Anything to avoid working on the browser itself. Very sad to see the decline of Mozilla and Firefox.
I wonder if someone could fork it and take all the people from Mozilla who are actually contributing to the technical mission (a small group these days!). Brendan Eich would've been perfect for this, but he's got his own browser now and wisely chose to use chromium as the base.
If there was a serious financial effort that went into a fork of Firefox, I'd be all on board with it. The problem is these knockoffs that you know aren't going to keep up with development and will be relatively short-lived.
Say what you want about Brendon Eich, but I wish he forked Firefox for Brave. That's the kind of effort that Firefox deserves, because it's by no means a bad browser. Putting aside some relatively minor performance issues (that don't manifest with average use), it's a great browser and I hope it sticks around for the sake of still allowing a good level of ad-blocking and such.
And yes, Firefox pretty much still exists in this form because of Google. That relationship has also accelerated the decline of Mozilla.
>effort that went into a fork of Firefox, I'd be all on board with it.
Chrome was designed to be "forkable" and put in different wrapper UI. Firefox was at that time battling to get rid of XUL and add a basic sandbox. Then pwn2own decided not to include Firefox in another year hacks because Firefox made no improvements at all in previous 2 years. This hurt me to hear as a long time Firefox user, had to be hurtful to Firefox management and developers too, but that was the fact. Mozilla lost their way in 2010-2017 and can't recover from that, the gap was too wide. Mozilla thought that after defeating IE and Safari they can't lose the market.
Mozilla had an opportunity to make Firefox modular but burnt it with Servo.
Nobody attacked Firefox successfully, but that's hardly a point against it. I don't know what "made no improvements at all in previous 2 years is supposed to mean", either, since we had just released a major overhaul of the optimizing compiler a few months before Pwn2Own: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/11/warp-improved-js-performan....
Which browser developers do you propose paused these donations in order to "avoid working on the browser itself"? In what way would that even accomplish that end, given that those donations weren't even going to browser development in the first place?
Yes, I am aware that these donations don't fund browser development, and that hucksters laundered the reputation of Firefox to take donations to advance their social causes instead of the browser.
I don't know if I agree with parent comment's concern. The what we do/what we fund pages are full of where the actual money goes. At worst, there's no disclaimer warning off people that arrived with a misconception.
But if we were to buy the premise, whether Mozilla can't or chooses not to use the money for browser development doesn't matter in the slightest.
And I think there's a pretty big citation needed on "they can't". Sure, they can't divert non profit funds in to the for profit corporation. But they could use it to build open source software with strategic alignment - like funding Rust.
Yeah but who would have the guts the sue a company that has worked so much to improve the world? You should be one of those people who hoarded toilet paper to resell it overpriced during the start of the pandemic to do something like that
The ends justify the means? If they hold me up at gunpoint for donations should I just not complain because they do other things that inxg33k1 believes improve the world?
I stopped using Firefox years ago because of such “improvements” they obsess over instead of stewarding one of the very few web browsers which could have helped keep the web open but is instead borderline controlled opposition.
What exactly are you forking here? Your README implies that it's for iOS, where every browser is just a skin over Apple's WebKit engine.
(More generally, forking a browser is generally a doomed prospect: even Mozilla and Google struggle to keep up with vulnerabilities and standards churn. Most other forks of Firefox are laughably/irresponsibly stale, and most "forks" of Chrome are really just reskinned Chromium builds.)
Edge represents the best possible case for browser forking: a company approximately the same size as Google, with approximately the same technical resources, and a history of in-house browser development to boot. Most forks are a far cry from that.
While partially using annotations only allows you to eliminate /instances/ of bugs, if you completely apply the annotations then it can allow you to eliminate the entire class of bugs (theoretically). Consider nullabiliy in java.
> I don't see that all of the great masses of Cpp code and libraries would be rewritten or annotated to use these new features.
It's much more likely and tractable that C++ libraries will be annotated than that they'll be rewritten from scratch in Rust.
Why should taxpayers subsidize unsustainable prices for the restaurants/shops/services?
If it's just left alone, the market will react to this. If a 1BR apt costs $2500/mo, then the price of a sandwich might go to $25 to be able to pay that sandwich-makers $75k/yr wage. And if SFers don't like paying $25 for a sandwich then they can vote for more density.
Nah, there are much more viable market solutions. There will be 4 sandwich makers sharing that apartment, or they will commute for hours, or the sandwiches will be made somewhere else and shipped in, or the sandwich shop will make you build your own sandwich, or it will understaff and you'll have to wait 30 minutes for your sandwich...
Over the years, a common argument I've heard against the tactic of calling all kinds of right-leaning people Nazis and Racists was that one day we might really need to identify Real Nazis as Nazis and then nobody will believe it (the boy who cried wolf).
That's not the problem. The problem is that for many, the years and years of calling your run-of-the-mill Republicans and whatnot "nazis" has diluted the term, just like GP mentioned.
So, now, when people try to get others to understand that the Nazis we now have are almost exactly the same we had in Germany way back then, people don't really make that connection (even if they say they do) on emotional level. Instead, they associate the self-professed Neo-Nazis with the "nazi Republicans" and the not-really-a-nazi-alt-righters that have been cried at in the 2000's.
Source: many acquaintances who are clearly very, very confused on the matter.
One would think that, for the people calling Republicans "nazis" in the 2000's, the absence of swastikas and Nazi Hails should have cleared things up. But they did it anyway.
People are not simple creatures, and things like crying the wolf actually do confuse us pretty easily.
So you're actually agreeing that someone waving a swastika and calling for the extermination of jews can be considered a Nazi, yet you choose not to do it, just to spite those lefties that annoyed you in the 2000s?
And, specifically, they annoyed you with their use of slightly-hyperbolic rhetoric, used to underline their contention that the Republican strategy of racial division and incitement of culture wars may create fertile ground for a resurgence of staples of the fascist ideologies? And that, if we continue down this path, America may some day start electing strongmen playing on feelings such as xenophobia?
I am not doing any of that. I'm just pointing out that this is a very real case of "crying the wolf" effect working it's voodoo, and that maybe, in the future, something could be learned from all this.
Personally, I'm not even from the US, and find many of the policies of the Republicans almost absurd. Where I'm from, your run-of-the-mill republican would be considered so deep into the right wing as to be completely niche. Almost alt-right, if you wish.
Look, I see where you're coming from. But is it so hard to see that waving the nazi stamp around willy-nilly really will dilute the meaning and connotations of the term, no matter how much you think it was justified. Nazi's are probably the Satan of modern times, literally the thing people use to mean "the worst there can ever be". However Republican policies seem baffling to me, I see no reasonable way to stamp them with that kind of stamp. They're 50% responsible for running your country, for God's sake :)
I can see how that criticism isn't completely invalid. I just don't see how it connects to this case, considering the website in question chose to name itself after a well-known Nazi propaganda paper (as in the realest, 1930s Nazis in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Stürmer)
There's also some confusion about terms, obviously. The meaning of Nazi has morphed and includes more than actual, card-carrying party members. The dictionary lists "a person with extreme racist or authoritarian views" as one of the definitions. It is also meant, and generally understood, as an insult, and a reference to a certain mindset (cf "Grammar Nazi"). And while neither Trump nor most other Republicans would be considered Nazis, there are some obvious tendency at play in the party that invite the comparison, such as the attempts to disenfranchise groups of voters, or, more recently, the Presidents' encouragement of police officers to "rough up" arrestees.
The only thing I said was that the term you are talking about most probably does not inspire the loathing it should (and once did) after all the crying-the-wolf. And considering that, I tried to hint that maybe in the future it might be sensible to take this effect into account before going down the same rabbit hole again.
> And considering that, I tried to hint that maybe in the future it might be usensible to take this effect into account before going down the same rabbit hole again.
To who? Is it implicit that I've misused the term? That I am misusing it here?
Who requires this admonition? If not me, then why are you burying this dire warning arm-deep in a comment thread on HN?
They're calling themselves Nazis. They wave flags, with Swastikas.
I do understand that GWB wasn't a Nazi. And maybe there was a bit too much wolf-crying. But even if the boy has had this annoying habit at crying "wolf" every day–does that render you unable to recognise a wolf when he's staring you in the eyes?
Who is "they" in this sentence? The original comment was giving a hypothetical subject.
Someone waving a flag with a Swastika, non-ironically, yes, they're a Nazi. Someone calling themself a Nazi? Yes, they're a Nazi.
Holocaust-denier and notable anti-semite and crazy person David Icke? A delusional idiot, but not a nazi. KKK members who believed National Socialism was still socialism and battled Nazis in WWII? Racist fuckheads, but not Nazis. Francoist Faciscts? Probably not Nazis, although I'd forgive you for making a strong case for it.
We have words and phrases like white supremacist, anti-semite, racists, and Nazi. They all mean things, and there's plenty of overlap. I'm not sure what we gain by mislabelling one group as another, other than opening ourselves up to accusations we're crying wolf.
Wellll... I mean I gave a list of things to watch for in a collective group. If a collective group is doing all these things, on camera, proudly... you're probably safe calling them Neo-Nazis and "Nazi" for short.
While the Klan has a long and inglorious tradition, it merges seamlessly with the pro-Nazi elements of the US in world war 2, for the most part. And Nazis are what folks had in mind when they say, "Anti-semite".
So I'm curios if YOU were ever confused. Or if this is for the rhetorical masses (who by and large don't seem too confused once they see a picture, that I can discern).
> If a collective group is doing
> all these things
If a collective group is doing any of the other things you've mentioned, I'd say they're pretty definitely a Nazi.
> [the Klan] merges seamlessly with
> the pro-Nazi elements of the US in
> world war 2
I don't think that's accurate. Overlap, yes. I'm not sure what muddying the water between different hate groups achieves.
> Nazis are what folks had in mind
> when they say, "Anti-semite"
I don't think that's even slightly accurate. Anti-semitism is a (terrible) feature of many many ideologies, from ISIS to mediaeval Iberian Catholicism, to people who believe that we're all controlled by shape-shifting masonic lizard aliens.
> So I'm curios if YOU were ever confused
Yes. Is David Duke a Nazi? Milo Ywhatever-his-name-is? Gamergate people? The_Donald?
Duke acts in accordance with most of their principles, so yes.
> Milo Ywhatever-his-name-is?
He hangs out with some self-proclaimed Nazis, but we've yet to see him walking in a march waving the flag.
> Gamergate people?
I actually think most are sexist. I see plenty of post-gaters resisting Trump and decrying the violence we're discussing.
> The_Donald
The reddit? Or DJT himself? For the reddit, I don't even know what it is. It's like one of those lego advertisement cartoons that doesn't have to make sense so long as we all agree we should buy Legos.
As for DJT himself? I would have said no before last week, but that last press conference really left me wondering.
I tried to think of a realistic scenario where someone would be inclined to fake the existence of a restaurant: to make real estate look more appealing? If a RE developer built a development with several dozen houses, it could boost the values of houses enough to make it worth the cost of faking a few trendy bars/creameries/restaurants next door.
The study doesn't control for companies are probably much more likely to have Diversity Programs if they are doing really well.
Sounds like a study that finds people who buy Rolexes live longer. It's not the Rolex: it's that only rich people who have money to take care of themselves well can afford a Rolex.
That's not the right comparison, statistically. You'd want to compare the number of police encounters vs the number of police encounters that result in death, broken down by race. The statistic that you quoted would skew if one race has less encounters with police than the other group (which if I recall is the case here. I think NYT and WSJ both ran articles several months ago about this.)
Not that this changes the rough idea here which is that someone changing a license plate on a car shouldn't have a gun pointed at her and have to depend more on her de-escalation skills than the officer's.
These meetings should not have any cost to their reputation and for the most part they don't. No matter what you think of the President, it is unquestionably good for America for our savvy CEOs to be advising him.
People trying to punish the CEOs who advise him are harmful to our country, and worse than the politicians that make decisions to further their own careers instead of do what's best for their country/state/county.
That would be true if the purpose of the meetings --- really, for any President, but maybe most especially with this one --- was to advise. But it's not: it's to endorse. The way you know that is, the meetings pointlessly include several competing big names simultaneously, and are organized around a photo op.
If you want to dispute that these meetings are done for their optics and not for their productivity, fine. You won't convince me, or I think many other people, but that doesn't mean you're not entitled to hold your own opinion about them.
All I'd like to establish is that it is, at this point in the conversation, not reasonable for you to write as if you don't understand the objection people have to these meetings.
If the meetings are done for optics and not productivity, why have Musk and Kalanick not mentioned that? Musk said he left on principle, and Kalanick said being on the council was getting in the way of his goal.
You're repeating yourself needlessly. Obviously, people who leave these groups have decided that the liabilities of endorsing Trump outweigh all potential benefits.
> Obviously, people who leave these groups have decided that the liabilities of endorsing Trump outweigh all potential benefits.
Obviously. The point of my OP was that there shouldn't be liabilities to advising the president (liabilities for endorsement are another matter).
> You're repeating yourself needlessly.
Because the central point of our disagreement is whether being on the economic council is an endorsement or not. Musk and Kalanick both being on the council and loudly leaving it, but not telling any of the public that the advisory council is an empty photo-op seems unlikely to me. So I wanted to get your explanation for why that would happen, but you twice didn't respond to the question.
I don't really even concede the validity of question.
Despite what they may say, tech leaders don't go to these things in the hope of seriously influencing the administration. They're grown ups, and most of them pay lobbying operations. All of them understand that nothing important starts at a giant polished wooden table occupied by their competitors on one side and the news media on the other.
You honestly believe Tim Cook woke up the morning of that last meeting and thought to himself, "the best thing I can do with my time today is to sit down at a table with Donald Trump and Eric Schmidt"? Of course you don't.
The reality is: Trump's invitation to these events is coercive, in the sense that Cook will make news by not attending, and 50% (well, OK, 39.2%) of the US market will be irritated by that news. Attending is problematic, but if he shuts up, it's less problematic than not attending. So that's what he does.
It's for a similar reason that Musk and Kalanick don't hold press conferences decrying the theater of these photo op meetings. The political photo-op is as old as cameras, and tilting at windmills offers them nothing but downside.
Which brings us back to the reason we're irritated that Cook and Schmidt go to these things. The current calculation they're making says they lose less by going, and effectively providing a soft endorsement, than by boycotting. That's because their own employees --- who overwhelmingly oppose the Trump administration --- are allowing them to get away with it. If even 5% of Google's employees credibly threatened a work stoppage of any sort over Schmidt's co-opting of their work to endorse Trump, Schmidt would not be allowed to attend; the costs to Google would outweigh the benefits.
Being quiet to not irritate the 39.2% of their customers is plausible, but in the case of Musk and Kalanick they didn't stay quiet. They left, and stated publicly the reasons why they left. I'm still inclined to believe that if the council was nothing more than a photo-op for Trump, Musk and Kalanick would've said that when they left. It would've made them look even better than they do now to that 39.2% ("I want to give my advice but the council is just a photo-op" is better to that segment than "I'm not giving my valuable advice because it's no longer a net-positive for my career/company").
Since, again, the fact that these are giant round-table meetings, of a sort that never occur in the industry itself, performed largely in front of cameras and with every word recorded, I think the extraordinary claim here is yours, and the evidence you've supplied is essentially nil.
That said, I think I've been pretty clear that I don't expect you to agree with me; I simply expect you to stop writing as if you can't imagine any reason other than (I suppose) bloody-mindedness that people would have a problem with Cook and Schmidt and Pichai attending these meetings.
I'm having trouble deciding whether this breathtakingly naive or breathtakingly cynical. It seems like you're arguing that CEOs and corporations should abstain from any kind of moral reasoning no matter what political indicators suggest. This seems odd to me, if only because consumers are quite likely to to adjust their purchasing decisions if they feel politically alienated by a firm's involvement with government.
It's cutting off your nose to spite your face. No one is better off by sabotaging our economy except those who want to further their political careers by saying "I told you so" at the end of his term. It's politicking of the worst kind and damages the democracy.
Good democracy:
- fierce competition in the election
- choose winner
- work together as much as possible to do what's best for the country
Replacing step 3 with "do as much as possible to obstruct the winner and hurt the country until we win again" is stupid. It slows us down and weakens the functioning of the democracy.
Nothing wrong with anyone saying "We are fully against policy X". There is something wrong with "We are fully against policy X, so we will harm unrelated things: Y and Z (the economy in this case)".
"Work together as much as possible to do what's best for the country" -- this is a two-way street. Do you believe the Trump administration is sincerely trying to work with anyone?
Where's the policy evidence of that? Musk's involvement came to nothing, he resigned abruptly in response to yet another executive order that went against his values.
It seems more like Trump sits at the table with people to have his own photo taken. Which is not much of a surprise because that has been his entire career for the past 30 years.
The last bullet I could've better stated as "work together as much as possible to do what both parties believe is best for the country". I'm not saying the opposition party should support all the policies of pres, but they should support the ones that they believe are good. It is good for the admin to have input from leaders of economy, and the dems believe that.
Since the Democrats generally do not believe that the purpose of these meetings is to provide the President with operating advice for the country or the economy, it is not incumbent on them to support the meetings. And so, they do not.
Saying you're 'fully against policy X' while cooperating with someone who is implementing policy X is a self-contradictory position. It seems as if you're assuming different policies to be totally independent of each other and that there is some objectively good direction for the the economy as a whole which is clear to all.
I'm curious, do you feel the same way about insurance companies that expressed dissatisfaction with the Affordable Care Act and stopped participating in the exchanges, or do you view that decision as purely business-motivated?
> Saying you're 'fully against policy X' while cooperating with someone who is implementing policy X is a self-contradictory position.
No it's not. The president has an enormous jurisdiction, and you can cooperate on some issues and abstain on others. And you can advise on all of them.
> there is some objectively good direction for the the economy as a whole which is clear to all
It is clear to all that the economy is best off if the titans of our economy give their thoughts to those making policy and decision. I'm not saying everyone has to help the pres do whatever he wants, but withholding advise from the president in the area of economy because you disagree with his stance on immigration is nothing but spite that harms the country.
It is clear to all that the economy is best off if the titans of our economy give their thoughts to those making policy and decision.
Count me out of this, please. If there's evidence of a pattern of bad decisions that are deleterious to the economy as a whole - something each person has to decide for themselves, obviously - then I think it's better not to assist with that process. Otherwise you risk enabling bad outcomes.
> It is clear to all that the economy is best off if the titans of our economy give their thoughts to those making policy and decision.
I don't think that's clear to all, but, in any case, the “titans of our economy” or going to do that whether or not they participate in formal executive commissions or not.
This is absolutely not "clear to all". You're always out on a treacherous rhetorical ledge when you try to speak for "all" in a contentious discussion, but here you've run right off the edge, Wile-E Coyote-style.
That's an irrelevant question, because Trump has demonstrated no interest in input from leaders of the economy.
A more relevant question is whether it's worth it for leaders of the industry to publicly pretend to give input to a person who they know will ignore it.
I disagree. Doing that legitimizes this president and their actions, which is something that plain should not be happening.
Not to mention that it was clear from the start that Trump was never going to listen to them anyway. Just about everyone on that board said no to the Muslim ban. He did it anyway.
This is exactly right. Trump seeks legitimacy for his policies, and by attending these meetings, tech executives give it to him. They get nothing in return. Sad!
Not sure if LTV for blue apron is in their IPO docs or not, but to put that number into perspective: their cheapest plan is $60 per week, so if they hold onto a customer for 6 months, that $1560. 20% profit margin would mean $312. No idea if those numbers are anywhere close to correct.
The magnitude of CAC and LTV are only meaningful together. A ferrari dealership might have a $5000 cost to acquire a customer and that would be a bargain, because their LTV is $250k+.
Not sure if I'm the average meal kit customer, but I don't choose to receive them every week. More like once every 2-3 weeks. Just something to consider in a customer's LTV.
According to their S-1, it seems as if their typical customer does indeed place an order pretty much every week. That certainly wouldn't be me. But, then, I think about using some of these services from time to time--but almost always end up driving to the store and picking up my own ingredients.
I wonder if someone could fork it and take all the people from Mozilla who are actually contributing to the technical mission (a small group these days!). Brendan Eich would've been perfect for this, but he's got his own browser now and wisely chose to use chromium as the base.