I liked poppy wars but it was a bit too relentlessly nihilist for me. I thought Babel was, if anything, better balanced in terms of presenting empire as a system where people who are not inherently out to harm others end up doing so anyway.

I read it, and I really enjoyed it. I will give a few reasons.

There are tons of spoilers here, by the way, you were warned.

So in short, it was one of my favourite books in the last few years. It also illuminates the opium wars in a way that hasn't often been done before.

It's interesting how NATO is "forced" to take action by Chinese military build-up, doesn't leave any room for China being forced to take action by NATO's military build-up. Reminds me of that recent video of previous NATO's head complaining about China placing bases close to NATO, when any NATO country is thousands of km away and China is deploying near its own coast.

I kept giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and telling myself things weren't so bad.

I was wrong.

I'll continue using Firefox because it's the least bad option, but I can't advocate for it in good faith anymore, and I don't expect it to last long with this orientation.

So it goes.

I'd like people to STOP PRETENDING that the only plausible reason why someone doesn't agree with this is that we don't understand it. Yes, I understand what this does. The browser tracks which advertisements have been visited, the advertiser indicates to the browser when a conversion action happens, and the browser sends this information to a third-party aggregator which uses differential techniques to make it infeasible to deanonymise specific users. Do I get a pass?

Yes, this is actively collaborating with advertising. It is, in the words of Mozilla, useful to advertisers. It involves going down a level from being tracked by remote sites to being tracked by my own browser, running on my own machine. Setting aside the issues of institutional design and the possibility for data leaks, it's still helping people whose business is to convince me to do things against my interest, to do so more effectively.

Whatever opinion you may have of advertising as an economic model, it’s a powerful industry that’s not going to pack up and go away.

Fuck that. Not if we don't make it. That's precisely the point. Do not comply. Do not submit. Never. Advertising is contrary to the interests of humanity. You're never going to convince me becoming a collaborator for a hypothetically less pernicious form is the right course of action. Never. No quarter.

We’ve been collaborating with Meta on this,

That makes it even worse.

any successful mechanism will need to be actually useful to advertisers,

And therefore inimical to humanity in general and users in particular.

Digital advertising is not going away,

Not with that attitude.

but the surveillance parts could actually go away

Aggregate surveillance is still surveillance. It is still intrusive, it still leverages aggregate human behaviour in order to harm humans by convincing them to do things against their own interest and in the interest of the advertiser.

This is supposedly an experiment. You've decided to run an experiment on users without consent. And you still think this is the right thing--since you claim the default is the correct behaviour.

I cannot trust this.

This is bullshit. The total amount of advertising I want is zero. The total amount I want of tracking is zero. The total amount of experiments I want run on my data without consent is, guess, zero.

For me the weirdest part of the interview is where he says he doesn't want to follow anyone, that he wants the algorithm to just pick up on his interests. It's so diametrically opposed to how I want to intentionally use social networks and how the fedi tends to work that it's sometimes hard to remember there are people who take that view.

Security and performance are hard to measure but it's at least questionable that they're behind in either.

AI has many good uses, for example the local translation capability that allows for privacy-preserving translations of websites is AI and already in Firefox, and makes it possible to translate in environments that do not allow sending data out for security reasons.

I don't get why states do this. Lie? Yes, that makes sense. But lie so badly it's inevitable they get caught? A lot of people, I would think, will now also have qualms believing anything coming from them, even things that might be true.

Not that hard left (I gave money to Sumar but I'm realistic that it's the best we can get, more than what we want).

I know some people who are really pissed off about the amnesty, and personally I don't get it. Like in what world is the personal fate of a few hundreds of people who, let's say for the sake of the argument, ran an illegal referendum, more important than labour rights for everyone?

There is literally no instance in which expanding the scope of copyright law is a good thing. Never.