• 5 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • Fennec is a poor alternative because it connects to Firefox services. Sync is optional, but some internal components will talk to Mozilla, and Mozilla changed their mind about “never selling your data” recently.

    Brave is Chrome with a history of suspicious moves, toxic leadership, involvement with crypto and AI



  • LibreWolf is a decent alternative. I switched to it a while ago as Firefox enshittification required more and more tweaks in configuration to close leaks.

    I’ve heard good things about Mullvad browser too especially on fingerprint resistance, but LibreWolf works for me well enough to not search for alternatives.

    For rare sites that I need to use and which don’t work in Firefox based browsers, I just use Brave.





  • The title of this is a misleading simplification. $4.5 tn is not “Tax Giveaway to the Rich”. It’s a maximum cap on total tax cuts that could be in this budget. It is likely to include renewal of 2017 income tax cuts and increased child tax credit - both of these were popular and not just “for rich”.

    They may also raise SALT cap which benefits higher income people from states with high property taxes. Living in one myself, I can tell you that you don’t need a mansion in a top school district to pay much more than $10k in property taxes. So this one is not just for billionaires for sure, but maybe from upper middle class.

    There are promises Trump made to eliminate income taxes on tips and social security, which are obviously not beneficial only to rich. But I heard it would cost a lot, especially SS one. Not sure if $4.5tn is enough.

    Unfortunately, it looks like proposed spending cuts to Medicaid and food stamps are favored by GOP and may be easy to pass, but they don’t cover tax cuts by a big margin. So they can hurt people in need, and still have to balloon national debt even more.


  • I think this should be baked into client apps.

    The popular email analogy works here too. When you are setting up a new phone, you get a default email client app that offers you to log in or sign up to the default email service. And usually user can choose to log in with their service if choice, for which they have to sign up in advance outside the client app.

    Having a default Fediverse client on new phones is not happening anytime soon, but if someone’s mother installs a client app from the store link sent to them by a family member, she can get similar default onboarding experience.

    Default instance can be picked by geo location, or maybe the less used out of 3 most popular instances. Or even maybe an instance ran by the client app developers.








  • I’ve seen a concept of an airplane that can eject sections of it’s hull, each equipped with a large parachute. This can solve the problem of “how to put parachutes on each passenger including kids, disabled and panicked and teach them how to use it”. Also it doesn’t require the plane to maintain certain height, speed or angle for parachuting.

    But of course it will add extra weight to carry, because not only they’ll need to install big parachutes, but also ejection system and something to seal off ejectable sections.





  • Actually, there is a drive concept called Bussard Ramjet, which relies upon scooping up hydrogen ions while the ship is moving at relativistic speeds. The intake is augmented with conical magnetic field to extend the range of the scoop. You don’t need huge fuel tanks to power such engine either - collected ions are compacted to produce thermonuclear fusion which is used to propel the spacecraft.

    However, I don’t see sense in having more than one such intake. Maybe a second one for redundancy…

    It’s fun to discuss plausibility of some purely hypothetical design on an imaginary spaceship 😃