it's the cornerstone of their strategy to invest in local, sovereign ai models in an attempt to court attention from persons / organizations wary of us tech
it's better to understand the concern over mozilla's announcement the following way i think:
- mozilla knows that their revenue from default search providers is going to dry up because ai is largely replacing manual searching
- mozilla (correctly) identifies that there is a potential market in eu for open, sovereign tech that is not reliant on us tech companies
- mozilla (incorrectly imo) believes that attaching ai to firefox is the answer for long term sustainability for mozilla
with this framing, mozilla has only a few options to get the revenue they're seeking according to their portfolio, and it involves either more search / ai deals with us tech companies (which they claim to want to avoid), or harvesting data and selling it like so many other companies that tossed ai onto software
the concern about us tech stack dominations are valid and probably there is a way to sustain mozilla by chasing this, but breaking the us tech stack dominance doesn't require another browser / ai model, there are plenty already. they need to help unseat stuff like gdocs / office / sharepoint and offer a real alternative for the eu / other interested parties -- simply adding ai is mozilla continuing their history of fad chasing and wondering why they don't make any money, and demonstrates a lack of understanding imo about, well, modern life
my concern over the announcement is that mozilla doesn't seem to have learned anything from their past attempts at chasing fads and likely they will end up in an even worse position
firefox and other mozilla products should be streamlined as much as possible to be the best N possible with these kinds of side projects maintained as first party extensions, not as the new focus of their development, and they should invest the money they're planning to dump into their ai ambitions elsewhere, focusing on a proper open sovereign tech stack that they can then sell to eu like they've identified in their portfolio statement
the announcement though makes it seem like mozilla believes they can just say ai and also get some of the ridiculous ai money, and that does not bode well for firefox as a browser or mozilla's future
I get the intention but it's a bad idea, same with the article
if people are meant to depend on your endpoints, they need to be able to depend on all of them
you will always have ppl who don't respond to deprecation notices, the best you can do is give them reliable information on what to expect -- if they hide the warnings and forget, that's their business
but intentionally making problems without indication that its intentional results in everyone (including your own team) being frustrated and doing more work
you cannot force ppl to update their code and trying to agitate them into doing it only serves to erode confidence in the product, it doesn't make the point ppl think it makes, even if the court of public opinion sides with you
cover your bases and make a good faith effort to notify and then deal with the inevitable commentary, there will always be some who miss the call to update
black markets and opposition members i’ve used / talked with focus on disposability not security
the premise of their communications is always “the platform is bugged” and in case of opposition members “the government can always just beat you and trick you into unlocking your phone”
deals happen on messenger all the time and burning messages / rotating phones and accounts is very common. for opposition members, messaging apps are purely for benign communication and actual discussion happens in person or in truly destructible formats or it’s not recorded at all
periodically anon burner message apps appear on app stores and rotate out pretty fast once they start getting too much attention
the idea of a perfectly secure app for communication is currently mostly a fantasy; if a malicious actor wants to get your info and communication they will. this doesn’t mean give up completely and be insecure but instead just be in a position to ditch the app when it becomes necessary, if you need that level of security
it’s better people be trained to understand the reality of what can be done with the communication methods they use and how they can be punked
so they can make informed decisions — i’m fine with signal’s goals and efforts but i’m not a fan of signal advocates treating security and privacy like another round of the OS wars, that teaches people the wrong lesson and makes it harder to convince ppl privacy and security are a problem we need to take seriously not just for criminals but for everyone. privacy and security benefit us all or it benefits no one
azure likes to open new sections on the same tab / page as opposed to reloading or opening a new page / tab (overlays? modals? I'm lost on graphic terms)
depending on the resource you're accessing, you can get 5+ sections each with their own ui/ux on the same page/tab and it can be confusing to understand where you're at in your resources
if you're having trouble visualizing it, imagine an url where each new level is a different application with its own ui/ux and purpose all on the same webpage
You are correct it's poor and sloppy, but it's not "just" that. It's a lack of concern over the effects of their poor/sloppy crawler implementation.
The poor implementation is not really relevant, it's companies deciding they own the internet and can take whatever they want, let everyone else deal with the consequences. The companies do not care what the impact of their ai non-sense is..
> Marketplace isn’t a major direct revenue source, but it keeps users engaged.
> “It’s one of the least monetized parts of Facebook,” said Enberg. “But it brings in engagement, which advertisers value.”
> Meta relies on ads for over 97% of its $164.5 billion revenue in 2024.
Facebook's spin in the article was delusional as expected for a big tech business, but I'm surprised they let this little nugget of truth slip out, and somehow managed to not learn anything from the fact that a huge demographic engages _more_ with the part of the site that gets the least monetization focus.
I think some other posters already commented, but I wouldn't put too much stock in the MDMA being MDMA -- I use MDMA pretty frequently and never had brain zaps from it, but when I was on sertraline and quit without tapering off, I definitely had the brain zaps being described, and I still get them almost 15 years after discontinuing sertraline.
MDMA depending on where you are and what you got can be quite a few things, it's why test kits are important. It's not to say that MDMA cannot cause brain zaps, but given that we know that MDMA is usually cut with a lot of filler/other drugs without the user knowing, I would acknowledge it could do it, but would always have doubt it was actually the MDMA due to the knowledge that whatever the users who experienced brain zaps took likely had many other drugs/substances in it. In the current political climate surrounding drugs, I'm not even sure how a study could effectively be done correctly.
Which is unfortunate because brain zaps really suck and withdrawal from SSRIs is pretty rough. I easily get into addictive substances, and have successfully stopped use on quite a few pretty heavy things, and they didn't come close to the withdrawals from SSRIs for me. This is personal experience of course, and likely many other factors in my life helped with my stopping some recreational drugs without hugely adverse affects, but SSRIs just nothing helped and at the time (2010-2015), I really couldn't find any reliable information online or from doctors about the brain zaps.
I'm glad to read this article because it's great to see that there is attention to this and more focus on the side effects of SSRIs. SSRIs definitely can help many people, but it is pretty intense drug and the withdrawal is nasty for quite a few people.
I don't know why you're so skeptical that a drug possessing the primary effect of flooding one's brain with serotonin can cause SSRI withdrawal symptoms upon cessation.
As for whether or not it's 'really MDMA', not everybody is popping pressed ecstasy tablets. It's trivial to send a few crushed crystals to a spectroscopy lab and I very rarely see samples cut with anything other than carbohydrates.
MDMA generally wouldn't cause the brain zaps after normal use (one 120-180mg dose), its usually high doses or abuse over multiple days that causes the changes necessary to feel these symptoms
Maybe I am just not familiar enough with the subject to get the point, but this article doesn't really seem to focus on their actual claim but instead it's about explaining why no one else could reproduce their findings?
I'm also still very confused on what the actual relationship is purported to be, at least based on this article. How did they determine cognitive ability here?
I'm extremely wary of claims like the title, especially this one, as it seems like something children on a playground would say and use to bully each other, and certainly I imagine that many people will use it to justify being awful to others that are perceived to be "lesser" because of the rather outrageous title of the article, the article which I still really don't get how they're even making these connections to draw such a conclusion.
A few tests, among which specific memory tests. However, the memory tests didn't correlate, they claim only "fluid intelligence" correlates (even though they've also claimed the two are correlated). Fluid intelligence was measured "with the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices, letter sets, and number series."
The problem, for me, is that there is nothing to relate intelligence (fluid or otherwise) and pupil size. Without something plausible linking the two, this is just meaningless.
And of course they rely on NHST statistics and a whole raft of modeling techniques, which is enough to call the whole article in doubt.
I dare say they used very visual tasks, which may be harder for people with small pupils under less than optimal lighting conditions.
> The problem, for me, is that there is nothing to relate intelligence (fluid or otherwise) and pupil size. Without something plausible linking the two, this is just meaningless.
They're both neurotransmitters and vasoconstrictors, but the latter effect is reversed in the pupils, so they dilate your pupils. If you're low on catecholamines then your working memory is impaired and your pupils will be smaller.
This is why amphetamine dilates your pupils and is prescribed to treat ADHD.
It always makes me wonder why it is that many people seem to be extremely sensitive to the idea that cognitive capability is variable among people. There is always backlash whenever anyone does anything that seeks to measure cognitive capacity or to categorize people along those lines.
I firmly believe that cognitive ability is a -physical- trait that can be estimated with useful and actionable results.
I base this on the simple observation that age or disease related cognitive decline is a real and measurable thing.
If cognitive decline can be measured, then cognition can be measured.
If cognition can be measured, and cognitive decline is impactful, then the variability in cognition between people is meaningful.
These measurements of cognition variability correlate strongly with real-world tasking, strongly implying that cognition is a useful metric of capability.
I don’t see how any of this is in the least bit controversial.
I don’t see how cognitive capacity is somehow bad to measure, talk about, or select for in how and why we provide education to deliver maximum utility to the student.
How is this different from athletic capability? Some people can never be pro-level basketball players no matter how much they train.
The limiting traits in that respect are products of their genes and early development. I propose that cognitive capacity is not distinct in this regard. As in any n=10^9 sample there will be outliers, but outliers are not evidence that a strongly predictive relationship does not exist.
There is no apparent reason that cognitive capacity, which is presumably based on some kind of physical neural apparatus, is somehow intrinsically malleable and non- deterministic in kind that other physical traits are not.
To claim otherwise seems an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, of which I am at a loss to discover.
I suspect, without any substantial evidence, that this peculiar bias against the idea of determinism in cognitive ability has to do with the perception that cognitive ability is largely indeterminable externally, and many people do things to seem highly capable when they are not.
This preening behaviour is inherently threatened by the idea that it could easily be discovered, and people are defensive of this subterfuge on their own behalf and/or the behalf of others.
But, that is just a suspicion, which I would gladly be disabused of if anyone else has a better insight as to the motive behind what seems to me to be a highly illogical bias.
The article itself as I read it doesn't really contribute or expand the concepts in the video and instead is a call to action (not defined) as it assumes you've watched the video, basically I'm just not confident the article contributes anything to the subject its presenting.
To save HN users further time, it's a link to a five month old Sabine Hossenfelder youtube channel video titled I wasn't worried about climate change. Now I am.
It's not a day late and a dollar short. It's 30 years late and tens of trillions of dollars short.
Actual climate scientists were warning about the dangers at 1.5C, and had been since the 80s. Now 1.5C is actually here.
So I feel like this needs more than just a "whoops, changed my mind". This needs a "Hey, turns out that maybe physicists don't know everything, and maybe when in doubt we should defer to the people who actually study the field".
Hossenfelder is very smart and (at least within her field) very well qualified. But she seems to like perceiving herself as a gadfly, choosing contrarian positions, usually without being in a position to be proven wrong. In this case she was very wrong, and everybody who actually knew the domain told her that.
I don't need a mea culpa about it. It's not like she was a really important force in climate denial. But changing her mind now isn't really helpful -- and it seems like she rarely has any desire to make an actual contribution.
As a general summary 2023 average ocean surface temperatures jumped by a bit more than one degree Celsius over the course of a few months. One degree doesn't seem much, but in the climate crisis people are discussing about two or three degrees of warming potentially fatal for human civilization. And also scientists were thrown for a loop because climate models predicted this change not happen so quickly.
Luckily (for some interpretations of luckily) it seems that 2024 ocean surface temperaturs are not rising as quickly as in 2023, but they are still rising. It still seems that we crashed with high speed through several tipping points and continue.
Especially that SST as of July 1st 2024 is same as July 1st 2023, in other words, we had a jump of slightly more than a degree Celsius and a year later we are at the same place.
I get what you’re saying but the other weird limitations of powershell as well as microsoft’s strangely abusive security relationship with powershell makes it a non-starter for me, or at least makes me hesitate a ton before putting effort into a ps script since even in the same AD orgs which in theory have the same gpos applied across all machines, it’s a crapshoot if the ps script will even execute without having to trick windows into allowing it to run. object oriented nature of ps is also a curse as much as blessing as simple text parsing or iterating over files on a system are very slow compared to bash, never minding that from my experience it’s a crapshoot on how well a given ps module handles strings and how that will be reflected in the script.
(e.g., one company’s ps module doesn’t handle square brackets ][ well and for an inexplicable reason the normal ps escaping does not work as advertised, requiring more backticks than usual and a different number depending on if you “” or ‘’ the input string. As best i can tell its joint fault of ps bug and poor module design but had no luck convincing the vendor to adjust their design because “it will break existing scripts”, which is a valid concern but it also means writing automation for their product is a headache since you’re going to see ][ in production environments as is a visually obvious delimiter when humans are reading it)
https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...
it's the cornerstone of their strategy to invest in local, sovereign ai models in an attempt to court attention from persons / organizations wary of us tech
it's better to understand the concern over mozilla's announcement the following way i think:
- mozilla knows that their revenue from default search providers is going to dry up because ai is largely replacing manual searching
- mozilla (correctly) identifies that there is a potential market in eu for open, sovereign tech that is not reliant on us tech companies
- mozilla (incorrectly imo) believes that attaching ai to firefox is the answer for long term sustainability for mozilla
with this framing, mozilla has only a few options to get the revenue they're seeking according to their portfolio, and it involves either more search / ai deals with us tech companies (which they claim to want to avoid), or harvesting data and selling it like so many other companies that tossed ai onto software
the concern about us tech stack dominations are valid and probably there is a way to sustain mozilla by chasing this, but breaking the us tech stack dominance doesn't require another browser / ai model, there are plenty already. they need to help unseat stuff like gdocs / office / sharepoint and offer a real alternative for the eu / other interested parties -- simply adding ai is mozilla continuing their history of fad chasing and wondering why they don't make any money, and demonstrates a lack of understanding imo about, well, modern life
my concern over the announcement is that mozilla doesn't seem to have learned anything from their past attempts at chasing fads and likely they will end up in an even worse position
firefox and other mozilla products should be streamlined as much as possible to be the best N possible with these kinds of side projects maintained as first party extensions, not as the new focus of their development, and they should invest the money they're planning to dump into their ai ambitions elsewhere, focusing on a proper open sovereign tech stack that they can then sell to eu like they've identified in their portfolio statement
the announcement though makes it seem like mozilla believes they can just say ai and also get some of the ridiculous ai money, and that does not bode well for firefox as a browser or mozilla's future
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