871–880 of 970 posts
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Agree with a lot of this except Mozilla Search. Search is already or very soon going to be an entirely LLM driven space.
Precisely why we need a reliably working search engine without llm, ai and other nonsense
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I mean, Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars and it isn't even close. 'Average' persons don't use Firefox, period - they use Chrome. I dunno when you last looked at browser market share, but Firefox is already extremely niche. Trying to cater to the 'average user' when your entire userbase consists of power users is asinine but Mozilla clearly doesn't understand this. They think it's still 2008 or somethin…
Do you use Firefox? If not, why not? Do normal people use Firefox? I've successfully migrated my girlfriend, parents, and several friends. Half those friends don't even know how to program. So yes, normal people can use Firefox and they really don't notice the difference. > Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars It isn't over till its over. It's trivial to make a stand in this fight. It is beyond me why a la…
Your comment about how YOU had to get the people close to you to use FF was exactly my point. Techies are the only people who use FF now without it being foisted onto them by their techie friends.
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The wider point here is that you can only use FF as long as Mozilla can fund it and Mozilla can only fund it as long as Google funds them. At some point, it will be cheaper for Google to pay monopoly fines than funding Mozilla.
There's penalties other than fines for abusive monopolies. Fines are only the slightest punishment.
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They can use addons, but it shouldn’t be built in to the browser. Not all that complicated.
Because of what? Why it must be addon? Because Ai has negative connotations?
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Translation? Image search? Live captions? Dubbing? Summary? Rewrite text better?
I get very annoyed by generative AI, but to be fair I could imagine an AI-powered "Ctrl+F" which searches text by looser meaning-based matches, rather than strict character matches; for example Ctrl+AI+F "number of victims" in a news article, or Ctrl+AI+F "at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of microwave ovens on Walmart. Or searching for text in images with OCR. Or searching my own browsing history for that…
Newegg has that as a built in filter.
Why do you people keep insisting I "need" an LLM to do things that are standard features?
I find shopping online for clothes to suck, but there's nothing an LLM can do to fix that because it's not a magic machine and I cannot try on clothes at home. So instead, I just sucked it up and went to Old Navy.
Like, these things are still lying to my face every single day. I only use them when there's no alternative, like quickly porting code from python to Java for an emergency project. Was the code correctly ported? Nope, it silently dropped things of course, but "it doesn't need to be perfect" was the spec.
>Or searching for text in images with OCR.
That thing that was a mainline feature of Microsoft OneNote in 2007 and worked just fine and I STILL never used? I thought it was the neatest feature but even my friend who runs everything out of OneNote doesn't use it much. Back in middle school we had a very similar Digital Notebook application that predates OneNote with a similar feature set, including the teachers being able to distribute Master copies of notes for their students, and I also did not use OCR there.
The ONE actual good use case of LLMs that anyone has offered me did not come from techbros who think "Tesla has good software" is not only an accurate statement but an important point for a car, it came from my mom. Turns out, the text generation machine is pretty good at generating text in French to make tests! Her moronic (really rich of course, one of the richest in the state) school district refused to buy her any materials at all for her French classes, so she's been using ChatGPT. It does a great job, because that's what these machines are actually built for, and she only has to fix up the output occasionally, but that task is ACTUALLY easy to verify, unlike most of the things people use these LLMs for.
She STILL wouldn't pay $20 monthly for it. That shouldn't be surprising, because "Test generator" for a high school class is a one time payment of $300 historically, and came with your textbook purchase. If she wasn't planning on retiring she would probably just do it the long way. A course like that is a durable good.
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Couldn’t care less about any of that. English is the world’s dominant language and will remain so for the foreseeable future. There’s nothing wrong with that. And subtitles exist already or can be generated by addons. Most people don’t use them. So, once again, maybe don’t inconvenience the vast majority of users for some small subset of the population.
Just say that you dont care about other ppl, that's it, lol. English proficiency is pretty high bar. Thats multi year effort
Crying about English’s global penetration is super weird while also being pointless, since it’s a fait accompli at this point.
Having worked at Mozilla a while ago, the CEO role is one I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Success is oddly defined: it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time. And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community. I hope Anthony leans into what makes Mozilla special. The past few years, Mozilla's business model has been to just m…
Let me be the customer.
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>sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out. They did that! Why are people proposing that like it's a new idea?
If they were on a sustainable trajectory they wouldn't be selling their soul for advertising money and other ill-advised revenue projects that contradict their stated mission.
The truth is the vast majority of organizations with an endowment are not able to rely on it in perpetuity, I think there's a small subset of organizations that basically amounts to a bunch of elite universities. So it's not the intended or functional or actual purpose of any endowment to be permanent firewall against any conceivable financial hazard for all eternity. Having at one point worked for a non-profit myself that had an endowment, generally, what you do is you calculate how long an organization's operations could be funded by that endowment, and is one of a portfolio of metrics for gauging the financial health of a non-profit. It's more properly understood as a firewall to create some breathing space in the face of financial uncertainty. Again, reaching back to my limited stint at a non-profit, they withdrew a little bit from their endowment during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, as well as during covid. It's rarely the case that an endowment can fund an organization in perpetuity.
And maybe I'm crazy but if someone falsely accuses Mozilla of not maintaining an endowment, it seems relevant to point out that they do actually have one.
If I were the CEO, I would: - focus 100% on Firefox Desktop & Mobile - just a fast solid minimalist browser (no AI, no BS) - other features should be addons - privacy centric - builtin, first-class, adblocker - run on donations - partner with Kagi - layoff 80% of the non-tech employees I worked for them for many years, I guarantee you that Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in c…
> just put engineers in charge
I would like that but is that even possible? Look at Wikipedia. Look at schools. Once an organization develops a bad case of fat "administrator" class, can it be cured or is it terminal?
I don't want to get my hopes up for nothing.
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A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there). Literally everybody is fu*king fed up with M$ arrogance. But you can't get rid of Active Directory and Exchange. Make comparable alternative (with say 80% o…
Are you sure of that? There have been alternatives to Microsoft Office for decades. Yet most businesses use and pay for Microsoft Office, even though their employees most likely don't need anything that doesn't exist in those alternatives. Why would it be different with email?