“Societal collapse is inevitable” my cowardly wayward son _change_is inevitable. Society is _how we navigate change without_ collapse, and the sooner you start acting like society is a thing you participate in, nurture and support instead of the thing on the other side of the glass that delivers your groceries and send you bills in the mail the sooner you’ll stop feeling quite as lonely, tired and frightened all the time.

Your alienation is not your destiny.

Reminder that Firefox has a pathway to specifying some settings, including ones not exposed to users any other way, with a config file stored on disk.

They call it enterprise policies but anyone can use it by just putting a file in the location indicated on that site.

You can disable entire features, opt out of Telemetry before your first launch of Firefox on a new install, declare you never want to be part of studies, turn off their ML integration and keep it off, force about:config preferences in a way that can't be "accidentally" reverted, etc.