Does anyone know what kind of apps Rapidata questions are integrated in? I suppose they are using ad-like integrations to ask users for feedback. Their website only states:
By integrating in a large range of mobile apps (3000+) we have access to a large crowd of over 10 million users responding to our micro tasks/surveys - which we call Rapids. They are spread all over the world, so we can get human input from over 160 countries. Due to the immense size, we can parallelize tasks and get near instant results.
All sorts, we go through third parties. But apps include stuff like Duo Lingo, Games, Sport Betting Apps ect.
Its an optional opt in instead of watching ads or paying for the app. And obviously you are vetted that you don't spam.
> There is no context that justifies UNESCO focussing on criticism of Israel's self defence, as opposed to focussing on Hamas's attrocity that started the war (or Putin etc)
Sure there is. Only one is still actively happening, and it's the one that's killed 20-60x as many civilians, depending on whose estimates you follow.
> There is no context that justifies UNESCO rebranding Jewish holy places as “Palestinian World Heritage sites.” Jews existed in the region for more than a thousand years before the violent Islamic conquest and colonisation.
The context there is simple; quite a few places are holy to more than one religion. Some are holy to Palestinians; some are in Palestinian territories, like the Church of the Nativity.
> Only one is still actively happening, and it's the one that's killed 20-60x as many civilians, depending on whose estimates you follow.
Firstly, I hope we can agree that estimates by the designated terrorist (and Iranian proxy militia) government of Gaza, Hamas, cannot be relied on.
Secondly, are you aware that 2 million German citizens were killed in WW2, versus only 70,000 UK citizens?
By your logic, should we have chastised the UK, prevented it winning the war (which Germany started), and allowed Germany to continue to invade its neighbours and exterminate Jewish people?
Israel disputes the proportion of civilians to some extent, but not that tens of thousands are dead. Last year: https://www.voanews.com/a/israel-publishes-new-civilian-deat... "Earlier this month, Israel's government offered its first estimate of the operation's death toll, saying its troops have killed 14,000 terrorists and 16,000 civilians." That's 10x what Hamas killed on Oct 7, and that's a year old estimate from an involved source with motivations to keep that number low.
> Secondly, are you aware that 2 million German citizens were killed in WW2, versus only 70,000 UK citizens?
In both cases, the counts indicate technological / logistical / war outcome differences. They don't automatically infer morality of those deaths, and comparing the era of saturation bombing to that of precision weaponry is pretty desperate of you.
> In both cases, the counts indicate technological / logistical / war outcome differences. They don't automatically infer morality of those deaths, and comparing the era of saturation bombing to that of precision weaponry is pretty desperate of you.
It certainly indicates war outcome in both cases (Germany and Gaza). Both these antagonists started wars which they then lost.
One major logistical difference is the propensity of Hamas to use its citizens as human shields. It's on record calling on its citizens to "bare their chests" against Israel, as it is wise to the fact that the World is watching, and there are plenty of Westerners on the Left who would be useful idiots to the Hamas agenda (which is the annihilation of Israel, as stated in the Hamas Charter).
> This is what happens when your neighbours wall you off because they don't want you in their countries…
Ah, so now context matters.
> keep training your children to hate them
As do Israeli settlers.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/clip-of-israeli... "An Israeli organization calling itself The Civil Front has sparked controversy on social media by producing a song in which children fete the “destruction” in Gaza and say “nothing will be left there” in a year’s time."
> you deliberately fight using civilians as human shields
> An Israeli organization calling itself The Civil Front has sparked controversy on social media by producing a song in which children fete the “destruction” in Gaza and say “nothing will be left there” in a year’s time."
That sounds like extreme Israelis, or the average Palestinian. If this were normal, Palestine would just be bombed to dust
Yes, that is bad. But that doesn't remove the other thing. Stop thinking in sides and start thinking in principles. If you hide behind civilians in a war then you get to have sympathetic journalists write pieces about the natural results of that practice, but you also clearly don't care about your civilians.
> Is that actually what happened?
I don't know - I'm responding to earlier in the thread, as that didn't seem to be challenged before. Here[0]'s an example of what they mean, I think.
It's squarely in the middle of the West Bank. The list is categorized by physical location; for similar reasons, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/529 is Bolivian, not Catholic.
That's not bombing. Bombing is generally from the air. I mean they went house to house and tried to clear things out and airdropped warnings at much greater risk to personnel than bombing. To minimise civilian casualties. Now the reality of that is painful still, because war is painful, but their strategy clearly wasn't just to level Gaza or they'd have never done it this way.
> Both should make you angry.
So don't bring the other thing up when I mention the first thing. You address the first thing instead of this whataboutism.
> More skeptical?
The pro-Palestinian take is the most credulous one, most likely to be adopted by children and young adults. I'm not saying it's wrong for that reason, but you absolutely need to be a sceptic to even consider Israel's position at all.
"By October 2024, Israel said it bombed 40,000 locations in the Gaza Strip (which is 360 km2). By one estimate, as of April 2024 the bomb tonnage dropped on Gaza was more than 70,000 tonnes, surpassing the combined bomb tonnage dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London in World War II."
That is, on average, almost a ton of explosives per acre. (360 square kilometers is ~89k acres)
> So don't bring the other thing up when I mention the first thing.
==There is no context that justifies Hamas using schools as weapons hubs.==
Hamas isn't a part of UNESCO, nor should they be. I don't think we should let the KKK, Proud Boys, or Gatekeepers into UNESCO either based on their domestic terror activities.
For context: The commentary those quotes are taken from was written by Eugene Kontorovich, a senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation which runs Project 2025.
Lots of Firefox hate here, but little discussion about the articles kicker, which is the exclusion of uBlock Origin from Chrome.
I hope this will mean that in the long run Firefox (and other secondary browsers) will gain more users again. For me, Firefox is a solid piece of software. Works well in strict privacy mode, with uBlock Origin and Multi-Account Containers.
Multi-Account Containers is a major feature I can't sing the praises for enough. I use it all the time, both to isolate stuff to break cookie tracking, and to enable me to log into things with two different accounts without opening a separate browser, which happens more often than I'd have thought.
There's a few pain points with containers; whenever I'm browsing in a container tab, I wish CMD-T opened a new container tab, not my default tab. I haven't been able to find a setting for this :/
I also wish there were more keyboard shortcuts for opening links in specific containers, or re-opening a current tab in a different one.
I know you can set certain domains to always open in certain containers - fine for Facebook, when I occasionally have to use it - but annoying when I'm trying to do things in different (e.g.) Bluesky accounts.
> I know you can set certain domains to always open in certain containers - fine for Facebook, when I occasionally have to use it - but annoying when I'm trying to do things in different (e.g.) Bluesky accounts.
on this one btw, the Containerise extension i talk about (if it wasn't clear) allows you to also map "portions" of the url in specific containers. so /u/0 in one /u/1 in another; ofc, this requires the service/website to distinguish the accounts via the url. i do this for github a lot (work repos in specific containers)
Very cool, thank you - I'll check out the hotkeys add-on!
The other extension won't work for me, mostly - for example, Bluesky doesn't give me different URLs depending on who I'm logged in as. (Which is the correct thing to do, but it does make my life slightly harder. :/)
edit: oh, nevermind. It looks like it adds a single hotkey to open a new tab in a single, specified container. I was at least hoping the hotkey would work by opening a new tab in the same container I'm in currently :/
Not having subdomains work for container assignments is a baffling design decision. It's a well-known issue and oft-requested feature that the devs seemingly have no plan to fix. It's incredibly frustrating.
> whenever I'm browsing in a container tab, I wish CMD-T opened a new container tab
Not exactly what you're looking for, but Temporary Containers (no longer maintained, fwiw) at least will open every new tab in a new temporary container that will be wiped after a configurable amount of time after closing.
When I was doing IT support for ~50 SMBs I was using multi account containers + temporary locations ALL THE TIME to log into customer accounts in various places, now I don't really have the usecase but the addons are still there for the rare occasion.
I love that feature, my only complaint is that it's an atrocious, confusing UX that has never synced correctly for me, which integrates ads for FFX VPN, and has been forgotten when it really needs to be added to the core browser.
Alphabet will definitely try to do that (within their business interest and all that), but I still choose to believe in the precept that “the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”, as old and outdated as that sounds.
A number of my privacy-minded friends choose a bi-modal approach: have two phones, one for work and one for personal. They don’t get the recent model (costing half as much), hold onto the old phone for as long as they can, use one phone for “required” apps (Okta, Slack, those websites that only work on Chrome…) and the personal phone for everything else.
As annoying as it is, i think that compartmentalized devices/accounts/apps are the only way forward.
With the ramping up of 18+ verification in Australia and now Europe (and South Korea and China already having such a programme for many years, including game time locks for young people), yeah.
It doesn't seem that big a leap to connect the dots from device attestation > web browser integrity > identity verification > verified web access
There is actually a relatively old game series of the 2000s called Bluesky Hacker Replay that has this as the core element of its worldbuilding. Governments and corporations became tired of the internet being overrun with spam, viruses, porn and cyberterrorism and decide to create an internet 2.0, tightly controlled by corporate interests. Hackers persist on the old 1.0 internet called the SwitchNet.
And really, when you think about it.. if you composed an internet solely from the big name social media, entertainment, work, food, news and knowledge services, running atop Cloudflare who verifies everyone via government ID, how many would really complain? 99% of their internet time is already spent inside that bubble.
Interestingly, I think if the Chrome browser gets spun off from Google, it might make sense for Google to have to make annual payments to support the development of Chrome like they do Firefox. Obviously being the default search in Chrome should have significant value worth paying for the same as Firefox and Safari. And it might be the most plausible economic model for Chrome if it's not being funded by Google.
They will try, but anti-trust laws and -lawsuits should compel them otherwise. Microsoft had to pay hundreds of millions in fines to the EU for not complying with a previous browser choice order [0], following previous lawsuits in the US about their tight coupling of Internet Explorer [1] in which they settled for $1 billion. Google has to pay a fine in excess of 4 billion (!) to the EU for anti-competitive practices in Android [2].
This does raise a very interesting point though in my opinion. There's been some debate about whether Google should be compelled to sell off its chromium browser, but I wonder if it makes more sense to spin off Google's various attempts at boning internet infrastructure such as AMP and 8.8.8.8.
I guess AMP is being wound down but it was a play for shifting more of the Internet onto Google infrastructure.
Now we are talking! Let's see the required steps, not necessarily in this order:
1) create a dominant browser
2) create a dominant mobile OS
3) create a dominant e-mail service
4) create a dominant search engine
5) leverage each of these to make other solutions, especially open ones, difficult to use
6) make other browsers perform badly when interacting with your services
7) lock other browsers from accessing your services, effectively crippling them
There are some more minor steps, like making your main browser competitor dependent on your funding, but we can leave out the details. So we are now at... step 6?
On my list of concerns for big tech abusing power, the ad company with the browser monopoly leveraging their position to essentially end ad blocking on the web by disabling it on the browser people are using in practice is very high on the list, and I would have been fine waiting on forcing Apple to let you uninstall the camera app, or switching the iPhone to USB-C if it could have prevented this. This didn't come out of nowhere, we've known about manifest v3 for years now.
In fact Google's browser monopoly only looks like it's gonna get further cemented as Apple is forced to allow other browser engines, which is the only thing keeping any sort of competition against Chrome.
I feel like the anti-Apple snark that's been so popular since around the late 2000s (and I took part in in my angsty teen years) has been affecting the priority of what's being dealt with from regulators and it annoys me.
> Lots of Firefox hate here, but little discussion about the articles kicker, which is the exclusion of uBlock Origin from Chrome.
I'll complain about Firefox a lot, because I'm exposed to all its issues. That doesn't mean I hate it: I see issues in all products that I use, even the ones that are really useful or essential. I'm sure I'm not unique in this aspect in the HN crowd.
I'm not sure trying to bad mouth it by bringing up a 5+ year old long fixed thing is the right way to go about making a point. Heck if we're doing that theres vastly more "wrong" over at Mozilla and Google to complain about in that timeframe.
Aa of right now Brave has two "features" that you can disable - the crypto thing and a vpn advert. Once those are off, they are off. You don't see them anymore, they aren't sitting in the background running, and they aren't calling home.
It's no different to Mozilla's constant and blatant attempts to reactivate telemetry data in Firefox updates despite opting out - I'd argue that's a bigger offence.
If your life has been as unfair to you as it has been to some of us, and forced you to work on SPAs as the result, try opening any large frontend project that uses Vite (or any other dev server that serves each file separately instead of bundling them).
If you're unfamiliar with this stuff, it results in your browser fetching thousands of JavaScript files from the local dev server.
Any Chromium-based browser handles that just fine in about 1-2 seconds. Firefox takes at least ten, including full page reloads. No adblocking on either, and yes I've tried all combinations of about:config knobs, fresh/empty profiles, etc.
That's the only reason I use Chromium for development work.
I use firefox to work on SPA’s and occasionally use chrome for compatibility checks. I haven’t really noticed a difference in speed, except for startup time (which firefox is definitely slower, but I also have it open pretty much all the time anyway)
I suspect part of it might be interactive-ity with the event loop: let me explain.
I regularly have to use web browsers (I try and want to use Firefox, but Chrome is faster for me in this scenario) on an under-provisioned (yes I know, but I don't have any control over that!) VM which runs VDI sessions on both Linux and Windows (with VMWare on Windows).
On both Windows and Linux, Firefox's UI (in this CPU-constrained env - it fluctuates, and sometimes is okay, but often is slow) in terms of UI interaction is very notice-ably much slower than Chrome, especially when there's animated content in the document. It seems like Firefox prioritizes thread-wise the HTML/JS content at the expense of any UI signals/presses/drags or other interaction, and so sometimes clicking close tab does nothing for > 30 seconds, but animated content within the document keeps playing perfectly.
Chrome does none of this (on same VM machines) with same content: I click the close button, and instantly a tab closes, or I can drag a tab around instantly.
I think that Chromium’s UI stack is also just more solid, being closer to “native” and being drawn with Skia and such, as opposed to the Firefox approach (previously XUL, which was always slow and clunky and later switching to a web tech based UI).
There used to be Gecko based browsers that fixed this with alternative native UIs (Camino, K-Meleon, and Epiphany aka GNOME Web), but then Mozilla removed embedding support and ever since anybody wanting to use Gecko are stuck with the design decisions of the Firefox team whether they want to be or not.
One example that I can give is that when Firefox has been running for long time, especially in Private window, the memory usage of "main" processes will grow a lot (normal & GPU). Compacting memory via about:memory does free up a bit but Chrome in similar situation will use a lot less memory. This does slow down Firefox (especially in system where you don't necessarily have a lot of memory), restarting it will make it a lot snappier.
For example I currently have Firefox & Chrome sessions which have been open for about a month on my laptop (16GB of memory). I closed every tab and only left the "blank" page open. Firefox's process manager shows 4GB GPU usage, a bit under 1GB usage for Firefox & about 250MB for extensions. After clicking "minimize memory usage" the GPU memory dropped to 3GB and Firefox process memory usage dropped by about 50MB.
For comparison Chrome uses 400MB of GPU, about 200MB for "Browser", ~150MB for for "utility" processes and about 100MB for extensions (extension list is different so we can ignore the memory usage difference for them, listed it just for completeness sake).
Despite this I do use Firefox as my primary browser.
As I said I think it's more of a perception thing than an actual slowness.
I don't think Firefox is actually any slower in a practical test of loading a site for example, I just perceived it as being slower, perhaps more likely its something like the transitions between tabs and other actions being different enough to feel slower.
It is always great to hear of another union being formed. Workers representing themselves is not only a benefit for the workers, but also a pathway to healthy and sustainable organisations.
This person refers to the German television and radio fee (Rundfunkgebühren).[1] It is a state-mandated system that ensures free (as in free speech) and (relatively) neutral public broadcasting institutions. There is a constant and engaged discussion, because every household in Germany has to pay this fee. Exceptions are made only for low-income households.
A constant discussion, lately fueled by extremist parties (AfD) who feel treated unfairly by (amongst others) the public broadcasters (which has parallels to Trump's recent campaign against public broadcasters in the US).
Can't argue them - Tageschau always has been trashtalking people with the wrong opinion.
Back in 2011, Tageeschau openly rallied against Muslims and wanting public broadcasting gone was a leftist position. The whole thing is completely asinine to anyone who remembers.
> Man didn’t evolve in an environment where stories were told by people who’d won a massive intertribe tournament of story telling ability. Stories were told by family.
The stories we grew up to were indeed those which won "a massive intertribe tournament of story telling ability". Only interesting stories got retold. Stories travelled further when made into songs. They became artworks when tranformed into plays. They became myths and legends in the luggage of those travelling the planet. And the art of telling stories also became a way of making a living much before our contemporary society produced the first pop star.
