> replacement parts for models several years old are still plentiful.
Data point:
Just replaced a battery in a six years old Samsung smartphone in 20 seconds. It did not even cost me $10. Incredible value compared to the hassle to do this on todays phones, if it is possible at all.
A friend of mine enjoyed her first years in school in the Pannonian basin; I am not sure, whether they did something special - but it was enough to get her into a selective German high-school specialised in maths and sciences later in her life. Always admired her for the experience, as she repeatedly speak of it if it has been fun and games.
The thing I can't stand about it is closing a window causes a multi-second beachball on latest Firefox / macOS. Really annoying. This is with a cleaned out profile and no extensions.
Yes, for my girlfriend, during some last few months Firefox is much slower than before: she uses it mostly for Facebook and Youtube, she doesn't have any extensions installed by herself (not counting the stuff that is in Firefox because Firefox marketing initiatives, like Pocket) and no adbockers, but Firefox uses so much CPU that it gets completely unusable.
And she is not any extreme Facebook user: she has less than 500 "friends." And she doesn't have big "subscriptions" list in Youtube.
So it's completely opposite of the propaganda: the average user, using the most common sites, is hit to the that much CPU more use that the most common sites are unusable.
So what's going on here? It's just the propaganda machine claiming the opposite of what is actually happening at the moment. They maybe have good goals but at the moment it's worse than, for example, a year ago.
Maybe it's because she doesn't have a newly bought computer, which are the ones used by those who test? And I guess those who test don't use Facebook and Youtube?
I also use Firefox but spend zero time in Facebook and minimal time on Youtube and block Javascript wherever I can, so I don't see the same. But I saw the CPU on her computer staying completely blocked by something Firefox is doing. The only thing I was able to figure out: around 40 percent is spent in kernel according to the task manager. Both cores are used more than 90 percent, and the Firefox is not responsive. She doesn't do anything more than scrolling down her Facebook to see that effect. It's not always that bad, obviously depends on the content on the Facebook, but it's bad often enough for her to see the slowness regularly, and when it really gets stuck to complain to me.
What I personally observe is the pages embedding more linked Youtube videos got to be very slow to even display them. Those are the pages I stumble on occasionally, so I didn't investigate. The second effect I've observed is writing a longer post for HN on Firefox getting much slower (less responsive) the longer the post is. Like writing these words now.
So, dear Firefox people, your product is really SLOWER for me too in the last versions, and not faster. And it is extremely slower for a "normal" user using the "normal" Facebook and Youtube.
(Additionally, I use a number of extensions, and only one will remain available soon when they turn off the support for what they mark as "legacy" extensions. That is really strange decision, deciding to remove the major difference between them and Chrome, becoming just as limited as Chrome is for extensions and wasting the work of most of the extension developers.)
> So what's going on here? It's just the propaganda machine claiming the opposite of what is actually happening at the moment. They maybe have good goals but at the moment it's worse than, for example, a year ago.
It sounds like you are hitting some kind of bug. Feel free to file issues about it if it's reproducible; the telemetry should also be automatically reporting the issues you're seeing.
I would like to respectfully suggest that you hitting a bug is not evidence of a "propaganda machine".
Slowdown on Facebook and Youtube up to getting stuck (exactly what I talk about) was reported in some form at least since February this year, e.g. this Reddit:
I've found that link after my GF complained many times, and I've seen the CPU at more than 90% (40% in Kernel) and Firefox stuck after only her visiting Facebook and scrolling down. It was hard even to kill the Firefox. I saw bugzilla entries too. Some quadratic loops for every element, triggering recalculating "everything" even if the result shouldn't change were mentioned if I remember.
What I claim is that on 56.0.2 (the most recent version until tomorrow) is still not better, FF getting stuck and CPU being fully stressed, and that the "subscriptions" can't be the only issue (which is the only scenario that the developers accused if I remember correctly the bugzilla conversations). The computer seeing this at almost 100% CPU and Firefox remaining unresponsive has only two cores, AMD CPU. If it's accidentally "better" on 16-core machine of some developer who doesn't use the mentioned sites anyway, my girlfriend can't change it.
Of course nobody is going to give FF developers her own Facebook access for them to reproduce it.
As for my GF the most of the internet are Facebook and Youtube, I suspect she'll really have to switch to Chrome if it continues. She already did "refresh Firefox" or however it is called now more than once. No change. And she is certainly not an outlier (and regarding the slowdown I see, I type these words on Firefox 57 (I downloaded it after reading other comments about the FTP availability, I see "Stylo true (enabled by default)") on 4 core / HT Intel and typing these last lines is also quite unresponsive and my notebook fan started at maximum even if unsurprisingly for 8 virtual cores I don't see much CPU use on the indicator -- something is still obviously wrong even on the very light site like HN and on the more powerful machine -- I guarantee you I see this only in Firefox and when I use native programming editors everything flies all the time).
If it is indeed style recalculation that is causing the problem, then Quantum (57) may well solve the issue, as Stylo both improves the dynamic restyling behavior (the style sharing optimization is more flexible) and accelerates the slow case in which restyling needs to occur from scratch (via parallelism). I can't promise anything without being able to reproduce, of course.
Naturally, like all browser engines, Gecko takes performance on popular sites such as Facebook very seriously.
Did any of you try FF 57? I also used a lot of extensions, but basically all the ones that mattered to me work again. (For tree style tabs I have to add a bit of CSS in a file to make it not awkward, though)
I've just installed 57 for me. The English Dictionary is gone -- now all the words I type here are with wiggly lines, I see "add dictionaries" but I had the darned dictionary already and what's the use trying to add the same? I don't know what to do next. The extensions are all gone, including the NoScript for which the developer claimed that he's adding support for new Firefox -- I checked noscript.net -- I have had the very last version. The mozilla site writes "Not compatible with Firefox Quantum". Noscript was the most used extension from a dozen I have had.
From the less used ones, as an example I've used "Copy Plain Text 2." Now I see there's a new similar and compatible extension by somebody else I guess, but it's obviously more limited: "Note: WebExtension API does not allow setting Copy PlainText as the default copy function of the browser at the moment, neither does it allow user defined keyboard shorts. Once there are such an APIs, I will add the feature."
Others have no replacements at all, not surprising seeing the limitations even for the simple "Copy Plain Text."
(Edit: regarding performance details see my other posts here.)
I was rather asking about performance for your girlfriend.
Regarding addons, I'd say give it time. It's a chicken and egg problem that will be solved with time. I was not expecting to switch until end of the year.
Firefox's Webextensions APIs are much more expansive than Chrome's. They still have an active developer community so the ecosystem will recover quickly.
Met a guy in his twenties recently. He wanted to share something with me on FB. Told him I had no account. He replied politely: Oh, yes. I believe the many people in tech do not have one.
I wholeheartedly concur. Most people see the problem of power in that they don't have it. I believe, fewer people understand, that power itself is the problem, and not its particular location in a point in time.
> We could have had a cultural renaissance, a democratization of information and thought.
I have hopes, that we will see a new mindset in the coming decades, which looks back at our times and recognises its primitive state.
There are ways to give the power back to people and raise them in ways that encourage benevolent cooperation and progress.
Side note: whenever I see people blasting “corporations,” it flips my hysteria/ignorance bits. “Large companies” is usually a better-informed replacement since (a) most corporations are very small and uninfluential, e.g. mom and pop stores and (b) some influential multinationals are not set up as corporations, e.g. Bloomberg LP.
The trouble with this study - if I should guess - is selection bias: How many of those high IQ individuals are actually member of Mensa?
Given some test many years ago, I might have been qualified to become a member of this club - but never tried, as I would like to see people as people and not people as their brains, only. Maybe Mensa selects for those who are anxious about their abilities and find the notion of the club card in some way - soothing.
> 1 billion people shouldn't have their lives dictated by a proprietary, opaque Skinner's box with no regard for privacy or rights.
Of course they should not. Or should they? We live in a free society and you are voluntarily participating. Or not. It's your choice. And that's wonderful.
People do not realise, how simple it is to stop. As with cigarettes the real trick is to just not do it anymore. You need some willpower and some plan to cope with the temporary withdrawal effects.
Single datapoint: I briefly used FB for a few weeks about ten years ago, but never saw its value. Today, thanks to dusty email and many other (more open) sites, I have a growing number of friends around the globe and locally.
There are places (like Central Asia), which are already operating in a Free Basics mode in that basically anything beyond facebook is an extreme hurdle to use. But anyone in the western world with lots of choices can stop feeding FB today, if they cared.
I agree with you that it's possible to stop using Facebook. It isn't like food or water.
However, Facebook really is, at this point, a clear monopoly. The reason I use facebook is because that's the social network that everyone else uses. If I want to see baby pictures, hear about my friend's band's upcoming show, get updates on how people are doing after the norCal fires, or get trolled politically repeatedly by my insular political bubble, Facebook is the only place where I can do this. The next best network is nearly useless to me - not strictly because it's worse in terms of features or reliability, but because nobody else is using it.
I can't say it's absolutely impossible to do this without facebook - I agree that people can, with effort, patch it together, as you've done.
However, I think the "voluntary" participation aspect you've identified, while not entirely inaccurate, should recognize the coercion that results from a monopoly.
> However, Facebook really is, at this point, a clear monopoly.
But here's a point: The zero-cost marginal cost characteristics of many software businesses makes this sector prone to be monopolistic. Acquire: data, users, or intellectual property and from there, competition will have little chance until a new wave washes clean the shores or you mismanage your company.
So the only way to stop this is to - do what? The political will and instinct, that would be required to redirect technological progress by not allowing monopolies is enormous. Not to mention the economical dynamics that come from companies competing on how to destroy privacy faster.
your data point of one doesn't really validate that addiction effects people differently and hence different outcomes. My wife stopped smoking for 5 months, then she started again. ooops, some much for just quit and all will be happy in the world.
Fun fact: Capitalism depends on crises - they are not the exception, they are the rule. People forget that and treat it as something that happens, like a natural catastrophe. This is unfortunate, because this is a purely man-made thing, but still, even the high end media is kind of left in the dark about this central theme (let alone economists, who sometimes get lost in the details of their specialisation).
Now the real analytic question to ponder is: where exactly does this destructive element of capitalism originates from (left as an exercise for the reader).
Crises aren't necessarily destructive, or something that needs to be prevented. When railroads were first built across the USA there was a huge bubble in railroad stocks. Many investors lost everything, but the country ended up with some great transportation infrastructure.
I'm sorry for being short on content, but I wish, more people would really go deeper into theory and open their eyes on the things around them and realize, that capitalism is an extremely aggressive beast that has sucked up everything, that is not itself.
Three days ago, I wondered (time and again) about all the fuzz about this site called facebook - within ten years it took something, that was not really exploited (social relations) and made it a first class business. Startup hubs are still dreaming of the next social startup - meaning exploiting special kind of relations (neighbours, potential partners, coworkers, what have you).
And we won't stop here. Think your dreams belong to you? Maybe today, but I can see large enterprises exploiting your very being for profit, soon. You find that disturbing? But why?
There are several issues to be aware of with the way society and technology is evolving for sure, but when you just shout "wake up sheeple!" and offer nothing but hand waving, you are not contributing much in that regard.
Yes, true. But I am not a salesman to sell you a solution.
All I ask for is to be more conscious about these, sometimes subtle, sometimes less so - things.
If it helps you, here's a simple framework of mine to develop some kind of directional feeling for technology: If it helps to lessen the power of a single entity it's perfect, if it enables you to do new things it's good, otherwise, it might only be a distraction.
Linux and free software is perfect, it is free and a huge enabler for all kinds of things - even for businesses. Bittorrent is good, because it is a huge enabler and took power off content distributors. Raspberry Pi is perfect, because it puts computing into a lot of hands. AWS is only good, because it is an enabler, but it actually feeds a single entity - so that's bad. Cryptocurrencies in theory are perfect, since they take power off single large entities - but they are not robust yet. Solar power is perfect, because it can a human make independent of a single large entity.
So, it is somewhat simple: There are things that liberate you - you as a person and let's you voluntarily choose to cooperate and there are things that lock you in - facebooks walled garden, adtech in general, where information asymmetry only grows - and many other things, that only make sense in the capitalist framework (in however shiny colors you want to paint its advantages).
Well, Minsky's financial instability hypothesis is at least interesting. His argument is, basically, that there's a cycle wherein: during normal times, people want to beat the averages, so they engage in more speculative bets; as that ratchets up, and speculative positions become increasingly leveraged, a point comes where debt is financing interest on speculative leverage; once enough people get suspicious, further debt isn't extended, so the speculative positions default and drive cascading defaults (since there's "blood in the water"); the after-crash period comes with a renewed sense of caution, and people accept lower yields as the price of earlier speculative frenzy; over time, the caution comes to seem outmoded and people believe that normal times are here again; and so on.
I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it's at least a perspective.
Basic differential equations: Any system with an effect proportional to the negative second derivative in it will tend to have cyclic behavior. That's a bit oversimplified, but in practice it often works out that way. And there's plenty of such things in the economy, so cycles in the economy are inevitable.
You can make solid cases that we don't need to have quite the crashes we actually do. But I don't believe in the existence of a real economy that doesn't have some substantial cycles in it that people will point to as evidence that something is wrong.
(Of course, if enough of those people get together and get put in charge of an economy, they often are successful at removing the cycles, by virtue of removing all instances of the economy going up at all....)
Data point:
Just replaced a battery in a six years old Samsung smartphone in 20 seconds. It did not even cost me $10. Incredible value compared to the hassle to do this on todays phones, if it is possible at all.