Excellent description, and further additions for the cynicism.
(opinion) Human society large rewards narcissism. Diligence is usually rewarded with exploitation. There's actually academic supporting the 2nd. Therefore, most politicians are largely selfish and mostly interested in being on TV, being the center of attention, and holding sway over other citizens. (Not all, just the majority). The only metric is "what gets elected." However, like "green" anything, the optimization is usually "do nothing, and color the corporate logo green."
Causes further issues. The optimization becomes, "focus on highly incendiary minutia, while avoiding anything risky, and maximizing viewer attention and anxiety." Issues that will allow them to say they're valiant, while exposing nothing especially damaging for the next election.
The American fiscal funding fiasco this / last year is typical. 6 months, and America finally has a budget. All the while, it's mostly arguments about minutia like "Homeland Security impeachment", who the speaker is, where Military can get abortions, whether a base will get funding, migrants on buses, and weekly CR shutdown "thwarting". It literally became weekly federal budgets around Feb-Mar in America... Meanwhile, a lot of enlisted in those abortion / base (yes/no?) states are wondering whether they're going to get paychecks. People on boats complain about having no ammunition to shoot with...
London's sewers are another excellent example. Dithering and dithering about repairs, about maintenance, about public toilets. Except the Thames is bright yellow, people won't go swimming, and when somebody asks, they're response is "well, btw, we're actually £18,000,000,000 in debt. Make -£2,000,000,000 per year. Have for years. Nobody even noticed. lolz." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Water Obvious optimization, nationalize while decrying the evils of the private sector. Quietly also nationalize the debt to the public in a line item somewhere that nobody writes about. Squander resources for years. Sell back to industry claiming the salvation of capitalism.
"an adversarial position" is the only position you should assume when interpreting legal texts. After all, if push comes to shove, your the actual adversary. And in any other case the legal text is not needed.
I’m sorry I’m sounding condescending. I was trying to be funny. The point is that there are so many problems that it is even a problem to list them. Those problems are so evident to me that I didn’t thought people might not understand it.
1. Linkedin is a platform promoting a closed-garden vision of the web while Firefox is seen a the last stand against that closed vision.
2. Linkedin is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft has been the biggest opponent to Mozilla and still is, even if it may be topped by Google in that place.
3. Linkedin is known for its terrible security practices regarding personal datas. It is also a big seller of private data. Which goes against "promoting privacy".
This tells a lot from a symbolic perspective. But it is not only symbolic:
4. You need a Linkedin account to view the link. Meaning that the very first step of the news CEO is requiring users to have an account on a rival platform which harvest their data if they want to know who she is.
5. It means that the new CEO find her Linkedin account more important that any personal website, if any, which is philosophically the opposite of Mozilla self-proclaimed mission.
I hope it is is clearer and you understand that, yes, it is a big deal. CEO position is mostly symbolic. The very first move and the fact that nobody at Mozilla even realized that it could send a bad signal is enough indication that nobody there even understand the original mission anymore. Nobody there cares about privacy. Nobody there cares about the independence of the Web.
Let say for a moment that it is acceptable for the CEO of a corporation working on the independence of the Web to not have her personal independent webpage.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume.
Let say for a moment that it is acceptable that the personal independent webpage is replaced by a monopolistic platform trying to centralize the web.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume
Let say for a moment that we don’t care that the platform is owned by one of the biggest competitor of the corporation. Historically and currently.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume.
Let say for a moment that it is not a problem that the platform is one of the worst offender when regarding privacy of its users and handling personal data, even if the new CEO is talking about privacy.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume.
Let say that to there’s no problem in requiring every person clicking this link to have an account on the linked platform to know who the privacy-oriented new CEO is.
I know, absurd, but let’s assume.
Let say that nobody at Mozilla considered it to be a problem as the introductory post of the new CEO…
It has nothing to do with tech. It's about a “pivot to data privacy” linking to one of the worse offender is terms of privacy invasion, that's just insane. It's as if say announced pivot to cloud computing and did so on a website hosted on AWS.
What I find weird is how many professional web developers contact me to ask what theme I’m using on my blog, a straight HTML website with 42 lines of inline CSS. I even was asked once with JS library I was using. (there is no JS, it’s a blog !)
None of those sending me those emails bothered to even look at the code. None even thought it was possible that this was NOT a "theme" somewhere on the web.
I wonder how many times in a row it would take of you being fired by the CEO who completely mismanaged the company, while massively increasing their own salary multiple times, before you stop wishing them well.
In fact maybe the problem is that you are wishing her well. She's exploited other people enough to be doing well enough on her own. She doesn't need anyone to wish her well. Maybe the least she deserves is to not be doing well at other people's expense. What about those people?
Being nice isn't always the right answer. When people do bad things, there should be negative consequences for them, otherwise that signals to them that their behavior was appropriate. It wasn't. You are doing the morally wrong thing by wishing her well.
I really don't sympathize with the argument that CEO's have be paid big bucks to perform. People would kill for a position like this as long as they could make a living. Free software is a medium that literally has dudes work night and day on some random meme project, create communities, partners and policies just because of their ideological beliefs. No other medium has this incredible level of activity. If Mozilla can't find a leader, they can surely make one.
In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[15] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million (in 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million,[16] and again to nearly $7 million in 2022[17]). In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues, after previously laying off roughly 70 in January (prior to the pandemic). Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.[18]
In other words, no she definitely is. She fired 250 devs while doubling her pay multiple times to live a luxurious life while lying about the cause. People have to feed their families, she doesn't need that much and this is not good community spirit.
It gets even more interesting googling bit further and becomes a brilliant example of either "money corrupts people" or "i'm romanticising my upperclass upbringing", because she apparently went from patos filled stories about her dad paying just above minimum wage (lol) to firing 250 devs while she ran with the money:
"[about her parents] So I would call them progressive. I would call them really focused on -- well, so for example, he would never pay minimum wage. They ran a small business. It was pretty--
Weber: Doing what?
Baker: -- hand to mouth. A pewter factory, making wine goblets and gift items out of pewter. Not so easy to do in the Bay Area, which is expensive. And so he would hire someone at minimum wage. But he had a period of time -- it was six weeks, or two months, or three months, or whatever it was-- after a probationary period, and then he refused. He felt he needed to pay a living wage."
So you agree to a bunch of examples of terrible things she's done, and then counterbalance it with a vague "she's done a lot of good for the community over the past 20 years"?
Oh, and she was considerate towards your feelings in an email, and a followup email?
I too have seen many corporate higher-ups be highly pleasant when you talk/correspond with them. But they do jack shit about the actual issue, but assure you that they care about your feelings.
I'd rather she was an absolute bitch to everyone, but actually steered the organization in the right direction. That would have had a better positive impact on the world than a few placating emails.
It's pretty straight forward to me.
"$CORPO_STOOGE does all the things that make you a great leader and talks in platitudes that seem genuine! That makes them a decent person!"
Nah. I have a quote that I think about often on this topic, from none other than Bojack Horseman[1]:
Bojack, "Well, do you think I'm a good person... deep down?"
Diane, "That's the thing, I don't think I believe in deep down. I kind of think that all you are is the things that you do"
$CORPO_STOOGE is just a sociopath who follow the suggestions of "Lean In" as a behavioral guide of motions to follow. That doesn't make them a good person, just maybe a more pleasant manipulator.
> I wouldn't want that job, and I'm not sure I could do it.
There are many jobs that I wouldn't want and that are not paid 6M a year. There are some things that I can do that not everybody can do, and still I am not paid 6M.
You can try reverting it: a CEO earning 6M a year could not necessarily be a firefighter. Yet firefighters are not paid 6M a year. And they actually risk their life.
The necessary skills are not rare, but the roles are rare so people start to think the skills are rare. I get a lot of grief for this opinion but I think most HN'ers could do the job of "CEO of whatever company they currently work for". It's not rocket science. We have this mythology around CEOs that they are such outlier smart, special, hardworking people, but really it's just that the top of the pyramids contain few people.
Executing untrusted code would be a lot safer if browsers and mobile OSes would make it easy to provide fake resources to the app/extension.
Yes, you may read my phone contents, and as far as you know, it's the contents, the whole contents and nothing but the contents - it just happens to be a folder to me. An empty folder. It's a new phone you see.
Yes here's my contact list. Sorry it's mostly empty, there's just the costly premium number in there. I hope your mothership doesn't try to call it.
Yes, here's my microphone. Oh thank you, yes, I do a good impression of Rick Astley.
Pictures on my phone? Oh yes, right this way. It's all pictures of turnips. Do you like them?
Forgive me for reflexively jumping to one of my favorite critiques of the universe:
Flat design weeds out a myriad of built in affordances of our visual system:
- Color to help us more quickly distinguish between things, what the things are, and their roles.
- Borders, to demark edges of active usable elements, communicate roles, encapsulate closely related things.
- Translucence as a way to combine subtle elements into a single form in a way our visual system can quickly interpret.
- Texture as another means of quickly communicating topic separation and indicating roles. Especially useful for areas containing other elements.
- Shading that our native visual system naturally interprets as rich 3D information. For processing separation, function, including the state of dynamic function.
- Smooth motions to draw attention to, and indicate changes of state.
I am NOT suggesting graphical interfaces should:
- Resemble a rainbow Christmas tree of "look-at-me!" ornaments.
- Organize hierarchical information in n-level nested Mondrian boxes.
- Be performatively stylish: overly glassy, shiny, lickable.
- Have unsubtle textures, or painstakingly recreate leather, felt, marble, or (dear baby Zeus) grass.
- Spray shading and shadows onto everything in an attempt to recreate VR on a flat screen.
- Sparkle, blink, bob and weave, and otherwise snow and distract us with motion.
I am suggesting that it is madness not to sparingly use large dimensions of our visual processing system, to communicate visual information.
These extra dimensions not only provide richer information for our visual fovea, but to our peripheral vision. Our brain is constantly processing peripheral vision to create context.
A classic case of form over function.
A classic case of "simple" as in "less design work, trivial brand language consistency", not "simple" as in "easy to discover, understand and use".
(As with the check/radio/button/selector, I cannot process that Apple fell for flat design. Such corporate amnesia. From design leader to lowest common denominator follower.)
It’s a solution that annoys me as an idea, but it’s the only thing I have found that works for me. I have about 20 individual AutoHotkey scripts that are named GO TO <application name> and that go like this:
SetTitleMatchMode 2
if (not WinExist("Mozilla Firefox ahk_class MozillaWindowClass")) {
Run A_ProgramFiles . "\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
} else {
WinActivate
}
Return
I also have individual LNK files that target the AutoHotkey scripts, so that you can run the scripts from any launcher. Here is how it looks in PowerToys Run:
Corporations, at their root, are an arbitrage on the fact that other corporations follow the bell curve.
The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get diluted and averaged in with mediocre performers so the company can pretend the high performers don’t exist.
This was my experience in (large co).
I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 people yet still being compensated for doing the work of one IC.
Management of that group took the approach “it’s a team effort!” And get the credit for that output.
Their boss looks down and sees Director managing 30 people and getting amazing result X, where X is 90% the effort of the one super star.
Eventually super star gets fed up and leaves, and gets paid what everyone else gets somewhere else “hoping to be valued.”
Management still win. They get the credit for the super stars work. Frustrated super star leaves. Mediocre management is still there.
A decade later nothing but the WORST and LEAST talented garbage are left. No one remotely talented would ever join that company because it’s a trap - you just get averaged in with mediocrity.
The “averaging the great in with the spectacular” to reduce the relative power of the spectacular is the entire point of “management.”
You have a team of six, pretend the work of the super star is “everyone working together” and attempt to grow your headcount off that super star.
That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently.
> The motivation for representing sequential control logic in a ladder diagram was to allow factory engineers and technicians to develop software without additional training to learn a language such as FORTRAN or other general-purpose computer language.
> Ladder logic can be thought of as a rule-based language rather than a procedural language. A "rung" in the ladder represents a rule. When implemented with relays and other electromechanical devices, the various rules execute simultaneously and immediately.
The combination of both statements entertains me, because while defenders of imperative languages might even admit that they are worse languages, they still cling on to the notion that imperative is easier to teach or understand and that other approaches requires genius level intellect. When it's mostly about what you are familiar with that determines what approach feels easy.
(Different approaches still differ in how well they can express or maintain your program whilst making errors harder to make, of course.)
Perhaps the phrase "I don't hate it, but I don't love it" doesn’t fully encapsulate the nuanced spectrum of emotional response. Might I suggest employing "I harbor a moderate degree of equivocation regarding this matter"? It articulates a position of neither fervent advocacy nor staunch opposition, akin to balancing on the fulcrum of a metaphorical teeter-totter, oscillating gently between the poles of approval and disapproval.
That's actually part of the thinking behind the "faster, better, cheaper" (FBC) policy of NASA in the late 1990s / early 2000s:
The intent of FBC was to decrease the amount of time and cost for each mission and to increase the number of missions and overall scientific results obtained on each mission
That was something of a mixed bag: numerous missions did succeed and returned phenomenal science, but there were also some spectacular and humiliating failures:
In 1999, after the failure of four missions that used the FBC approach for project
management, you commissioned several independent reviews to examine FBC and
mission failures, search for root causes, and recommend changes.
(Both quotes from the transmittal letter for NASA's 2001 report on the policy, as subsequent sentences.)
It turns out that space is an unbelievably unforgiving environment, and attempting to perform repairs, maintenance, tune-ups, and/or mitigations at distances of hundreds of millions or billions of kilometers, often at the end of hours-long round-trip speed-of-light lags, is challenging at best.
At the same time, FBC mitigated risks, and some of the problem may well have been a failure to manage expectations: with FBC, some missions would succeed, whilst others would not. But even in that context, gambling losses on $150 million bets remain painful. (It's worth considering that there have since been numerous failures by other nations attempting various space missions, this isn't a failing of the US alone.)
It's also worth considering that earlier missions, notably Apollo & Skylab, suffered numerous critical incidents, one fatally catastrophic (and that on the ground), but any one of which could have resulted in total mission losses, including lighting strikes on launch, computer failures on Lunar landing (Apollo 11), wiring-induced oxygen tank explosion (Apollo 13, resulting in abort of the planned landing), and failure to deploy Skylab's solar panel and sunsheild. People tend to remember the major incidents of Apollos 1 and 13, but not the numerous other close calls. The US Space Shuttle programme similarly had two catastrophic failures but each occurred within the context of numerous other close calls. The envelope for both error and deviance is vanishingly thin.
Since the early 2000s, NASA have modulated their approach to FBC. Some missions, such as the JWST, are absolute monoliths and relied on extensive and expensive testing and development, which has paid off with absolutely flawless execution of launch and deployment and truly universe-expanding insights. Others, such as the Mars rover programs, have iterated on concepts starting with small, cheap, and simple rovers of limited range to incorporating a "technology demonstrator" in the form of the Ingenuity heliocopter which accompanies the SUV-sized Perseverance rover. The Huygans lander (part of the Saturn-based Cassini mission, landing on the moon Titan), and Galileo probe (part of the Galileo orbiter mission) both rode along with and extended orbiter-probe missions to provide actual contact with planetary or lunar atmosphere and/or surfaces.
More on FBC:
"'Faster, better, and cheaper' at NASA: Lessons learned in managing and accepting risk"
I don't know if the 1981 issue is covered, but you can read some very fun examples of bugfixing and OTA updates on the Voyager spacecraft in this article:
Including a 20 year wait for a pro-active fix to pay off in prod!
"A CCS FSW patch was developed and implemented in 1995, and linked on the spacecraft in 2006 for V1 and 2005 for V2 to automatically restart some of the critical functions in the event of an Error entry. This patch was exercised in flight in 2014, nearly 20 years after it was installed, when one of the CCS processors went into an error entry on V1; the patch worked as designed."
You probably were. Tight shoulders and ribs inhibit inhalation. Once you loosen up and grow stronger, you will increase the volume of your ribcage. As you do that, the tissues of the lungs unfold or stretch to fill them. Some corners of your airway will get cool/fresh air for the first time in ages. It all feels pretty odd -- tickles, itches, or even a fearful asthma response.
When I started taking my daughter to daycare(1300 metres and ~15min with the stroller one way) I noticed a positive change - but it was mostly about loosening up my shoulder muscles and lubricating my joints - stuff that previously made all other activities surprisingly energy-consuming.
Cycling 2+ hours weekly on top of that was the real bump in fitness. It's still the bare minimum a person should be doing, but it's nice to finally be able to sit comfortably after all these years.
First weeks were rough though - it felt as if I was morphing into something else - something with a higher lung capacity.
(opinion) Human society large rewards narcissism. Diligence is usually rewarded with exploitation. There's actually academic supporting the 2nd. Therefore, most politicians are largely selfish and mostly interested in being on TV, being the center of attention, and holding sway over other citizens. (Not all, just the majority). The only metric is "what gets elected." However, like "green" anything, the optimization is usually "do nothing, and color the corporate logo green."
Causes further issues. The optimization becomes, "focus on highly incendiary minutia, while avoiding anything risky, and maximizing viewer attention and anxiety." Issues that will allow them to say they're valiant, while exposing nothing especially damaging for the next election.
The American fiscal funding fiasco this / last year is typical. 6 months, and America finally has a budget. All the while, it's mostly arguments about minutia like "Homeland Security impeachment", who the speaker is, where Military can get abortions, whether a base will get funding, migrants on buses, and weekly CR shutdown "thwarting". It literally became weekly federal budgets around Feb-Mar in America... Meanwhile, a lot of enlisted in those abortion / base (yes/no?) states are wondering whether they're going to get paychecks. People on boats complain about having no ammunition to shoot with...
London's sewers are another excellent example. Dithering and dithering about repairs, about maintenance, about public toilets. Except the Thames is bright yellow, people won't go swimming, and when somebody asks, they're response is "well, btw, we're actually £18,000,000,000 in debt. Make -£2,000,000,000 per year. Have for years. Nobody even noticed. lolz." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Water Obvious optimization, nationalize while decrying the evils of the private sector. Quietly also nationalize the debt to the public in a line item somewhere that nobody writes about. Squander resources for years. Sell back to industry claiming the salvation of capitalism.