Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

There is a realistic chance that Google's funding of Firefox/Mozilla through default search engine deals will be struck down by a court in the current antitrust case.

If that happens, I do not think Mozilla can survive financially on their own, at least not at the scale they are operating at right now, despite their half-assed attempts at "creating other revenue streams" over the years. I also question the maintainability of their existing browser codebase.

So. If you've been contemplating whether to start building a new browser engine... now's the time to start. This is your advance warning. Make sure it's one you don't need millions of dollars for to maintain.

It's going to take a while, most likely, for all of this stuff to go through the courts, so there's time. But building a browser engine is a big task, too, and ideally it should be started *before* things implode over at Mozilla.

Here's an example of what hidden #ableism can look like, that wouldn't be obvious to spot:

There's a social convention to do something a certain way. Pointing out how it works is considered rude, or otherwise socially undesirable. If you do not participate, you are disadvantaged or left out entirely.

This means you cannot ask for disability accommodations. If you *do*, you will be considered rude, get extra scrutiny, and so on - not even for being disabled, but for pointing out the social convention out loud. If you *don't* ask, you get left out entirely, because you are unable to participate on the usual terms.

Meanwhile, everybody else feels that the social convention "works", because they've never had issues with it, and they don't get why you can't just ask for help. They may not even realize that the social convention *exists*, and just go along with it because that's how they learned it.

Ableism takes many forms. This is just one example that is easily missed.

I guess I should define the context a bit more: I'm trying to solve the 'holy grail' of theming, namely "how do you simultaneously allow applications to design custom controls that work best for their usecase, while also allowing end users to personalize their whole system in a genuinely expressive (and mostly consistent) way, that can be shared between people?"

(Unspoken part: without restricting the theme engine to recoloring and such only, and still allowing for structural changes)

Thinking about software theming and the distinction between style themes (how the UI looks) and structural themes (how the UI is arranged and organized), how these are really two separate things from each other, and how recognizing that separation may allow for designing a theming system that can apply a custom theme across arbitrary applications of arbitrary purpose

I wonder if anyone has done an analysis of why Old School Runescape is so much less social-interaction-driven than it used to be in the mid-2000s

It occurs to me that there seems to be a big difference between how I think about "human nature", vs. how a lot of other people do.

When people bring up "human nature", whether their view of it is correct or not, they almost always do so from a perspective of "this is how human nature will ruin any attempts at improvement".

Whereas I think of it as "this is how traits of human nature can be relied upon to shape a culture that lasts and perpetuates itself". Which seems to be a much more useful interpretation to me?