Don't be so judgemental, dying is traumatic! Who wouldn't want a little somethin' to take the edge off?

I find this whole "I gotta be able to turn off AI!" thing to be silly, personally. Do you also want to be able to turn off anything that uses binary search? Perhaps anything written in C++? Ooh, maybe it's nested for loops! Those kinda suck, give me an option to turn those off!

My indelicately expressed point is that the algorithm or processing model is not something anyone should care about. What matters? Things like: is my data sent off my device? Is there any way someone else can see what I'm doing or the data I'm generating? Am I burning large amounts of electricity? But none of those are "is it AI or not?"

Firefox already has a good story about what is processed locally vs being sent to a server, and gives you visibility and control over that. Why aren't the complaints about "cloud AI", at least? Why is it always "don't force-feed me AI in any form!"?

(To be clear, I'm no cheerleader for AI in the browser, and it bothers me when AI is injected as a solution without bothering to find a problem worth solving. But I'm not going to argue against on-device AI that does serve a useful purpose; I think that's great and we should find as many such opportunities as possible.)

Are you implying that the direct competitor, Chrome, is taking in the same or less? Chrome has a much larger staff (excluding the rest of Google), so I guess they must all be earning a small fraction of Mozilla staff salaries. Such dedicated people!

My point is Mozilla achieves practically nothing despite making half a billion ad dollars for free from Google. If Wikipedia's numbers are right, that's $730,000 per employee.

Ah, but your words say Mozilla should be doing more than nothing, they should in fact be winning:

> With that income there's no reason they shouldn't be the leading browser.

despite having less resources than their primary competitor.

Well, our primary competitor. I work for Mozilla. Which apparently means I'm making $730K. Maybe that's why I pay my house cleaner with a suitcase full of cash every week. Who isn't as happy about it as she could be, on account of not existing. Some people are picky about that.

I'd love to be growing our market share dramatically, since I put in a lot of work when I'm not on HN. Sadly I've been told that work is achieving practically nothing. I will point out that practically nothing does at least include still having enough sway in standards committees to hold the line against an ad-tech company whose incentives all push in the dystopic direction that everything is currently headed in. (Ok, maybe not fully holding the line...) If that stops being the case and Mozilla stops making a difference, then I believe I could still get a job elsewhere for a fair bit more than I'm currently making.

Oh wait, I forgot I'm already making $730K. Maybe not, then.

They're the only modern usable browser engine not developed by a multi-trillion dollar corp. I'd say that's a pretty big achievement.

They're developed by a billion dollar corp riding on their past success from when they challenged the leader of that time, Microsoft.

And their engine is still around, how's the leader of the times web engine going?

Not relevant here. Yes, you can donate to Mozilla.org and stipulate whatever you like, but Mozilla.org does not develop Firefox so telling them to use it for developing Firefox will do about as much good as telling them to use it to resurrect unicorns. Mozilla.org owns Mozilla Corporation, which is a for-profit entity that develops Firefox, but thus far the corporation hasn't wanted the complications and restrictions that would come from accepting donations.

Everything I can find online says that there are contributors working for both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation

Contributors are people. Donations are dollars. People ≠ dollars.

Unless you grind them up and eat them as sausages, but don't do that. The anti-theft threads will get stuck in your teeth.

The contributors are paid by Mozilla Foundation. This is not complicated.

Hm. I'm dumb so you'll need to spell it out for me.

MoFo and MoCo both have contributors, yes. Both have unpaid contributors, which apparently are not who you're talking about. Both also have paid people who work for them. Whether or not you call them "contributors" or "employees" doesn't matter much, I guess. But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox. Firefox is not a MoFo product. Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product. It's confusing because MoFo owns MoCo, but owning a company does not mean its products are your products, nor that you can freely assist with those products (especially in an arms-length setup involving taxes, which is the very reason for the MoFo/MoCo split in the first place.) MoFo does other things, non-Firefox things, like advocacy and pissing off HN commenters who assume that "Mozilla does X" headlines always mean MoCo is doing X.

One of us is confused. I have that uneasy sensation I get when something is going "whoosh!" over my head, so it might be me.

> Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product.

This is true.

> But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox.

This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise?

Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories.

This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy.

There are corollaries to what I'm describing in most large nonprofits in the US. You get money that a donor requires you to spend in a certain way, and you spend that money that way. If you can't do it with in-house people, you give it to consultants.

> This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise?

Yes, I work for MoCo.

> Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories.

I don't really understand the whole setup, but I believe tax law is what is stopping this. What you are describing would be fraud (or something like it; IANAL). Money flows MoCo->MoFo (via dividends). Paying MoCo for something directly or hiring consultants to provide value would be "private inurement" [1], a phrase which here means that lawyers like scary words. It is using tax-exempt money to enrich private individuals.

But the tl;dr is that the MoFo/MoCo split was created specifically so that money could flow MoCo->MoFo and not the other way around, in order for MoCo to do business-y stuff without jeopardizing MoFo's non-profit status. Nvidia's game where it pays companies to buy their chips would not fly in the non-profit sector.

> This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy.

Servo was split out from Mozilla during COVID, and sadly is now completely unaffiliated. It is in the Linux Foundation Europe now. (Igalia is great, though!)

[1] https://legalclarity.org/private-inurement-definition-exampl...

No part of this is true, fwiw. His salary at Mozilla was not high and he was a strong advocate of keeping executive compensation low (and as supporting evidence, that compensation shot up soon after he left). He may have made more from Brave, but that was obviously well after the donation. He also never backed down from his donation and the directly implied opposition to gay marriage, only stating that it comes from his personal beliefs and that he refused to discuss those openly. (I disagree with his position on gay marriage, or at least the position that I can infer from his donation, but I agree with his right and decision to keep it a private matter.)

I had... complex but mostly positive feelings about Eich in the time I worked for him (indirectly), but I can state unequivocally that he's not someone who would bend his principles as a result of getting cornered at a party.

I've been using Firefox for a long time, longer than it's had that name, and it used to be excellent for my tab hoarding habits. Specifically, it could handle a large number of tabs, and every couple of months it would crash and lose all of them. I would have to start over from scratch, with an amazing sense of catharsis and freedom, and I never had to make the decision on my own that I would never be able to make.

Now, it's no better than the others. I'm at 1919 tabs right now, and it hasn't lost any for many years. It's rock solid, it's good at unloading the tabs so I don't even need to rely on non-tab-losing crash/restarts to speed things up, and it doesn't even burn enough memory on them to force me to reconsider my ways.

This is a perfect example of how Mozilla's mismanagement has driven Firefox into the ground. Bring back involuntary tab bankruptcy and spacebar heating!

Appropriate amount of effort for what purpose? Is it appropriate for me to use ChatGPT on my mathematics test because it is the least effort required to pass the test? Or is it inappropriate because the goal should have been to learn the material?

Even something as straightforward as picking up a coffee mug runs into this. Just enough effort to be able to lift it without dropping, or enough to hang onto it if someone happens to bump into me?

I'm not disagreeing with the article, just pointing out that there is nuance that is easy to miss.

(Ok, I got a little triggered by the title, since I was just thinking about how 80% of my kid's mathematics class made it through by using ChatGPT for all of the homeworks, quizzes, and even the tests. The teacher doesn't want to police it, the administration doesn't care, and those kids learned almost nothing. "Zero effort == good" is a dangerous statement out of context.)

I think part of this is:

- you need to have clarity on the what the goal is

- then you can adjust your effort to meet the goal

no one can tell you what your goals are.

> It's light but dense,

What does that mean? It's tough enough that you can make it thinner? It dries out more fully? Or does "dense" refer to something other than density, like tightness of the grain?

It's indeed the tightness of the grain, but also volumetric density (975 kg/m³) is higher than oak or spruce. What I mean with light is, indeed you can make very thin utensils and they won't break, bemd etc so at the end the product is lighter than the obe made with a softer/less dense wood.

Boxwood was for centuries the choice of wind instrument makers because of its stability and hardness, which made it possible to create thinner more practical instruments (clarinets, flute etc). till humans discovered granadillo wood, which is as dense as boxwood but much more humidity and temperature stable.

Hm, good thought. You could just do

    printf("%d is %s\n", n, last_binary_bit(n) == 0 ? "even" : "odd");

and the rest is trivial:

    int last_binary_bit(int n) {
        if (n == 0) return 0;
        if (n == 1) return 1;
        if (n == 2) return 0;
        ...
    }

Come to think of it, with a little fancy math you could divide and conquer:

    int last_binary_bit(int n) {
        // Handle the easy cases.
        if (n == 0) return 0;
        if (n == 1) return 1;
        // Number may be large. Divide and conquer. It doesn't matter where we split it,
        // so use a randomized algorithm because those are fast.
        for (;;) {
            int r = random();
            if (r < n) {
                // Smaller numbers are easier.
                int smaller1 = r;
                int smaller2 = n - 4;
                int bit1 = last_binary_bit(smaller1);
                int bit2 = last_binary_bit(smaller2);
                // Fancy math: even + even is even, even + odd is odd, etc.
                if (bit1 == 0 && bit2 == 0) return 0;
                if (bit1 == 0 && bit2 == 1) return 1;
                if (bit1 == 1 && bit2 == 0) return 1;
                if (bit1 == 1 && bit2 == 1) return 0;
            }
        }
    }

That was my immediate thought too, but I'm still in favor of banning it in order to make it a community norm. Right now, people generally seem to think that such comments are adding some sort of signal, and I don't think they're stupid to think that. Not stupid, just wrong. And people feel personally attacked and so get defensive and harden their position, so it would be better to just make it against the guidelines with some justification there rather than trying to control it with individual arguments (with a defensive person!) or downvoting alone. (And the guidelines would be the place to put the explanation of why it's disallowed.)

People will still do it, but now they're doing it intentionally in a context where they know it's against the guidelines, which is a whole different situation. Staying up late to argue the point (and thus add noise) is obviously not going to work.

I'd prefer the guideline to allow machine translation, though, even when done with a chatbot. If you are using a chatbot intentionally with the purpose of translating your thoughts, that's a very different comment than spewing out the output from a prompt about the topic. There's some gray area where they fuzz together, but in my experience they're still very different. (Even though the translated ones set off all the alarm bells in terms of style, formatting, and phrasing.)