper spray; with more psychological evaluation and extensive training, perhaps a taser. Firearms should be exclusively allotted for specific use cases, such as animal deterrence in communities near wilderness areas, and perhaps SWAT teams. Qualified immunity should be abolished, and every person killed or injured by a police officer’s weapon should result in immediate suspension of the officer, pending an external audit and investigation.

All weapons and ammunition used by any private citizen, police officer, private security employee, or military personnel should be subject to strict check in/check out regulations, and should include a valid reason for checkout associated with specific training activities or a specific, single incident requiring their issue. Government employees (members of law enforcement and the military) and private security employees should be subject to mandatory bodycam activation (with the footage declassified) any time weapons are checked out.

That is what can be done now, safely, without unduly endangering individuals. We know that it can be done, now, safely, because many other countries have done it.

You just open it in Firefox and modify it. It’s only form filling for now.

I have concerns.

Best privacy

What does “best” mean here? Privacy is binary: either something is private, and only you decide who has access to it, or it isn’t.

and unbiased ad-blocking

Uh-oh. That’s a red flag. When a company makes a big deal out of being unbiased about something that isn’t inherently biased to begin with, I just automatically assume right-wing.

by default.

And how easy is it to change that default if you don’t like it? Or if YouTube kills ad blocking in it? No thanks, I’d prefer it be an extension, thanks.

Handy features like native !bangs

Custom search with extra characters. Firefox has had it for over a decade, and Chrome has had it for a while too.

and split view.

Pretty sure this has been in several browsers recently, too.

No adware,

Thanks, that’s…kind of the bare minimum in a browser?

no bloat,

Degoogled is already that for Chromium, if that’s really what you want. There are several Firefox forks that pull out a bunch of stuff and make it leaner, too.

no noise.

Bold move disabling the sound API. Respect. /s

People-first

Which people? Ok, this is easy to say, but essentially meaningless.

and fully open source.

Isn’t BSD a sharealike license? So they can’t not. Still, props to them.

At the end of the day, I think I’d still prefer a Gecko browser, or Degoogled if I absolutely had to use Chromium.

Hey, Chime? You can work on your creative writing when the changelog is done.

I can’t find any links to the project itself, only to announcements about the project. Anybody have anything more concrete? How far along is this project?

Great point, although there’s also the third option where silver goes to the winner of the losers’ bracket (so, they only lost one game, and it wasn’t the last one). I’m pretty sure they don’t do that in the Olympics, though.

That makes a lot of sense, thinking about it. With a bronze, you can say, “well, I had a really rough day, but even still I managed to eke out a bronze.” But with silver, you’re tempted to say “…but could I have done 0.2s better and got the gold?”

It’s ok. The people would’ve certainly Mole of Moles’d themselves long before that happened.

“Oops, couldn’t find that file! Better reset your browser. Actually I’ll just go ahead and turn Windows Recall back on, too. Better get your OneDrive trial started also, I know you wanted that…”

They don’t even need to go that far. Windows has so many problems all the time, they just have to pick one and attribute this response to it.

Yes. If it is built using public money, it belongs to the public.

On the one hand, it seems slightly less ideal to have the same organization that develops mastodon also providing hosting for it. On the other hand, they probably have a better chance of doing it well.

Yeah, I could see it going two ways. On one hand, they could devote too much time to their for-profit arm and neglect the FOSS branch, or worse, make the .com a favored child over the .org, like WordPress does. But on the other hand, they could be like Canonical which, while they’ve made some questionable decisions with Ubuntu over the years, has pretty staunchly put open-sourced all of their improvements and opened up their improvements to everyone downstream.

And I too miss moz.soc.

I don’t know, Valve is financially motivated to make every game they sell a hit. This isn’t like YouTube, where they want people to keep churning out content without remuneration; Valve only gets paid when video game companies sell their game.

And as a software engineer myself, I can totally see how this bug could’ve happened. There are so many ways, in fact; they released on 2024-12-12, maybe the bug was that they also released at 12:12, and some ancient code in the emailer got set up to treat any repeating string of four 12’s as a signal that this is only a test and shouldn’t actually be sent (probably in an attempt to diagnose and fix another bug), but that if statement was never removed from the codebase before it shipped.

Or maybe there’s a weird overflow error that happens when an email is supposed to go to exactly a certain number of customers. It’s kind of close to a number divisible by 64 (138,688); maybe it’s just sloppy binary unit choce?

Or maybe it was at the end of the email fanout for the day and the server crashed without warning, and lost some games without notifying anyone. That would only have to happen once a year over that decade and it would add up to all 100 games.

The point is, I don’t see any evidence of malice here, so I have to assume stupidity. Or at least a SWE going too quickly and not checking their work.

Some people see participation in any sense as a sort of tacit agreement or endorsement of the system as a whole. So by casting any vote, even one of protest, you are legitimizing the system as a whole.

This assumes that there we are always afforded the option to choose whether or not to participate. If you are a bus driver and your full bus is careening toward a cliff, and you have the opportunity to swerve into a procession of nuns crossing the street (toward the cliff? What kind of street is this?), not choosing is still a choice. You can’t say, “well, I’ll just sit this one out. I can comfort my conscience with the knowledge that I’m not making a choice.” The people on your bus are still going to die, and it will be your fault. Now, if you swerved, the nuns would die, and that would be your fault, too.

A person who comes of age in a country with suffrage is a part of that system; they are not afforded the luxury of not casting a vote guilt-free, even if they tend more Kantian, because they were placed in the driver’s seat of that bus on the day they became an adult. In fairness, they share that seat with hundreds of millions of others, but they still face a choice between two bad options. No matter which they choose, even if they choose neither, bad things will happen.

I guess what I’m saying is, when the stakes are high enough and stacked up against you enough, you have to become at least a little bit of a consequentialist.