I assume that anything on a work machine is potentially compromised. Having a strict barrier between work machine and personal machines eliminates any embarrassing cross-contamination between them.
If you want to eliminate having duplicate hardware, this is perhaps the only use case I can think of for thin clients/cloud desktops that isn't a step backwards.
> The bad news is that donations are unlikely to happen with the current massive misspending on overpaid people with no technical background that don't code that spend 95% of their budget on themselves, support staff that also doesn't code, offices they don't need, commercial products that flop, monetization schemes that fail, etc.
Mozilla already solicits donations, but I wonder if people who donate to them know that Mozilla funds things that are wildly not Firefox-related, like feminist AI conferences in Africa. Meanwhile Firefox looks more and more like an also-ran compared to its competition. All I ever wanted from Mozilla was a browser, not this.
I'm not sure how common this sentiment is, but I had a discussions with colleges who will NOT donate unless they can guarantee that their money is going to the development of a chosen product or even more granularity to a chosen feature.
I think it is more up to Mozilla to put its act together and implement more transparency. So that people start trusting the organization not to waste their donations on executive salaries.
There is very little probability that your friend would donate any money even if they could have a say at the feature. But even if it was the case it would not be enough to fund the development. And finally you don't manage a company like that.
How much did Mozilla spend on this conference? They sell badges to attendees, who must also pay for their own accommodations and airfare. Were there other sponsors?
I'm not sure this is the smoking gun you think it is.
And to do so in bad faith, no less - the event seems to have had 2-3 sessions related to feminism (out of a couple dozen), but no connection beyond that.
"Bad faith" just means "I disagree" huh? That "2-3" should be zero. Activist woke BS needs to be excised from Mozilla. It all brings nothing but conflict, waste, and censorship. Tech companies need to focus on tech. Go peddle your cancer somewhere else.
According to their 2023 form 990 (the 2024 one isn't published yet) those sort of donations are usually on the order of 15k. You don't get much browser for that money.
That's hardly an isolated example though, plus who knows how many staff hours went into evaluating various proposals and facilitating the conference. The big question is why. It's not like there are a dearth of social justices non-profits out there. It couldn't be easier to donate directly to such projects. Why can't we have a single non-profit focused entirely on preventing a total browser monopoly?
> The big question is why. It's not like there are a dearth of social justices non-profits out there. It couldn't be easier to donate directly to such projects.
That line of argument require there to be a line of competent and productive 3rd world developers ready outside the doors of Mozilla HQ. Not just productive developers either, they'd have to be entirely intrinsically motivated and self driven, preferably with projects lined up. They would of course also have to be completely at-will, at risk of being terminated after their quarter year contract. Anything less than that will cost more then the developer salary.
My argument, more directly, is that a developer is not just a salary. You need support staff, office space, capital, and actual work for them to do. You need to hire, manage, and tutor them. Comparing developer salaries to money spent on one-time goodwill activities is ridiculous. Internal billing at enterprise corps usually estimate two times salary for "real cost", but that still assumes you're actually holding that cost against a tangible planned project.
> Mozilla already solicits donations, but I wonder if people who donate to them know that Mozilla funds things that are wildly not Firefox-related
It's not just that: Mozilla can't use any of your donation on Firefox. Firefox belongs to the for-profit, and money cannot flow from the non-profit to the for-profit. So in a way all of the random stuff that they do do as the non-profit is the inevitable outcome of their structure:
They have a product that people who care know is struggling to survive and so those people want to donate. Mozilla now has money that they can't spend on the product, so they have to find somewhere else to put it.
One might reasonably ask why the org whose primary purpose is maintaining the one independent browser engine is structured in a way that makes it impossible for donations to flow to the browser engine. I don't have a good answer that doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory.
Firefox is the best alternative to a Chromium/Google dominated web. As long as Firefox isn't kicking ass and being used by, say, 20% of web users, I argue that Mozilla shouldn't be doing anything else. This is especially prudent when a large part of Mozilla's (and therefore, Firefox's) funding is in jeopardy.
So, yes, I have a problem with Mozilla doing events right now, no matter what event it might be, short of a major product launch.
> As long as Firefox isn't kicking ass and being used by, say, 20% of web users, I argue that Mozilla shouldn't be doing anything else (...) I have a problem with Mozilla doing events right now
Consider it marketing, and think about if the market share would have been even lower if they didn't do outreach. Most people don't select a browser based on technical merits (heck, they don't even consciously choose). Saying they should spend every penny on developers is naive.
What would make for a better impact? A marketing event to increase outreach or not announcing a change in the terms of use that allows Firefox to sell user data?
If you don't want something, don't think everyone else thinks the same as you. From my observations, if something is being called "woke", that means it's probably a good thing, actually.
He's right though. The way to get clients long term is to have a better product. Competing in marketing against Google is a terrible idea considering their main business. Firefox should just be a better, more user friendly product because that's the weakness of Chrome, especially now that they're actively messing with adblocking and they're focusing on everything but developing the actual product.
To use the car analogy, if you want to buy a car, and you can choose between 2 models (and from all the features and prices and luxury and build quality they're equal), and it's a choice between a Tesla and a Ford, which would you choose, at this moment?
I'm missing your point at the moment but likely Ford due to parts/service center access if they're equal. Depending on how slightly better it is and whether I plan to keep it long term to where I might need to get things on it repaired I might hop over to the Tesla. Can you elaborate a bit on where we're going with this?
I was trying to say, Tesla is now a toxic brand not because of their product quality, but because of what their CEO is doing... at least for a lot of people the behavior of the corporation and people in it plays a role in buying products.
So it's a question of if Firefox and Chrome are just competing in quality. I can see people swearing off Chrome because of Google, as well as the same with Firefox because of its activism.
That's true but the general populace does not care enough unless you commit a PR suicide which is difficult when your company PR isn't bound to a single person.
Most people don't even know who the CEO of Google is so even if he were to be found with 17 mutilated kids in a moldy basement it won't have the effect Musk's 'tism has had.
Most people don't realize how they're being fucked over. My parents use adblockers because I set them up and they're not even that old, a lot of people believe surveillance is good and even on HN where privacy is a big thing many use less private products because the alternative is mildly inconvenient. The best way to convert them IMO is to offer them a more intuitive and snappier experience, especially on cheap older machines where it's really noticeable and nice integrations into things like email, pdf, etc. Just make their life as easy as possible with as little setup as possible.
"Nobody" is an exaggeration since there are a few people like you. Most people want Mozilla to focus on making a good browser.
If Mozilla had used the Google billions on improving Firefox instead of fart sniffing, Firefox would be a better browser now and its market share would be above 2.62%.
The misspending was (implicitly) part of the deal: the Google money would stop if Firefox started to seriously threaten Chrome's dominance.
Nobody is confused about how it's currently working. The whole complaint is that there isn't a way to donate towards Firefox and have any confidence that's where the money will go. There are a million social justice charities out there and zero dedicated to non-chromium browsers. A lot of people are disappointed by that. Anyone who wants to fund Afrofeminist conferences can do so directly.
Sure Mozilla can spend donations how it wants, but donors are free to not donate as well. For years many people have been saying that they want to support Firefox without all of unrelated social projects, but Mozilla has refused to offer that. I expect that a lot of potential donations have therefore not happened.
Quite a few people would donate for Firefox development, but they can't donate to Mozilla because Mozilla spends the money on other stuff. Until now, as Google's lapdog, Mozilla didn't need donations, so that wasn't a problem (for Mozilla, it did however result in firefox getting 2.62% market share).
To reinforce this, I'm a stingy bastard but I'd give them 5$ a month if I could donate them to the browser development itself since it's the program I use the most.
The question is more "Do these events and keynote speakers in Zambia have anything to do with browser development?" This isn't supposed to be a generic non-profit charity, it's a non-profit for supporting web browser development. If only 5% of the funds are going toward the browser or related technology, the organization is corrupt.
In 2023, Mozilla spend $230 million dollars on software development. And then they also $6 million on "Grants and Fellowships" (which supports many "green field" open source software initiatives), $1 million on Events (under which the event you're worried about probably falls), and $7 on travel (which probably also includes lots of travel to things like C++ conferences and browser standards conferences and other things that you probably would agree are very mission related, along with the event in question).
So—just out of this subset of expenses, there's probably some other stuff you could take issue with—Mozilla spent money in a 94% ratio on browser development, and 6% on "other stuff", of which probably .001% was this conference in Africa. And I think it's arguable that a lot of that "other stuff" is related technology! But even ignoring that, talking about how we can use the open web to improve life for people in third world countries is exactly the kind of thing that I, personally, would like Mozilla to be doing. And I'm happy for them to spend <5% of their budget on it.
Of Mozilla's $653 million in 2023 income, $496 million was spent, but only half was on development ($260). Fair enough. But realize mozilla does not exclusively develop a web browser. Instead, they also make Pocket, Firefox Relay, Firefox VPN, Mozilla Monitor, AI products, ect. So probably only 1/3rd of their income is going to browser development, which is pretty bad.
> Only because you assume that they should only be working on browser development.
Why not? This isn't Oxfam, this is Mozilla. To an outsider, the assumed point for all these other endeavors was to be profitable to provide more money for browser development. When that money doesn't primarily provide for that something seems sketchy.
Mozilla has basically never been 'just' a browser company. It's probably confusing for people who don't pay attention to stuff, but it's not for the rest of us.
They were expressing their own opinion, that's not an assumption. The relevance of opinion to nonprofit organizations is mediated through donation or other forms of support.
Sure but their opinion seems informed by their flawed assumption that a large software company that makes a browser is primarily only a browser company despite that not being the reality to situation. Life is easier if you interact with reality as it actually is instead of arguing against a version you've made up in your head.
"Corrupt" is too strong. Just unfocused. You can say it is disqualifying for making donations personally, and I think that is a pretty reasonable take. Many people have exactly the same quibble with Wikimedia.
No, not in general. Only if done dishonestly or for corrupt purpose (e.g. self-enrichment). It also is not totally clear that these activities are actually outside the scope of the nonprofit's mission.
> Do the people in Zambia deserve an open, equitable web any less than Americans or Europeans do?
They deserve an open, equitable web as much as we all do. I'm afraid that Mozilla's tendencies to waste money on such projects instead of using it to improve their main product aren't helping though.
Yes, that's part of it. Guys in SV don't need help with access; women in Africa do - that's the place to hold conferences, and probably much more cost effective. (Whatever is mean by 'Africa', a very large area, and I know nothing about the conference.)
If we start with the propostion that all people are created equal, and have equal value, then adding some marginal value in SV seems to have lower ROI than transforming lives in a place where people have little access to the resources and people of the IT industry. And in many societies, women face discrimination that tries to exculde them from tech.
Intel isn't hosting a hardware conference in 99% of the world. It's a great opportunity for Mozilla's mission, for those people, and for the world.
To me I think the issue is "how can Mozilla be self-sufficient without Google?", and that means tightening their focus.
Those things should all get effort, energy and investment - but maybe Mozilla doesn't need to be the one driving it (to that point, maybe Mozilla can advocate for Google funding those things directly?).
> As with the prior-gen 700X3D chips, the two new 9000X3D chips use two compute dies, with one die featuring a 3D-stacked V-Cache chiplet that increases L3 cache capacity to 128MB.
AMD had to have prototyped a Ryzen 9000 CPU where both compute dies had V-Cache on them. I wonder why they didn't release such a chip. Performance? Heat? Power? Yields? Cost?
True. I'm meaning more "take a one month government-sponsored class to learn about safe methods of protest, the relevant regulations on sound amplification, and what words are deemed too profane for putting on a sign, in order to obtain your Protester ID Card."
I've always wondered, what happens if there's no organizers and a bunch of people just sorta independently agree to show up together somewhere and tell all their friends by word of mouth? Is the first person who tweeted "Let's all go protest!" held accountable as the organizer, or what?
Having seen the other extremes, eg Westboro attacking mourning families, I'll take the UK's interpretation of freedom. It includes the idea that other people have a right to go about their business without busybodies with no standing getting in the way.
Edit: I also wouldn't claim the UK always gets it right, but sometimes balancing those ideas —rights to speech, privacy, and to exist unimpeded— isn't simple. Nasty artefacts like super-injunctions feel stifling, people arrested for online speech sometimes a little too far, but I'd still take it over many alternatives.
The reason for that is because you can fuck off with the persistent harassment of those who come to get abortions, including by "praying", that is, hanging around near the clinic trying to guilt-trip pregnant women. You're completely free to fuck the fuck off away from the area and bow your head disapprovingly. You're also free to think whatever you like inside the designated safe zone so long as you're not being demonstrative about it. Anyone who's deliberately come near to the clinic in order to visibly pray is picketing it. Having a grievance about this as if it was thought policing is dishonest.
If it were a fish and chips stand there'd be no problem with picketing, praying, or most other nonviolent, non-threatening demonstrations that didn't get in somebody's way. You could make it your full-time job to protest every fish and chip stand in the country without issue. It _is_ thought policing, since the only crime is protesting the "wrong" thing.
Maybe it's still fine to ban that sort of protest, but let's call it what it is.
Harassment, yes. To get an equivalent situation, you need to eat a fish supper to avoid monumentally unpleasant life changes, and the looney fringe of the dominant religion, in cahoots with some of your friends and relatives, wants to call you a murderer for eating that fish supper. Then they don't limit themselves to publishing their views, they hang around the fish and chips stand acting sad and concerned. This is not a constructive discussion or public debate, it's coercion.
Pretty sure that the US, UK and Europe fixed that back in the 90s, during the anti-globalization protests.
Ever since the Democratic Party established in 2004 that you could designate "Free Speech Zones" where the constitution would be in effect, and literally put bars around them, it was an inevitability that people living in US vassals that have never had strong speech protections would lose it all. The US sets the standard for a written absolute free speech right, but makes bad speech its biggest enemy and covertly finances censors overseas to lobby against free speech protections.
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Random person on internet:
> Has anyone heard about the protester pen set up at the Democratic convention?
> It's constructed with mesh, chain link & razor wire to contain any DNC protesters - not after they've been rounded up by police for unlawful activity - but to house them while they are protesting!
> "U.S. District Court Judge Douglas P. Woodlock called the barbed-wire pen "an affront to free expression'' and "irrefutably sad'' but necessary because of protesters' antics in New York and Los Angeles."
> Demonstrators who want to be within sight and sound of the delegates entering and leaving the Democratic National Convention at the Fleet Center in Boston this coming week will be forced to protest in a special "demonstration zone" adjacent to the terminal where buses carrying the delegates will arrive. The zone is large enough only for 1000 persons to safely congregate and is bounded by two chain link fences separated by concrete highway barriers. The outermost fence is covered with black mesh that is designed to repel liquids. Much of the area is under an abandoned elevated train line. The zone is covered by another black net which is topped by razor wire. There will be no sanitary facilities in the zone and tables and chairs will not be permitted. There is no way for the demonstrators to pass written materials to the convention delegates.
Says someone from a country where the act of crossing the road is outlawed.
But seriously, get some new material. Tiresome fake accents mocking another country is just childish, especially when it has nothing to do with the article in question.
Different kinds of freedom. In London you can legally jaywalk naked while drinking a beer in front of a cop and know that even if you really pissed the cop off, you'd never get shot for it.
It's oddly specific mockery, like Ozzy is England's international representative. I don't know, maybe he is. But I doubt Birmingham even inspired the meme, this is probably a caricature of Dick Van Dyke more than anyone.
To be fair, Brits seem to think New Yorkers go "oi" and they don't really either.
If you want to eliminate having duplicate hardware, this is perhaps the only use case I can think of for thin clients/cloud desktops that isn't a step backwards.
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