I don’t disagree, but Windows’ built in screen casting is hard to find and clunky to use. Linux is even worse off. Until earlier this year there was no real support from any Linux desktop environment. There’s a GNOME project that’s supposed to be putting together support. It was announced to ship with GNOME 46, but I’m not a GNOME user so I just tried to install the flatpak on my Kubuntu machine. It detects my TV but fails to connect with it. Definitely still needs work.

Some of that focus involves adding features that have become table-stakes in other browsers.

Speaking of this, does anyone else feel like Firefox’s lack of ability to wirelessly screencast is a major problem when it comes to convincing others to switch away from chromium browsers? I know chromecast and airplay themselves are both proprietary, and therefore counter to firefox’s open source philosophy, but they could at least implement first party support for miracast (or DLNA?) A surprising number of smart TVs work well with those protocols. They just tend not to advertise it because most people don’t know what they are.

I admit that I haven’t looked much into this since some years ago when I first switched over to firefox as my main browser, but at the time I found that there weren’t even any decent addons for screen casting functionality. I’ve learned to live without it, but I know a lot of people who use that functionality on a daily basis and could (quite justifiably) never be convinced to switch without an equivalent.

I agree. The concept is simple, and it’s not perfect, but it isn’t dumb either. This is basically recreating how coal and oil got in the ground in the first place. Plants absorbed carbon from the air as they grew, then they got buried in a way that prevented them from decomposing and re-releasing it into the atmosphere. My main question here would be whether burying it only 10 feet under ground is really enough for long term storage. The other big elephant in the room with carbon capture is that it can be a convenient excuse for companies to avoid doing work towards actually decarbonizing their operations. If, as the article suggests, this is used primarily by industries like cement making that don’t currently have a way to become carbon neutral then it’s a good thing. If it’s just used as cynical green washing by companies who could be doing better, then it’s at best a wash, and arguably a net negative.

I second weawow. It’s got everything I want in a weather app: clean UI, customizable homescreen widget, and you can pick which provider it uses for the weather data.

Youtube in has done a remarkably good job carrying the torch of high quality documentaries and educational content beyond the realm of traditional media. Science, art, technology, history. It’s all there, and much of it meets or exceeds the quality of anything the old guard of cable TV channels ever managed to produce.

I’m actually only now realizing that some of the most established channels have been reaching a wide audience with consistent and high quality content for the better part of a decade, and yet I can’t think of any who have successfully broken into more “traditional” media such as television or or even streaming services. That seems exceptionally strange to me. I mean, last month there were headlines about Netflix giving $55 million to an unproven director who proceeded to blow it all on expensive cars instead of filming the show he was hired to make. Who decides to hire that guy over any number of youtube creators who have spent the last ten years cranking out a short video a week along with occasional longer form projects, all with a small crew on a shoestring budget. I can imagine three possible reasons for this. No idea which one(s) could be the real reason, or if there’s something else entirely going on.

1. Hollywood¹ is so insular that they don’t even realize these people exist.
2. Hollywood is so stuck in its ways that they refuse to believe these people could be successful running a larger production.
3. Offers have been made, but those offers have been so restrictive that any number of youtubers have turned them down despite, one would assume, a large amount of money being on the table if they go along with it.

That last one in particular seems unlikely, but I do recall that the popular Primitive Technology channel went quiet for a year or more before abruptly coming back to life. Rumors swirled that he had been hired to turn the concept into a TV show, but the production company kept trying to change things and he eventually gave up and went back to doing it his way on youtube.

¹ used here as shorthand for the more corporate and structured entertainment industry at large.

I remember reading a comment a while ago (on Reddit, ironically) which pointed out that SFW subreddits naming themselves [subject]porn are borrowing the wrong part from the word “pornography”. “Porn” is from greek pornē meaning “prostitute”, but the suffix -graphy means “to write” and is often used to indicate “the study of” the thing it’s attached to (e.g. geography, cryptography, demography, etc.)

It would be more accurate, and perhaps less controversial, if these communities named themselves earthography, spaceography, unixograpy, etc. As an added bonus, the -grapy suffix is also prominent in “photography” which is appropriate considering that many of these communities are places where people share photos of the subject matter.

I read something a while ago that really put all these “ancient mysteries” into perspective: Modern humans with modern brains have existed in our current form for at least tens of thousands of years. During that time we’ve seen huge advancement as a society thanks to the accumulation and sharing of scientific knowledge, but any individual human today has no more brainpower than one living 10,000 years ago.

In other words, if we can sit around today and brainstorm a dozen different ways to build a pyramid with nothing but ramps and levers, there’s absolutely no reason to think that the smartest builders in ancient egypt couldn’t have come up withl the same ideas or better.

Attributing these achievements to aliens, or divine intervention, or anything other than raw human ingenuity is a disservice to our ancestors.