Dang. Covid really messed stuff up, I used to love Meetup before, but I haven’t had as much time since (had a kid right after Covid started, so I’ve been spending more time at home).

I just… don’t see the benefit. I host videos so I can access video content even if my internet goes out, and it’s a lot cheaper than paying for streaming. I host my own documents because I don’t want big tech scraping all my data. I host my own budgeting software, again, because of privacy.

I could host Vaultwarden. I just don’t really see the point, especially when my SO and I have a shared collection, and if that broke, my SO would totally blame me, and I don’t think that’s worth whatever marginal benefits there are to self-hosting.

Maybe I’ll eat my words and Bitwarden will get hacked. But until then, stories like yours further confirm to me that not hosting it is better.

One of us!

I have Leap on my homelab and Tumbleweed on my desktop and laptop for >5 years now. It’s been awesome, and it’s my favorite so far from >15 years of Linux.

Glad you’re enjoying it! Next step: get unreasonably obsessed with chameleons.

That’s largely why I haven’t self hosted either. But problems can be mitigated:

• regular, automated backups to something else (say, KeePass), encrypted with your master pass and backed up off-site
• host your PW manager on a VPS, or have the VPS ready to deploy a snapshot from offsite backup
• change your master pass regularly - limits the kinds of breaches that can impact you
• randomize usernames - makes it easier to detect a breach, because you can see if any of those were exposed without the org being breached

But honestly, my main reason is that I don’t trust my server to stay up 100%, but I do expect Bitwarden to. I also trust their security audits.

I honestly only buy a new phone when my current one breaks or runs out of software support. I bought my current phone (Google Pixel 8) because my old (Moto G Power) ran out of security updates, and this one has 7 years of support.

If I could have switched to a FOSS OS for longer support, I’d still be using my old phone. If I could replace parts to something that gets software updates, I would have. But no, it’s ewaste because it’s no longer getting support.

If someone makes a forever phone, I’ll buy it.

Seems like a pretty extreme flex, I’m worried it’ll snap.

it is anyones guess what the order of magnitude of spin Nobel’s corpse has accumulated.

I’m guessing it’s nearing the theoretical limits of “abstract wankery.”

I think there are a few reasons it will be hard to switch to this model.

It’s the same model advertisers use though. Here’s the flow for ads:

1. Ads load from the advertiser, with metadata about which website to pay
2. Periodically, advertisers pay the website for showing ads

All that’s changing is the browser vendor is paying instead of the advertiser. So I guess think of Mozilla “paying” for ads, but not showing anything, and Mozilla’s non-ads would show if a given header is present.

Another is that sites want to be able to charge more for popular content. That’s easy with advertising

Sure, and users could decide to see the ads or pay the premium to avoid them.

And yeah, I agree that most sites overvalue their content. This makes that more transparent, so users will gravitate toward the better value. I personally avoid a lot of high quality content because viewing it is too much of a hassel, a privacy violation, or too expensive (I’m not getting another subscription to read a handful of articles).

I don’t think Mozilla is interested in this sort of solution.

Agreed. But unfortunately, Mozilla seems like the best chance we have here. Brave replaces website ads (big no-no for many sites), Chrome doesn’t EB want ad blocking at all, and Microsoft is cooking its own ad network.

So the most obvious niche left is an un-ad network, where you can pay to not see ads. Yet Mozilla wants to make “ethical ads” or whatever, which doesn’t really solve the problem for people who hate ads.

I see two arguments here:

1. Billionaires existing is a symptom of a larger problem
2. Someone having a better start than you makes them a “nepo baby”

For the first, I and Warren Buffett somewhat agree, and I’ll quote him here:

“I continue to believe that the tax code should be changed substantially,” wrote Buffett. “I hope that the earned-income tax credit is increased substantially and additionally believe that huge dynastic wealth is not desirable for our society.”

“Perhaps annual payout requirements should be increased for foundations,” he added. “Some time ago, I testified before Senator Baucus in favor of increasing and tightening estate taxes.”

…

“I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing U.S. debt,” wrote Buffett.

That said, I likely disagree with his specific solutions, though I haven’t bothered researching to figure out what those are, because he’s clearly not particularly interested in crafting policy.

For the second, I largely hold to this definition of nepotism:

favoritism (as in appointment to a job) based on kinship

Someone giving their kids the best education they can isn’t nepotism, that’s normal parenting.

Someone giving their child an job they’re not qualified for absolutely is. If you want to see examples of that, look no further than Trump and his kids.

When I look at the top billionaires, most of them are largely self-made. For example:

• Elon Musk - dropped out of college and co-founded zip2, largely with money from investors
• Bill Gates - dropped out of college and founded Microsoft, which was pretty much bootstrapped
• Jeff Bezos - graduated from college, worked his way up in his career, then started Amazon when the internet was getting big (parents did invest $300k)

I don’t really consider any of them to be “nepo babies” because their parents didn’t give them an undeserved job or anything like that. And honestly, none of their parents were particularly rich, except maybe Musks. Each of them had incredible luck and capitalized on the early days of consumer computing, but that doesn’t cheapen the work they put in.

Do they deserve hundreds of billions? Probably not. But I don’t think they really benefited from nepotism like Trump’s kids, Kim Kardashian, and others did. There’s a huge difference between someone who had a good start and builds something great through their hard work and someone who is handed a pile of cash or a prominent position and rides that.

If you show evidence that their success is largely dependent on their parents, I’ll believe you. But if they largely built their wealth themselves, that’s a harder sell. I think each of those I mentioned earned their wealth, I just think our tax system dramatically increases wealth accumulation past a certain amount, and that’s what needs to be changed here.

My main issue with BAT and crypto in general is value fluctuations. If a website is going to get on board with something, they don’t want to build a system that adjusts the price with the value of the token, so I don’t think it could ever replace ads, only be supplemental.

So that’s why I’m interested in Taler. It can be pegged to whatever currency we want without having any concern for transaction fees or anything like that, even across borders. But honestly, I also don’t care what the currency is, I just want a way to pay a website without seeing ads and without making an account.

The implementation doesn’t need to be that complicated, just a header that provides a unique identifier (can change every request), the entity to get payment from (e.g. Mozilla), and a cryptographic signature from that entity that guarantees funds are available. And then the response would be the same as if the user had a no-ads account, and the website would settle up with the payment entity at some interval. So:

• user interaction - load funds, and a local ledger is kept tracking transactions, which is periodically synced with the browser vendor
• website owner interaction - receive and validate headers in lieu of account details; send invoice each month to browser vendor (same overhead as dealing with one customer)

It wouldn’t need to be Mozilla-specific either, it could be a standard that websites could adopt if they so chose. Mozilla and other browser vendors would be motivated to get sites on board because they’d make a cut from these transactions, and they could build plugins for the more popular platforms so adoption is easier. I’m thinking the big news agencies would be the perfect initial customers here, and they could branch out from there.

Picking a ten transaction tool (like Taler) could simplify things, but honestly anything could be used. Mozilla probably wouldn’t be able to convince Google to join, but it could probably be an extension, and they could maybe convince Apple to join.

Dang. Does meetup work? I know it’s pretty decent for tech meetups, not so sure about the others.

Exactly. We should make rules about scary prompts and whatnot, I’m just hesitant about requiring an app store to distribute apps it doesn’t want to for whatever reason, whether that’s an ideological, technical, or competitive reason.

I suppose that’s fair, I’m just concerned that smaller orgs will be caught in the crosshairs, while larger, better funded orgs find the loopholes. In general, my opinion is that the simpler the rules are, the less likely for your average small org to get screwed, because they’re playing by the same, simple rules as the larger orgs.

In this case, if I create an Android competitor and my income stream depends on revenue from my app store, would I be expected to support the Play Store if it can run it? I think Google would have a valid argument here if they’re forced to support my store on their platform. Or maybe I can start w/o it, but if I get past a certain amount of sales, I would have to, which could mean that I still get screwed once I hit that threshold.

So I’m skeptical and would need to see the law first. I just think, in general, we shouldn’t be making policy as a knee-jerk reaction to orgs we don’t like. For example, I think the TikTok ban is dangerous precedent, despite loathing TikTok.

Does buying BAT compensate websites? AFAIK, no sites actually signed up to be compensated that way, so it just ended up being a random cryptocurrency. Brave went crypto first, websites second, and that obviously didn’t work.

Mozilla should do the opposite IMO. Go out and make agreements with major sites to make their content available w/o ads for compensation, and then get users to start using that service. What they use for payment isn’t particularly important to me, but it should be stable and low-cost. I think GNU Taler is a good start to keep costs really low (no money is actually changing hands), and Mozilla can settle up with websites monthly, quarterly, etc.

It should be Brave collaborating w/ Mozilla, not the other way around, because Brave obviously has weird motivations. Brave can keep BAT to reward watching ads, I just don’t think they should use the same system for rewarding ads vs compensating websites for not showing ads.

It’s just playing by the rules as stated, and we have decided that limiting the liability of corporations is desired.

If you start a business, banks loan a lot to that business, and then the business goes under, you don’t lose your house. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, and the intention is to help small business owners not lose their shirts if things go sideways.

But it also ends up benefiting wealthy people because they can use these legal entities to shelter funds. A common real estate strategy is to have a corporation own your properties, leverage them like crazy, then if the market drops and you’re underwater, bankrupt the company. You’ll lose the properties, sure, but you’ll also lose the debt, so you can end up net-positive.

I think we absolutely need to reform how corporations work and remove liability as the value of the company increases. But in most cases, these wealthy people are just playing by the rules that have been agreed upon. IMO, the solution here is generally fewer rules to let things like fraud laws work, not to create more and more exceptions (because who has the resources to find loopholes? The uber-rich).

Exactly. I don’t want to have a dozen small subscriptions, I want one pot of money that handles all of my online stuff, with no recurring monthly obligations. If they continue to produce good content, they’ll continue to get my money, and that’s how it should be.

Look at his history. He started out selling gum and candy to kids at school, then took increasingly demanding jobs (delivered newspapers and whatnot) until he went to college, after which he worked for his professor (IIRC, I don’t recall specifics).

And he never was a day trader, so he’s not the type that’s making money on the margins off other traders, he’s actually investing and sometimes buying a controlling stake in companies that he believes in. If you look at his lifestyle, he very much doesn’t look like your typical billionaire, he lives in the same house he bought in his 20s, and generally lives a pretty modest life, especially given his wealth. Yeah, he makes a ton at his job, but he seems to be doing it because he loves his work, not because he loves money.

In my mind, he’s basically the best possible example of a billionaire. He didn’t do much of anything shady to get rich, he worked hard in his youth and invested wisely the rest of his life. And he started a pledge for other billionaires to donate the vast majority of their wealth, leading by example by giving away half of his wealth to drop from #1 to #2, and now to #10 or so.

If you’re going to criticize billionaires, start with Gates, Bezos, Musk, Trump, or Zuckerberg, not Buffett. Buffett is about as ethical of a billionaire as you can get, and while there’s room to criticize him, he should be nowhere near the top of the list.

In the US, sales tax varies by jurisdiction, even within a state. If I buy something in my city, it could be 0.10-0.25% difference than the city next door, because our cities will have different tax needs. In my state, sales tax ranges from 7.5-8.5%, depending on where the purchase is made, and the city portion is generally around 1% (state portion is fixed).

It’s incredibly dumb, and I wish physical stores were required to display price after factoring in taxes. However, for websites, I don’t expect that, simply due to the variability between jurisdictions (makes advertising prices ridiculous), and because it’s trivial to see the final figure in the cart after I input shipping information.

So if Brazil includes taxes in online quotes like the EU, the gaps is even narrower. My local tax rate is around 8%, so for me, that $600-700 item would be $650-750, which is still cheaper than Brazil, but Brazil may very well have higher sales tax than here. Ideally, we’d compare w/ pre-tax values for a more apples-to-apples figure.

Yup, and that’s generally what I do.

I honestly just want to put $20 in a pool or something and have the browser deduct from that balance when I visit a site. The sites I visit more get more of my money, and I’ll get a record of how much each site changes per visitor to decide whether I want to keep going there. If they use something like GNU Taler for the accounting, the sites can’t track me at all, they’ll just get micropayments and settle up with Mozilla at some interval.

Yet Mozilla seems to not consider this at all. Their entire messaging is “better ads,” not “alternatives to ads.”

card counters

Yup, but these systems are a lot less sophisticated than many people make them out to be. It’s also not illegal to count cards, the casinos just aren’t big fans of losing money, so they’ll enforce their right to refuse service to anyone if they suspect you of counting cards.