>> "Knowledge should be free at our point in time and supposed evolutional stage. But it's not."
We only evolved technologically. Our economic systems are still stuck in the 19th century. The planet's cultures are still recovering from a string of empires that valued domination and assimilation over cooperation.
For now, I have to charge for my skills to live. Some day I hope to be able to have hobbies and share their output without having to monetize them to fund the efforts.
>> "I've also enjoyed the organic explosion of low carb cooking that has happened online. I have been witness to the community growing from its very beginnings less than a decade ago when it was just some people trying to make weight loss taste good"
This is way older than a decade. I knew people getting into it and sharing recipes on Usenet. The current boom is new, but online low carb communities are ancient in internet terms.
It wasn't very palatable back then, but people sure did try.
Site searching Reddit can at least give some ideas for different words to try. Most of my problems finding things on Google stem from its declining ability to make a reasonable guess based on what I put in. It's not enough to have a word anymore. You have to know the right keyphrase or it shows a whole different world of results.
It used to show its best guess, then branch off from it with less specificity and more variety and, in general, a result reflecting what I meant within a few pages. Now Google is so desperate to get it right on result #1 that it never admits failure no matter how many pages you go.
The neonazi invasion happened around when both tended to show up in the same discussions. More people know about punks than skinheads, so I used one to give context to the other. The recent movie about the late '90s punk scene, Bomb City, even had a skinhead with an anti-Nazi jacket.
I'm going to pass on the browser part owned by the chairman and cofounder of Palantir. I don't trust it for that and other reasons. I don't have the skills or interest to audit and compile every release myself. I don't do it with the browser I do use, but the threat model is different for its maintainers.
You can frame a critique in a way that doesn't make the subject feel targeted.
Some tips:
* Rather than call their way atrocious, try something like "Use $(CC) instead of hard coding gcc to avoid a lot of headaches down the road."
* Instead of:
>> "This also raises in me the suspicion that it hasn't been tested with no compiler other than GCC at whatever version the developer had installed on his machine, which is bad."
Consider:
"Test on other machines to make sure you don't depend on quirks of your local gcc installation."
On the plus side, Google at least tells you when it omits words and offers to put them back in now. Not that it does much good. Something about Google the search engine changed and now it's impossible to get good results for anything but the most obvious queries. I tried looking up why every commercial pot pie says to let it sit for 5 minutes.
I looked this up years ago and got blog posts explaining it. All I get now is page after page of recipes for homemade pot pies. You'd think after a while some logic would spin up to say "I bet this isn't what they're looking for! Let's try something else." It used to do that.
1. Exponentially more space in a market where single or double digit megabytes was the norm. GMail's original pitch was that you never had to delete an email, and that you could always find them with search.
2. It was one of the first web apps. It was dynamic in a way few sites were then. Asynchronous JavaScript (Ajax) and Web 2.0 were still new concepts.
ActivityPub (AP) has the advantage of running on top of HTTP. You don't have to convince people to install a new browser. All the tools that communicate over AP run on familiar technologies. The hardest part is convincing people to make an account, so most growth is from people following friends--the key incentive--to Mastodon instances. It's not a big problem in practice. Monoculture concerns aside.
AP doesn't have to run on HTTP, but any alternative has the same problem as anything else that needs its own client. Even browser support for FTP is on the way out, and it used to be standard.
>> "It was historically used to either refer to a person of unknown gender, or to optionally refer to a person of a known gender. so your options for singular pronouns might be either he or they, or she or they."
That's the thing though. Enbies don't generally know their gender. If you would use they without anger for an unknown person of unknown gender, it makes no sense to be mad about using it for a known person of unknown gender. You still don't know their gender. Neither of you do. He/him, she/her, man and woman, and sir and ma'am can cause tremendous dysphoria. That's often part of how they know they're not binary.
It's mainly used by nonbinary (enby) people of Latin descent in the US who feel like both Latino and Latina are a poor fit.
These threads always have the same look as the ones where people complained about singular they. Latinx doesn't have centuries of use the way singular they does, but it doesn't really matter. It costs you nothing to respect another person's self-identification.
Whether people should use it as a group term beyond enby Latin American descendants is another matter.
Climate refugees are going to be the big issue, not where to choose to move if you have that freedom. Any question of where to go has to somehow answer "What happens when everyone else who can tries to go there?"