very cool. this is why i hate the modern web.

@ariadne anti-fingerprinting feels like a pyrrhic victory to the extent it can be achieved

sure, random webpages probably don't need to know how many cores you have (and thoughtful design could keep this available to those few which maybe do). but the thing that made me conclude this is Accept-Language:, a feature that is intentionally made worse for bilingual users in service of reducing fingerprintability. i think i'd rather have that than a (in practice) false promise about privacy

@whitequark @ariadne At some point we need to start legislating these things instead of trying to patch over them with technology.

Like, there is zero legitimate reason for fingerprinting to uniquely identify individual users at scale. It should simply be illegal. This does not preclude stuff like identifying bots. Ad stuff should just use cookies where allowed.

@lina @whitequark agreed, but also why do websites need to know i have a fucking threadripper
@lina @whitequark like that is my point here, i cannot think of any reason why a website needs to know i have 128 threads

@ariadne @lina i ship an FPGA toolchain in the browser. it can* use multithreading. it needs to know how many threads to run to not contend on resources uselessly

* currently not built in that configuration for a variety of reasons that is not specifically tied to the web

Glasgow Interface Explorer

Use Glasgow Interface Explorer from your browser!

@ariadne @lina it's not a reason to expose information useful to, like, 1 site you might maybe use, to every of them, and frankly i am not aware of any material benefit from running more than 4 of p&r threads in parallel so it could probably be capped to that. but i think this is a legitimate reason
@whitequark @ariadne @lina a problem is we use the web browser for two totally separate purposes: as a way of looking at transient text/image/video content; and as the only surviving application platform. we want two totally opposite things out of these two different platforms ("control the computer" vs "touch nothing"), but insist on not delineating the two website metacategories. and microsoft/apple/android are only gonna keep making it harder to offload applications back onto "computers"