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I use live captions for this a lot and find that it's pretty accurate. It's helpful if someone says something that I don't catch and I can just scroll up the captions to make sure I understand.

Also helps if someone tries to interrupts and the live caption can notate who was the breaker so I can call on them without a dumb-sounding "uh who was that?"


> Mozilla couldn't find a sustainable business model for Fakespot despite its popularity

I don't know if it's fair for me to armchair quarterback, but still - what was their business model when they decided to do the acquisition? From the outside looking in barely did anything whatsoever.

I browse Amazon using Firefox extremely often and I don't recall seeing any helper UI pop up. Even so, what would have been their strategy to monetize me? User data? Commissions? Some kind of Mozilla+ subscription?

I love FF and cheer Mozilla on where I can, but honestly these decisions are inscrutable.


Mozilla seems infected by corporate board members who probably have conflicts of interest including investments in Amazon, Google, etc.

Mozilla seems to be infected by upper management that feels a need to justify ever spiraling salaries.

It's easier to justify a new thing than it is to make an improvement in an existing thing.

Why do you think VPs love new projects / products so much?


Couldn't agree more. After the founder of the company itself Brendan Eich was fired it only went downhill

Brendan Eich was fired for opposing gay marriage, then went on to create Brave, which is yet another Chromium wrapper just with bad crypto monetization and other scummy practices.

Couldn't imagine what Mozilla would be like today if he stayed around and tried to integrate crypto. At the end of the day, main post shows Firefox engineering is keeping up with Chrome which is a feat no other browser has accomplished.

For the record I also dislike the top brass at Mozilla for the same reasons I dislike Eich - trendchasing instead of making a good browser. Firefox is succeeding because of the engineers and despite the c-suite.

We project Brave MAU (going up) will pass Firefox (going down) this October.

> Firefox is succeeding because of the engineers

By what metric is Firefox succeeding?


>Brendan Eich was fired for opposing gay marriage

This gets really tiresome to rebuke. He supported a proposition that was supported by the MAJORITY of the citizens at the time and that was already six years old when we became Mozilla CEO. Some people wrote hit pieces even though he even distanced himself from it. He was not fired, he stepped back voluntarily.


Yes, Mozilla and I agree that I was not fired -- which would have been illegal in California under CA Labor Law 1101/1102.

Why do a relative few on HN insist on this false claim? It seems to make them feel better about Mozilla (one reply nearby in this page says so explicitly). Reaction to a guilty conscience?


Are they hiring?

Mozilla wants to be the "web you can trust" brand, which involves not just shipping a browser but protecting people from the rougher sides of the internet.

I think this is the real answer; they've got a vague mission statement, they saw something they wanted to support, opted to buy it, and in classic Mozilla fashion let it squander because the managers in charge moved on.

It's a move straight out of Google's playbook, with the glaring flaw of them not being Google, and their user base likes them for not being Google.

Honestly, Mozilla gives me gnome vibes. They're so caught up believing their own spiel that they don't understand why they keep missing the mark.


I do get the feeling that Mozilla has no idea what their goal is any more. Another one they are like is Yahoo! Just seem to be endlessly trying new things but not really committing to any of the new things one they have them.

I’d guess the idea was about generalizing the team’s efforts to spot fakery across the internet, in-browser. But that horse has left the barn.

Before AI, a lot of search result gamesmanship looked more like bad Amazon reviews. But leading-edge fraud is far past “humans pretending to be real, U.S.-based consumers/posters on a website.” The tools don’t generalize anymore.


> Mozilla wants to be the "web you can trust" brand, which involves not just shipping a browser but protecting people from the rougher sides of the internet.

And also, apparently, selling your data. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612, and particularly move-on's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213945.


I don't actually think there was (or needed to be) one...keep in mind they're a non-profit. I think they just wanted to make the internet a safer place, but semi-extraneous (particularly unprofitable) projects sadly need to be cut aggressively with the rising threat of the google antitrust suit, as they may lose most of their income.

Mozilla Corp is a for profit organization owned by a non-profit foundation.

That doesn't necessarily change the overall mission of the organization, but definitely does give them more flexibility to offer paid options to help sustain development, should they see an opening in the future.

This is more or less taken directly from Thunderbird's website (which I think is a fair comparison): "Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. This structure gives us the flexibility to offer optional paid services to sustain Thunderbird’s development far into the future."

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-GB/about/


Why is Mozilla, supposedly a subsidiary of a nonprofit with the goal of making the internet better, looking for business models in the first place? They should be looking for donations, sponsors, government grants, etc.

Right, why even buy it in the first place? I can't imagine the landscape has changed much, unless the most popular comment here is all the evidence you need...

They could have slid in their referral link, which would probably make them decent money, but the "ick" factor is pretty high from consumers.

I'm sure there will be a replacement though, and I'm sure they will go hard with referral links.


Just make it opt in

I recall seeing the Mozilla Review Checker pop up on Amazon shortly after I started using it as my daily driver.

I dismissed it quickly because fake reviews is not a problem I have. Maybe I'm not the target market? I do buy a lot on Amazon but can't recall ever thinking I felt burned by fake reviews.


Feels like they bought a cool tool, didn't know how to plug it into anything meaningful, and quietly sunset it when it didn’t fit the roadmap

Similar feelings about Pocket too. Mozilla seems to be on a cleaning spree

Rather that taking yet another opportunity to dump on Mozilla (it's easy, I know), I think a better question would be who is the alternative out there doing the work that Fakespot tried to do? Is this telling us that the task is too large for any current solutions to handle?

Just relying on consumer judgement has certainly proven to be inadequate in combating fake reviews, and without incentive, we're not going to get many legitimate reviews.


I can almost assure you, the plan is to run it into the ground,

Why? Can’t imagine any realistic push for this when there’s theoretically much more money to be made by creating a product that people pay to use.

IIRC that video is about how young content creators get exploited, which is indeed a bad thing but not exactly what GP is asking about (young players getting predated upon)

Agree, I've seen enough wrong answers that I think it's actively harmful to put AI answers at the top of Google search results.


> The hotel internet did not like multiple devices off the router. It didn’t reject it outright but it throttled or nerfed it.

Curious - what tools would they use to detect this, and what could someone do to work around this?


I hit this once - it was using the TTL. I setup an iptables rule on the router to rewrite TTL and then it worked fine.


Reminds me of the Blender Donut. It's a good beginner project and the outcome is pleasing.


The emotional support chicken isn't a great beginner project.

You want to start with a scarf and move onto a beanie.


Funny you say that. The top projects on Ravely are:

#1: Musselburgh (a beanie)

#2: Sophie Scarf

#3: Emotional Support Chicken


It’s a great project to leave the beginners bracket.


I have the non-cover version of this (or at least, it's another Logitech keyboard with a very similar design but lacks a cover - the K380s), and I also have a Keychron B1 Pro and a TKL mechanical keyboard, but my cheapo K380s still feels better to use to me.


My team does this, most scheduled meetings are scheduled 5m/10m after the hour. Meetings usually end at the hour or before. Our calendar defaults to start/end on the hour so sometimes one-off meetings will start/end on the hour but those are usually 2-3 people and focused on solving some problem so they don't usually last the full time anyway.

For the larger scheduled meetings, if they drag over the hour because of some conversation our culture is that people leave/drop if they're not interested.


I did something very similar, but the effects were different - people who intended to send mail to other people with my first name had my new distribution list (I created a distribution list with myname@company.com with myself as the only member) pop up as the first thing in their autocomplete.

I started to receive mail across the entire company for people who typed "myname<TAB>".

I deleted the distribution list a few minutes later.


For anyone interested in this style of gameplay mechanic, the game Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons (steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/225080/Brothers__A_Tale_o...) uses a twin-stick approach to this, and builds puzzles around controlling two "people".

It's a quick play and the game is pretty good, I recommend experiencing it.


That game was an emotional journey, man. Very short as these games go, but it hit hard.

And the music was by Gustaf Grefberg, "Lizardking", my favorite oldskool demo musician by a mile.


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