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> It's not curing cancer. I do believe that creating software can be a deeply meaningful experience, and that software can change people's lives for the better in real ways. But... this is a VC-funded startup for a browser shell.

I have worked on software for treating cancer, and I have worked for Mozilla. And boy, let me tell you, the latter sure felt like it had a much bigger impact on the world.

Are you affirming munificent's claim of "SV hubris" or do you actually feel you made more of an impact at Mozilla? This is an honest question; I can't tell which way you are trying to go with your comment.

I don't know. It was a sincere statement.

Let me tell you a little bit about medical software. It is incredibly hard and expensive to get data. It usually involves finding enough people who are dying in a particular way (already hard), and managing to collect comparable data from each (i.e., with the same process: even harder). There is never enough of it to do the statistics you want. Once you have some, and you maybe come up with some way to do some step of the treatment process slightly better, there are a lot of hurdles and it takes a very long time before anything you did can actually be used on a patient. Rightfully so. People's lives are at stake.

With cancer in particular, maybe after a decade in the field you might know if what you did had a positive impact on treatment outcomes. Maybe. That's the best-case scenario. For me, I don't even know if any line of code I ever wrote was actually used to treat a real patient. Oh, yeah, and those dying people whose data you used to come up with and test your idea? Yeah, you could not do anything for them. They got whatever treatments were the best available at the time, and good luck. If they were great treatments, you probably would not have been working on the problem. So that sucks.

Meanwhile, at a browser company, I was able to write a patch and within a month or three it was deployed to over a hundred million people. Software projects I worked on are currently used to encode and decode a non-trivial fraction of the bits on the internet. They are deployed on every Android handset and every iPhone (not just in Firefox), so that's a few billion devices. Every time you make a Zoom call or use probably almost any other video conferencing service, you are using at least one, if not several, of those projects. I understand people are doing a lot of video conferencing these days. Maybe even some telemedicine calls between radiation oncologists and their patients.

So, uh, yeah. I feel like that had more impact. Not to discourage anyone from trying to cure cancer. It's incredibly hard.

P.S., "cancer" is actually a thousand different diseases with a thousand different causes and requires many different treatments. There will never be a "cure for cancer".

There are other problems in healthcare that are more tractable. I built some software a few years back that identified HIV+ patients at risk of developing certain complications, and alerted their clinic/case workers. We were able to show after a year that they were seeing real improvements across their patient population. This is probably the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.

Could I message you about this? I have some questions about doing something similar but very formulaic

Sure thing, my email address is in my profile. I left that job like 2 years ago, but I’m still close with the CEO and have done some other health tech projects.

Your email is not in your profile by the way

Ahh sorry! Chase[dot]gilliam[at]gmail

That's great! Take the opportunities you have to do good for the world. Everyone's circumstances will present them with different ones.

For sure! I’m taking a break from healthcare but I’ll be back.

No disrespect intended but this reads a lot like I tried to cure lung cancer but the challenge was too much so I switched to selling vapers instead. Also, you’re counting your blessings in terms of reach, which is relatively easy to come by. Anybody working on Chrome, at Google, WhatsApp, etc gets this reach for whatever work they do.

I read this as an indictment of tech firm culture, not of the actual merits of saving lives vs saving bookmarks.

I mean, that's fair. He's not even wrong. I just found it funny that I have literally done both of the things he was trying to draw a contrast between. I mean, not precisely slapping note-taking onto a browser shell, but close enough.

The #1 all time human tool has got to be a piece of software called "Microsoft Excel".

Not to far down that list is probably Lotus Notes

VisiCalc should get the credit: Lotus 123 and Excel are both derivatives that would not exist without VisiCalc (though it’s a given that someone else would have come up with a similar concept ex nihilo around the same time, imo).

Lotus Notes is awful. It’s Exchange, but worse. They wanted it to be an “open” platform for applications to be built on top of but failed to win over hearts and minds (and especially not hearts...).

Mozilla is a non profit that has had a substantial positive impact on the world, this is a vc funded startup to slightly improve fact retention

This reminds me of what a coworker of mine said who moved from working on software for medicine to consumer tech, that the gains in medicine were so hard won and so niche he felt like he was having a much greater impact making our bit of consumer tech better, given how many users we had.

Give me a cure for cancer over 10000 Mozillas

Nobody is asking for 10000 Mozillas?

Doing the work researching a cure for cancer is much more practical with 1 Mozilla.

That’s only because a cute for cancer is a binary result.

If tomorrow we found the cure for cancer, and your work contributed even the slightest amount to it, that’s what you would be telling people at parties, not that you also worked at Mozilla (assuming you’ve done equivalent work in both fields).

No, I don’t think this is true! “Curing cancer” is short for making progress on many aspects of many diseases. There are so many people doing productive and rewarding work that tangibly improves and lengthens lives. And alongside those, there are ineffective and dysfunctional projects that in retrospect were worse allocations of funding and skill.

It's not binary. There are thousands of variants, thousands of paths to matestasis. Some cancers are already, for most intents and purposes, "cured" (prostate, thyroid, testicular etc.)

It's only that way because we haven't fully cured cancer yet.

> The knowledge base should be primarily in your head.

I agree generally, then there is also a case to be made about writing down notes as a way to memorize the information. Particularly useful when starting on a new subject and could be great for teaching.

There is also information that isn’t worth memorizing but worth annotating. Shopping for instance.

I would appreciate a 2-way annotation system, where existing notes would appear when visiting a page and where pages would appear when visiting organized notes.

I agree that note-taking is important. But I don't think eliminating a single click to switch from the browser to a note-taking app will make any measurable difference in the quality of anyone's knowledge base or note-taking. The thinking and writing is the hard part.

Reminds me of an old Wilde quote someone used to post at work...

    If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
    Oscar Wilde

I don’t know.

Browsers are already huge beasts, but I feel like their large feature set mostly benefit the cloud services than the user. I am not advocating for even bigger browser, but I would welcome a better local-first integration with surrounding apps.

As of now, extensions are pretty limited in what they can do around the browser UI.

On desktop, extensions can merely add icons to a toolbar and inject content to the current page. Vertical sidebars are gone.

On mobile, it’s even more limited to adding actions to a menu and some background tasks.

Browsers escaped from the crazy and sometimes fragile extension system that could interact with the browser chrome, maybe for the better, but nowadays, they are mostly sandbox screen readers or huge cloud only monoliths à la chromeOS.

"The knowledge base should be primarly in your head".

Unrelated to the article, but I often vaguely remember that I did read something on internet, and want to be sure of what I did read, but google search is not powerful enough to find the thing I already seen.

I wish I had a search engine for every content I browsed, watched, heard, but I don't care about the content I didn't read yet.

> I wish I had a search engine for every content I browsed, watched, heard, but I don't care about the content I didn't read yet.

You want something like ArchiveBox[1].

[1]: https://archivebox.io/

Thanks I will look that !

Now that I did read it: The storage part is exactly what I wanted, but the search part is missing.

It has full-text search with Sonic (or ripgrep as a fallback), it's a new feature released recently (v0.5.3). If you use the Docker setup it should work out-of-the-box.

This is the guy who created Sparrow, which basically kicked off a revolution in mail clients, a space that was moribund until Sparrow arrived.

I think he’s earned some benefit of doubt.

Wasn't Sparrow got acquired then killed off by Google ?

> "I should spend less time fucking around on the Internet mindlessly consuming media."

How do you know that is the target audience? To me it's people who are research focused, which doesn't necessarily mean they're fucking around at all. Academics, scientists, etc, often spend a ton of time reading papers and researching things + taking notes. You're making a big assumption here.

Yes and that already exists - https://web.hypothes.is/ and works as a simple add-on. I don't see what new benefit the dedicated browser could bring.

There's more than one way to skin a cat...

I feel that in the case of Beam browser all cat lovers will be disappointed.

Hang on, are the cat lovers here wanting their cats skinned or not? :-P

Here is an article I would like you to read about cat taxidermy https://www.catster.com/lifestyle/pet-cat-memorials-preserva...

it explains why you can become disappointed

While we've gone OT, thanks. That was an interesting read from a different point of view.

Personally, I had never even considered taxidermy on a pet. It'd feel too much like having a relative stuffed and put on display which somehow feels disrespectful.

But then, there are things like Lenin and Mao being on display. Way off topic now so I will stop.

That’s a key insight for all of us. The internet contains just too much stuff that is interesting. We will never able to consume all of it. So you have to restrain yourself eventually.

> The knowledge base should be primarily in your head.

Making it easier to store and recall useful information, without using your brain, is a good thing that has fuelled progress in recent decades.

The impermanence of the internet requires you to store useful information in your brain (you can't guarantee that it will be stored for when you need it), when really it would be better stored externally.

The fact that the internet is impermanent encourages you to treat it as something you need to siphon information from (jam all the data into your head), rather than a safe store that you can depend on.

I'll take the exact opposite side on that one. Here's the red flag:

> The knowledge base should be primarily in your head

This is exactly the same thing as saying "you shouldn't need search engines, you should be able to find it yourself." But Google proved that if you can change the way people find information, you can literally change the world. It is precisely in building new tools, new fundamental primitives by which we interact with information, that we can make the biggest impact.

It remains to be seen if he can execute, but the idea of decentralized, personal knowledge databases sounds like it could be one of those indispensable tools in the future.

I had the same existential crisis from of all the time I waste on the internet.

My solution was to make the Productivity Owl. It’s not for everyone, but if you need an extremely strict browser extension to change your browsing habits I think it’s useful. (also free and open source)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/productivity-owl/e...

Hey that's awesome! If you ever think about charging or adding paid features, check out my extension payment service https://extensionpay.com It's nice because it's cross-browser and you don't need to run your own server :)

relevant: https://youtu.be/WqoYoXY-RC0?t=114