I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.

Interesting. Some of them are just dip switches, too. I hadn’t heard about needing a cable, that’s an interesting wrinkle.

I don’t have any specific recommendations for you, but I will say that

• pretty much every modern Chromebook will be able to have Linux installed over ChromeOS. You might have to open it up and remove a write-protect screw.

• Linux is a surprisingly good platform for games these days, actually. Steam has done a lot of work to get it there.

• If you’re wanting lightweight specs, you’re probably going to find the best bang for your buck in an old Chromebook; however, I don’t know if you’ll see as many of those coming on the market, and you’ll want to watch out for old school devices. Those things get worked over pretty hard.

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.