> Europe is in a hybrid conflict on two fronts; our elections and political life are under direct attack from foreign agents who use social media to manipulate public opinion and centre the political agenda to undermine us. We are deploying systems that have editorial pluralism and FIMI monitoring built in to shield our polity from influence and make our democracy resilient under attack.

I just wish there'd be more of a acknowledgement about the very real democratic deficit in the EU, where multiple elections are overloaded and affect different widely disparate affairs, leading to much of the EU largely able to operate completely without fear of repercussions from its citizenship. Strengthening democracy must start at an institutional level.

As of right now, there is just no real way for a European citizen to hold anyone accountable for something like Chat Control. Parliament, where you get a say, is mostly already opposed to it. The council and comission are de facto untouchable.

Do you need to know the meaning of the latin words manus (hand) and facere (to make) to understand the English words manual (by hand), factory (place which makes things) and manufacture (to assemble)? Do we need new words now that Latin comprehension is dwindling? Not really.

Language works by metaphor, even if the thing you're alluding to doesn't exist anymore.

The thing that makes these skeumorphic designs work so well is that it kinda forces a consistent metaphor, and consistency above all else is huge for UX.

The fact that it's based on things we've seen in real life is also helps, as it means we can reason about the UI with the same faculties we've spent our entire life training.

What users want is a working browser that gets out of the way and them browse the web. That's what Chrom(e,ium) is. It's like air, it's everywhere but you can't see it.

Firefox is not. Every time you open Firefox, there's a new dialog announcing some change or shilling some product. It's cut from the same cloth as that car that Homer Simpson designed. Every time you open Firefox, it works a bit differently, so you have to unlearn some habit and learn a new one[1]. This is friction. This grates. You have some task to perform, which is why you opened the browser, but now you your blood pressure is up 20 points because firefox can't just let you browse, it's always telling you stuff in a dozen different channels, popups, toasts, notifications, there's always something it throws in your face, often multiple calls to action at once. So you say for fucks sake, and go back to chrome which just lets you browse with none of that nonsense.

These are all the calls to action I get when I open firefox. Which I opened yesterday as well, so it's not a clean install.

https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/firefox.png

Why is there a dialog announcing widgets, when I can see the widgets already? It's literally telling me what I see on the screen. Why do you need this exposition to inform me of something that is plain to see in front of my eyes? It's like bad fiction writing, except in the form of annoying UX.

Like is anyone working on Firefox actually using the browser, in its vanilla configuration? How can they not see how infuriating it is to be a Firefox user?

[1] 5 years ago we changed which kitchen drawer we keep the cutlery in, and I still reach for the wrong one every time.

This is almost exactly the situation that resulted during the first gilded age with standard oil. Antitrust legislation works wonders if it has teeth. Currently it does not.

1. The economy is not a zero-sum game.

2. The new gilded age concentrates wealth in a way that is harmful to free enterprise, detrimental to the economy, and bad for the world.

(Other big problem with regexes is that they are strictly slower than handrolling the equivalent string parsing code, and kind of a denial of service hazard to boot).

You gotta pick a dude like Sarpedon who just was a swell guy poking holes in greeks with his spear until he gets killed by Patroclus and everyone is sad.

You can generally do a lot of the same things with CSS grid layouts, but it's 100x more complicated, and the layout information is generally in the CSS file rather than the document itself making parsing the layout a Hard problem demanding the implementation of a partial CSS engine (and a sometimes JS engine too).

[1] A totally viable workflow was to draw your website in something like photoshop, cut boxes where the content would go, and then export it to an HTML table.

Regardless it's a confounder, statement otherwise now being that affluence predicts mortality.

For as much as how the startup space loves to pay lip service to contrarian bets, people sure do all be running in the same direction.