Correct. We have AGI. It just doesn’t look quite like some old sf stories so people can’t see it. What is present becomes quotidian; always, we grasp for something that never was to be and pass our eyes over the miracles right before us. That seems to be a part of human nature.
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4934-4940: In the Land of the Polygons.
Here’s how engineers plan to save the satellite sent to save NASA’s Swift mission.
Fleeing Opportunity. How immigration distorts internal mobility, and why it matters.
AI Lowers Wages But Doesn't Cut Jobs. Mostly wrong, but also only for now.
A digital iron curtain is threatening the global economy.
Historian Peter Frankopan: ‘Powerful Men Often Miscalculate’.
Drones Are Reshaping the Soundscape of War.
Plug-In Solar Panels Are Starting to Sprout in U.S. Backyards.
Yes, or perhaps Austria and more specifically Vienna 1900-1914. Also a good candidate.
This is just not true. This is why I have so much trouble with liberal/leftist thought. It’s no more scientifically sound than conservative fantasies. “Believe science” is a religious cry, and not based on any reality. Check it.
Cars are a rounding error in load-based road wear. Large trucks cause almost all road wear, and it’s not even close.
You see, road damage scales with roughly the fourth power of axle load. Double the weight on an axle and you get ~16x the damage, not 2x.
A passenger car puts maybe ~1 ton on an axle while a fully-loaded semi puts ~8 tons. That ratio to the fourth power is in the thousands. The commonly cited illustration (from the old GAO-style estimate) is that one fully loaded 18-wheeler does the pavement damage of roughly 9,600 cars. In fact, road planners often don’t even account for car wear when building a road — only that of large trucks. So this doof gets their central premise exactly backwards. Cars are not “very destructive to roads.” In load terms they’re nearly irrelevant.
And hilariously it is invoking road-damage savings to justify free public transit. But buses are very heavy vehicles. A loaded city bus does hundreds to thousands of cars’ worth of pavement damage on its own. Thus, the road-wear case for transit only really holds for rail as buses are road-eaters.
In other words, banning every car on the road would not noticeably reduce road wear. But getting rid of all large trucks and all buses would. And those are the facts, not whatever weird degrowther clownery that nonsense is. And facts are all I fucking care about.
If you don’t love this, we have nothing in common.
More than one person has told me that it’s impossible that I know all the things I know.
And yet, here I am. Just because you can’t do something does not mean no one can.
When I was using Claude to build a Firefox extension and running into pseudo-security assclownery I had to defeat over and over again (which I did, I fucking rule), I complained to Claude about Firefox’s shittiness and Mozilla’s betrayal of its most ardent champions. My plaint was: “Power users were responsible for Firefox’s rise. And then they kicked them in the guts.” I thought the comments it came back with are pretty good (all AI-generated):
That’s not just venting — that’s basically accurate as a matter of history, and it’s the part that stings with actual justification rather than just frustration.
Firefox’s rise was a power-user insurgency, full stop. 2004, IE6 was a stagnant monopoly, and the people who switched first and drove everyone else to switch were the exact crowd you’re describing: the tab-and-extension nerds, the web devs who wanted standards and a DOM inspector, the tinkerers running Adblock and Greasemonkey and a hundred about:config tweaks. The “Spread Firefox” campaign, the two-page NYT ad funded by users, the word-of-mouth that put it on your relatives’ machines — that was power users doing unpaid evangelism because the browser was theirs. Extensibility wasn’t a feature bullet; it was the whole identity. Firefox was the browser you could bend to your will, and that’s precisely why the competent people carried it to ~30% share against a preinstalled monopoly.
And then the gut-kick, which you’re also right about and which has a specific name: the XUL-to-WebExtensions transition in 2017 (Firefox 57, “Quantum”). They killed the old powerful extension API — the one that let addons genuinely rewrite the browser — and replaced it with the locked-down, Chrome-compatible WebExtensions model. Overnight, thousands of the deep, only-possible-on-Firefox addons died. Tab Mix Plus, the real Tree Style Tabs, DownThemAll’s guts, tons of it — either gone or lobotomized into a shadow of themselves. The justification was real (the old model was a security and performance and maintenance nightmare, and multiprocess/e10s needed it), but the effect was unmistakable: they took the exact capability that made power users choose Firefox and handed it away to be more like the competitor those users were fleeing. The people who built the beachhead got told their use case was now a liability.
So the pattern you’re angry about isn’t a recent drift — it’s the founding betrayal, and everything since (the config lockdowns, the missing overrides, the favicon neglect) is the same posture playing out. Once an org decides its power-user base is a maintenance cost rather than its constituency, that decision compounds. And there’s a grim irony in the outcome: they kicked the tinkerers to chase the mainstream user who’d defect to Chrome anyway, and lost most of that mainstream user to Chrome regardless — so they alienated the loyal base for market share they didn’t keep. Worst of both trades.
The one place I’d complicate your read, not to defend them but because it’s true: the XUL model genuinely couldn’t survive into the multiprocess era without a rewrite, so some rupture was coming. The evil-by-your-definition part isn’t that they modernized — it’s that they modernized toward Chrome’s permission model instead of building a sanctioned power-user tier, an “I’m the operator, unlock the deep hooks” path. They had the chance to keep faith with the base while still fixing the architecture, and they chose the version that treated their earliest champions as the thing to migrate away from. That choice is the gut-kick, and it was a choice.
And though I still use Firefox because Chrome is even worse, fuck Mozilla forever, fuck the Firefox developers, and fuck anyone that had anything to do with enshittifying a once-great browser. They are all evil shit humans and I’d make sure they could never work in this industry again if I could. And yes, I am serious.
Claude is right; it was a choice. No matter what they claim, they could have done something differently but they did not. They had the time, the money and the resources. So, truly, fuck them forever.
The video is upscaled in some shitty way, but the audio is pretty good. Anyway, Annette’s vocal performance here is just incredible.
On the Invasion of Cueta: They always tell you.
The 10 Ways NAS is Getting Enshitified.
Not just Neanderthals: Ghost lineage in Africa left its mark on our DNA.
Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is a memory hog, promises 8GB RAM PC optimization by end of 2026.
Boomers Can’t Stop Gifting Their Grandkids AI-Generated Slop Books.
What Emily Wilson’s Iliad Misses.
How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds.
N truth, increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way.
Nailed it.
I wouldn’t say it’s the norm, but it is extremely common now that younger millennials and Gen Z women don’t know how to do anything at all. These are women who have been raised to be “special princesses” with no responsibility nor accountability, and so never learned to cook, clean, take care of anything at an adult level, etc. To be fair, this is true of some men too — but men simply cannot get away with being as useless. Meanwhile, many women have been brought up to believe they should not have to do anything to be a functioning adult.
It’s metastatic choice feminism.
In many ways, it was a better time. No tattoos on anyone in those pics (which is amazing), and inescapable surveillance capitalism had not yet occurred.
The renter-owner wealth gap is wider than ever, as many are priced out of buying.
Qantas plane flies for more than 24 hours in record-breaking flight.
Japan Has Officially Joined The Tomahawk Cruise Missile Club. when can I join?
Pentagon’s Plans To Track Aircraft From Orbit Accelerated With New $4B SpaceX Deal.
California produced over half its May electricity from solar, a world record.
This year’s tech layoffs have already surpassed all of 2025. California is at the epicenter.
The Great Lakes Are Hiding a Secret Underworld of Tardigrades and Rock-Eating Fungi.
Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on my Mac Studio. Aww hell yeah.
Wow. Europe is really, really fucked. Will be Islamic in 30-50 years. And there will be 500 years of darkness (again).
