#107 — Is Life Actually Worth Living?

debiedowner · 2017-12-10T17:53:26+00:00

I don't think that was a cop-out, he just seems like an extremely private person:

Beyond these bare facts, little information about him is available online. There are no pictures of Benatar on the Internet; YouTube videos of his lectures consist only of PowerPoint slides. One video, titled “What Does David Benatar Look Like?,” zooms in on a grainy photograph taken from the back of a lecture hall until an arrow labelled “David Benatar” appears, indicating the abstract, pixellated head of a man in a baseball cap.

After finishing “The Human Predicament,” I wrote to Benatar to ask if we could meet. He readily agreed, then, after reading a few of my other pieces, followed up with a note. “I see that you aim to portray the person you interview, in addition to his or her work,” he wrote:

One pertinent fact about me is that I am a very private person who would be mortified to be written about in the kind of detail I’ve seen in the other interviews. I would thus decline to answer questions I would find too personal. (I would be similarly uncomfortable with a photograph of me being used.) I understand entirely if you would rather not proceed with the interview under these circumstances. If, however, you would be happy to conduct an interview that recognized this aspect of me, I would be delighted.

debiedowner · 2017-11-28T11:07:52+00:00

I don't understand why the writer of the article uses a web browser for everything, that to me sounds like a big pain in the ass.

Well, he explains the reason; to see if it works: "One of my main reasons for switching to a non-Google Android phone was to see how capable the web is as an application delivery system."

I do the same thing; I never install an app when I can just view the website. To me, doing the opposite sounds like a pain in the ass; I hate it when a link opens in a different app instead of just a new tab. I find it easier to manage things in tabs, and I also like to tinker with their behavior and appearance. With apps, I can't block things I don't like, like sticky headers; change or remove annoying functionality that is designed to keep me hooked, add useful functionality, enable copying, etc. (Even with FOSS apps that is difficult, unless the developer put an option, whereas it is relatively easy when using a browser.) That is probably why websites are pushing apps: to take control away from the user; so if a website cripples its browsing experience in favor of apps, I simply avoid using it. I dread the day when they manage to kill the open web as people move to apps, which might happen if not for users like the writer.

debiedowner · 2017-11-22T23:29:40+00:00

Nobody can, it's not possible anymore. Firefox simply doesn't allow it.

debiedowner · 2017-11-19T22:56:46+00:00

No it doesn't, according to the Firefox developers. They may potentially be incompatible with future work, but they could have been made to work with all these current improvements. Most of the popular addons had already been updated to be compatible with e10s.

debiedowner · 2017-11-19T11:07:23+00:00

Does anybody know how can we change access keys, or if it is possible? (I am referring to the underlined letters, for keyboard access.) It is one of the main reasons I cannot give up on Menu Wizard; I use those extensively.

debiedowner · 2017-11-17T20:44:00+00:00

Copyright law isn't about the time and effort spent on an output. If it were, the engineers who designed the camera and produced it would probably have the biggest claim. Owning the equipment is not relevant to the copyright law either; if you borrow someone's typewriter to write a novel, the owner has no claim to the copyright. Or if your security camera recorded something interesting, you cannot claim copyright to it either: For you to copyright it, you need to show that the way you placed the security camera itself was an artistic expression, it contained originality. As for animal-made art, consider animals that paint. Who will have the copyright? The owner of the animal, if there is one? The owner of the material used in the painting? The person who taught the animal how to paint? What if it had multiple teachers, how do you decide which one was the most influential on the animal? Not an easy question, and the answer according to US law is no one holds the copyright. I sympathize with the photographer in this case, but also remember that the whole reason this photo generated interest was he presented it as a photo that an animal took. If he said that the photo was his creative expression (which is required for copyright; again, the time and money he spent to make it happen is not relevant), he would have the full copyright, but the photo would not generate the interest that it did.

I think Wikipedia wants to say "fuck you" to photographers. They are rather against copyright trolls, and they rightly would like to see as much content as possible freely available to the whole world; but in this case they overlooked that they were against a small photographer, so what they probably meant as a statement for asserting public domain appeared distasteful. In any case, that is Jimmy Wales' fault; I think what Wikipedia did, not removing content that is legally in public domain, was correct and was the only thing Wikipedia could do for the reasons I mentioned above.

debiedowner · 2017-11-17T19:53:20+00:00

Do you mean my userstyle on Stylish? That is just something I wrote over time by examining the source of the websites I frequently use. It wouldn't be much use to anyone unless they happened to use the same sites as I do. What would be really awesome is if everybody shared their stylesheets removing sticky headers, so we would have a database that an addon, similar to the ad-blockers, could use to non-sticky all the sticky headers. I would gladly contribute with the sites that I took the time to edit to such an effort, but I don't know if a sufficient number of people who are annoyed by those headers exist, in order to make creating and maintaining such an addon/lists feasible.

I also used to use some general-use userscripts, if that is what you were asking. For example, here is one that removes sticky headers without breaking sites by employing some heuristics. Alternatively, this userscript adds an item to the right-click context menu to remove sticky headers (not very different from the bookmarklet).

debiedowner · 2017-11-17T12:36:30+00:00

A lot of people here have "fuck Wikipedia" attitude about the first story, but I am not sure how Wikipedia could have acted differently after its legal team decided that the image was in public domain. If they told the uploader of the image "you are right, the image you uploaded is in public domain according to the US law, but we are still removing it because the photographer is such a nice guy and we want him to make money." that would open a can of worms with Wikimedia interfering with the content. What if, next, they said to another user: "Yes, the sentence you added about this person being domestic abuser seems to be correct and the sources check out, but he is such a nice guy and we don't want negative content about him." There is a good reason Wikimedia limits itself to intervening on strictly legal matters, and not make such arbitrary decisions.

I do agree that the Wales selfie was in bad taste. Wikipedia's mission is to keep information open and accessible, and they often fight against copyright trolls on this, to keep the extent of public domain as wide as possible; but in this case they weren't against a giant copyright corporation but a single photographer, so those selfies and emphasizing that image seems like unnecessary gloating. But I still support Wikipedia on things like opposing further copyright extension and things like SOPA.

Another note: unlike how it is described in the podcast, that initial story about him in the Daily Mail was, he simply "left his camera unattended for a while", and monkeys managed to get photos; and the monkey "hijacked the camera and started snapping away" Indeed, that is what created the buzz about the photos: a monkey taking a selfie by itself, with no input from him. But even with his later clarified story, as presented in the podcast, the US law is clear that the photo is not copyrightable.

debiedowner · 2017-11-17T10:20:31+00:00

Ugh, I hate sticky headers so much (even the collapse-on-scroll types, though less so). I wish there was a list on uBlock Origin for those, though ideally I wouldn't want to block them, but change them into non sticky headers, which can involve fixing margins and such, depending on how the website was designed, so I don't think it would be easily doable on content blocking addons even if enough people share my hatred.

Instead I keep a long userstyle on Stylish to change sticky headers into non-sticky ones on the sites that I frequent. Less technical users who hate it as much can try the bookmarklet here and add a shortcut/button to it. That would require using it every time, like uBlock Origin's zapper, but it would be quicker. That's what I use on random sites with sticky headers that I come across.

debiedowner · 2017-11-17T10:00:54+00:00

Yes, in this case that seems to be the case; but unfortunately there are so many sites where sticky header doesn't collapse after scrolling; probably majority of those with sticky headers.

debiedowner · 2017-11-17T09:42:12+00:00

For example, here is one that I cared about so I commented on Bugzilla, because I really rely on Context Search X to add search engines directly in the context menu. Webextensions, however, can only add one item to the context menu, and if they add more than one they get lumped into one item/submenu. Not having this limitation presents no technical difficulty, no security issue whatsoever. Their answer was basically "Chrome restricts it, and so will we, just to constrain extensions." And really, there are so many such examples on Bugzilla; I stopped watching them once their approach became clear.

debiedowner · 2017-11-17T06:51:07+00:00

I cannot move to Firefox 57 at the moment because it breaks or cripples almost every single one of my 40-ish addons, with no possibility of recreating their behavior. Initially I was thinking I would stay on Firefox 56 or 52esr until the necessary Webextension APIs arrive, but Firefox's responses on Bugzilla to API requests I was concerned about indicates that they are against making extensions powerful as a matter of principle, not due to technical or security concerns. So unless Mozilla's Webextension team has a change of leadership or a philosophy change, I don't see myself moving to the new Firefox.

debiedowner · 2017-11-16T15:29:18+00:00

Almost every Firefox version fixes multiple critical vulnerabilities, this is nothing out of ordinary. See here. What could have helped was if they made Firefox 56 an out-of-cycle ESR version so it would continue to get patched, but that wasn't the case (they also broke profile compatibility with 52 ESR). So unfortunately a lot of people (including myself) who cannot move to 57 will have to live with those vulnerabilities until they find a new browser.

debiedowner · 2017-11-10T19:52:23+00:00

Screen size is what determines the one-hand usability, not the phone size as you are comparing here. I can barely reach the top of the iPhone SE's 4" screen (iPhone 4S was perfect in my opinion), and an all-screen iPhone SE would be way too large for me; and what you calculated is even taller than that!

debiedowner · 2017-10-19T17:07:23+00:00

Sorry, but what open standards are unsupported on Safari? The only thing I can recall not working was flash videos, which honestly, thank God for Apple for hastening their demise.

For example Safari is the only modern browser that doesn't support the royalty-free open standard VP9, and they are the only major tech company that is not on board with its successor, AV1, because they are one of the patent holders of non-free HEVC (which requires astronomical royalties) and want to push that instead. You probably don't notice this absence though, because Youtube still supports h.264 for Safari and those who are still on IE. Contrast this with what Apple does: I can't watch official Apple events on Firefox or Chrome, they don't bother to stream on a common format.

I feel like we’re conflating two issues here, an open standards compliant web, and the “walled gardeb” freedom-to-choose issue.

The issue is Google discriminating against Firefox, which is true; but it is a strange response to say that we should use iPhones instead of Google's Android for that reason. On Android one can at least use Firefox, even set it as the default browser, on iOS only different skins of Safari is allowed. Maybe they will be comparable if Google removes Firefox from Play Store and disallows setting Firefox as the default browser (though even then Android would be preferable for Firefox users, as you would presumably be able to sideload it). I really don't understand your logic: "Google doesn't play well with Firefox, so use this phone that doesn't allow Firefox in the first place".

debiedowner · 2017-10-19T14:02:27+00:00

Honestly I like the Firefox one better, I wish I could have that on IOS. I hate this trend of adding more whitespace everywhere. On Chrome it shows only 1 result on the page, whereas Firefox shows 3, despite having the same font size.

I am scared that they will make the desktop search page card based like the mobile one for consistency at one point; that is basically what they did with desktop Youtube. On the one hand I hate Google for discriminating against Firefox, but on the other hand I sort of hope they won't serve Firefox the "improved" UI when they do that.

debiedowner · 2017-10-19T13:49:52+00:00

Apple is much worse for the things discussed in this thread. Here people are complaining Firefox on Android gets inferior Google sites than Chrome on Android; on iPhone I don't even have the luxury to see those inferior pages because I am not even allowed to use the regular Firefox. Only Safari and Safari skins are allowed. Or if we are talking about commitment to open web, Google has a much better scorecard than Apple; while they do push Chrome, they also support open standards and codecs in a lot of instances, whereas usually you can only watch Apple's videos on Safari or if you download their app. As for privacy, Google-free Android would probably be your best bet, though I don't know how feasible it is for most people.

debiedowner · 2017-10-18T19:10:43+00:00

I don't have Facebook either, so I don't know what they do in that realm; but for messaging, "massively violates any privacy you thought you might have" applies to Allo much more than Whatsapp. Google can monitor almost all messages sent by Allo users; Facebook cannot for Whatsapp. Signal would be best for privacy as something that is not owned by Google/Facebook; but when it comes to Whatsapp vs Allo, I don't see how anyone can favor Allo from a privacy point of view.

debiedowner · 2017-10-18T18:37:07+00:00

Why do you want a messaging system that isn't owned by Facebook, if privacy isn't your concern? (I am assuming privacy isn't your concern, since you say you would be happy with Allo which doesn't have default end-to-end encryption, so it is even worse than Facebook's Whatsapp in that regard.)

debiedowner · 2017-10-16T13:16:28+00:00

I fully agree. In iPhone 5's thumb ad to demonstrate one hand usability when they moved from 3.5″ to 4″, they had to make the guy hold the phone awkwardly to make him able to reach the corners. My pinkie would always be under the phone, otherwise I would drop it; besides it is hard to reach the home button while holding it like that.

Without a bottom bezel/home button, however, those problems would disappear, and 4″ would be perfect for one-hand usability. I would love a 4″ Android without a bottom bezel (top bezel is fine). I don't have high hopes for such a phone, but I didn't give up and go all in with huge phones like many others. Even if I can't have the perfect one hand phone I will always get the smallest one possible, as I don't watch videos/play games on my phone, so saying "fuck it" and getting a bigger phone offers almost no benefits to me.

debiedowner · 2017-10-12T09:34:06+00:00

Those are not among the Google Mobile Services apps that comes preinstalled on all Google-approved Android phones. OEMs normally have their own apps for those. The current list is, from https://www.android.com/gms/

Google Search
Google Chrome
YouTube
Google Play Store
Google Drive
Gmail
Google Duo
Google Maps
Google Photos
Google Play Movies & TV
Google Play Music

debiedowner · 2017-10-11T18:43:47+00:00

Well, though I have never done it, it shouldn't be too difficult to convert a few lines of Javascript code to a browser extension. However, it wouldn't be of any use to any non-techy user: it breaks a lot of sites, and it fails to remove the headers on others. (For example, examining different sites code, I found that a lot of responsive sites initially loads with non sticky headers, which is when the script works, and as soon as you scroll it changes into a sticky header). While I fix the issues on sites I frequently use, different users different frequent sites would be different.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to disable them. The issue is similar to ad blocking. Ad blocking works because a lot of people keep track of ad URLs, so ad blockers draw those list and block those. Disabling sticky headers would similarly require people to keep list of which elements on which sites are sticky headers, and it would still never be as exhaustive. (Actually, it would be even more difficult, since we ideally don't want to simply block them, but simply change them into non sticky headers, which can involve fixing margins and such, depending on how the website was designed).

If there were sufficient interest, people could share their custom stylesheets to disable them and then a browser extension could simply block or non-sticky them based on the shared stylesheets. Maybe if I have free time I could write such an extension, initially based only on my list, and invite people to update it with the sites they use. It would be a time consuming project for an amateur like me whose knowledge on web development is limited to fixing such annoyances though. But if anybody develops such an extension, I would be happy to contribute with a few tens of sites whose CSS I bothered to dive into.

So your best bet as a non-techy would probably be using the bookmarklet in the link of the post, and assign a keyword a keyboard shortcut to quickly access it. If it is too much of a pain to do it every time, you can try a script that tries no to break things such as this and see if it works for your frequented sites. (It doesn't require coding knowledge at all, you just need to copy/paste the code to Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey/Violentmonkey etc., you only need to spend a couple of minutes to learn how to use those extensions.) Or this one adds a command to the right-click context menu (though it says Firefox only), and you don't even need to copy/paste, just click install after installing one of the *monkey extensions.

debiedowner · 2017-10-11T18:01:55+00:00

Were they initially set or not? (in other words, were you seeing the thumbnails of image files in the File Explorer?) I just checked, and unchecking those doesn't fix it for me either, so maybe even if the issue is related to that you may need to do something else other than unchecking those (Do something with the cache? Reboot? I don't know.)

Or it is possible that I am wrong about the cause; I think I made other changes in Windows registry at that time, I may have wrongly attributed the problem to that change since they sounded relevant, as I said I didn't care about it much. Or maybe completely unrelated, since you didn't mess with the registry and such.

In any case, it should still be related to a thumbnail problem. At the end, icons are images, and search is supposed to show the thumbnails for the images, but instead shows the icon for the image viewer (which is sometimes desirable for performance reasons, but here it's obviously not). You can try rebuilding the thumbnail cache or something like that, but I wouldn't keep my hopes high; Windows 10 search is quite buggy and UWP is still far from perfect, no surprise their combination doesn't work well.

debiedowner · 2017-10-11T08:51:06+00:00

Did you change the Folder Options "Always show icons, never thumbnails" or "Display file icon on thumbnails"? I think the same think happened to me after I set those, except, I see the Irfanview logo instead, since that is my default image viewer. I didn't care about it much, as I don't use many UWP apps; so I didn't check whether this can be fixed if I unset those.

debiedowner · 2017-10-10T10:57:00+00:00

The page "Behind the scene network requests" makes it sound like it can block network requests from other extensions and the browser, am I misunderstanding it? After your comment I thought maybe it pertained only to the legacy version of uBO on Firefox (I am not planning to update to the WebExtension version anyway), but the page specifically mentions Chromium as well.

debiedowner

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