Not sure what’s worse:
Mozilla going down the path that was foreshadowed, already, or the fact that the biggest shitshow on the internet has literally stolen a nice and short word from us, to dirty it up with ugly, slimey and disgusting Zuckerbergian hands…
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Damn…
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So what’s the alternative? Brave? Opera? Vivaldi?
The world wouldn’t be as shitty, if there were always alternatives. As in many cases, there is no absolute alternative. There are only alternatives, where you have to pay. For example, by having less features, being more error prone or simply with reduced UX capabilities and worse design choices.
At the moment, in my experience LibreWolf is the best alternative so far. Of course, it’s not perfect, but it’s the closest alternative I know of and I haven’t found a better alternative, yet.
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I’ll give it a try. The price is right.
[Next day] Librewolf works nicely and seems snappier than Firefox 97. Maybe I’ll make it the default for a few days.
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I’ve always kinda hated the word “meta” - it just sounds like wankery where someone couldn’t figure out how to describe something, it looks gray and vague to me…
e.g. my mum (love her) is in some wierd cult, but she calls it “metaphysics” and it turns my stomach! It’s actually not as malign as it sounds, but I hate that name… Worst thing is my gullible younger sister recruited her into that cult, this sister actually BELIEVED the old “Nigerian Prince Scam”, indoctrinated my mum into that cult, then scarpered off to Blighty (the UK) …
I’m exaggerating a tad… But I ain’t got time for organised religion or SHITTY little cults either - the requirement to sustain an indefinite “sense of belief” in something without evidence, is just too much work for me…
Here’s a Zuckerberg meme I created :
It’s a parody of the movie poster for “My Life As A Zucchini” (which is f–king briliant French stop motion movie).
Hypocritical of me - I know - I do use Facebook, in fact right now I’m using my backup account because my main one is 22 days into a 30 block (my third such) for “h@te speech” - my alleged hate speech was describing Scotsmen as “funny c_nts”. Some of the funniest people on the planet, are the Scottish, and they also love to throw around the big “C” (c_nt) bomb word too… Did Zucc’s AI even ask a Scotsman what they’d find offensive?
The greek word meta used to mean after or following, like the latin post or ad. It seems to have come to mean more abstract or more comprehensive.
That is a strange switch of meaning?
So vague? Yes.
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Okay, well, I can fully understand your situation as such a word, or likely many words which have any relation to being “above” or “most important” or anything like that, was most of the time presented to you as just another tool for religious brainwashing methods.
In my experience, the meaning was almost exclusively only the opposite. It began when I went to Middle- and High School (translated it into the American system for easier understanding). I felit like I were religious as a kid and my friends were laughing about it. I always told them, they shouldn’t laugh about it, but they continued to do so. Their reasons to laugh about it, were just as childish as mine to do the opposite. For example, most of them had serious losses in their families, which is one of the huge triggers for people stopping to believe.
However, at some point I looked into the issue. The more I did, the more I discovered they were actually right in laughing about me. The more I researched, the more I realised that religion, as a whole, is basically just a pile of bullshit, etc.
I could go on and on forever about this, but I summarised it heavily to get the point across for the word meta.
So, in the process when I got less and less religious, I tended to do more stuff that is areligious or even opposes religions. This process took years. I started watching lectures made by the four horsemen on YouTube and many other people related to them. I left the class which teaches about religion and joined the one teaching about philosophy.
“Metaphysics” was a fascinating thing back then. Was really into it. It showed me so many different things. For example, it’s entirely possible to have a meaningful, good and moral life, even when you don’t have a sky daddy watching how you take a dump.
“Meta” is also “what is above”. As in, not a sky daddy, but what is “above” in your life. What matters most, etc.
This is also the reason why I stop using YouTube.
I never used Facebook really, neither did I do that with Twitter. I used YouTube since its inception, though. After so many years, I stop using YouTube almost altogether (sadly it’s not possible to leave it an entire 100%), because I think more and more about what “matters” in life. Then it’s also easier to stop being sucked into such hell holes. YouTube being just 2 levels less cancerous than Facebook and Twitter.
Those are the biggest reasons, I like that word. It makes me think about what “matters” in life. What I personally find important and I personally want to do, instead of what I am expected to do or what most people do. “Most people do it, so I have to do it, too.” I hate that attitude…
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@Akito @daniel.m.tripp
Daniel is talking about the Problem of Evil.
There is almost universal agreement
- That the problem exists. Things do sometimes go wrong.
- That there has been some progress - we no longer have slavery or duelling, at least not whole economies like the Roman Empire that was based on slavery to support agriculture
- There are still issues - like cults and mind manipulation, crime and punishment, and poverty
But I tnink most of us would prefer todays world compared to previous civilizations.
Neville
Agree. The level of outrage we feel towards innocuous problems is a measure of how comfortable our lives have become.
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@Daniel,
Yes we all seem to have that " good old days" feeling. Even in software matters.
Where does it come from? It is not rational. It even spans generations back to things we have no memory of (bad english).
It may be related to mytholoby, ie to things we can imagine?
Neville
.
That’s the reason. People tend to remember stuff from the past very nostalgically, in a positive way. Especially, if they have not been there themselves and only heard nostalgic stories from older people. Sometimes I watch TV content from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s and I notice how many things were actually the same, even though people think it’s something new and didn’t exist before.
I recommend everyone, who is being too nostalgic, that they should check out media, wether it’s print or TV, whatever, from that time. They will notice that many things were different, but most things were just as shitty or, most of the time, actually shittier than now.
And I don’t even count in the Cold War, or whatever… I mean every day shit. Like, people complaining it’s so easy to get ripped off on the internet nowadays, bla bla… Truth is: people got ripped off the exact same way in the 50’s, but it happened at your house door and not on the computer.
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I’m 60 this year, and I detest most “retro” IT tech… things were crap back then (1970’s and 80’s and early 90’s)… 320x240 VGA games with pixelated sprites… And people younger than me a into that stuff? What? And minecraft looks like someone too lazy to create curves from polygons programmed a demo and it became a product… $500 for a CRT that could max out at 800x600 and 256 colours? Bugger off with that substandard shite!
The “good old days” were mostly crap - except for a few things… e.g. before circa 1965, a whole bunch of stuff was manufactured (often locally, by local people) to LAST for well beyond 10 years, maybe even 20 years, cars, refrigerators etc…
And I thought I were the only one. I just don’t get the retro tech people. Sometimes I watch LGR, because there are some funny devices or cool stories associated with them, but I would never think about getting such old piece of powerlessness nowadays, because it would just be an expensive waste of space. If I would bring a Raspberry Pi into the 90’s, I would probably become super rich and I would become some Messiah of the computer world. Now, when we have Raspberry Pis, some people are interested in getting a huge machine, probably relatively expensive, which is 1/100 as powerful as a little Raspberry Pi for 35 bucks.
Humans are weird, man. 
Literally the same thing I just thought. Seriously! This is really one of the actual “better parts” of past products. At least they lasted what seemed like forever. And even if they broke, parts were replacable, etc. It was normal to repair your stuff. Today, people throw away expensive shit, because they can get a new version of it, when comparing the prices of replacement parts, if they are even available.
I think every printer owner knows exactly what I’m talking about…
Or how they literally put weak parts into washing machines, so they calculatively break after exactly 5 years or whatever they set the time limit to.
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Sometimes “fantasies” about retro tech can be interesting, or fun - like the TV show “Halt and Catch Fire” - it was great, and I believed most of the stuff in the first couple of seasons… But towards the end when they got to the early and mid 1990’s - they’d have Sun Sparc workstations running Microsoft Windows, yeah - Sun actually had a Windows emulator for Solaris - but I don’t think that’s what they were doing, they would have had a “dead” Sun box on the desk, with a hidden PC going to the Sun branded monitor… But why bother??? The main “hacker”, played by Mackenzie Davis (she’s great, and she’s great in Station Eleven) makes a 3d game, on her Sun workstation at home, a PC game (yeah I know John Carmack did most of his Doom and Quake programming on a NeXt UNIX box) for x86 personal computers… it just looked silly anyway… why not just use Digital, Compaq or IBM branded 386’s or 486’s or early Pentiums?
A video says more than a thousand words.
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Yes. I still have an HP65 calculator, and it is still useful.
And I will not part with my 1968 Landrover.
And I am happy to still program in Fortran II
but other things had to go
like my 8086, and my 486, and old printers
and I dont want to go back to mainframe operating systems or to CP/M or to DOS
and I dont want to use a mechanical calculator, or a slide rule
It is a matter of what technologies have progressed
Neville
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I’ve recently gotten back into listening to vinyl…
Got my turntable sorted out in 2020, even bought my first new vinyl album in 30 years, in 2020 (a “new” album released in 2019, by a “youngish” artist - Chelsea Wolfe if you must know). Had to buy some “doohicky” thing to “amplify” the output to my intermediate audio system. Used it for a few months - but I keep it “raised” on a shelf just above my desk… then I stopped playing stuff - and started piling junk on top of - then I need to reroute some cables to disconnected it…
Got it all hooked up again yesterday, mainly to play a new vinyl LP I got in late January, Nirvana’s Nevermind - and it sounded great. Both the Chelsea Wolfe album and Nevermind, are on 180 gram vinyl - and there’s a vast difference between that and consumer grade vinyl on LPs from the late 1960’s through to the 1980’s (I never bought vinyl in the 1990’s).
All my albums I’ve retained from the 1970’s onwards, are on shonky dirt cheap cardboard thin vinyl…
Those two 180 gram LPs feel like how I remember my mum an dad’s jazz 33 rpm albums from the 1940’s and '50s and early '60s - i.e. not quite as THICK as a 78 RPM disk (I’ve got one - a recording of Ravel’s Bolero - but my turn table only does 33 and 45 rpm)…
So - before about 1965, vinyl albums were manufactured to “last”… By 1970, they were mass market items and it was in their interest to make sure they didn’t last quite “forever”…
Anyway - I like listening to albums on vinyl, no DIGITAL wankery between my analog ears, and my analog music…
So anyway - been on a mostly Beatles kick since watching the three part “Get Back” edits from the Let It Be sessions and workshops and rooftop concert - and I got my copy of Abbey Road out - and its in shonky thin vinyl, and it’s warped, and scratch, and there’s defects on side B towards the end, that make it nearly unlistenable… So I go to JB-HiFi where I ordered Nirvana’s Nevermind back in January (about $8 delivered), and how much are they asking for Abbey Road? $155!!! WTF? Get outta here!
So needless to say - I’ll be saving up my pennies to get most of the Beatles back catalog, on 180gm or better vinyl, I’m only interested in their stuff from Rubber Soul onwards, I really can’t stand all that “hold your hand rubbish”… But I WILL not, on principle alone, pay $155 for something that should have been done right the FIRST time, when the “plant” manufactured my copy of Abbey Road (I got it for my 17th birthday in 1979).
Planning on checking out my favourite rekkid store in town tomorrow, first went there in 1979, and it’s still around, they went CD for a while, but they’re now nearly 100% vinyl, and it’s quaint and “old school” and the guy behind the counter is a bit of a weirdo, and that’s good! That’s where I got that Chelsea Wolfe album in 2020…
The good thing about vinyl, is you’re almost forced to listen to ALL the songs, cause skipping a track is a pain in the A for lazy people like me 
- and if you’re that lazy, you might even just play the same side a couple times instead of getting up and listening to the “flip side”…
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Nice rant…
