No surprises here. Well, at least the items it ordered this time were kinda-sorta-maybe-almost plausible to stock at a café, unlike the tungsten cubes in the vending machine.

Reason #### not to allow random untrusted sites to run Javascript on your system. (I’m not actually sure how many reasons there are, but I am sure we must be into four digits by now.)

Sure it can (most of the bits, anyway). You can go the opposite way around the world or around the edge of Africa, for instance. Latency will go up, and it’ll add to the congestion of other trunk cables, but rerouting is certainly possible for any location where the cables in the strait aren’t your only route out. The real damage will be to the middle-eastern countries served directly by these cables, and it may be a bit of a headache for people who maintain Internet infrastructure.

Although Iran might cut the cables regardless, since one of the countries they appear to serve is Iran itself. Easiest way to control the news is to limit the flow of information across the border.

Your Internet obviously does not look like my Internet. I can’t remember ever seeing a site that didn’t belong to Google or Microsoft that required their login garbage (I see commercial sites that offer it as an option for lazy people who are unable to understand that using it is not in their best interests, yes, but every single one I’ve encountered thus far has also had a local username/password system).

As for the hyperscalers, that’s starting to break up a bit because of the number of countries the US has pissed off recently. People want to move their stuff back inside their own borders. It’s a drop in the bucket so far, admittedly, but every little bit helps.

Using hg-git everywhere reinforces the idea that Mecurial is a second-class citizen. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that an option for interoperability exists, but I wish it weren’t needed.)

Definitely. The last time I checked, your only hosting options if you wanted to use Mercurial directly were Heptapod and ($DEITY help us) Sourceforge.

If I were talking just about devices I myself use, I would say yes, get rid of all forced updates, but unfortunately, smart TVs are not bought only by the technically adept. (You should see my mother trying to use hers, and given her age and general incomprehension of technology I doubt her understanding is going to improve.) Their devices still have to be patched to keep the botnets from going after the rest of us. I don’t particularly like forced updates, but for security updates on consumer devices they sometimes are the lesser of two evils.

That becomes a problem when we’re talking about the 1% of updates that are sent to prevent your smart TV from becoming part of a distributed botnet, though. Some people might even complain about the 9% of updates intended to keep up with churn in the APIs of 3rd-party services that are part of the functionality the device was purchased for.

What we need is something that restricts forced updates to those categories. That requires regulation, which likely means starting in the EU, since that’s the only major jurisdiction that’s (sometimes) pro-consumer. We also need regulations on labeling that force the manufacturer to indicate on the outside of the packaging in big letters exactly what advertised functionality of a device will break if it’s kept off the internet.

Fair. Two wrongs don’t make a right. (And to be honest? If it were me, I’d actually just drop out of those channels. I’m used to venues on the Internet being easy-come-easy-go.)

Well, there’s always the ancient method that teens used to get their hands on alcohol when I was that age: pay someone who’s down on their luck for ten minutes of their time.

The article notes (along with names of shops—vote with your money, if you’re in the UK), that the ID system being used has the usual racial bias (has a hard time with anyone who isn’t white) and also a gender bias (has an easier time IDing men). And that the provider was careful not to mention this until after people started complaining.

For what it’s worth, I have a system with first-gen Zen cores (Threadripper 1900X). 8 cores at 3.8GHz. Not too shabby even now. It’s just got a higher power draw than the newer chips. Got a fairly decent price on it on Black Friday of 2017. (Never ran Windows on it, though.)

anonymity enables greater levels of toxicity

No. No, it doesn’t. Various fora that have required real names and IDs over the years have proven this—people are quite willing to be extremely toxic even if their real names are attached to every post.

Feeding machines to get a pat on the head from the bosses is seriously fucked.

If the tokens are the company’s property and not yours, I guess it’s no different from paying for things with play money. (Or maybe the fake money they burn for the dead in China would be a better analogy.)

Pretty sure they’ve been doing fine without the US market for years.

(It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when BYD sets up dealerships just north of the border, since Canada has given them the okay to import a certain number of vehicles per year.)

Inertia. Mental inertia, that is.

Point is, people are using the wrong tools to look for stuff. So it’s a social problem more than a technical one. Those are always the most difficult type to solve.

Hmm. Using the search term “small website discoverability crisis” . . .

On duckduckgo: original website is the third result (after what looks like a SEO firm’s longform ad and ycombinator) without quotes and the first result with.

On startpage: original is the first result even without quotes

On mojeek: original is the first result even without quotes

I do not have accounts with any of these search engines and do not allow them to run Javascript or set cookies, although it’s possible that duckduckgo may have noticed that someone with my ip often makes highly specific searches and looks at the long-tail results.

My conclusion from that, combined with other people’s searches surfacing large sites first, is that the results you receive can be significantly distorted by the search engine’s algorithm. Google in particular is likely trying to direct traffic to its advertising customers and should be avoided for that reason.

Lithium is pretty much the best possible chemical to build batteries out of.

Depends on how you define “best”. Likely the highest possible short-term energy density, yes, but that isn’t the only thing we might want out of a battery. “Doesn’t catch fire” is one of the areas where the highest-energy lithium battery chemistries are far from the best, for instance.

Since I’m sure it has no authority, why would anyone want to talk to it? About the only reason anyone ever approaches their boss is to get said boss to do something. (That can be something as nebulous as “put more faith in what I say in the future than what this other guy says,” but there always is something.)