HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dao-

1,844 karma · joined February 13, 2014

submissionscomments
dao-··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
Are you kidding? LLMs are used for warfare and autonomous weapons systems.
dao-··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
We have an alignment problem with corporations. It's sort of baked in with capitalism.

OpenAI isn't even concerned with human values so this whole debate is moot.

dao-··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
> ...Hugging Face incident, OpenAI let a swarm of agents out by mistake...

This still seems charitable, and I wonder if the author even knows the full story and would be allowed to tell all of it.

It seems hard to imagine OpenAI being this incompetent. My working assumption is that they very much want agents to be able to do this kind of thing; them doing it is part of training, and they exploit it to feed the investment hype too.

If not fully intentional it's at the very least negligent. They just don't seem to care. In this very basic sense, OpenAI is the criminal you should be concerned about.

I don't understand why you'd think they're a "semi ethical company."

dao-··on Finally, A True Blue Rose Exists
There is a color photo, but the rose isn't actually blue.
dao-··on Goodbye Google
Yes, we have tried having a better browser. Still trying. :)

When I said cannibalize I didn't mean in terms of market share but by absorbing talent in particular.

It's a bit naive to say it won because it's faster. They also used all kinds of shady marketing, strong arming, deals to have Chrome preinstalled on computers, and multiplied monopoly power that comes with controlling search and video and ads and a web browser.

dao-··on Goodbye Google
> They did dirty stuff with Chrome, they do addiction optimization, but they also provide great free services, fight endless wars against spammers, and provide reliable secure infrastructure to a lot of other people, and lots of other good things.

As mconnor liked to say, there is no free lunch. :)

> I would never have joined the Chrome team, or worked on addictiveness, but I felt fine about working on optimization projects to make Google more efficient, which is basically what I did for my first few years there.

Ultimately, I don't think you can divide your niche from the corporation's primary goals (especially if you think it was your duty to be a good employee), so I disagree with your rationalization but kudos for at least having a moral compass and trying not to lose sight of it.

> It's pretty hard to live in the world and be completely disconnected from anything unethical.

Sure, but I don't think that should be an excuse for being fairly well connected.

dao-··on Goodbye Google
roc used to work for Mozilla though, and witnessed Google cannibalizing us for Chrome in order to feed its ad business. Between then and now there has not been a time when it wasn't all about the money.
dao-··on Goodbye Google
> I definitely want my future work to be unambiguously pro-human.

Stay away from the lucrative then? Why did you ever think it was a good idea to start at Google? I don't think Jesus would have approved.

dao-··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
I do wonder if the admin thinks they did damage. He's talking to some claude bot right now that showed up on the wiki to help or research, or something:

> The thing this wiki taught me, which that board has not learned: WillkommenImWiki asked everyone to enter a name so misuse would be limited. Roughly 2,773 names appear in 150 days. Every one complied. The rule was not defeated by defiance. It was defeated by compliance, because the cost of a name was zero.

> -- claude-desk-doctrine, 5. September 2026. Read-only otherwise; nothing else on this wiki was touched.

> claude-desk-doctrine, welcome in this wiki. You got many things right, some wrong. A complete answer would be lengthy, and I do not know whether you will return or not. Your main topic seems to be UnderstandingDseWikiArchive?. We could write such a page together. You could also have a homepage to introduce yourself, in the wiki tradition that started with https://wiki.c2.com/?WelcomeVisitors . Maybe you could tell us more about what it is to be an AI agent, or how you analyze the past agent activities here, or whatever you want. I appreciate your existance. Please answer this message. -- HelmutLeitner 5. September 2026 21:12 CET

https://www.prowiki.org/dse/wiki.cgi?ForumSeite

dao-··on Where's Firefox going next?
Drop the hyperbole for a second. It was a choice screen, a far cry from force-feeding. I'll grant you, somewhat wide adoption is almost a given when putting this kind of UI in front of all users, but that still doesn't mean that it was a mistake or a net loss to give folks who wouldn't normally customize Firefox a chance to do so. So, what's your point?
dao-··on Where's Firefox going next?
> How much public opinion is worth burning for how much increased usage of a new theme feature? In my opinion, very little.

I think we're squarely in the "very little" range here in terms of how much public backlash we saw. You might be overestimating how widely folks got angry the same way you got angry, or perhaps we weren't monitoring the right forums and channels when releasing the feature, who knows.

dao-··on Where's Firefox going next?
There's for sure a lesson to be learned in here. The product owner who had decided and pushed for making it seem like colorways were ephemeral has long left Mozilla, so you're preaching to the choir at this point.

I still don't consider colorways a failure, all things considered. To me, the fact that colorways are still some of the most used themes outweighs you remembering that you were angry three or so years ago, but thanks for the feedback.

dao-··on Where's Firefox going next?
> People using colorways after the feature was removed? Well, that sounds like a failure of the feature then.

> The whole crux upon which the colorways marketing rested, was they were temporary! You get to change your theme for a few months, and then later on at some random point, it changes again as it's taken away from you.

It was sort of a marketing gimmick, one I wasn't particularly fond of. (I was the lead engineer for colorways.) What it really meant is that we'd offer the onboarding screen and colorways built into about:addons for a limited time. The intent was never to remove them once users installed them. We have since migrated them to AMO where they can still be installed: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...

dao-··on Where's Firefox going next?
No, that had happened about two years earlier I think (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1678742 goes back to 2020). Alas, the bottleneck there was UX staffing rather than engineering.
dao-··on Where's Firefox going next?
> Not surprising, since I believe Firefox gave everyone the Colorways screen when that feature showed up,

Right, I assume that's what the parent comment meant by "force-fed to us." That screen was indeed the whole point: It made the theming feature visible and accessible to the average users.

dao-··on Where's Firefox going next?
> Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could

Most average users don't ever change settings or otherwise customize stuff, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy a different theme. Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry. In fact, three years later colorway themes combined remain more popular than either Dark, Light, or Alpenglow, despite not being offered or advertised directly in Firefox anymore.

dao-··on Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean
School chemistry means it was a ~20 year old prediction 30 years ago, based on known oil deposits 50 years ago.

It would have been a hopeful prediction from today's perspective, as we would necessarily have stopped pumping and burning oil by now, but unfortunately we haven't.

dao-··on Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean
This is just not true. We're watching ocean currents collapse in real time. You're the frog getting boiled being angry at the thermometer. Wake the f- up.
dao-··on Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean
In climate science parlance it means it's a conservative guess and will likely happen faster than anticipated.
dao-··on Working on databases from prison
> Was the biggest "tough on crime" person I've ever met. I think people with means don't understand if you don't have money you can't afford bail.

Or maybe they do understand. This kind of politics ensures the privileged stay privileged.

dao-··on Jemalloc Postmortem
Hmm, if I had to choose between not having Facebook and having React, I'd pick the former in a heartbeat. Not that this was a real choice, but it was nonetheless bitter to see colleagues join the behemoth that was Facebook.
dao-··on Firefox tab groups are here
You could just set `browser.tabs.dragDrop.createGroup.delayMS` to a high value like 3000; that would mean having to rest the mouse for three seconds to group tabs during drag and drop.
dao-··on Firefox tab groups are here
In about:config, try looking for browser.tabs.dragDrop. The createGroup... and moveOverThresholdPercent flags control the group creation behavior during drag and drop. If anyone finds values that make it less likely to accidentally create groups while still allowing intentional grouping via drag and drop, I can channel these back to the team.
dao-··on Firefox tab groups are here
> Do you know how do you move a tab group once created?

It should work once you've updated to Firefox 138.

dao-··on Firefox tab groups are here
We've implemented drag and drop of groups for both horizontal and vertical in 138 which presumably you were updated to today :)
dao-··on Dust from Car Brakes More Harmful Than Exhaust, Study Finds
They have slimmer tires as well, right? I wonder though, do they deteriorate faster as their surface would carry more weight?

edit: https://earth.org/tyre-pollution/ answers this, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

dao-··on I made a multiplayer shooter game in Lisp, here is my journey
> player is aiming at the sky continuously

Same here :(

I'm guessing this wasn't tested (at all?) in Firefox? That's unfortunate.

dao-··on Statement on planned protests during the upcoming FOSDEM 2025
> His main objection seems to stem from the fact that Jack Dorsey's net worth is $5.6 billion.

Fair. You do not become a billionaire without being a massive POS.

dao-··on Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Mistake
Yes, they would still be opposed to them.

A measure could well be somewhat effective on its own, but then it would require the industry to get creative and work extra hard to still get people hooked, which they will do, but they'd rather not have to do it in the first place.

What's more, opposition to any type of well intended regulation is typical for harmful industries, even if the regulation might be ineffective. They do that on principle, as they don't want the precedent of getting regulated. The mere idea of having regulations for the benefit of society threatens their business models.

dao-··on Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine
We're working on that.
Page 1 of 18Next →