Or buy the ~$400 speed editor and get the license for free. That's what many people do.

No. But some of it was certainly a parody of the trash heap that was 20th century human civilization. Those groups are still around.

Technically, all of them ;-)

I guess that means by living in Seattle, I also technically hang out with Bill Gates. Neat. ;)

> Most (all?) interactions do not involve money.

I think we can still buy ice, but I don't think we can buy coffee anymore. Coffee was a fun excuse to go to center camp every afternoon.

Coffee going away was a sad time. I had a tradition of getting some from Center Camp in the wee hours of the morning on overnight volunteer shifts.

It depends what time you try to exodus. If you wait until the end, it's 50k+ people trying to leave a campground at the same time.

You can also stay an extra day. Help clean up and leave with zero traffic. I’ve done it myself.

You can, but a big part of the marvel is in walking around (er, biking) and seeing the spectacle. If it's your first year, that's your job: be the audience.

The difference between 2002 and now is that it is so much easier to follow each other's leads on pricing without explicitly communicating about it and leaving a paper trail. But they never stopped acting indistinguishable from a cartel.

Trustworthy companies take reasonable steps before.

> I want my browser to prevent random extensions...

Why are you installing random extensions?

Not GP, but sometimes I want my browser to do pretty random/niche things without that compromising all of my browsing data.

How can the browser tell the difference between a random thing you want and a random thing you don't want?

The permissions mechanism.

this is not a solution. Running an untrusted software will always be a security drawback. Permissions/sandbox/etc can decrease risk, but not eliminate it

Significantly reducing the risk is enough for me in many cases. Chasing “zero risk” is often a fallacy.

Expressing intent is good enough for me for this purpose. I understand that there are additional implementation specific risks.

How can the permissions mechanism be fine grained enough to prevent bad random things, and coarse grained enough that you can understand it?

Requesting site access by click or by URL really isn't rocket science.

Not nearly every user will get it right, so extensions will probably still have to be monitored for malware for the foreseeable future, but it gives many users at least a chance at privilege minimization.

Have you seen AWS IAM?

Power users who care about this don't need a GUI - a text file config in any format will do. Especially in this era of LLM assistance.

Create a new profile, do the niche thing there, separately from the rest of your browsing.

I'm not. The only extension I trust enough to install is uBlock Origin.

Well great! You are already protected from random extensions then.

Yeah, by opting out of them altogether. I'd very much enjoy having useful extensions that are not dangerous instead.

You can't trust a code that you didn't audit before. End of story.

What you are asking for is simply impossible, even without any permissions rogue extensions can still do a lot. It's what some developers spend their entire time working on.

If Google couldn't fix it with Android, which has granular permission per applications, why do you think it's going to be even remotely effective on the web browser ?

Do you audit all the code running on your PC? I certainly did not audit Chrome (and I also don't really trust it).

Firefox reader mode can often strip out JS annoyances.

Doesn't reader mode disable JS by definition?

iirc I can use Firefox's reader mode on websites that if I simply disabled js entirely would refuse to load anything at all. The viewer itself might have minimal or no js but it's not quite the same.

ABP works for the most common of these too (e.g. popups/banners)! You have to enable it in the settings I think.

JS annoyances it won't fix are like idiotic scrolling behaviour and stuff. And for that, yeah reader mode is ideal.