- The exodus from GitHub has not begun, as far as I can tell.
They seem to care much less about free users than in the past but businesses still flock to it. GitLab is the only other platform I’ve seen in the workplace of anywhere I worked, with the exception of a big tech company I worked at. They had both GitHub enterprise and an internally maintained platform which was being phased out. if I recall correctly it based on Phabricator
- >It's the IE of the 21st century
I see this claim often. As someone who learned web dev during the days of IE dominance, I don't understand it.
Internet Explorer never kept up, especially after IE6 reigned supreme. They weren't "a little behind" or didn't have some more niche APIs missing or implemented in a buggy or proprietary way. It actively ignored standards, it didn't receive real updates for a long time (IE11 being the fruition of what the best they could offer was) and generally with few exceptions (namely, the invention of CSS Grid and XMLHttpRequest) generally degraded the ecosystem for over a decade. It actively held back companies from adopting new web standards. Its why polyfilling became as proliferated as it is now.
Safari / WebKit has not induced any of this. Yes, sometimes Safari lags behind in ways that are frustrating. Yes, sometimes Apple refuses to implement an entire API for political rather than technical reasons (see the FileSystem API), but largely it has managed to stay up to date with standards in a reasonable time frame.
While their missing or subset implemented APIs can feel really frustrating, they haven't actively held back any work nor the mass adoption of newer browser APIs.
Apple has their faults, but this isn't even close to the drudgery that was the IE heyday era.
- Power user is not equivalent to technologists, though they overlap. Making inroads into power user marketshare would be at least a modest increase in Firefox marketshare, given how small their current share is.
- It can be seen though. Thats why I referred back to the Arc browser. People saw the real differences and it had fairly brisk adoption across a number of different type of folks, it didn't narrowly target technologists. Our designers, for example, at my last job, loved the heck out of it.
It was good enough for Atlassian to buy the whole company for a good chunk of cash too, if I recall correctly.
The abrupt ending of Arc's development has now left a hole in the market that Firefox could fill and gain marketshare.
- They’re not in a position to completely ignore some of the current AI trends. That much I can wrap my head around.
The seeming double down makes no sense to me. It won’t suddenly make Mozilla more popular. It could be useful, yes, however I doubt it’ll be radically different from other implementations of AI + Browser in such a way that it stands above the others.
What I wish they would realize in the Mozilla C-Suite is that there is real appetite browsers that get out of people’s way and focus on productivity. Given their small market share they could stand to grow by addressing that part of the market. Look at the previous success of Arc.
They keep chasing trends instead of creating them. And while it is a hard job to do that, I feel they haven’t given it an earnest attempt in some time
Firefox is still my daily browser of choice. I really want to see it do better and succeed
- Don't forget the user experience needs to be seamless. We bubble ourselves to this as tech fluent folks on HN, but the seamless quality needs to be on par or better with Google Drive, iCloud drive, Google / iCloud Photos etc.
Ability to share, good default security, and seamless integration with the things people care about.
If this device can't automatically backup a phone wirelessly and without my interaction, it will be a poor proposition to most people.
We would all have been better off fiercely advocating for open protocols for all this stuff first (forced interop), but technologists have not wanted to wade into that in a sustained, en masse way
- >I do believe this is a growing market, giving people who are fed up with BigTech
Most people I interact with don't even think about "Big Tech" in this way. They don't question iCloud storage, Google Drive or Google Workspace, Microsoft OneDrive etc.
They do sometimes get upset about right to repair, AI, and sometimes I hear about net neutrality or how Google search sucks, or how Facebook is privacy invasive.
To reiterate though, the core services like a product like this would replace - Google Drive, iCloud Drive, OneDrive etc. - that is not on the radar. Let alone having functional seamless replacements for email or calendar or contacts etc.
These are people adept at using technology too, there simply is no reason to invest in these types of products to them.
The reason these companies struggle is because mass market doesn't care about this enough first and foremost. They aren't seamless drop in replacements.
They don't handle my phone backups, for example, wirelessly and seamlessly. They don't offer seamless contact sharing, photo sharing and sometimes even file sharing is so clunky compared to a Google Drive link, or an iCloud download link.
How do they handle expiry on a link address for said share?
At best, what you have here is an on premise redundant storage drive and little else. It doesn't have the seamless features to do what the other services do. Even if its on the spec sheet, the experience isn't seamless enough. This is the same problem Nextcloud has been trying to solve for some time.
I think among technologists, the market for this is growing, but thats been the case for some time, its simply reaching more and more of us. This being a knock out commercial success where every 3rd person you know is buying something like this? That isn't happening in the foreseeable future.
- As far as the anonymous sourcing goes, that has to do with the exposed issues that some news outlets simply claim to have “sources” and when exposed they either don’t or they aren’t credible.
There is a real trust problem Journalism will need to overcome and some of it is self inflicted
- > What am I missing here?
Historical context
- from a purely technical point of view i do wish HDMI 2.1 was able to gain traction. On a couple of things I own that do actually use it, its an actual noticeable improvement and I feel does a better job than DisplayPort.
Granted, I suspect quite strongly the next wave of consolidation is going to continue the trend of being around USB-C, since the spec should have the bandwidth to handle any video / audio protocols for quite some time. Matter of time until that happens IMO.
It also lets you have a single cord that could theoretically be your power cord and your A/V cord.
- As far as I am aware, after having done exhaustive research on this, its licensing costs and popularity. Display port simply isn't popular enough. The vast majority of TV manufacturers (not brands mind you, many white label their manufacturing to different brands) also make monitors, and adoption of HDMI across both tvs and monitors not only was much higher, it was overall cheaper in cost since you could share the same components across lines. This being driven by cheaper licensing costs for accessory manufacturers (like blu ray players).
Its also easier to implement, if I recall correctly
This is the essential core of it, as I have come to understand it anyway.
- I like the first part of the idea, which is the header. Heck, even enable it by default. As long as the tracking of the toggle isn't a thing its a perfect compromise. While we're at it, respecting do not track headers would also be nice.
This completely leaves it up to the families / parents to control and gives some level of compliance to make the effort worth while.
There may even be a way to generate enough noise with the request to prevent any forms of tracking. This sort of thing should really be isolated in that way to prevent potential abuses via data brokers by way of sale of the information
- >Worse, it leads to situations where society seems to want to flat out be kid free in many ways. With families reportedly afraid to let their kids walk to and from school unsupervised.
I'm not seeing the correlation / causation here.
- >You can only just barely figure out what is in an object
There's a couple really well documented and understood ways of doing this in the language. I'm not sure what you're specifically referencing without more information.
>I wouldn't so much as call what JS does "reflection" any more than "making objects out of poorly implemented hashmaps."
Is this anymore different than .NET deriving everything from a base `System.Object`[0] type?
Also, what is missing in JS reflection wise that you can't do that would make sense for its environment? (namely, this excludes compile time reflection stuff I know .NET can do, it wouldn't make sense for a scripting language as it currently is)
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.object?v...
- What is it really about, in contrast to what I assert? I'm looking at how its being implemented, talked about, thought about, introduced.
I'm happy to re-evaluate my stance in the light of better evidence, but the AI adoption has corresponded to alot of CEOs announcing layoffs with a simultaneous doubling down on AI tools to replace those now displaced workers or those LinkedIn stories from people saying how they will never have to hire X or Y because AI will do it / does it.
- Thinking about this upfront for me, I am actually wondering why this is useful outside of equality comparisons.
Granted, I live and work in TypeScript, where I can't `===` two objects but I could see this deterministic behavior making it easier for a language to compare two objects, especially if equality comparison is dependent on a generated hash.
The other is guaranteed iteration order, if you are reliant on the index-contents relationship of an iterable, but we're talking about Dicts which are keyed, but extending this idea to List, I see this usefulness in some scenarios.
Beyond that, I'm not sure it matters, but I also realize I could simply not have enough imagination at the moment to think of other benefits
- >Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.
I agree with this 100%. I may add a tidbit here simply because I'm thinking about it. There is a real agency problem in leadership.
I've been a staff engineer[0] for just over half a decade now. I've noticed, particularly in the last few years, there's been more dustups over executive[1] authority of the role. Traditionally, what I've experienced is having latitude to observe, identify, and approach engineering problems that affect multiple teams or systems, for example. I've contributed a great deal to engineering strategy, particularly as it relates to whatever problem domain I am embedded in. Its about helping teams meet their immediate sprint goals, not working on strategy or making sure upcoming work for teams is unblocked by doing platform work etc.
The only thing I can surmise about this shift is that engineering managers (and really managers going up the chain) don't want to feel challenged by a "non manager". They didn't like that we didn't have a usual reporting structure that other ICs do (we all rolled up the same senior director or VP rather than an EM) and previously had similar stature that of a director.
[0]: for a general sense of what this entails, see this excellent website: https://staffeng.com
[1]: As in having the power to put plans and/or actions into effect
I think the fall down you see is in logical domains of that rely on relative complexity and contextual awareness in a different way. I've had less luck, for example, having AI systems parse and break down a spreadsheet with complex rules. Thats simply recent memory