They do have a history of such things happening, yes, which is why my comment exists in the first place. Normally, I would assume this to just be the result of regular shitty management practices paired with regular shitty profit motives.
The history makes it look like they might genuinely have a higher motive here, and I’m saying I still don’t think so, because it would be far too petty and I don’t see them benefitting that much from it.
Most of it?
Google is blocking popular instances these days, so yeah, you basically need to find an unpopular instance, which usually means it’s new and may not live for long, or it will quickly become popular, because it works, which will cause Google to block it.
Yeah, Google started blocking popular instances of Invidious and Piped in May this year: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3822
Every so often, it may start working again when those instances get a different IP address, but it usually doesn’t last more than a few days…
The thing is, I really don’t think, Google would care about Firefox. Firefox is sitting at negligible percentages of usage share. The only real competitor to Chrome is Safari and that’s because of iOS.
I guess, they might impact Safari on macOS with this, but someone would have to try this out to actually see, and ultimately, this could still just be a dumb mistake.
Having said that, Google holds a near-monopoly in both video content and web browsers. They have a special duty to not disadvantage competitors and even if this was an honest mistake, I do think, it deserves a slap on the wrist.
I mean, at this rate, I’m imagining Microsoft will have hollowed out OpenAI in a few years, but I could see them buying Boston Dynamics, too, yes
I certainly don’t want to dismiss any individuals as tech bros. Tech broism is more like a natural phenomenon, which occurs when you lock exclusively privileged people into a room for long enough and then let them discuss user needs.
At some point, they’ll ask themselves questions like “Why do we need privacy?” and everyone else in the room will agree that they’ve never needed it either and then they’ll found Google.
I am very much at risk of this, too. I have to constantly go out of my way to try to re-adjust my perspective, so that I don’t completely miss the ball on what users actually need.
And places like Hacker News naturally form, because of course, we all do want to only talk about topics that we consider relevant. And folks whose needs are not generally considered relevant by the Hacker News community will look for different places, too.
I guess, a question you can ask yourself:
If you’ve ever interviewed a senior engineer who was for example black, gay, trans and/or a woman, did they frequent Hacker News?
Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve been there, but my impression was the polar opposite. That it’s filled with business folks and tech bros. That their unbalanced voting system unearths controversial takes rather than informative comments. Every now and then, you’ll genuinely see a comment from someone with expertise, but that was not worth sacrificing my mental health for.
Well, those will work in Firefox just fine…
Yeah, people will use anything, if it comes as default…
Sure, yeah. The way I imagine this would work out best for humanity, is if companies are forced to open up platforms they provide, when they have e.g. more than 40% market saturation with that.
Most small platforms will want to strive for interoperability with the dominant platforms anyways, so this threshold is just to keep the burden of regulation low.
In practice, this might mean that Twitter would be forced to allow federation with Mastodon.
Or that Microsoft is forced to open-source the code for the Windows API.
Or that Reddit is blocked from closing up their third-party API.
Ultimately, I don’t think, it even needs to be as concrete. I feel like even a law stating that if you’re providing a platform, you need to take special care to keep competition alive (along with some detailing what this entails), and then leaving it up to a judge to decide, would work.
The GDPR is implemented like that and while most larger companies are IMHO in violation of the GDPR, I also feel like most larger companies actually did go from atrocious privacy handling to merely bad privacy handling, which is an incredible success.
That’s effectively all I’m hoping for, too. That dominant platforms can’t just stagnate for multiple decades anymore. That they do have to put in at least a small bit more effort to stay in that dominant position.
Yeah, I could imagine their legal department actually making up a sizeable chunk, with how much the music industry loves to sue.
Well, the F-Droid team may in theory permit it, but it’s also the F-Droid team that has to actively build and distribute the new version. If they don’t feel like distributing a newer version, they can absolutely do that.
The fact it hasn’t imploded a long time ago is proof that digital platforms need to be regulated to enforce interoperability.
Since this shitshow started, I have not heard from anyone that wanted to be on Twitter. In anything resembling a free market, these customers (both advertisers and users) could freely go to a competitor.
But due to the way platforms work, no one can compete, once a dominant platform emerges. A platform has a monopoly on all the things people built on top of the platform (content, software etc.). This monopoly kills the free market. Enforced interoperability would reduce this platform effect and help out competitors.
The EU is starting to tackle that, with the Digital Markets Act, but very few companies are targeted so far, even though the whole industry is plagued by quasi-monopolistic platforms that are universally agreed upon to be trash.
So, first they rewarded YouTubers for wasting ever more of your time, making you watch as many ads as possible, and now they’re building a tool to sort through that whole crap content?
Apparently, “Theorems for free!” is a paper that talks about an extensive ability to reason about parts of programs, if you follow some rather basic rules.
However, lots of popular programming languages throw this ability out the window, because they do not want to enforce those basic rules.
Most languages, for example, allow for rather uncontrolled side effects and to be able to reason as a programmer, you have to make the assumption that no one else abused side effects.
The instanceof is rather referring to dynamic typing, though, as e.g. employed by Python and JS, which makes it difficult to make any assumptions at all.
So, in statically typed languages, when you’re implementing a function, you can declare that a given parameter is a number or a string etc. and the compiler will enforce that for you. In dynamically typed languages, you have to assume that anyone calling your function is using it correctly, which is a difficult assumption to make after a refactoring in a larger codebase.
All in all, such different levels of rigorosity can be fine, but the larger your codebase grows, the more you do want such rules to be enforced, so you can just ignore the rest of the codebase.
We’re getting customers that want to use LLMs to query databases and such. And I fully expect that to work well 95% of the time, but not always, while looking like it always works correctly. And then you can tell customers a hundred times that it’s not 100% reliable, they’ll forget.
So, at some point, that LLM will randomly run a complete non-sense query, returning data that’s so wildly wrong that the customers notice. And precisely that is the moment when they’ll realize, holy crap, this thing isn’t always reliable?! It’s been telling us inaccurate information 5% of the usages?! Why did no one inform us?!?!?!
And then we’ll tell them that we did inform them and no, it cannot be fixed. Then the project will get cancelled and everyone lived happily ever after.
Or something. Can’t wait to see it.
Every now and then, you’ll see some journalist uncovering the great revelation that Mozilla is doing unthinkable things, but I have never these stories actually being relevant, if you do more research on the topic.
Some examples:
And telemetry by itself is not evil either. It depends entirely on what data is actually being sent. You can look at what Mozilla sends by typing “about:telemetry” into the URL bar. In my opinion, that is perfectly fine.
Ultimately, though, they enjoy so much trust, because they have no profit motive. The Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit and the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the Foundation, so cannot pay out profits to anyone either.
Any ‘evil’ shit they do to make money, they do it to pay wages and to invest further into Firefox & their other projects.
You can criticize that the CEO takes a salary she can’t possibly spend (yet is below industry-standard, to my knowledge). And you can argue whether they should be taking so much money from Google rather than other sources.
But all in all, that still leaves them far above companies who need to exploit users as much as justifiable, to make the maximum amount of profit.
I came into this comment section wanting to make the same argument, but I guess, you could also be carrying around a USB-C-to-audio-jack adapter in addition to your wired headphones…