A beautifully-written and moving story; thanks for posting it. Have you written any other fiction? I couldn't see it (or even this one) in the list of writing on your frontpage.
Wholeheartedly approve your reading list, by the way. O Caledonia in particular is an under-recognized gem; I've never seen anyone else capture the awesomeness of squirrels the way she does:
> Calm and tranced she walked up through the beeches again and saw two red squirrels leaping along their sinuous branches; they leapt and curvetted, stopped dead, flourished their tails and were off again, swift and smooth, fleeting like light up the trunks, so bright and merry and joyous that she wanted to shriek with delight.
Mozilla thus far have been very reluctant to take donations to Firefox specifically. AFAIK you can still only donate to the Foundation, not the Corp, which means that most if not all of the cash will get spent on random non-Firefox-related things that you probably couldn't care less about.
It's still kind of surprising that the optimal design / speed for fuel efficiency has plateaued though, given how much more powerful the modelling tools are now. The FAA certification overhead presumably has something to do with this.
I was very struck recently looking at the Wikipedia pages for the KC-135 Stratotanker (first flight 1956) and its ongoing replacement the KC-46 Pegasus (first flight 2015). Just from the pictures of the two planes, I'd have no idea that one was more modern than the other.
Out of curiosity, what "obvious reasons" issues have you had with Docs and YouTube. I use Firefox for everything, including those, without problems. (Though not in any kind of advanced way.)
I use Firefox on my HTPC, running a 6700K with 24GB of RAM. Not new, but not “slow”. Clicking a YouTube video will cause a three second page load, even if the actual “page” says it’s finished loading. Videos will start to play audio before the page is rendered. Navigating back and forth causes issues like this too. Sometimes I can get it to show a video but not change the title or comments that it renders. If I accidentally click the “Shorts” hyperlink I basically have to close the tab to stop it from endlessly playing shorts in the background of the SPA.
It’s awful. The best example I experience on a day to day basis that the SPA as a concept is utterly flawed. YouTube is a fucking webpage that fails to work like a webpage and an app that behaves like a students rough alpha. An utterly painful experience, continually made worse by likely skilled devs who are managed by complete bozo losers. But at least the progress bar has an ugly pink hue now.
Docs just almost entirely does not function for me on Firefox on Linux. As in, I've had it crash the entire browser while just trying to type in a document. In general, Google just aggressively seems to be hostile to any non-Chrome browser using any of their sites. I'm sure they cloak it in "well Firefox just hasn't implemented this spec yet" but when it's functionally enforcing their browser monopoly I have to assume malice at this point.
Too many Google sites behave worse on any non-Chrome browser for it not to be intentional.
I wouldn't call them "obvious" reasons but I recently discovered that in Google Sheets under FF I couldn't duplicate a tab or copy a tab to a new sheet. I had to fire up Chrome to do that.
Oddly enough, Chrome had somehow lost my settings since the previous time I started it a few months earlier, as if it were a new install. :-?
I've not noticed any problems under YT Premium so far.
If you're thinking of Marcus Crassus, the dynamic there was that he'd offer to buy your burning property from you at a steep discount, and would only put the fire out if you agreed.
Interesting. This idea appears pretty much exactly at the end of Bob Shaw's 1972 SFnal collection Other Days, Other Eyes. The starting premise is the invention of "slow glass" that looks like an irrelevant gimmick but ends up revolutionizing all sorts of things, and the final bits envisage a disturbing surveillance society with these tiny passive cameras spread everywhere.
It's a good read; I don't think the extrapolation of one technical advance has ever been done better.
Wholeheartedly approve your reading list, by the way. O Caledonia in particular is an under-recognized gem; I've never seen anyone else capture the awesomeness of squirrels the way she does:
> Calm and tranced she walked up through the beeches again and saw two red squirrels leaping along their sinuous branches; they leapt and curvetted, stopped dead, flourished their tails and were off again, swift and smooth, fleeting like light up the trunks, so bright and merry and joyous that she wanted to shriek with delight.
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