cjpearson

Blocking ads only works because just a small percentage of users block ads. It's a free-rider situation and someone has to pay. If everyone blocks ads then sites will either counter ad blockers or if that's not possible, implement a pay wall.

They are not subsidizing the browser, but the content you consume through the browser. Firefox is free and will always be free.

Well of course it would have to go beyond Firefox to be effective. But if PPA can show that advertising can function without surveillance, then the business case for surveillance-based advertising goes away. This would make it easier for governments and browsers to more aggressively limit surveillance. Those who continue to use surveillance instead of or in combination with PPA would be seen as bad actors.

I consider Mozilla to be a public interest group. It's understandable that Meta's involvement is seen as a red flag, but if you want it to actually happen, part of this process will involve cooperating with advertisers. In the end any proposal should be judged primarily on its merits rather than its authors.

It's unfortunate that almost none of the PPA criticisms actually go into depth on why its implementation isn't sufficiently private. It seems there's no desire to actually improve privacy, they'd rather just kill the feature.

If killing PPA meant the internet would suddenly be advertising free, I would be 110% on board, but that's not going to happen. Advertising is the dominant business model on the web and it's not going away. The alternative to privacy respecting advertising is the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today.

Yes, on an individual level you can mostly opt-out of this surveillance nightmare by using pi hole, uBlock origin, AdGuard etc. I do so myself. But keep in mind that this solution only works because of the 95% of users who do not use these tools and thus subsidize your browsing.

They deserve privacy too. So I'm holding out hope that Mozilla and others can succeed in developing a truly privacy protecting solution.

I think it would be a good idea to remove these examples from the draft as it gives people the impression that this method is SQL-over-HTTP. A more typical body might be a JSON object with various filter criteria.

> building customer service infrastructure

The effort here is not to be underestimated. It took years for them to implement a cancel button.

Tailwind is a CSS build process. If you only want to customize the default link color it probably isn't the right choice. If you want to avoid a build step, it's also not the right choice.

Is this a principled defense of free speech or a case of a man treating ostensibly independent companies as divisions of his personal conglomerate?

It's not too different in the corporate world. I'm an owner of Apple, Google, Microsoft and others and they refuse to divulge their secrets to me. I can't see their contracts, strategy documents or root passwords.

I really don't like advertising. I use uBlock Origin in my browser, AdGuard on my phone and pi-hole in my home. I even take a seam ripper to my clothes to make sure no logos remain. But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet. (Browsing HN and seeing that the top comment for every paywalled article is a pirated link confirms that.)

If advertising must exist, I'd prefer it to be safe and private rather than the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today. Mozilla is working hard to make this happen and catching a lot of flak. It's notable that criticisms usually fall into three buckets.

1. It has "advertising" in the name, thus it is bad

2. Meta is involved, thus it is bad

3. Mozilla earns most of their revenue from Google, thus they are incapable of doing a good thing

It would be much healthier if criticisms actually focused on the design and implementation of PPA. Perhaps things could be improved. Or maybe you have your own ideas for privacy preserving advertising. But it surprises me that even on a technical forum like HN, so many people endorse the awful advertising status quo.

Yes, you can mostly opt out of advertising with uBlock Origin. You can still do that when PPA is enabled. The vast majority of browsers will continue to subsidize your browsing. What Mozilla is doing is working to provide the same level of privacy and security for the 90% of the population who does not use uBlock Origin. I think that's a noble goal.

Were there any reports beyond the Seymour Hersh substack post? Besides some Russian outlets nobody took that seriously. While Hersh has had some impressive scoops he also has a history of fabrication and unreliable sources. There's a reason no media outlet would touch that story and he had to self-publish. No newspaper is going to risk their credibility on a story by a disgraced journalist using a single anonymous source.

Stylo (CSS Engine) and WebRender (compositor) came from Servo and are still used in Firefox. I believe the Mozilla team still upstreams patches as well.

The sports for 2028 have already been decided. Flag football, baseball/softball, cricket, lacrosse and squash will be added. Breaking will not be included.

I still haven't seen any arguments why these restrictions aren't good for users. Just a bunch of assumptions that these restrictions are a fig leaf. For a technical forum, I would expect more discussion around the actual details. Instead many people are building a strawman and fighting that instead.

Assume for a moment that Apple will allow alternative web engines as long as they follow certain user privacy and security guarantees. (Given that the company has announced this and it's legally mandated, I think this is a safe assumption.) In that case, are users better served with or without these requirements?

All of these requirements look good for user security and privacy. I don't want apps to bring their own Blink or WebKit fork with all sandboxing and cross-site tracking protection disabled. I'm fine with apps bringing their own engine with the goal of performance or better user experience. These requirements enforce those expectations.

There seems to be a concern that Apple will use these requirements to ban every single alternative including Blink and Gecko. I doubt that is the case since the purpose of these changes is to allow reliable, responsible players to run their engines on iOS without giving the keys to the kingdom to every app that requests it. Banning Google or Mozilla would not satisfy the EU requirements. Banning BlinkButItAlsoMinesCrypto is fine.

The only additional thing I'd want as a user is transparency. I want to know if an app with a WebView is using WebKit, Blink, Gecko or EngineNobodyHasEverHeardOf.

Apps are sandboxed, but WebKit runs outside the sandbox with additional privileges such as JIT and multiple processes and communicates with the app through IPC. This change is allowing third-party code to also run with these privileges as long as they follow certain security standards.

As someone who hasn't played a CoD game in probably 10-12 years, what has changed?

In Germany I think it's a bit of both. Beginning in 5th grade, pupils attend different schools. It differs a bit between the states, but generally those in the university track schools (gymnasium) will attend secondary school until 12th or 13th grade then go on to university while the other schools finish at 9th or 10th grade. Those students can then begin working, take an apprenticeship or attend vocational school.

While it may be beneficial to have support for apprenticeships and vocational training, it's controversial that the decision point is made so early. At that age, it may be less about the child's ambitions and abilities and more about the family's resources and social class.

But since most engineers probably started before last week, wouldn't they be still up quite a bit? Even with the crash it's up 75% over the past year.

Instead of Chesterton, I think Thomas Aquinas made the same point more simply: "If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever."

Ads as a revenue model is not going anywhere even if you personally block them.

I'm also a ublock origin user. But it only works because most people in the world are not ublock origin users. I view no ads and am subsidized by the users who do.

The old joke is that there's a new JavaScript framework every month. That's not really true — we've had the same big three for a decade — but there has been an explosion of new bundlers: vite, esbuild, turbopack, farm, swc, rome/biome, rspack, rolldown, mako. And of course plenty of projects are still using rollup and webpack.

Some competition is a good thing, and it seems to have led to a drive for performance in all these projects which I'm not complaining about, but I wonder if more could be gained by working together. Does every major company or framework need their own bundler?

What do you have against anti-Taliban Afghans or anti-Lukashenko Belarusians?

Most definitions of Generation Z would include both those who are presently 25 and 14 years old.

Flow is another example I've seen.

https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/

Pay might be motivation for some, but it's not the only source. People also join for reasons such patriotism, sense of duty, or family history of service. Boosting pay could certainly help, but I think its effect would be limited if it's facing cultural headwinds.

The article references four books including "The Great Good Place" which originated the term along with the classic "Bowling Alone", which documents the decline of social connections in the United States. Additionally they interview four university professors who have studied the topic and they link to at least five academic papers, three surveys and several more newspaper articles. It seems to me that the article offers quite a bit of information on where the studies are.

They've definitely thought about it. This is not the first user to rage quit and vandalize their posts and they have standard procedures to deal with it. (IIRC their system will even automatically flag bulk edits for review.) If you would like to disavow your content, you can ask to have your name removed, but once the content is out there and considered sufficiently valuable, it will not be deleted.

I don't agree with how StackOverflow's current management has been running the site, but for anyone who has used the site, the outcome of this behavior should have been obvious. I'm sure Wikipedia would react the same if you deface all the pages you contributed to prevent OpenAI from consuming words you wrote.

It's a losing battle in that the CC license and StackOverflow's ToS make it clear that StackOverflow is allowed to restore the post regardless of the original author's wishes.

It's less clear that the license gives AI companies the right to train LLMs. They tend to take the view that any media can be used for training regardless of licensing because it's fair use. Many authors disagree and believe they must explicitly license their content for LLM training. AFAIK none of these legal disputes have been settled yet.

In my view you shouldn't really expect to have much control over who uses the content you post to Stack Overflow. Maybe your answer will be used by a CS101 student. But it could also be used by a defense contractor, gambling site, North Korean hacker, or darknet drug marketplace. Yes, the license requires attribution, but if ChatGPT ignores that requirement it's behaving like 90% of programmers.