I answered above, but answering here as well in case it's buried.
> But is there a tangible risk vector to European consumers of open source, commercial American software.
Yes. If you're a European sanctioned by the US, it's illegal for American companies to provide you service. That means no Amazon, PayPal, Expedia, Visa, etc.
Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.
All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.
"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.
He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.
I think you’re missing the point of my question. I’m not saying that story isn’t distressing and a good reason to use alternatives, but I’m asking about whether you can convince individuals and individual businesses that these alternatives are more cost effective or capable than the software they’re replacing.
If the extemporaneous style of cooking from the article sounds interesting to you, the book "An Everlasting Meal" by Tamar Adler teaches it. (She quotes M. F. K. Fisher often, who was edited by Judith Jones.)
Personally, for everyday cooking I find that way of cooking much more engaging – and much less like drudgery – than cooking from recipes. In my case, it also made food waste go down quite a bit.
The beans chapter stuck with me too. Just fished out my copy:
> The best instruction I've read for how long to cook beans comes from a collection of recipes called "The Best in American Cooking" by Clementine Paddleford. The book instructs to simmer "until beans have gorged themselves with fat and water and swelled like the fat boy in his prime."
> It got killed because Apple stopped supporting it.
That's how it happened in my orbit anyway.
Steve Jobs published an open letter entitled "Thoughts on Flash", in which he said that iOS would never support Flash. We had a discussion at the web shop I was working for; we decided to stop making new things in Flash.
Fun story: Apple demoed the iPad to Hollywood execs a couple weeks before the release. The Hollywood folks saw all their web properties rendering almost no UI and their video content not available.
I worked for a boutique consulting firm at that time and Warner Bros/Telepictures was our big client. We immediately got calls from a lot of execs and I had a week long firedrill of converting MANY Telepictures properties from Flash (mostly for the video content rendering with timecoded UI updates). They also had a video delivery company that was co-located with AOL fly out to Burbank and fly back with tons of hard drives full of episodes of Ellen, the Tyra Banks show, etc to recode from Flash video to video that could be served with the <video> content tag on iPads.
It somehow all got done by the iPad release and Apple published a top 10 "sites that work great on iPad" page on their site and we had done 4 out of 10 of them. All we had to test on was desktop Safari resized to the screen size they told us it needed to work on.
Would you mind saying what you would like to do but can't with FF?
I don't think I'm part of a cult, but I've used FF as my default browser for over a decade and I guess I don't know what else people want from a browser.
For me it's how user-defined search engines work. In Chromium-based browsers you can just supply a URL-template, a name, and a shorthand, and you're off to the races, it takes 10 seconds to add one.
In Firefox it used to be you needed to like create your own little mini-addon or something like that, and these days they have "smart bookmarks", but it's such a weird name and doesn't really work the same.
At any rate, I have 100 different little shortcuts defined like for example "tren" which takes the given text, puts it into a translator, and auto-detects language and translates to English. Ditto "sven", "ensv", "trsv", then I have "wiki", "wikise" (Wikipedia Sweden), "wikt", "aw" (ArchWiki), etc., etc.
I use these hundreds of times a day, and when I tried converting to Firefox (before I eventually landed on Brave) I couldn't find a simple way of moving these from my Google Chrome profile to Firefox and have it work like I expect it to. Perhaps that's possible now?
In Firefox you right click on a website's search field and select "Add keyword for this search". The you can use "<keyword> whatever you're searching" in the address bar and it will take you right to the results page.
It works great but is poorly advertised and not particularly discoverable... They're stored as bookmarks so it should be possible to import them.
It's not the same, and you can't import them from Chrome, but I'll share what works for me just in case it works for you as well. Which is: set DuckDuckGo as your default search engine, and use their "bangs" - you'll be able to guess most of them, and never have to set them up yourself. For example, you could use !deepl, !wiki, !wse, !wt, !aw, etc. etc.
(If you do still want to use e.g. Google for search, you can use !g.)
I'm a bit confused, don't you just navigate to the page and right click the url to add that page to search? It will default to an @baseurl, like @wikipedia. But you can go to settings > search and scroll down and add your own shortcut. Or you can click the cog wheel in the address bar.
Another user mentioned ddg's bang commands, and that's how I name things. But also built in there's "^ " (need the space) for history, "* " for bookmarks, "% " for tabs and "> " (disabled by default?) for actions.
I really don't see how this is meaningfully different from chrome. Aren't you performing the same actions? Or actually less? "navigate to url, right click, add, (optional) click cog, supply additional shortcut(s)"
I think firefox almost always could do a lot. But the out of the box experience was very lacking. Even now that I'm using it as a default browser I had to tinker with some settings, and still didn't get where I would want it. For example the tabbing experience definitely needs an extension, but I don't want one.
But it's oh so much better than it used to be. Split stop/reload used to drive me crazy - just why?
Not Zen, but there's "kasina" meditation that sounds similar to this. You might stare at a light source or a colored disc, then close your eyes and watch the afterimage. Repeat. That's it really – very mechanical.
That can lead to wakeful closed-eye hallucinations, some of which are described here:
> The implicit definition of "fair" as "equal suffering" is always a bit concerning to me.
For family peace, it may be the best thing. My personal anecdote:
I'm from city A. My spouse is from city B. We lived in city C. Our parents were fine with that.
My mother-in-law developed a rare disease. She had no children nearby. Now we live in city B, close to her.
In city A, despite having two of my siblings nearby, my parents absolutely resented our move. They were quite hostile at some point.
That sent my spouse to therapy and there's been no contact between them since. I'm fully on my spouse's side, especially given what my parents said and did.
Life gets complicated. We’re in a similar situation - family and friends are mostly in cities A and B (in different countries nonetheless). We lived in a compromise/neutral city C until we needed help with the kids and it’s impossible to choose where to go for the long term.
The author isn't defending debunked "learning styles", which were popular in the 90s and 00s.
"Learning styles" usually refers to one of a handful of specific ways of dividing up people. E.g., as preferring visual, aural, reading/writing, or kinesthetic learning.
The body of the article acknowledges that those "learning styles" have been debunked:
> Briefly: the theory was that some people were inherently visual learners, while others were textual learners, among other kinds. This has been proven untrue.
The author is defending this idea instead:
> I’m talking about learners finding paths that work for them.
Fair enough, but recycling "learning styles" in the title is knowingly and needlessly confusing.
Thank you for debunking the myth of the myth of the myth of learning styles.
Seriously now, the way I see it, there is a common problem when a general descriptive observation—in this case that some learners subjectively prefer certain learning approaches to a greater or lesser degree—derives into an overly assertive model as to which types of "learning styles" exist, the assertion that each person must fit into each category, and prescriptive assertions as to how each "type" of person learns better. This is common in many other observations that are overly reified into people believing they must fit into a category and believe that identifying as part of it confers predictive power or expectations. This happens in the myriad of personality type models, attachment styles, and, to a lesser extent, even sexual orientations (see how often young people will ask questions online in the vein of “I am a h(eter|om)osexual g(uy|irl) but I am attracted to my (fe)?male friend. Can I still be $1sexual?”).
The legitimate observation of average differences and tendencies, as well as their descriptions, is overshadowed by going too prescriptive. And sometimes, when there is legitimate backlash against these overgeneralisations as happens in "learning styles", the pendulum goes to far the other way and society rejects the initial observation entirely. And yet, in certain circumstances, some people do prefer different ways of learning than others. They may even be correct that, in that given case, they learn better that way. Let's accept the messiness of human diversity without coming up with overly defined boxes.
To your point about "overly defined boxes," it's a little ironic how 10-15 years ago the prevailing thought in LGBT spaces was (more or less verbatim) "Society wants to fit us all into these rigid boxes, but I say fuck your boxes!" and now it's more like "Society wants to fit us all into rigid boxes, but there's actually a lot more boxes out there that you may not know about, so just keep looking until you find the right box. But you will find a box."
E.g., the extent to which nonbinary has almost become a defined third gender category with its own set of expectations rather than a catch-all for anyone who finds that the main two categories just don't quite cut it.
It's extremely difficult to prove anything in education research, just like any kind of sociology or psychology research.
Humans aren't like bowling balls dropped from towers, they're very non-deterministic, and the number of background factors that every individual has makes it very difficult to make federal statements.
See Angela Duckworth's "Grit"-based cottage industry ("A 2013 MacArthur Fellow, Angela has advised the World Bank, NBA and NFL teams, and Fortune 500 CEOs.") The grandmaster of the form is Yuval Noah Harari, who, among other things, has parlayed his pop histories into children's books and graphic novels.
It's also confusing to talk about learning styles without it's context. They always come from the detached top. Here in Sweden it's primarily used (along with most trends teachers have to stomach) to distract from budget cuts. The initiatives never seem to include smaller classes or more teachers, only mire work for an already overworked profession.
They actually haven't been debunked IMHO. They've done a handful of tests that tend to show that people remember pictures better than words. They have not tested, as far as I have seen, Active vs Reflective, Inductive vs Deductive (or Sequential vs Global), etc.
I don't think it's been studied in a long time because of the influence of the "Learning Styles is Bullshit" gang.
The term 'learning style' has two completely separate meanings depending on whether it's a tool at your disposal or an external requirement. People in the latter group talk about "debunking" a "myth" in the same way that programmers write "agile is bullshit" blogs.
It hasn't been seriously studied since the late 90s (imho) because the people working on it were all fairly satisfied with the new tool they'd created for certain struggling teachers in very specific circumstances. From that perspective, potential research questions might boil down to "Is empathizing with a different point of view useful?" or "Exactly how attracted am I to the idea of archetypes?"
I'm starting to think that debunkers of X are tedious than people who are pro-X. It's so easy to find a study that says X has some flaw and debunk away. There was an oft cited study about plastic bags with some weird methodology that everyone used to smugly proclaim that their single use plastic bags were actually better and people who used reusable bags had been debooonked.
> But is there a tangible risk vector to European consumers of open source, commercial American software.
Yes. If you're a European sanctioned by the US, it's illegal for American companies to provide you service. That means no Amazon, PayPal, Expedia, Visa, etc.
See this case of a French judge from 2025:
https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...