311–320 of 384 posts
Instead of identifying fake content, I'm more interested in features that generate fake stats for analytics, effectively making them useless. However, not sure if the Google money would keep flowing for such efforts.
You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this. And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mo…
> but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding I had been using Firefox since 2002, when it was called Phoenix. I switched to a Chromium-based browser because the performance difference was noticable enough, and I am in the browser often enough, to finally throw in the towel and switch. They have a huge amount of money coming in from Google. Why is this going to acquisitions like this and not towards str…
You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this. And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mo…
I use FakeSpot a lot, and it's less about finding AI written reviews and more about finding any fake reviews, human written or not. They don't need to try and tell if reviews are actually written by a human, just if they are authentic. A reviewer with only 1 review on their whole account will be flagged as suspicious. A reviewer with only reviews for the same company will be marked as definitely fake. It also does things like look for repeated sentiments across all reviews for a product. Sometimes it gets false positives, like a review for a chair might legitimately have 30% of users saying the phrase "super/very/really comfy" at some point in their review. But because it's repeated so much it's flagged as indicating fake reviews.
There are lots of companies working on making convincing language models. ChatGPT is pretty much already at that level for something simple like Amazon reviews. But there aren't any large AI companies working on AI that can fake looking like an authentic group of reviewers. Those are all more shady businesses without billion dollar budgets.
Sure the problem of writing a single convincing review is now solved for those shady businesses. But the really sophisticated ones were already paying humans to write the reviews before good LLM's came along. There's also the issue of sellers themselves including a card or followup email promising a small gift card in exchange for a 5 star review.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was surprised that was still 22.4% even after narrowing down to desktop US https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/unit... I didn't realise Macs were a quarter of the desktop market.
I'm not that surprised... They're not just trendy, but hardware wise pretty nice in terms of quality, appearance and battery life. I don't use it much, but my M1 Air that I got for personal use generally makes it through a week of use on road trips without needing to recharge. Hour or two of email/reading a day, about 60% brightness. I think MacOS feels a bit old at this point, but the hardware is pretty nice for wha…
It's also just blazingly fast compared to the similarly priced ~3yo Dell that it replaced.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how it felt to me too. Stretched too thin. Yet as a small company compared to MS or Google, I can imagine how hard it is to try to thrive or just survive and maintaining a stable path when you're fighting big pockets. I just wished they could rebalance their allocation and focus on simple daily usability things. Just a bit more. ps: for instance, the screenshot tool is brilliant
Stretched too thin? They fired Brendan Eich, who invented JS, led Netscape past IE, and then headed Mozilla. Who, when fired, started Brave and turned it into a bigger system than FF (including the only relatively new free search engine with its own index), from scratch, in a world already dominated by Chrome, and Safari. I know, I know, Eich donated personal money to some cause that some people on the internet didn'…
Mozilla's mistake was not in firing Brendan Eich (and Brendan Eich was not fired).
Mozilla's mistake was in promoting Brendan Eich to CEO.
Mozilla employees said ~"we were not totally comfortable with Brendan as a leader in the Technology role, but we recognized his long history with the Org and his Technical excellence, so we kept mostly quiet. But we strongly object to his promotion to CEO and primary representative of Mozilla to the world, because we do not feel that he represents the Org's values and do not believe he will be an effective leader of us."
Brendan probably could have returned to his CTO role with little fuss. But he may have had larger aspirations, he may have been sick of working under existing leadership, and he may have been personally disappointed by the Org's vote of no confidence in him. All are 100% reasonable! So he resigned. He was not fired. Yes the board might have "recommended" that he resign, but he would have been crazy (and display poor leadership abilities!) to try to stay in the CEO role after that drama.
> and he apologized afterwards
Has he? Not really. At least not contemporaneously with the events at Mozilla, and likely not since then. To be clear -- I don't think he should feel the need to apologize for personally-held beliefs. But I don't think it's possible to be a leader of people in any Org while simultaneously holding beliefs that are so offensive to the same people.
...
We do agree that Brendan's resignation was a net loss for Mozilla. But he might have not been able to succeed in the Mozilla Org anyway. Even as CEO, he'd have the board to contend with. As CTO, he had the CEO and the board to contend with. If there are effective people in that group, they are not making themselves known.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And “their new alliance” was to keep shipping Office for the Mac like they had done for the past decade…
Yes and/but there was real concern then that they'd stop supporting it which would have killed Mac use in corporate environments where specific version of office compatibility was a huge issue (As anyone who remembers the Office 2.0 vs Office 6 update on Windows will remember).
> Recognizing the importance of Mac Office to Apple's survival, Microsoft threatened to cancel the product unless Apple compromised on a number of outstanding issues between the companies. One of these issues was the extent to which Apple distributed and promoted Internet Explorer, as opposed to Navigator, with the Mac OS.
> At the end of June 1997, the Microsoft executive in charge of Mac Office, Ben Waldman, sent a message to Gates and Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer, Greg Maffei. The message reflected Waldman's understanding that Microsoft was threatening to cancel Mac Office:
> The pace of our discussions with Apple as well as their recent unsatisfactory response have certainly frustrated a lot of people at Microsoft. The threat to cancel Mac Office 97 is certainly the strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately. I also believe that Apple is taking this threat pretty seriously
[snip]
> Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office . . . ."
from https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f... paragraph 345 onwards.
Jobs' deal with MS fixed this problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Firefox is slower than all the other browsers" Wow, absolutely not my experience. I use both Chrome and FF regularly on Mac and PC desktops and laptops with vintages ranging from 2011-2023. There is no perceptible difference to me. Admittedly all of my machines are relatively comfortably specced. Desktop-class CPUs, 16GB+ of RAM, SSDs. Perhaps the difference is more pronounced when the computing environment is more…
Firefox is fine on all platforms. Smooth even! But in terms of loading time and raw JS performance, Chrome wins hands down every time in my experience. Using https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ this is quantified not only by some arbitrary number but also through the visibly slower update speed during the DOM tests. I use Firefox on every device, but Chrome is just faster. I can live with the impact on speed for…
But benchmarks are fun too...
this is quantified not only by some arbitrary
number but also through the visibly slower
update speed during the DOM tests.
My opinion is that while benchmarks are vital, I don't believe that a benchmark such as that necessarily correlates with user experience. There are benchmarks where FF is faster and certainly they can't all be right. (At first glance, the one you linked appears to be a mix of modern UI frameworks, which seems pretty reasonable to me)
A look at a browser's dev tools during my "normal" usage certainly aligns with what I'm saying -- network bandwidth/latency really dominates perceived performance in nearly every use case; blasting out DOM updates as fast as possible via a synthetic benchmark does not resemble my browsing sessions.
That is of course just my subjective opinion. You may have other use cases in which your browser is truly the bottleneck. Or you can just have another set of preferences.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember "Firefox OS"?
It was a fantastic gamble IMO. Low chance of success, but enormous payoff if it had succeeded. Imagine a commercially viable alternative to iPhone and Android with multiple manufacturers and a completely open platform. Ultimately, I think they came to market too late and Android moved into the niche (low end market) they were targeting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we'll fight the big guys I'd be more convinced of this if they weren't actively collaborating with the big guys.
"Actively collaborating" meaning doing the bare minimum to keep Google paying while actively fighting the bad things Google does everywhere else? This is the rich philanthropists debate all over again. Yea, sure, they got rich from participating in the system, but they're using a big chunk of that wealth to fight its consequences. Sure as hell beats the alternative, where the only people willing to fight are the ones…