Riverheart

I’m hearing a lot of hole poking and not a lot of solutions. If everything I’ve said is wrong then what do you believe is right?

Genuinely, if you have something to teach I’m all ears for my personal betterment.

How do we ensure everyone gets a livable wage without redistributing the wealth of the rich, mandating a higher minimum wage, or increasing inflation and since you mentioned housing, make that affordable without gutting the value of existing housing which will make existing home owners upset.

If the answer is tax cuts for the rich “job creators” so they might spend some of the savings on employees instead of pocketing it, we’ve had decades for that to work.

> You're trying to solve the problem that people aren't being paid enough by passing a law that literally says they have to be paid more

If a company is profitable and chooses not to share their profitability with their employees then I have no qualms with this anymore than I do with the current minimum wage law, which was created for a reason and the world did not burn down as a result.

Businesses are more profitable than ever, employees more productive than ever, they had their chance to do this on their own and avoid gov interference and they blew it. We can argue the details of that intervention but the market isn’t going to correct this.

> These things are two sides of the same coin. The increase in wages is the same as the increase in costs, so if one of them is small then so is the other one and if one of them is large then so is the other one.

It’s not 1/1 increase and labor is not the only cost. If 5 employees make an extra $1 the price of a burger doesn’t go up $5.

If 5 employees build a million dollar house the cost of the house doesn’t go up if they get paid $7 extra because the cost is tied up in material/licenses/etc, not labor.

And higher income can lead to increased spending on businesses that are paying their employees more. I’m not saying it’s a silver bullet but you can poke holes in anything. The point is, one party is proposing “something” and not just posturing.

The cost of ingredients for a burger doesn’t radically change if a burger flipper gets paid more and the price of the burger isn’t going up drastically either.

Clearly companies with billion dollar market caps can also be held to higher standards because no one is going to pay more than they are required for labor. Maybe the minimum wage is a percentage of the business total profits and minimum wage at $7.25 is just the floor?

A lot of wealth is locked up in the wealthiest people which could be circulating in the economy instead of being in a Swiss bank account.

There are multiple layers, multiple solutions instead of hoping wealth trickles down. Poverty wasn’t solved under the last Trump administration as I recall nor do I expect it in the upcoming one.

> Do you have some sort of resource/evidence that there were higher level of corruption during the Trump presidency?

Okay. How about leveraging the presidency to make a boatload of money from his private business.

https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...

Also, the Ukraine call, Georgia call, Egypt bribe, flagrant nepotism, that one time he denied funding to the post office because he thought mail in ballots would harm his re-election.

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53772526

Appointing people to agencies who wanted to dismantle them instead of carrying out their mission like Betsy DeVos for Dept of Edu and like Robert F Kennedy will apparently do for HHS because fluoride and vaccines are sus

https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...

Creating an atmosphere where loyalty is more important than founding principles which is an environment in which corruption can flourish.

That time he incited a mob to storm the capital because Mike Pence wouldn’t over turn the election results like he wanted.

If only there were people who wanted to raise minimum wage…

Really like the simplicity of the project (this is a compliment, the root is not overwhelming with files). Nice that this tool uses only system libraries. Way easier to distribute a single file with leverages already installed languages.

Thanks for sharing!

Instead of sending json to an api, form submission does a post back to the form page which detects this and reads the contents of form to do work on it. HTML pages can have code associated with them to do this in a cshtml file (C# specific). Lots of older frameworks support this, PHP being a popular example. Razor replaced ASP.Net webforms which has also been around forever.

See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/web-pages/overview/...

As a powershell user I have never had an issue with case sensitivity at the language level as Sigils provide separation of concerns between language constructs (keywords/variables/types). You’re using an IDE with autocomplete most of the time and many other languages have linters/formatters.

All I have personally experienced of case sensitivity is an added layer of friction any time I go to use a REPL for Bash/Python/Javascript/etc or some awful ‘allowercasewords’ gets cemented in place barring a total refactor since you can’t correct files piecemeal.

And case sensitivity in the language doesn’t even help with case sensitivity at the OS level when you’re writing cross platform code =/

“You want a world where only the rich can create beautiful experiences. You're either rich or short sighted.”

Being rich to create a beautiful experience is neither required nor does it require a synthetic voice to achieve.

It does require effort and being rich can reduce that effort for sure.

Not my experience for what it’s worth.

Yeah. How quickly we forget the hologram Tupac and Gorillaz concerts as well as a the virtual live concerts from Fortnite.

I will. If usage increased enough they would. The more users they have the more important their search becomes, gives them greater leverage and an audience to market products at. Unlike Google/Microsoft/Apple, they do not have a strong platform to reach users with and need something to coalesce a consumer-centric Mozilla ecosystem around.

At the moment, it is unclear how much extra money, devoted to improving what, would increase Firefox’s market share significantly and am not surprised to see them explore other options. Brave, Vivaldi, etc, don’t seem to have figured it out either.

I choose not to be cynical, nor will I allow myself to be upset about it one way or another and wish others would do the same.

Being negative is more likely to scare off new users/contributors than change Mozilla.

I’m unconvinced that Firefox can compete purely by being the better browser now that Chrome exists and I hear no one complaining about Brave doing more than just a browser (crypto, ads, brave wallet, brave vpn, brave talk, brave search) so even Brendan doesn’t believe that a browser without diversification can compete and likely would have done the same stuff the current CSuite did if he were in charge. You might argue he’d have done a better job of it, picked better products but still would happen.

Brendan choosing to build on Chrome instead of Firefox probably says more about Chrome’s dominance than Firefox’s technical merits. If all Firefox was lacking was better leadership improving it would’ve been easier. If it was a technical issue that’s probably money that needs spent but doesn’t move the needle which is why the current CSuite doesn’t address it either. Or maybe it was just to get away from the stigma around Firefox that doesn’t exist in Chromeland.

I think there are forces in play beyond what the Csuite can control. Microsoft and Google have bigger platforms with more reach. If anything, it explains why Mozilla is trying to expand beyond the browser so they have more ways to reach people and try wooing them into using Firefox.

I’m having a hard time thinking how else you’d market Firefox to regular users beyond word of mouth advocacy. I remember Firefox running TV ads once, no idea how effective that was.

Firefox used to be significantly better than IE which drove adoption but since Chrome is heavily invested in I don’t think Firefox can compete purely by being the better browser. The strategy from the “the good old days” doesn’t work here.

Also, I was looking for a specific example. Saying that the C-Suite is bad because market share is down is not an answer without context of how it could have been avoided which is not obvious. How could they have retained or grown the market share they had?

I’m not saying management bears no responsibility but not all companies fail because of bad management alone. They have big, well funded competitors and platforms users can’t ignore. In particular, Windows, Google Search, Gmail, IOS, and Android. So much browsing is done online and default browsers rule there.

Now you could say Firefox should have come to mobile sooner. Firefox OS was an interesting idea that might have had legs but who knows if it would have caught on. That work required them to divert attention away from the browser and they have a smaller warchest to devote on an idea that might not payoff.

I must be seriously out of touch because I have no idea what is missing from Firefox that you can find in other browsers. Can you at least list off some stuff so I can understand why people are so upset?

I know dropping XUL, plugins, performance have been issues for people. I see the changes they made as necessary to keep the codebase maintainable and improve performance. What else am I missing?

Okay, so what is complaining achieving here since you already acknowledge they won’t let you donate to Firefox directly?

I’m not crazy about it either but I don’t lose sleep over it. It’s a browser and management could be better. I know it’s a touchy subject and people may not like to hear it but until I’m downvoted into oblivion I’m going to say this discussion is not worth rehashing time and time again.

The donation suggestion is years old at this point. There is nothing new in this thread.

You could try being supportive instead. But hey, the current strategy has worked out so well thus far, please continue until the market share reaches 0.

Mitchell really seems to care about these comments. Oh wait, she probably doesn’t read HN does she? Oh, but the Firefox devs probably do. Well I’m sure they’re just as moved and powerful enough to affect the kind of change you want to see in the organization.

There is more nuance here than your comment assumes. If Firefox makes X dollars by investing Y dollars but Y+N dollars doesn’t return more money, they will spend the minimum amount on Firefox and allocate the remaining funds elsewhere because otherwise they’d be throwing money away, or so the C-Suite assumes.

You think Pocket and Mozilla VPN sprung up because creating new products was easier than investing more into the golden goose? If Firefox was the end all be all that would be the obvious, safest business decision. Clearly they don’t think it is and that they can get more money through diversification.

A number of people here believe that Firefox is only supported by Google so they can avoid anti trust. If that were the case they’d pay Mozilla regardless of how good/bad Firefox was wouldn’t they?

No offense but how is the CxO club running it into the ground exactly?

By not being on the default browser on their operating system? By not marketing it on their world used search engine?

The community was the biggest factor Mozilla had in its favor and the community jumped to Chrome and here we are. It’s nice that you still use FF but their market share makes it clear that you and I are exceptions.

I said the CEO makes too much money so I don’t know what the point of your post is.

I think it’s pretty clear all the complaining hasn’t done anything as this conversation has been going on for years but I don’t expect that to stop anyone from getting easy HN karma.

Honestly these kinds of posts are tiresome and unhelpful. Yes, Mozilla is different now, yes the CEO makes too much money but if more people used their browser more they might invest more in it in instead of seeing it as a money sink to satisfy people who can’t be satisfied.

Seriously, Mozilla cant win. A large voice of people constantly scold Mozilla for anything it does. We’ve heard from Firefox devs on how this bash fest affects them and we expect them to crank out awesome software despite the abuse. Instead of picking the lesser of two evils they say oh, Firefox is N milliseconds slower than Chrome so I’ll use the greater of two evils.

Can we stop beating a dead horse? If you don’t like Firefox or Mozilla fine but don’t act like it’s unusable as a browser. It’s fine, it works, I don’t why everyone is so bothered by minor details when their goals and clearly better than their competition.

Sure it may be slow for YOU (whatever your use case is) or maybe your extensions broke but average users who rely power users to recommend a browser don’t care. If they can open Facebook and Netflix it’s fine. So use Chrome yourself and recommend Firefox to the people this crap doesn’t matter to. And maybe, if they see the numbers tick up, they’ll change course.

Jenkins has a “Replay” button on completed jobs and allows you to edit the Jenkinsfile before rerunning it. That is the easiest way to test changes without going through version control.

Boston Dynamics has pledged not to weaponize their robots.

“We pledge that we will not weaponize our advanced-mobility general-purpose robots or the software we develop that enables advanced robotics and we will not support others to do so.”

https://bostondynamics.com/news/general-purpose-robots-shoul...

TLDR

Compares “using a computer” to “using an AI” as if they’re the same.

Makes AI companies out to be the victim of AI doomers without offering any kind of solution to the people using copyright as a tool to protect their livelihoods. People are not IP maximalists on principle I’d have to guess but if it’s the best available means to safeguard their work from being leveraged against them they will use the means they have. Until that issue is addressed articles like this fall on deaf ears.

“All these employees losing their livelihoods for the greater good.”

The same employees building technology that will ultimately put many more employees out of jobs? Ironic, because people say that jobs lost to AI will be for the greater good. I think we’re okay with sacrificing for greater goods as long as we aren’t the ones getting sacrificed.

“I for one am happy that I can now express my creative ideas, which I couldn't do before due to missing talent / practice.”

The problem here is we need to look beyond our own self interest to how this will impact other people.

We don’t make a career out of art. This technology is just a novelty to us and but many others rely on it for themselves and their family and had no way of foreseeing the technology coming. They need it more than we do.

“Don't say that a crime was committed because an LLM produced something better and faster than a human could. Don't call obviously original writing and original art a COPY when it is obviously NOT. These are the same tactics used by patent trolls.”

The law is arbitrary, written by humans, not by some platonic ideal inherent in the universe. It doesn’t need to be applied equally to people and tools.

The people producing these models just want profit as much as any patent troll and like them will interpret the law in such a way that benefits them or fight to change it so they can realize that profit.

It’s easier to go after the models and prevent copyright for AI generated works than to take issue with all of their users which is what we’re seeing in the courts.

“Society is fucking changing”

I agree with you there.

I’m not fundamentally opposed to AI generated anything actually but the training is problematic and I don’t see society as ready for it.

It would be an easier pill to swallow if we had a shortage of writers/artists/etc and this was the solution to that.

Human society is built around humans so there is a reason I’m allowed to store art and stories in my brain; I and the vast majority of people can do jack all with it, pose little threat to the owners if we could, would draw attention if we did, and it’s not worthwhile or feasible to sue an entire population of content consumers for consuming content so people act smart and pick and choose their battles so society can function.

LLMs and diffusion models don’t “consume content” and the content they produce doesn’t come from inspiration, greed, boredom or any number of human traits. They don’t remember the Target logo to go shop there or a college class they took to apply for a job so they can be a tax paying member of society.

Sounds worse than it is. Most sites work fine without and the ones that absolutely require it will have messages requesting you enable it.

Beyond the privacy/security benefits of not running arbitrary code in your browser, the web is a lot faster without JavaScript involved.

In what way? Docker-compose files are composable. I can specify several compose files that layer functionality or have different behavior and tie it together with make. You can also set defaults and override with environment variables using bash syntax.

There’s no way to qualify the sample size of writers based on his claims so within the bubble of his experience I’m sure it’s correct but not useful to base an argument on that writers at large are onboard with this and as for good faith engagement your response to parent…

“Everybody not agreeing with you represents "chauvinistic SV attitude"?”

…wasn’t very good faith either as it’s unclear whether the writers share the same belief as some tech people that AI and humans doing stuff are the same and use that idea to further a pro AI agenda as opposed to them just finding a useful tool to incorporate into their workflow regardless of the underlying technology or politics. Your response assumed the former and paints parent poster as wrong based on your assumption. Some writers liking the tool, just like some artists liking stable diffusion, doesn’t invalidate the original criticism or imply their ideology.

Indeed my experience jives with what he said. Many AI people I’ve seen comment are very much “adapt or die” when it comes to AI technology, suggesting that writers/artists must (even if begrudgingly) use these tools to stay competitive and see many datasets as fair game even when their authors are against its inclusion in said datasets, such as the author of this article.