Not unless they’re complete boneheads (which, admittedly, is not impossible). If they do that, they effectively lose embed-video-in-external-sites functionality, and that might just be enough for unpaid content creators to dump the platform en masse and cause their effective monopoly to crumble. The content creators who are actually making decent money may never leave entirely, but if another viable platform comes into existence, I bet most of them would mirror to it.

No extension—even Netscape 1.0 had most of this stuff built in. I use Pale Moon as a primary browser, but the settings required still exist in modern Firefox, under General > Language and Appearance > Contrast Control and General > Language and Appearance > Fonts > Advanced. Note that although the font labels may say “Serif” etc., Pale Moon at least doesn’t care what you put there—you can set “Serif” to a sans font if you like, or vice-versa.

Of the Chrome-based browsers I have lying around for work and emergency purposes, Vivaldi has the font settings under Webpage, but doesn’t have full webpage colour settings (although you can force a dark theme, which might be enough). Chromium has the font settings under Appearance > Customize Fonts, but lacks anything that looks like useful colour settings.

If you’re looking for browser extensions that will restore the colour-forcing functionality for Chrome-based browsers, “Accessibility” is one category to look under.

Like what are the drug cops even supposed to do now, arrest Facebook?

We can only hope.

My browser is set to override the colour scheme of all pages I visit. It breaks the odd site that doesn’t know how to present image content correctly, but I consider that an acceptable tradeoff. It also forces a specific font and minimum font size.

There actually is a myth in circulation in some places that China’s electrical vehicle tech is somehow advanced over everyone else’s (my father got sucked in by that one). Tearing one apart is one way to counter that.

The question for me isn’t whether or not there’s a difference that I might be able to see if I were paying attention to the picture quality, it’s whether the video quality is sufficiently bad to distract me from the content. And only hypercompressed macroblocked-to-hell-and-back ancient MPEG1 files or multiply-recopied VHS tapes from the Dark Ages are ever that bad for me. In general, I’m perfectly happy with 480p. Of course, I might just have a higher-than-average immunity to bad video. (Similarly, I can spot tearing if I’m looking for it, but I do have to be looking for it.)

On top of that we shouldn’t distribute compiled binaries for the x86 and ia64 chipsets; instead program code should be distributed like .wasm, in a hardware-independent way, and compiled on the target device. That would enable that hardware can use any chipset it wants and there are no software incompatibilities because of it.

You’re describing Gentoo Linux . . . which is not especially popular among Linux distributions even though it runs on just about anything. There may be a reason for that.

The thought of how the computer would react to me telling my cat to get down off the desk is . . . both amusing and disturbing.

I HAVE broken discs in similar sets (Mr. Robot, Planet of the Apes) taking them out of those awful cases

So someone actually came up with something worse than the Scanavo DVD cases (on the grounds that I never actually broke a disc taking it out of a Scanavo case, just thought I was going to)? That’s . . . brutal.

Phone numbers are the equivalent of IP addresses. It’s just that the accompanying DNS solutions are pretty badly broken and the firewall options are all iffy.

what’s the point of taking art classes?

The point is the same as taking classes for any other skill, from baseball to carpentry: you have to learn technique before you can engrain the skill through practice. Some people can pick it up on their own if they’re motivated enough, by studying other people’s art, watching artists working, reading books, etc., but it’s more difficult and time-consuming without an instructor’s feedback. Sometimes they even figure it out wrong, and develop a very difficult and time-consuming method of doing something when a much simpler one exists.

So it’s optimal to both have the classes and do extensive practice outside of them. One is not a substitute for the other.

I’m pretty sure that you can find one researcher, somewhere, who will agree with anything you say, including that the weather is being affected by a war between Martians and the people living inside the hollow earth. Especially if you’re offering a large bribe to said researcher to make a statement about something outside their field while they’re somewhat drunk, and then mutilating their remark out of context via the process fondly known as journalism.

In other words, “one researcher” predicting something is pretty much worthless.

I think they’ve funded a couple of series, although not nearly as many as Netflix has.

Nice to see I’m not the only person whose brain immediately tried to come up with titles and genres where that subtitle could be legit.

People out to make a quick buck are banking on suckers not knowing about Project Gutenberg, or failing to check it, or not wanting to do a couple of extra steps to get something onto their Kindle.

I would not want to be involved in working the bugs out of that. Even after they get it to the point where it almost never produces two-headed mice in testing.

So the difference between the current ownership, who may be handing data over to the Chinese government and are using an algorithm that promotes undesirable content for “engagement” and propaganda purposes, and the new ownership, who I’m sure will happily sell data to anyone who pays up including thinly disguised fronts for the Chinese government, and will also use an algorithm that promotes undesirable content for “engagement” and propaganda purposes is . . . what, really, at the end of the day?

Well, there’s plenty of standards-noncompliance out there, but breaking the firmware of a peripheral you manufacture so that it can’t be properly supported by the OS driver you wrote and needs a workaround requires a special type of corporate boneheadedness.

Well, at least this way they know for certain that something is listening to what they say. Most deities are awful when it comes to offering feedback.

The dot-com bubble? A whole bunch of investment money was poured into businesses operating over the Internet from around the time dial-up became widely available. A few years later, investors realized that “on the Internet” wasn’t necessarily the key to making a crapton of money and the stock market crashed. A bunch of companies (many of which never made it to profitability) went under, and a fair number of people lost their jobs. Pets.com was one of the more notable victims.

This doesn’t, however, mean that no business is done over the Internet today.