My midwestern US schooling taught me almost nothing about African or diaspora history beyond the slave trade. When I learned that there was a whole big huge continent whose history I didn’t know, I was fascinated. Simultaneously, I was awakening to the systemic injustice that Afro-folks experience in the United States, and wanted to learn as much as I could about their background and context.

Maybe so, but I would say they’re more alternatives to Firefox than any of the Chromium forks are to Chrome (except Arc, I guess) by nature of the fact that you don’t have to strip telemetry out of the Gecko codebase in order to ship a private fork.

It’s also worth noting that almost all of this stuff was open-source. If you wanted to, you could still use most of it, continue development on it (and in some cases, such as FirefoxOS, its development is continuing without Mozilla’s involvement). Not so with stuff killed by Google.

You currently only have three choices in web rendering engine, unless you want to go REALLY esoteric:

• Blink

• WebKit

• Gecko

Blink is Chromium, meaning Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Arc, Vivaldi, ug-c, Konqueror, etc. It is built, maintained, and controlled by Google, and currently has an approximately 81% market share on the internet.

WebKit is Safari, and is only really usable on Apple products (and is the only engine available on Apple’s mobile products outside the EU). It enjoys about a 9% market share as a result of its wide install base.

Gecko is developed by the Mozilla Foundation for Firefox, yes. But if you want any sort of web independence, you have to have a browsing engine that is not controlled by a major corporation. Otherwise, you’re just going to have a duopoly that can make whatever web decisions they want to.

Can’t possibly be the bridge as a whole. When I said “certain sections,” I meant, like, every third square centimeter or something. If the entire bridge inertial dampeners were completely offline, our heroic crew wouldn’t be jumping madly across the bridge, they’d be a thin paste of organic material on the wall.

Actually, having individual sections fluctuating could explain some of the wilder dives Kirk & Co did during battle sequences, now that I think about it.

Yeah, but they’re maneuvering at appreciable fractions of the speed of light when they travel at impulse, so there’s no way anyone survives if they’re all offline. They have to mean that the primaries are offline, or they’re offline in certain sections, or something like that.

When you’re talking about a ship’s capacity that’s approaching five digits, that stuff would have to be moved around a lot.

Foodstuffs from the Conestoga is behind the new sensor package from Starbase 80, but we can’t install the sensor package until we get to a drydock, so we have to move it over there and get the ingredients for Thanksgiving out–but we’re also supposed to deliver half of the potatoes from the shipment to the Boyle when we pass them at Deep Space Two, so we have to crate them into a separate container, and the stasis container we need for them currently has Vulcan plomeek bulbs in it for a diplomatic function on Tendar IV, so we can’t move them over until Wednesday. Meanwhile, in Cargo Bay 2, we literally have a whole entire shuttle that for some reason the commander of the shuttle deck decided just had to be put here, but that means that the restraint units are inaccessible, so we’ve had to jury-rig some force fields to hold everything together. Plus, because of some sort of requisitions mistake, we got sent a double pallet of PADD-xe’s, when what we really needed were PADD-xt’s, so that was taking up every spare parts locker and case in Cargo Bay 3 until we could offload them to some environmental observatory or something, but then Lt. Cmdr. La Forge had this weird idea yesterday to pull 250 of them and try to network them together for…something?..and they’re still strewn all across the floor since he left to deal with a plasma injector leak yesterday afternoon, so I guess we should put them away? I mean, I don’t even know if they’re still functional–and THIS is when the Vendorian terrorist leader decides to pull up and have a tentacle-measuring contest? Does he have any idea how busy we are right now? I don’t have time to deal with artificial gravity fluctuations or inertial dampener overloads today, I’ve got potatoes that are about to rot!

And when the trauma you’re expected to deal with is “run a glowy light over any plasma burns and bring anything else to Dr. Crusher,” I think a physical therapist could probably get qualified in a few hours at most.

Help clear sickbay in preparation for casualties, prepare plasma burn kits and dermal regenerators, monitor comms for damage reports and put together response teams.

Make sure everything is tied down well and then prep for damage control, probably. Cargo bay officers are probably under the Quartermaster’s purview, so there’s probably a lot they need to do to support repair efforts.

I would imagine civilians’ biggest responsibility in such a situation would be “stay out of the way and lock the doors.”

Yep. The “always open in container tab” gets a little fidgety because Reddit uses a whole bunch of different domains (some of which it only flips to for an instant while redirecting elsewhere), so it takes a bit of work, but I’ve been able to successfully silo off Reddit, Xwitter, Meta, etc. into their own distinct containers that are independent of everything else I do.

I just dont like cases and take the risk. Phones are nicer looking without.

No doubt, but I don’t have that kind of cash to burn on the aesthetics.

Neither is a good split, he is charging as much as spotify for content he did not create and keeping half.

Hosting and maintaining an application actually has some pretty non-trivial cost associated with it. If it’s half of revenue, then MKBHD actually isn’t taking very much at all.

I dont know what the sticky hands comment means.

I’m not brave enough to use my phone without a case, because I know I’ll drop it. Either you’re braver than me, richer than me, or you have better grip than me.

Fifty fifty is what MKB said was the split, which is a predatory figure.

50% of the revenue or 50% of the profit? Because if they’re paying the artists first and footing the bill for hosting the app out of the other 50%, that’s a pretty good deal.

There are a lot of people walking around with cracked screens who would seem to disagree.

Im not rich and I use my phone without a case

I guess you could also have fairly sticky hands.

and watch some of those reviews.

Yeah, sometimes I do too, if only for the novelty of it. But they’re certainly not for us.

The app is a bad idea with a bad deal for artists.

Citation needed. Do you have any data on the app’s profit share structure? Because at the price they’re charging, if they’re passing on a decent share of it to the artists, it sounds like it’s not a bad gig.

There’s also this infamous story. And also this one. I recognize that anecdote is not the singular of data, but there’s a pretty substantial paper trail on Fiverr.

Marques has a decent chunk of his fan base that’s…kinda rich? That’s the only thing that can explain why he reviews supercars and expects people to use their phone without a case. So if he’s directing some of that fan base’s money toward artists, I’m all for it, assuming the profit sharing is reasonable (and I have no reason to believe it’s not).

I mean, I’m not going to pay that sort of money on a wallpaper (I almost always use photos of family or friends anyway). But if the people who buy it like it, and the people who sell art for it are treated well, you go MKBHD.

Fiverr is the worst. They enable abusive clients to find victims, and AI con artists to find marks.

They have to maintain backwards compatibility for 40+ year old applications so that they don’t lose big corporate and government customers, but they also have to chase the newest trends in order to keep their shareholders happy. They built their business on selling their software, but most of their competitors are giving functionally-equivalent programs away for free. Their software runs without incident on literally billions of devices for decades, but one or two high-visibility bugs or design missteps and public perception of their brand totally tanks.

And so, their business model sucks. Moving Windows to become a data-harvesting SaaS was a terrible choice, their pivot to AI is going to crash and burn, and rent seeking software subscriptions are a scourge.

But I think they’re just too big and too vertically integrated to actually be any better at this point. I just don’t think it’s possible for their executive team to make good decisions anymore, not because they’re dumb, but because the good decisions literally don’t exist. It’s like a black hole, where the closer you get to the event horizon, the more possible paths point toward the singularity; likewise, the bigger Microsoft gets, the more possible decisions point toward “devastatingly bad.” They honestly should have been split up 25 years ago; for the industry’s sake and for their own.