I admin the.coolest.zone, the coolest site on the net for online social engagement.

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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • By observing the HTML of the about:preferences#privacy page, we can find that the checkbox “Cookies” has a preference value of network.cookie.cookieBehavior, as does the dropdown next to it, so that’s the preference value that is changed.

    You can see in the console of about:preferences that if you type in Services.prefs.getIntPref('network.cookie.cookieBehavior') it will return a 1. You can also see this if you have about:config open as you are toggling the preferences dropdown - the value will change there.

    Hope that helps!



  • So this is actually an interesting term. Looking it up from Wikipedia…

    The term “sideload” was coined in the late 1990s by online storage service i-drive as an alternative means of transferring and storing computer files virtually instead of physically. In 2000, i-drive applied for a trademark on the term. Rather than initiating a traditional file “download” from a website or FTP site to their computer, a user could perform a “sideload” and have the file transferred directly into their personal storage area on the service.

    The advent of portable MP3 players in the late 1990s brought sideloading to the masses, even if the term was not widely adopted. Users would download content to their PCs and sideload it to their players.

    So as applied to phones it originally meant a particular type of download and install - rather than installing directly to your phone from an app store, you have somehow obtained the file on your PC, transferred the file to your phone, and then installed it. In that context, downloading an APK directly to your phone and installing it would not be sideloading.

    However, semantics have shifted somewhat and now it’s used generally to refer to any install that isn’t directly from an app store of some kind, and requires downloading an actual package file and then installing it.




  • A fascinating take on it. I’m still wary about Threads interoperating with the rest of the Fediverse, and how that may change the culture as well as the system over time (Meta would have the power and money to throw around regarding changes to ActivityPub implementation), but I also see it similar to email. And I’ve spoken about this before to the point I sound like a broken record …

    But people understand the basics of email. They understand they can sign up for a Gmail account and send an email to anyone else. Maybe Threads will be our Gmail here, and introduce people into the idea of a wider open social media concept in a more familiar way to them, and they can branch out as needed or just choose to stay on Threads.

    In any case, any given instance can choose to block Threads if they so choose.


  • Ok, so I use Gboard and it doesn’t seem to do that for me, it leaves existing spaces alone. Here are my settings:

    Under Text Correction I have enabled:

    • Show suggestion strip
    • Auto correction
    • Auto capitalization
    • Double space period
    • Proofread

    Everything else is disabled, so maybe try toggling things off and on and seeing whether the behavior changes?

    I also have two keyboards I switch between: English (US) and हिन्दी . I’m unsure whether having multiple language keyboards changes how the base functionality works.


  • It probably won’t make you ill immediately, more likely the texture or flavor would begin to suffer first (hence “best by” rather than “expiration” date). Keeping it stored properly (i.e. not an open bag but something sealed) would likely allow it to last longer.

    You should probably not eat 3.5lb of candy within 10 days unless you are trying to make your intestines suffer, but if you choose to binge please update us as to the state of your health so that you may be used as a cautionary tale.





  • Found it. I keep recommending this book on this community. :)

    From ADHD 2.0:

    Modern life compels these changes by forcing our brains to process exponentially more data points than ever before in human history, dramatically more than we did prior to the era of the Internet, smartphones, and social media. The hardwiring of our brains has not changed— as far as we know, although some experts do suspect that our hardwiring is changing— but in our efforts to adapt to the speeding up of life and the projectile spewing of data splattering onto our brains all the time, we’ve had to develop new, often rather antisocial habits in order to cope. These habits have come together to create something we now call VAST: the variable attention stimulus trait.

    Whether you have true ADHD or its environmentally induced cousin, VAST, it’s important to detoxify the label and focus on the inherent positives. To be clear, we don’t want you to deny there is a downside to what you are going through, but we want you also to identify the upside.

    I do suspect that we’re likely already seeing a spike in VAST since a bunch of kids with growing brains did online-only learning for a few years during the pandemic instead of sitting in classrooms learning to focus on something not screen related…


  • I’ve had to bring up Google Images and search up “ADHD Brain vs Normal Brain” before for people. I think a lot of folks don’t realize that ADHD actually comes from tangible, structural brain differences, and seeing that puts it into the same realm as other “real” medical problems for them.

    Regarding:

    everyone has ADHD these days thanks to the internet

    I have written extensively in my comment history about the differences between ADHD (the structural and heritable attention issue) and VAST (variable attention stimulus trait, aka the brain poorly making connections when people, especially kids, are exposed to screens too long). I’ll dig up that comment and post it as a self-reply, but essentially: the symptoms are very similar, but the origin differs.



  • Separately, to answer your question… It’s generally been assumed I suppose, if a product is invented and people use it, that means it’s providing some positive impact. Like asbestos did initially.

    What this research says is that there are products that make the users’ lives worse, and would be even worse than that if they didn’t because their peers are using the products and they would be left out.

    Like, the ideal scenario for happiness might be if Tiktok didn’t exist, but since it does it’s now a choice for school aged kids between “using Tiktok and absorbing harmful messages” and “not using Tiktok and feeling left out and possibly being ostracized by their peers”. The very existence of some products cause usage simply because it’s the least bad option of using/not using.



  • While I agree in theory, it's hard practically to give the ability to make private wording and typo edits without giving the ability to make more insidious changes - like pushing a certain narrative and then quietly changing words here and there to erase evidence of that after most people have read it, etc.

    If news websites kept their own visible audit trail, much like Wikipedia, I could see the argument that Internet Archive doesn't need to capture these articles immediately, maybe it should be time bound to a year after publication or somesuch, and therefore recent news could retain its paywall by the NYT without being sidestepped by Internet Archive. (While it's annoying that articles are paywalled, news sites do need to make money and pay for actual news reporters.)


  • AI is absolutely taking off. LLMs are taking over various components of frontline support (service desks, tier 1 support). They're integrated into various systems using langchains to pull your data, knowledge articles, etc, and then respond to you based on that data.

    AI is primarily a replacement for workers, like how McDonalds self service ordering kiosks are a replacement for cashiers. Cheaper and more scalable, cutting out more and more entry level (and outsourced) work. But unlike the kiosks, you won't even see that the "Amazon tech support" you were kicked over to is an LLM instead of a person. You won't hear that the frontline support tech you called for a product is actually an AI and text to speech model.

    There were jokes about the whole Wendy's drive thru workers being replaced by AI, but I've seen this stuff used live. I've seen how flawlessly they've tuned the AI to respond to someone who makes a mistake while speaking and corrects themself ("I'm going to the Sacramento office – sorry, no, the Folsom office") or bundles various requests together ("oh while you're getting me a visitor badge can you also book a visitor cube for me?"). I've even seen crazy stuff like "I'm supposed to meet with Mary while I'm there, can you give me her phone number?" and the LLM routes through the phone directory, pulls up the most likely Marys given the caller's department and the location the user is visiting via prior context, and asks for more information - "I see two Marys here, Mary X who works in Department A and Mary Y who works in Department B, are you talking about either of them?"

    It's already here and it's as invisible as possible, and that's the end goal.