lmorchard

The Firefox repo gets 100-300 changesets per day, up to 1000 commits per week. Around 100-150 contributors land those in any given week. That's activity comparable to Linux or Chromium. And, the release schedule is accelerating from a four-week cadence to a two-week cadence this fall.

Just because other efforts and initiatives are flasher or noisier doesn't mean Firefox isn't the main priority.

Yeah, this is a real thing: Mozilla doesn't have a team dedicated optimizing Gecko-based Firefox for iOS just in case it can be shipped someday. That Firefox can be built and will run on iOS doesn't mean it will immediately be a great browser there - there are some things you just don't know to optimize until you've gotten the thing into a lot of users' hands over a decent span of time.

> I'd say Mozilla should take the money they're spending on their current nonsense and spend it here instead.

Mozilla makes roughly $500m per year with maybe $1.5b in the bank. That's about 1-2 orders of magnitude short of what would be required to poke Apple in the eye and make them feel it.

Why lol? If you only want to scale to a few dozen or a few hundred or even a few thousand folks, a Mastodon instance is fine. You don't have to scale to the whole world.

Scaling is not useful if that's not your goal

I'm interested in ATProto, but honestly this kind of "cheeky" post just turns me off. These are different approaches to the problem, they don't have to be adversarial.

Another way to look at it: the Twitter-brained perspective is that it's a good thing to build a system where everyone has access to everyone else all of the time - that the global firehose is a primary goal.

That notion is not universally agreed upon as desirable. Some folks and groups of folks value membranes with varying degrees of permeability.

With Mastodon, each instance is a self-contained community server with the option to link up with peers of similar shape. That this arrangement makes a whole-world view difficult is seen as a feature-not-bug by many users.

Also, since each instance is a self-contained complete unit of microblogging-shaped community, that means a relatively small technical team can host & maintain that unit for a decent-sized group of folks with relatively cheap cost.

Put a bunch of those together in federation, and you have a chance at a pretty well-distributed spread of moderators and caretakers. Depending on how any particular instance's funding and governance is setup, that can also result in members being more or less involved in the running of the place. (Which, also, is why some folks value being "belonging" to a particular instance.)

In ATProto, the "instance" is the complete stack you'd need to have ownership over the whole shebang. Some folks and communities value that. Versus Mastodon, Bluesky is just a much much bigger box.

You can also separate Mastodon from ActivityPub. You can make new apps atop ActivityPub - and folks are. Photos, videos, calendars, etc. It's based on JSON Linked Data, and that's expandable to other types of activities and data. If you really wanted to, you could make a great big all-encompassing app UX that handles everything. But, I guess no one's found that interesting enough for it to take off yet.

And then once you've self-hosted ever component in the stack, you have one (1) Mastodon instance equivalent :)

Meanwhile, Undertale, one of the most celebrated video games, famously has a 1000+ line switch statement and AI had nothing to do with it. Sometimes you have to bang out something that works, just to even get the chance to be annoyed at how bad it is for next version.

No, but it's increasingly penalizing folks for focusing on well-crafted code on company time.

My comments are often more off-the-cuff than my blog posts—I spend more time editing the posts, usually

As I'm asking folks what bits they think are LLM imprints, they keep showing me bits that I originally wrote. It's really weird.

I mean, the irony is that those sentences were in my original draft before running it past the LLM

> The web was objectively awful as a technology

I, for one, remember when I could crash Netscape Navigator by using CSS too hard (i.e. at all) or trying to make a thing move 10px with DHTML. But I kept trying to make browser to thing.

I guess I have a grating LLM-voice, then, because I don't think it sounds particularly different than how I've written other posts.

Which bits? And don't say the em-dashes because I've been over-using them since high school

Sure, I ran the post past an LLM for some ideas on clarity and tightening it up - but I wrote, edited, and published it myself.

Well, yeah, that's what a lot of folks are sad about - they can't practice the craft concurrently with the livelihood quite as much. But if you don't have a livelihood, you probably don't have as much space for craft at all.

Yeah, this is a lot of what I'm doing with LLM code generation these days: I've been there, I've done that, I vaguely know what the right code would look like when I see it. Rather than spend 30-60 minutes refreshing myself to swap the context back into my head, I prompt Claude to generate a thing that I know can be done.

Much of the time, it generates basically what I would have written, but faster. Sometimes, better, because it has no concept of boredom or impatience while it produces exhaustive tests or fixes style problems. I review, test, demand refinements, and tweak a few things myself. By the end, I have a working thing and I've gotten a refresher on things anyway.

What you consider fun isn't universal. Some folks don't want to just tinker for half an hour, some folks enjoy getting a particular result that meets specific goals. Some folks don't find the mechanics of putting lines of code together as fun as what the code does when it runs. That might sound like paid work to you, but it can be gratifying for not-you.

Like, fine, here's a personal example: I wanted to build a system that posts web links I share to a bot account on the fediverse. That seemed like a fun result to me.

I wanted to self-host the links, so I installed Linkding. (I didn't write Linkding.) For the fediverse bot, I installed gotosocial as the service host (I didn't write gotosocial.)

From there, a cronjob running a small program using Linkding and gotosocial APIs could do the trick. Decided to do it in golang, because the standalone binaries are easy to deploy.

Writing that small program didn't seem like fun - I've already played with those APIs and golang. What I wanted, for my enjoyment, was the completed system.

So, I took 10 minutes to write out a quick spec for the program and what I wanted it to do. I loaded that up as context for Claude Code along with some pointers for building CLI apps in golang. I let it rip and, in about 20 minutes, Claude produced a functional tool. It also wrote a decent README based on my original prose.

I reviewed the code, did some testing, made some tweaks, called it done. My bookmarks are now regularly posted to a bot account on the fediverse. This is an enjoyable outcome for me - and I didn't have to type every line of code myself.

For bonus points, I also had Claude Code gin up some GitHub Actions workflows to lint, test, build, and release multi-platform binaries for this tool. I've done these things before, but they're tedious. More enjoyable to have the resulting automations than to build them. And now I have them: I can make tweaks to this tool and get builds just through the GitHub web UI.

I've since repeated this pattern with a handful of other small personal tools. In each case, I wanted the tool and the utility it offered. I didn't care about the process of writing the code. It's working pretty well for me.

It's different for everyone, so no one answer would likely satisfy you

This is just obtuse. Some folks have fun building their own pizza oven, curing & slicing their own meat, and mixing their own dough. Some folks like to buy mostly pre-made stuff and just play with a few special ingredients. Some folks want to make 5 different pizzas with different flavors. Some folks just order a pizza.

Some folks walk out of their house and start hiking. Some folks drive somewhere and then start walking. Some folks take photos from the car. Some folks take a roadtrip.

All of these things ask for different effort & commitment with different experiences & results as the payoff. At least be honest about that.

> Firefox OS: 2013

Apple wouldn't let Firefox onto the iPhone. Pretty big writing on the wall, there. Turns out it's really hard for a sub-billion-dollar company to succeed with a mobile OS, though, which is why we only really have two left. (Even Microsoft couldn't swing it)

> Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014

Shipping the only major browser that can't play movies, cool cool cool.

> Directory Tiles: 2014

Nearly everything on the web visited with Firefox is funded by advertising. The new tab page is one of the least obtrusive surfaces in the browser that still gets seen. Seemed worth a shot to try building an ad stack in that space which tried not to surveil.

> Pocket acquisition: 2015

Discovery on the web is hard. Maybe that's a job for a browser? Maybe folks will pay for it? Maybe it can pay folks on the web?

> Firefox Focus: 2015

Privacy seems like a good idea. Maybe folks would like a browser that focuses on that?

> Cliqz experiment: 2017

That's Brave Search, these days. Lots of folks seem to like it?

> "Looking Glass" Mr. Robot sponsorship: 2017

I don't know the whole story there. IMO, looked to me like some earnest folks tried to do something fun but rolled a 1 on the d20 for a critical fail. Footguns abound.

Not saying all the above were handled with perfection, but I was there for all of them and there were good folks doing things that made sense at the time. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess?

"Nothing going on here is permanent loss... it isn't a big deal to rebuild to the status quo."

There is no status quo to rebuild.

Loss of trust, loss of momentum, loss of context, loss of relationships - insofar as any of these things existed, they are permanently destroyed. That's what will need rebuilding. The original process took decades, if not a century or more. You can't just disrupt that and then expect to restore it easily - or expect it to spontaneously reconfigure on its own with reliably desirable outcomes.

People working in the government are not fungible labor units like GPUs or VMs, to be spun up and disposed of without consequence. The network formed between people is even more important than the individual jobs - and it has an insane cold-start penalty.

Maybe if the folks in charge were absolute geniuses in leadership and organizational psychology, something miraculous might happen. But, that's never a thing to expect in general, let alone given the evidence at hand. They're making the classic blunder of trying to rewrite the system from scratch, which has almost never gone well for anyone.

That happens on small web sites, sometimes. Maybe try again later, as advised?

At the same time, it's rather myopic to disrupt what reciprocal incentives there might be in an information sharing environment and somehow expect that the sharing will continue indefinitely.

I mean, not compared to having to stand up an entire server cluster of Docker containers and friends

Yeah, that sounds like fundamental team dysfunction that no amount of engineering tooling or gatekeeping will address in any positive way.

Even if correct (doubtful), you also get to experience actual disease caused by the virus. Which, sure, for many folks, was mild.

But, for many other folks, it was decidedly not mild at all. The funny thing is you don't hear as much from the latter group of folks - because, extrovert or not, lots of them stopped talking altogether.

Different countries have different laws regarding encryption and money