- sfinkDon't be so judgemental, dying is traumatic! Who wouldn't want a little somethin' to take the edge off?
- > This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise?
Yes, I work for MoCo.
> Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories.
I don't really understand the whole setup, but I believe tax law is what is stopping this. What you are describing would be fraud (or something like it; IANAL). Money flows MoCo->MoFo (via dividends). Paying MoCo for something directly or hiring consultants to provide value would be "private inurement" [1], a phrase which here means that lawyers like scary words. It is using tax-exempt money to enrich private individuals.
But the tl;dr is that the MoFo/MoCo split was created specifically so that money could flow MoCo->MoFo and not the other way around, in order for MoCo to do business-y stuff without jeopardizing MoFo's non-profit status. Nvidia's game where it pays companies to buy their chips would not fly in the non-profit sector.
> This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy.
Servo was split out from Mozilla during COVID, and sadly is now completely unaffiliated. It is in the Linux Foundation Europe now. (Igalia is great, though!)
[1] https://legalclarity.org/private-inurement-definition-exampl...
- Ah, but your words say Mozilla should be doing more than nothing, they should in fact be winning:
> With that income there's no reason they shouldn't be the leading browser.
despite having less resources than their primary competitor.
Well, our primary competitor. I work for Mozilla. Which apparently means I'm making $730K. Maybe that's why I pay my house cleaner with a suitcase full of cash every week. Who isn't as happy about it as she could be, on account of not existing. Some people are picky about that.
I'd love to be growing our market share dramatically, since I put in a lot of work when I'm not on HN. Sadly I've been told that work is achieving practically nothing. I will point out that practically nothing does at least include still having enough sway in standards committees to hold the line against an ad-tech company whose incentives all push in the dystopic direction that everything is currently headed in. (Ok, maybe not fully holding the line...) If that stops being the case and Mozilla stops making a difference, then I believe I could still get a job elsewhere for a fair bit more than I'm currently making.
Oh wait, I forgot I'm already making $730K. Maybe not, then.
- Hm. I'm dumb so you'll need to spell it out for me.
MoFo and MoCo both have contributors, yes. Both have unpaid contributors, which apparently are not who you're talking about. Both also have paid people who work for them. Whether or not you call them "contributors" or "employees" doesn't matter much, I guess. But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox. Firefox is not a MoFo product. Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product. It's confusing because MoFo owns MoCo, but owning a company does not mean its products are your products, nor that you can freely assist with those products (especially in an arms-length setup involving taxes, which is the very reason for the MoFo/MoCo split in the first place.) MoFo does other things, non-Firefox things, like advocacy and pissing off HN commenters who assume that "Mozilla does X" headlines always mean MoCo is doing X.
One of us is confused. I have that uneasy sensation I get when something is going "whoosh!" over my head, so it might be me.
- Contributors are people. Donations are dollars. People ≠ dollars.
Unless you grind them up and eat them as sausages, but don't do that. The anti-theft threads will get stuck in your teeth.
- I find this whole "I gotta be able to turn off AI!" thing to be silly, personally. Do you also want to be able to turn off anything that uses binary search? Perhaps anything written in C++? Ooh, maybe it's nested for loops! Those kinda suck, give me an option to turn those off!
My indelicately expressed point is that the algorithm or processing model is not something anyone should care about. What matters? Things like: is my data sent off my device? Is there any way someone else can see what I'm doing or the data I'm generating? Am I burning large amounts of electricity? But none of those are "is it AI or not?"
Firefox already has a good story about what is processed locally vs being sent to a server, and gives you visibility and control over that. Why aren't the complaints about "cloud AI", at least? Why is it always "don't force-feed me AI in any form!"?
(To be clear, I'm no cheerleader for AI in the browser, and it bothers me when AI is injected as a solution without bothering to find a problem worth solving. But I'm not going to argue against on-device AI that does serve a useful purpose; I think that's great and we should find as many such opportunities as possible.)
- Are you implying that the direct competitor, Chrome, is taking in the same or less? Chrome has a much larger staff (excluding the rest of Google), so I guess they must all be earning a small fraction of Mozilla staff salaries. Such dedicated people!
- Not relevant here. Yes, you can donate to Mozilla.org and stipulate whatever you like, but Mozilla.org does not develop Firefox so telling them to use it for developing Firefox will do about as much good as telling them to use it to resurrect unicorns. Mozilla.org owns Mozilla Corporation, which is a for-profit entity that develops Firefox, but thus far the corporation hasn't wanted the complications and restrictions that would come from accepting donations.
- No part of this is true, fwiw. His salary at Mozilla was not high and he was a strong advocate of keeping executive compensation low (and as supporting evidence, that compensation shot up soon after he left). He may have made more from Brave, but that was obviously well after the donation. He also never backed down from his donation and the directly implied opposition to gay marriage, only stating that it comes from his personal beliefs and that he refused to discuss those openly. (I disagree with his position on gay marriage, or at least the position that I can infer from his donation, but I agree with his right and decision to keep it a private matter.)
I had... complex but mostly positive feelings about Eich in the time I worked for him (indirectly), but I can state unequivocally that he's not someone who would bend his principles as a result of getting cornered at a party.
- I've been using Firefox for a long time, longer than it's had that name, and it used to be excellent for my tab hoarding habits. Specifically, it could handle a large number of tabs, and every couple of months it would crash and lose all of them. I would have to start over from scratch, with an amazing sense of catharsis and freedom, and I never had to make the decision on my own that I would never be able to make.
Now, it's no better than the others. I'm at 1919 tabs right now, and it hasn't lost any for many years. It's rock solid, it's good at unloading the tabs so I don't even need to rely on non-tab-losing crash/restarts to speed things up, and it doesn't even burn enough memory on them to force me to reconsider my ways.
This is a perfect example of how Mozilla's mismanagement has driven Firefox into the ground. Bring back involuntary tab bankruptcy and spacebar heating!
- Appropriate amount of effort for what purpose? Is it appropriate for me to use ChatGPT on my mathematics test because it is the least effort required to pass the test? Or is it inappropriate because the goal should have been to learn the material?
Even something as straightforward as picking up a coffee mug runs into this. Just enough effort to be able to lift it without dropping, or enough to hang onto it if someone happens to bump into me?
I'm not disagreeing with the article, just pointing out that there is nuance that is easy to miss.
(Ok, I got a little triggered by the title, since I was just thinking about how 80% of my kid's mathematics class made it through by using ChatGPT for all of the homeworks, quizzes, and even the tests. The teacher doesn't want to police it, the administration doesn't care, and those kids learned almost nothing. "Zero effort == good" is a dangerous statement out of context.)
- > It's light but dense,
What does that mean? It's tough enough that you can make it thinner? It dries out more fully? Or does "dense" refer to something other than density, like tightness of the grain?
- Hm, good thought. You could just do
and the rest is trivial:printf("%d is %s\n", n, last_binary_bit(n) == 0 ? "even" : "odd");
Come to think of it, with a little fancy math you could divide and conquer:int last_binary_bit(int n) { if (n == 0) return 0; if (n == 1) return 1; if (n == 2) return 0; ... }int last_binary_bit(int n) { // Handle the easy cases. if (n == 0) return 0; if (n == 1) return 1; // Number may be large. Divide and conquer. It doesn't matter where we split it, // so use a randomized algorithm because those are fast. for (;;) { int r = random(); if (r < n) { // Smaller numbers are easier. int smaller1 = r; int smaller2 = n - 4; int bit1 = last_binary_bit(smaller1); int bit2 = last_binary_bit(smaller2); // Fancy math: even + even is even, even + odd is odd, etc. if (bit1 == 0 && bit2 == 0) return 0; if (bit1 == 0 && bit2 == 1) return 1; if (bit1 == 1 && bit2 == 0) return 1; if (bit1 == 1 && bit2 == 1) return 0; } } } - Heh, and rereading my comment, it comes across as more against the usage than I actually feel. It's not my personal style, and sometimes I find it annoying, but 80% of the time I think it's totally fine and expresses a nuance that would take a lot more words otherwise. Your usage here, for example, seems totally appropriate to me.
- That was my immediate thought too, but I'm still in favor of banning it in order to make it a community norm. Right now, people generally seem to think that such comments are adding some sort of signal, and I don't think they're stupid to think that. Not stupid, just wrong. And people feel personally attacked and so get defensive and harden their position, so it would be better to just make it against the guidelines with some justification there rather than trying to control it with individual arguments (with a defensive person!) or downvoting alone. (And the guidelines would be the place to put the explanation of why it's disallowed.)
People will still do it, but now they're doing it intentionally in a context where they know it's against the guidelines, which is a whole different situation. Staying up late to argue the point (and thus add noise) is obviously not going to work.
I'd prefer the guideline to allow machine translation, though, even when done with a chatbot. If you are using a chatbot intentionally with the purpose of translating your thoughts, that's a very different comment than spewing out the output from a prompt about the topic. There's some gray area where they fuzz together, but in my experience they're still very different. (Even though the translated ones set off all the alarm bells in terms of style, formatting, and phrasing.)
- Yeah, I haven't used AIs enough to be that good at immediately spotting generated output, so I appreciate the chance to reconsider my assumption that something was human-written. I'm sure people who did NOT use an AI find it insulting to be so accused, but I'd rather normalize those accusations and shift the norm to see them as suspicions rather than accusations.
I do find it more helpful when people specify why they think something was AI-generated. Especially since people are often wrong (fwict).
- It's not "off" unless you're simply reading it literally. If you do that, then it's a verbose way of saying "I agree". But the connotations are something like "I agree, strongly, and in particular am implying (possibly just for effect) that there are objectively right and wrong answers to this question and the other answers are wrong." The main difference is the statement that there is an objective answer to what people may be treating as a subjective question.
If it helps, you can think of it as saying more about possible disagreeing opinions than about the specific opinion expressed. "This answer is right, and the people who disagree are 'objectively' wrong."
It took me some time to catch on to this. It can certainly be jarring or obnoxious, though sometimes it can be helpful to say "yo people, you're treating this like a subjective opinion, but there are objective reasons to conclude X."
- > First, ignoring frail patients means your trial isn't representative of the wider population, so it shouldn't be accepted for general use - only on people who were well-represented in the trial.
Sure, but including frail outliers does not automatically mean you can generalize to the whole population. People can be frail for a wide variety of reasons. Only some of those reasons will matter for a given trial. That means the predictive power varies widely depending on which subpopulation you're looking at, and you'll never be able to enroll enough of some of the subgroups without specifically targeting them.
The results in the posted paper seem valid to me, but the conclusion seems incorrect. This seems like a paper that is restating some pretty universal statistical facts and then trying to use that to impose onerous regulations that can't and won't solve the problem. It will improve generalizability for a small fraction of the population, at a high cost.
> Second, you're ignoring the possibility of other treatment options. It isn't always the binary life-or-death you're making it, so SAEs do matter.
Of course they do. It's a good thing we have informed consent.
> Third, a big part of trials is to discover and develop prevention methods for SAEs. Explicitly ignoring the people most likely to provide data valuable for the general population sounds like a pretty silly approach.
If your primary claim is that data from non-frail people is not generalizable to frail people, then how can you claim that data from frail people is generalizable to non-frail people? If the trials for aspirin found that hemophiliacs should get blood clot promoting medications along with it, then should non-hemophiliacs also be taking those medications?
I'm thankful we can extract some amount of useful data from these trials without undue risk. It's always going to be a balancing act, and this article proposes putting a thumb on the scale that reduces the data without even solving the problem it's aiming at addressing.
- Don't those 99 enjoy being alive despite all of the things that would have killed some of them had they not taken the vaccine? If "some" is at least 1%, that sounds like an individual benefit to me.
If you take the vaccine, you have a lower chance of dying over those 4 years. You also have an infinitely higher chance (specifically 1% vs 0%) of dying from the vaccine, but that doesn't change the previous sentence.
- Same here. My logic is that my toothbrush is in the same room as a device for aerosolizing fecal bacteria, which is kinda gross but also not that different from a lot of other surfaces and environments, and that it's going to collect some amount of stuff floating around. A quick rinse is going to dislodge a good fraction of what has accumulated over the course of a day.
I thought I was just being logical, but apparently I also have a deficit of attention. Okay, then. I guess I'd rather bear that burden than brush my teeth with shi... sorry, I probably should terminate that sentence before I get carried away.