Lvxferre [he/him]

I have two chimps within, Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drink yerba, fling shit at each other, and devour the face of anyone who gets close to either.

They also devour my dreams.

  • 31 Posts
  • 2.21K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • [François] The revived people of South America helped me to learn it [Spanish]

    Things like this are the ones that make me like the least this part of the series. It shows how much they rushed research.

    There’s no way they’d learn Spanish in Araxá, most of the population there speaks Portuguese. In fact, I don’t even know why they decided to mine niobium there, if they entered SA through the Amazon river delta; for reference they’re further from each other (2000km) than Berlin from Moscow. Plus there are niobium deposits in the Amazon basin, smaller and less profitable but still enough for their purposes.

    And the whole idea of going to Catalunya feels silly. There are some fluorite deposits in Sant Cugat del Vallès but they’d need to walk something like 15km from the coast, on a rather hilly terrain. Transport is hard. There are better deposits in Asturias, by the coast, but no olives. But you know, where there are fluorite deposites near the coast? And olives? Tunisia. Plus dates; amazing travel food, tasty even if dried for long-term storage, and with a high caloric content. I should stop chewing on those everyday, though. They certainly don’t help with my weight.


    Those things don’t make me say “bleeergh, I’ll drop it!”, but come on… it’s a stain in a series that shone because of all the research behind it. Granted, mostly Chemistry, but still.


  • If you develop some feature (or bug!) of course some people will find a decent way to use it. That doesn’t mean the feature should be there on first place, specially when the possibility of abuse is so obvious. Plus if the pressure behind this anti-feature was “only” single page applications, and nothing else, I bet it would be implemented in a different way.

    Also, look at the big picture. In isolation, one could argue giving pages access to your browsing history was a necessary albeit poorly thought feature; but when you look at other stuff browsers nowadays are supposed to do, you notice a pattern:

    • Browsers giving more info to the page about your system than just “I’m a browser, I can browse pages”: the browser software, its version, the operating system, the fonts you have installed, your screen dimensions…
    • Letting pages decide the behaviour of mouse clicks. And if the window is focused or not.
    • The ability to show pop-up messages.
    • etc.

    Are you noticing it? All those “features” are somewhat useful, but with such obvious room for abuse it would be insane to add them, in retrospect. And that abuse is usually from money hoarders, or people controlled by them.

    Worse: all of them crammed into what was supposed to be a system to show you content, but eventually got bloated into a development platform, transforming browsers into those bloody abominations of nowadays, with a huge barrier of entry, dominated by a single vendor (and where the vassal of said vendor got ~3% market share). I’d say that not having a monopoly is more important than all those features together.

    And odds are the ones pushing for those features (like Google) knew they were insane, and that they would raise the barrier of entry for new browsers. But that was their goal, innit? Enshittify the web while claiming control over it.



  • I’ll expand here what I mentioned in another comm.

    Most back button hijacking relies on the browser history API. Further info here: “The replaceState() method of the History interface modifies the current history entry, replacing it with the state object and URL passed in the method parameters.”

    So for example. You visited site A, then site B. Your browser stores this as “user went A then B”, so if you click the “back” button while navigating B, it sends you back to A. However Javascript in the site B can tell your browser “no, the user didn’t visit A then B. They visited C then B”. So as you click “back” you’re sent to a third site you never visited.

    Why is this anti-feature there on first place? Why are sites even allowed to interact with your history? Because corporations really, really, really want to know your browsing history: which sites are directing traffic to it site, which pages within that site you visited (imagine those pages show you products you might potentially buy), so goes on. It has practically no reason to exist for non-commercial sites. Now remember Google is a corporation, it profits the most from advertisement, and has a role in the web standards, and you’ll notice Google was at least partially responsible for this anti-feature.

    And now, the same Google is using its monopoly over search to dictate which should be the rules for the usage of the anti-feature it added. As if the internet was Google’s property: it’s who decides which features should be on the internet, and how you’re allowed to use them.

    Moral of the story is: even if it looks like Google is doing something good, remember they were responsible for this mess on first place.


  • Wow. I checked both; the first seems to be an abridged version of the second video, that left me genuinely impressed. AI or not AI, it’s well damn made propaganda: depicting Trump’s allies as clowns, showing his allegiance is to the Zionist State of Israel instead of USA, catchy song, they even call him a removed and say “talk real big for a man with tiny hands, tiny hands, tiny things, tiny everything” (Trump throws hissy fits if someone reminds him he has a tiny dick).

    It’s doing a lot in three minutes: mocking the people in power in USA, throwing Trump’s base against him (note the ones spamming “removed lol lmao” are usually the right, not the left), and even souring relations between USA and Israel.

    It shows how well prepared Iran was to this war.




  • I guess I think of Bertia as the MC, even though Cecil is supposed to be the MC.

    Cecil is the main character, but Bertia is the protagonist.

    People often use both interchangeably, because they often refer to the same character, but here I think the distinction is useful:

    • main character — the character we “tag along”, following the story through their point of view. Note how almost every scene showing Bertia also shows Cecil, but the opposite is not true.
    • protagonist — the character driving the plot. Bertia is clearly the one doing so: from her world knowledge, her desires to keep the plot intact, and even her interactions with other characters. Cecil might act behind the scenes, but it’s more accurate to say he simply reacts to whatever Bertia comes up with.

    This distinction is also something you see in spin-offs: the protagonist is usually the same as in the original series, but the MC is a different one. And this series plays a lot like a spin-off to an inexistent main series, since you’re following the love interest instead of the otome villainess.

    And also in Sono Bisque Doll, at least at the start (Marin as the protag, Gojō as the MC). Later on it becomes a mess, and likely on purpose.







  • Back button hijacking wouldn’t be a problem on first place if the HTML standard (ooopsie, HTML plus JS plus CSS plus kitchen sink!) wasn’t such a bloated mess because of corporations like Google, who tried (and managed) to make the internet more corporation-friendly and thus user-hostile, while raising the barrier of entry for browsers.

    So, Google is pretending to solve the problem itself was [partially] responsible for creating. And, in the process, it can control the web from both sides, right? As both the one “graciously” granting the cattle/users access, and the one dictating its access.

    For a start: a lot of those rely on the browser history API. Sites should not be granted the ability to manipulate your browser’s navigation at all, be it through JS or smoke signs or whatever. Why is this capability there on first place dammit.