Psst you’re literally on the fediverse right now.

I have a handful of yearly reminders in Google Keep along these lines:

Are you sick today? No? Then rejoice! On this day in 2016, you were quite sick and miserable with an infinite runny nose. The past version of you would gladly trade their place with you.

Another one for it being too hot in the apartment I lived in:

Was it swelteringly hot to the point that it was very hard for you to do sleep or even go upstairs to your room today? If not, rejoice! Because on this day in 2017 (these past 3 days, really) it was unbearably hot and dry in your room, and you had to soak a towel in cold water, and tried and failed to sleep. Also the cat got stuck in your closet and you had to let him out

And a few others, including reminding myself not to lose an entire day to watching youtube videos. A few like that.

Wow, I feel like the most upvoted solutions here don’t work, and meanwhile some obvious and widely known alternatives are being completely overlooked.

❌ Inspect Element - many modern sites don’t even include the full article in the paywalled html, so this wouldn’t work. Also sitting there and mousing over elements and deleting them one by one, is tedious, it’s easy to accidentally delete an element that encloses the content you intended to keep, or to drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how elements are nested.

❌ Ublock Zapper - a similar to the above, won’t work on stub articles, and just janky because you’re manually zapping things

❌ Disabled JavaScript - Similar to the above, same problem because many articles are stubs anyway. And the HTML layers that block your view don’t have to be done with JavaScript.

❌ Rapid copy and paste of the article to notepad or rapidly printing the screen - similar problem to the above, lots of places just post the stub of an article, and besides nobody should live their life this way rapidly trying to print screen or copy everything. If you’re trying to do a quick copy you’re going to grab all kinds of gobbledygunk from the page and probably have to manually filter it out.

❌ Reader Mode - Your browsers reader mode will be hit and miss because, again, many sites post stub articles, and it’s possible the pay wall stuff will just get formatted into the reader mode along with an incomplete article.

✅ Archive.is - works!

✅ Pocket and Instapaper - amazingly, nobody has mentioned these even though they’re probably the longest running (dating back to 2007-2008), possibly most widely known, and most consistent solutions that still work to this day. They keep their own local caches of articles, so it’s not depending on the full content being visible on the page.

✅ Other dedicated extensions - Dedicated browser extensions seem to work, but be careful what you’re signing yourself up for.

🤷‍♀️ Brave - It works, but, it’s a Chromium supported browser, so ultimately Google controls the destiny and can drive Chromium to incorporate fundamental frameworks supporting DRM and pushing their preferred web standards.

What’s the issue if they’re ONLY using this info to improve my experience

Suppose they start out entirely benevolent. That commitment must be perpetually renegotiated in upheld over time. As the landscape changes, as the profit motive applies pressure, as new data and technologies become available, as new people on the next step of their careers get handed the reigns, the consistency of intention will drift over time.

The nature of data and privacy is such that it’s perpetually subjected to these dynamic processes. The fabric of any pact being made, is always being rewoven, first with little compromises and then with big ones.

SSRN is a kind of vast warehouse of academic papers, and one of the most excited cited and well-read ones is called “I’ve got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy.”

The essence of the idea is that privacy is about more than just hiding bad things. It’s about how imbalances in access to information can be used to manipulate you. Seemingly innocuous bits of information can be combined to reveal important things. And there are often subtle and invisible harms that are systematic in nature, enabling surveillance state institutions to use them to exercise greater amounts of control in anti-democratic ways, and it can create chilling effects on behavior and free speech.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

Probably my 2008 Suzuki Reno. It’s coolant system was made of such brittle crumbly plastic that it would crack and leak out all the coolant, and I didn’t realize this at first I didn’t know to look for it, so I get off the highway after driving 20 miles just in time for huge plumes of white smoke to be coming out of the front of my car.

I got it fixed only for it to crack again and leak again. And it became this nightmare of whack a mole where I’m constantly adding coolant, constantly checking my temperature gauge, constantly bringing it in to be fixed.

And then the whole engine died on the highway and I had to pull over while driving to my new job.

I wouldn’t rely on them for predictions, but I do think they can be a reasonable proxy for people’s beliefs and/or assumptions. And I would say they at least loosely track the truth…

NBA betting is not perfectly predictive, but there’s a reason the Celtics are at the top and the Pistons are at the bottom.

Trump outperformed polling in both of the last elections, and the polls are much closer now, so if he even just outperforms the same amount as before he wins.

I think the polls have tried to correct for this, and I also believe Kamala has huge and sophisticated ground game operation aimed at turnout while Trump’s team seems completely disorganized. So I wonder if that advantage in operational sophistication counts for anything.

I know this is not the point, but “begs this question” is the oddest construction of that phrase I’ve heard yet.

What’s an AP messenger? (This better not be the setup for a punchline).

Remindme works on lemmy?

Thank you for breathing a bit of sanity into this thread. Same here. Some commenters were like “oh there’s already too many adds” and I was like wait, what? They’re not adding more adds to Firefox, are they? The article doesn’t suggest that.

The “Mozilla bad” crowd echo chamber has gotten completely out of control in my opinion, and it’s an avalanche of low effort comments, dozens of upvotes, and it’s kind of a self sustaining echo chamber that exists because it exists.

I was using them interchangeably. I guess one is understood to be kind of a general foundation or overall company, whereas Firefox is just the browser itself

I would say you’re basically right. I think Mozilla can try to grab a slice of the pie, the Q is if it’s enough, and fast enough, to replace revenue from the search partnership.

I don’t see how eating their lunch would happen. Something like 85-90% of Mozilla’s income every year is from their Google search partnership. Google does some sort of revenue sharing thing where a portion of the value of search ads clicked through Firefox goes back to Mozilla, but the payment for search partnership itself, well, if that goes away, there’s no lunch to eat, metaphorically. There’s nothing to replace it with. Maybe Bing takes it’s place but I’m not sure that would happen.

I think the elephant in the room here is that Mozilla has 0.2% of the revenue that Google has, but is sustaining market share orders of magnitude higher than that. But unfortunately, at this point there’s a growing echo chamber of extremely low effort comments assuming that if you could just run back the clock, and not focus on “distractions” like their VPN or Mozilla.social, or the Mr. Robot Easter egg, that they would have overtaken Chrome in market share.

Like it was this easily achievable thing that just slipped through their fingers, rather than an inevitable consequence of Google’s disproportionate finances and monopoly power.

Did I miss something? I don’t think the browser is going to be full of ads?

It’s probably a coincidence that shortly after Mozilla acquires an ad company, they “accidentally” remove an ad blocker.

I mean I’m of two minds here. One, there’s an epidemic of intellectually lazy, kneejerk Mozilla hate and it’s time to turn the tide on that.

But on the other hand, even as a Mozilla fanboy I can see how this is a really bad look, and really indefensible. I think it’s more of a huge error of judgment, and if there are other huge errors, I can begin to see a problem, but I think they have too much of a positive track record in their history to just go reaching for the tinfoil hats so quickly.

Firefox will be adopting Manifest V3, but a modded version that enables ad blocking.

For a second I thought you meant you don’t use Signal, so they all went there on purpose to avoid you.

I think this is an excellent idea, a worthy project, and I applaud you for putting some real thinking into practical steps!

My federated X wishlist had social media, reddit-like thing, instagram-like thing, and a youtube-like thing. A federated IMDB alternative would be awesome.