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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#871
post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a bit rich to claim that Brave cares about privacy when just one year ago they were spoofing identities to commit charity fraud. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

Your comment shows malice (ascribing motives to us), as that blunder was quickly corrected, and the tokens at stake came from our fund. Try Hanlon’s Razor.

> Your comment shows malice [...] Try Hanlon’s Razor.

For the sake of internal consistency you should accuse GP of stupidity, not malice.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode. Just curious, but could Cranelift (or rustc_codegen_cranelift, I'm not sure which would be the closest) also acquire a C-transpiling backend, making it a viable replacement for mrustc? There might be quite a few people willing to fund that sort of work, since it could suffice to bring Rust to a whole lo…

Yes, it's plausible that were Rust to adopt Cranelift as a supported backend, you could use Cranelift as an intermediary to translate Rust MIR (via Cranelift CLIF) into C. Outputting functional-but-horrifying C would not be terribly difficult. The CLIF format is low level but relatively architecture-independent.

Sorry for question, but will you continue work on adopt it to Rust?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#873

I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures. This is not even included in comp. One time, the CFO sent out a missive urging everyone to stay in AirBnB to save money and the execs (literally the following week) booked $500/night rooms at a hotel in NYC. I think the moment…

$500/night for a hotel in NYC sounds relatively cheap. $400 is about the lowest you can find. If you find $350, I would really recommend you not stay there.

I think you're out of touch with pricing or have a very high bar for what you consider acceptable in a hotel. When I was in New York last month I paid $125 for a perfectly pleasant room with good online reviews (in the top 20% or so of NYC hotels on TripAdvisor). It was well located in Manhattan walking distance from most of what I wanted to do and I had no complaints.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#874

I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures. This is not even included in comp. One time, the CFO sent out a missive urging everyone to stay in AirBnB to save money and the execs (literally the following week) booked $500/night rooms at a hotel in NYC. I think the moment…

$500/night for a hotel in NYC sounds relatively cheap. $400 is about the lowest you can find. If you find $350, I would really recommend you not stay there.

Unless your criteria is 4+ stars in an excellent location, or at at very peak time of year, those prices are completely out of line.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#875
post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I poured into Mozilla and the community, I have always been critical of how political it has always been. It inherited a lot of that from the end of Netscape.

Could you elaborate please? What happened near the end of Netscape that made them political?

Netscape had three phases, the startup, the amazing new big business, and then the slow decline. During the slow decline a lot of fiefdoms popped up. With some people control was more important than collaboration, process was more important than results. Too many suits took over without any real engineering prowess to understand how the things they wanted to do would actually work, and how long they'd take.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#876
post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a bit rich to claim that Brave cares about privacy when just one year ago they were spoofing identities to commit charity fraud. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

Your comment shows malice (ascribing motives to us), as that blunder was quickly corrected, and the tokens at stake came from our fund. Try Hanlon’s Razor.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#877

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interested in hearing more about your views on this. I use Firefox and Thunderbird almost exclusively, and every time I think about donating money I then remember all the wasted time and effort they've poured into what seem to be pipe dreams over the years. I WANT them to succeed. I WANT there to be an alternative on the desktop to Chrome (now that Edge is basically rebranded Chromium), and on iOS to both Ch…

Not really able to make a good argument against it, the poor leadership I had to deal with is one of the reasons I left. I'm still happy to use Firefox and want them to not have to rely on Google Search placement for funding but the company has a shaky track record and it's reasonable to view them critically. FWIW while Firefox OS was a failure I don't actually view that project as a mistake - trying to give mobile p…

Thanks for the reply. I see my comment got downvoted (I figured it would), but I was still curious as to what your response would be and I appreciate it.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#878

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is unreliable. Perhaps you missed it, but Verizon bought Yahoo!, realized how Marissa's five year default search deal with Firefox was bleeding money as most users reset their default to Google, and Mozilla and Verizon declared the other party in breach in rapid succession. This will go to court, and my money is on Verizon. There will be no balloon payment of the last two years. The jump in comp in 2017, as…

According to this article, the lawsuit was settled in September 2019, though it doesn't give a reference and I haven't seen it reported elsewhere. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3487825/mozilla-in-tro...

Thanks, I missed that. I asked around, and I'm told that Mozilla's suit was dismissed with prejudice in Santa Clara County Superior Court (original case id is 17CV319921, I think). If true this helps account for both Chris Beard termination and layoffs.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment shows malice (ascribing motives to us), as that blunder was quickly corrected, and the tokens at stake came from our fund. Try Hanlon’s Razor.

> Your comment shows malice [...] Try Hanlon’s Razor. For the sake of internal consistency you should accuse GP of stupidity, not malice.

Do a search on that handle in connection to Brave/me, notice patterns. Also I do not take ascribing motives to be a sign of low intelligence, per se.

Product and design people who were involved in our blunder had the best of intentions, and I'm not saying they were stupid either, but they missed the mark and we corrected within a month.

To say "fraud" is to accuse us of a crime, deceiving for gain, which we did not do. We were the source of funds, we did not take anything due to anyone. But the product design was on edge of infringing rights to publicity, even if by scraping, and the appearance of donation fraud was bad. Sorry again for this error. The team learned from it.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#880
post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> curiously, none of them want to do this. How do you know? If you ask someone whether they're harboring murderous intent, they're obviously going to say they aren't. Most people that actually commit murder will go on to claim that they never had murderous intent, and in the majority of cases, they're probably not even lying. Yet they still murdered. We can't even understand our own motives and intentions. The intern…

If you think that there's some kind of connection between the (alleged) illusory nature of consciousness and practical issues of workplace politics, then you've probably gone off on an enormous tangent. In any case, I have no idea how you think your main argument gets from A to B, so I can't usefully respond to it. I know that my Muslim colleagues don't want to murder me in the ordinary everyday sense that I know lot…

> If you think that there's some kind of connection between the (alleged) illusory nature of consciousness and practical issues of workplace politics, then you've probably gone off on an enormous tangent.

Yeah, I absolutely did. Upvoted.

> In any case, I have no idea how you think your main argument gets from A to B, so I can't usefully respond to it.

It boils down to "professionals should not allow differing opinions on non-work-related issues to negatively impact their working relationships, no matter how strongly they disagree." The fact that no one knows anything about anything just helps people cope with that reality.

> I assume that you don't intend this as a characterization of the beliefs of actual white supremacists (?), so I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

It's a placeholder for any ideology, at least insofar as it remains in the realm of ideology and isn't unduly brought into the professional environment by the accused ideologue.

If someone starts bringing up politics, religion, or other controversial topics at work, redirect the conversation and ignore. If someone dispenses of their personal time advocating for causes that some others may find distasteful or even repugnant? Ignore, live and let live. It's not a professional issue.

Taking adverse action against an employee for using their private time to participate in the political process is not only already illegal in many states, but it's also hugely counterproductive. The ideologue is essentially compelled to lay their career at the problem ideology's altar (often post-facto, because the muckrakers are digging up some ancient LiveJournal entry or whatever). This creates fertile ground for a new internal narrative of heroic and principled self-martyrdom in behalf of the problem ideology. It's a fast track to radicalization, and you've likely just made the ideologue unsure how they're going to pay their rent next month. Bad scene.

If someone really hates the problem ideology and not the individual currently fascinated with it, "fire ideologue" will be pretty far down on the todo list.

tl;dr, If the employee is doing good work and they're not disrupting the work environment, leave them alone.

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Pre-edit: harassment, stalking, direct interference with other employees' lives, threats of violence, and other types of red-flag behaviors should never be ignored, no matter how professionally someone behaves during business hours. Dangerous behavior should always be reported to HR and any applicable civil organization.

Pre-edit 2: This is not medical advice and I'm not your attorney. I'm not a psychologist, psychiatrist, or counselor of any type. As discussed in the grandparent comment, I made all this up mostly on accident, everything I think is surely wrong and dumb, and everything I type should be ignored.

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