- To make a statement about a subject that immediately reveals you know nothing about it.
If you hadn’t epoxied the birdbath, you would have remained a philosopher.
- To become confused when attempting to follow a guide, with catastrophic results.
“You tried to bake foil-wrapped potatoes in the microwave?” – “Yeah, the recipe confused me and I ended up epoxying the birdbath.”
- To give worthless but technically accurate advice to someone, just so you can tell them it’s their own fault when something inevitably goes wrong.
Take an old computer and first epoxy the ethernet port so it’s not able to go online. (…) Write down the key and bury the paper wallet under a birdbath in your backyard.
Month: November 2017
Essay: On the eternal return of the Ask.com toolbar
So Firefox Quantum has arrived in earnest. This update is a massive improvement in almost every way – this version of Firefox really is faster, and it looks better too. I’m a huge fan of Firefox, and this update should do a good job allaying concerns about the browser’s performance. So… hooray, right?
Well, no. This is the cyberpunk hellscape of the late 2010s. Nothing related to technology, particularly web technology, can ever be good. You see, Firefox Quantum also introduced in-browser ads in the guise of so-called Pocket Recommendations.
This is part of a larger trend. Microsoft, for example, is always blazing new frontiers in being completely awful. The spread of substance-free “sponsored content” piggybacking on legitimate subject matter is a deeply awful and deeply harmful practice.
I spent some time ordering my thoughts (okay, social media whining) on the kind of software that spreads such “recommendations.” I’m introducing the term Askbar to describe them, named after the venerable Ask.com browser toolbar. I hope to use this post as a resource in the future. For now, it’s meant to be a “debate starter” more than anything else.
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