Notes in Google Keep will sync between mobile and web

13 sextillion transistors is about 1625 billion transistors per human, though - or just over 200 iPhones’ worth of transistors per person. That’s still about an order of magnitude higher than I’d have guessed.

Ads should be tailored to the content of the website they are on. Not to me in any way whatsoever.

Then you might be interested in this new technology being tested by Mozilla that aims to replace tracking cookies.

Mozilla isn’t doing anything to Firefox. The Anonym purchase you linked to was literally to acquire a technology they developed which would, if implemented web-wide, end the dystopian nightmare of privacy invasion that is the current paradigm where a few dozen large companies track everything everyone does on the internet all the time. “Privacy preserving” isn’t just a buzzword in that article - privacy is actually preserved, and the companies involved (including Mozilla) learn nothing at all about you - not your name, not an “anonymous” identifier, not your behavior, nothing. Moreso, Anonym didn’t just create this technology, the entire company was purpose-founded to create this technology.

There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about Mozilla in particular at the moment. Very little of the animosity they receive is truly deserved once you dig past the narrative and find out what Mozilla’s actually up to, and why.

Thatâ™s⠀rea​lly cool. � Ꭰо уо𝗎 𝗍һі𝗇𝗄 уо𝗎’ӏӏ со𝗇𝗍і𝗇𝗎е ᖯ𝗋о𝗐ѕі𝗇𝗀 ӏі𝗄е 𝗍һа𝗍?

By default they do block quite a bit. The “Standard” tracking protection option in their Settings page says it blocks Social media trackers, Cross-site cookies in all windows, tracking content in private windows, cryptominers, and fingerprinters. They have a strict option with a disclaimer that it may break some sites or content that does a bit more.

So they’re already blocking as much as they reasonably can without affecting legitimate functionality, and they have an option to block even more.

As for “Why offer them anything?”, my guess is pragmatism. They’re a lot more likely to succeed if they propose a system where the users give up nothing but companies can thrive anyways, vs. a system where the users give up nothing and the companies in charge of everything just burn to the ground and die.

I notably don’t have a strong opinion on whether or not I think they’ll succeed with this feature. I think their intentions are pure, though, and that it legitimately offers no privacy risk to users at all. I think the best chance it has is something like government mandates. Maybe there’s also a future where they somehow get Google on board for PR reasons or something. I wish them the best of luck.

I look at it as a pragmatic attempt to work within the system we have to shift the internet away from its current nightmare dystopia of user tracking and information selling, and toward a system where all parties can be reasonably happy, with companies being able to receive aggregate anonymous data that helps them operate efficiently, without compromising even a tiny bit on user privacy.

Editing to actually respond to your question about who Firefox is built for: Definitely the user. But users don’t exist in a vacuum. Mozilla can and does consider the entire ecosystem their products and users exist within, and can take steps to make that ecosystem, the internet, a better place for users. The best part is that their actions often make the internet better for everyone - not just Firefox users.

Nothing here is incompatible with the principles of free software. The feature isn’t for the “sole benefit” of advertisers - it’s beneficial to users specifically because it attempts to shift the paradigm from one where they have essentially no privacy regarding their online activities whatsoever, to one where they give up literally nothing about their privacy.

And they are not selling data - I believe that to be a straight-up lie. I’ve searched extensively to find out if anything is being sold here. I have no doubt at all that if they were, the headlines would be about Mozilla selling user data, rather than about tracking users.

From their FAQ:

The system is designed so that neither the advertisers, nor the websites with the ads, nor Mozilla can ever tell which specific users had their activity contribute to the data being reported.

The current paradigm is that the vast majority of internet users have their activity tracked across a vast majority of websites. It’s that dozens of large companies have access to information about which websites you’ve been to, when you visited them, and what you did there. That they can and do sell this information to other companies, who usually have as their primary goal using that data to somehow extract money from you to them. Users who block tracking like this are a tiny minority.

The new paradigm would be that the companies in question know none of that, and instead get told information like “approximately 7 out of 487 people who saw your advertisement on [x] went on to purchase your product on [y]”.

I would call that pretty paradigm-shifting. The only absurd thing here is that this is somehow being used, loudly and repeatedly, to make it seem like FIrefox is somehow worse for user privacy than its competition.

People feel betrayed because that’s the narrative they’re being fed - the number of times this same exact story has been posted in the past few days is staggering, as is the number of anti-Firefox stories that have been posted in general over the past few weeks/months. But almost every time one of these anti-Firefox stories comes out, just a small amount of digging shows it’s a whole lot of narrative or even outright misinformation piled on top of nothing at all.

The truth is Mozilla did nothing here that harms or has the potential to harm its users or their privacy, and in fact they’re actively trying to build a system that, if successful, would be a paradigm-shifting boost to online privacy. Mozilla is a legitimately good tech company that has made and continues to make the internet a better place, which makes the recent coordinated push to demonize them as an enshittified boogeyman all the more bizarre, especially considering who their competitors are.

Cross-posting my comment from the post you cross-posted (and possibly created your account just to post?)

After reading about the actual feature (more), this seems like an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.

The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it’s a way for advertisers to figure out things like “How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?”, but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.

The only thing I looked for but could not find an answer on one way or the other is if Mozilla is making any sort of profit from this system. I would guess no but actually have no idea.

There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like that users with pre-existing installs should have been asked to have it turned on (for optics alone, apparently), or that its mission of replacing tracking cookies is unlikely to succeed. But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody.

I’m absolutely convinced there’s a coordinated anti-Firefox astroturfing campaign going on lately.

Meanwhile I avoided playing because I wanted to wait until it was out of early access and had its full release… Seems like I’ll either never get that, or by the time I do, the game will already be dead

Could be that for sure - like I game a bit every day, but if I was doing this same project, all of my screenshots from the past three weeks would have been from Crash Bandicoot 4 - and the three weeks before that would all be from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2. I basically just beat a level a day. If other people were chiming in every day maybe I’d mix it up.

It could also be self-selection bias - like, I would never do a project like this because I know it would be super repetitive. Maybe they were willing to do it because they already played a hyper-varied selection?

You have more variety in the games you play than I have in the foods I eat

How many of these 54 have been unique? What are you doing that you play a different game almost every day?

The worst part is that I know the menu calories aren’t precise at most restaurants, but I still won’t let myself be wishy-washy with them. I actively recognize there’s no point in relying on how many calories Outback Steakhouse says are in a Bloomin’ Onion (1900 btw) when the largest bloomin’ onion I’ve had in the past is close to double the size of the smallest I’ve had. But my entire system relies on precise tracking so I still feel I have to make the effort.

Rounding up to the full amount after eating >85% or so is something I do though. I’m much more okay with it if I know I’m overestimating than if I think I might possibly be underestimating.

While that’s true, and while it’s something I’d definitely recommend for others, I can’t honestly say that’s something I’ve mastered doing myself. To me, not finishing just means I have more work to do when it comes to figuring out how many calories I actually ate. While I could just guesstimate that I had 60% of that blizzard, I find that in practice I’m really not okay with being that wishy-washy with the numbers. The days where I have to just guesstimate kill me inside.

My own advice:

The diet I’m on, which has lost me 36 pounds (196 to 160) and counting since early April, is simple calorie restriction - I try my best not to go over 1500 calories/day, and if I do go over, I try to make up for it by going under on following days until things average out.

Every time I’ve tried this diet or similar diets, I’ve had great success, as long as I’ve meticulously tracked and wrote down how many calories I ate each day. The times I’ve tried this diet without tracking have all ended up failing, even when I “tried” sticking to it for months. The moment I start writing numbers down, things just fall into place. So for me at least, that’s the key.

Some notes:

• Over the last 127 days my actual average calories/day has been 1472/day
• I try to avoid meals where counting is very difficult or impractical. That means I try to avoid going to restaurants that don’t post calories and I’m not big on “real” cooking. If I do have a meal where a good count isn’t possible I try my best to overestimate - usually with 2500 or 3000 depending on how full I am since it’s really hard to eat more than that at once. I find it very difficult to go to most restaurants without getting more than 1500 calories, also, so I don’t eat at restaurants all that often anymore. Fast food places like McDonald’s are actually some of the easier options to work with, though.
• I’ve made little to no effort to eat healthier - just less. I can have a blizzard from Dairy Queen if I want, but that’s 1100 calories and then I’ve only got 400 left for something else. I have mastered making delicious ice cream that’s just 300 calories/pint though. In practice I usually eat processed foods from a can, box, or bag that you just need to heat up or follow the instructions on the box for.
• A scale is essential for getting accurate calories out of things like butter, milk, ketchup, ice cream ingredients, etc.
• In general meats are a pretty poor choice - compared to other foods they make me a lot less full compared to how many calories they take up
• For me at least, after the first week or so I just stop feeling hungry in general most of the time. There are occasionally days where I only eat because I know I should, rather than because I got hungry.

An added bonus of writing things down is getting to graph things too!

Sure. Firefox is developed by lovely people.

It’s a reference to the “Man in the Moon”. They, the Zorks, see a Zork in the Earth because their bodies are shaped kinda like the Americas.

Which SNES emulator do you use?