I came across an autism documentary from the 1970s and it was only covering the classic autism symptoms back then (non verbal/learning difficulties), and they only thought 3000 autistic people existed in a population of 50 million. So much research has been done since then.

One thing that was different in the 90s was that even though games were expensive to buy outright rental shops were common. I played loads of N64, SNES and Mega Drive games for paying £2.99 for the weekend. Plus games were more stand alone as well so you got more for your money.

Even on big websites like Wikipedia there are only a few hundred major editors that write most of the content and they all know each other. On Youtube you tend to get to know everyone in your filter bubble as well.

Can’t robots make toys for us in 2025? We shouldn’t need to use humans at slavery level wages.

All the forks need to make a common engine independent of Mozilla. Pale Moon did it with Goanna and it is shared between Basilisk and K-Meleon as well. The big problem is that any new engine has to beat being filtered by Cloudflare or other WAFs that discriminate by user agent. A bold idea is for all the Firefox forks to rebase off of the new Ladybird engine and abandon the old Gecko codebase entirely.

It is obvious that Cloudflare is being influenced to enforce browser monopolies. Imagine if Cloudflare existed in 2003 and stopped non Internet Explorer browsers. If you use cloudflare to “protect” your site you are discriminating against browser choice and are as bad as Microsoft in 1998.

Windows 95 was easier to use simply because of saving everything to the desktop. When Windows 98 tried to introduce “My Documents” i was like nope and still saved everything to the desktop.

The closest you can get is the Seamonkey browser, which forked off the old Mozilla Application Suite that Netscape 6/7 was based on. The last version of Netscape 9 was just a rebranded Firefox 2.x.

A lot of isps are rolling out gigabit and even faster internet. Finally having a killer app for it will increase demand for it and shame slower isps to upgrade their old coaxial and copper cables with fiber.

Just remember we got rid of TLS 1.0 the same thing can be done with IPv4. It’s time for browser makers to put “deprecated technology” warnings on ipv4 sites.

As someone who started in the deep end back in 2001 (My first distro was a Slackware derivative) I actually enjoyed the satisfaction of trying to get XFree86 to work and seeing all the available command line tools. Of course this was back in the Windows 98 days so I was already used to going into MS-DOS mode. My first computer was a Commodore 64 as well so didn’t get mollycoddled at all when learning to use a computer.

Geoblocking shouldn’t be a thing, unless it’s for a good reason like sanctions. It’s called the Internet (International Network) for a reason. If Coca Cola can operate in nearly every country, why can’t Sony?

My personal theory is that the industrial revolution created more neurodivergence. The fact that stuff like computers and trains are common obsessions means that the development of technology is making life more neurodivergent friendly. My grandfather worked for Rolls Royce so I’ve got tech genes in me.

There are a lot of decades old embedded systems out there. Every so often you hear about a big company still relying on floppy disks and other old tech, including major railways and airplane companies. Having the source code will help with debugging better than having to disassemble or other reverse engineering.

I just hope Ofcom will have a similar idea for the UK. Currently you only have a “universal service obligation” for 10Mbps, and if you can be provided by 4G then Openreach doesn’t have to upgrade your old copper line. Large areas of my city are still copper only.

The biggest insult is that Jimbo Wales of Wikipedia helped create fandom because he was fed up of people using Wikipedia to create detailed articles about fictional characters and video games. Wikipedia now has an artificially strict notability policy where things are falsely declared as not notable so they can be monetized on Fandom, all while Jimbo Wales has the gall to ask for money for his “non profit” Wikipedia while he makes the real money on Fandom.

This is what Wayland should have done years ago, by forcing the lack of a fallback to X all bugs will be highlighted and therefore fixed faster. I just hope we can finally say goodbye to X for good.

I remember back in the 90s N64 magazines were always posting rumors about the “Dolphin” console that Nintendo was supposed to be developing, which eventually became the Gamecube. Nintendo also was more open back then, with their famous Mario 128 tech demo for example. Also the Nintendo DD rumors were huge as well, which turned out to be a big failure and never released outside of Japan.

It’s time to use web integrity against them, by blocking access to your site if they “pass” integrity checks, and telling them to use a freedom respecting browser instead.

The whole idea of playing videos on a computer is so heavily patented it’s hindering innovation. Even ancient by modern standards MPEG-2 video is still patented in some countries. And then companies keep patenting new codecs and new playback methods (“on a phone”, “on a tablet”, “from a qr code”) that pushes back the clock another 20 years. Same thing happening with AI, where they will make more money from licensing/lawsuits than actual innovation.