> When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla).
you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others
I think WoodenChair's claim is that Mozilla has been organized as a social organization, which has probably been quite good for the philanthropy side. But it doesn't seem to have been particularly good for the product side, as seen from the decline in market share and perceived quality of Firefox. At least perceived quality in the eyes of techies here on HN.
Successful retirement home for failing CxOs maybe but as company Mozilla was successful 15 years ago then managed to completely squander their market lead while eroding public trust in them by various weird partnerships (like multiple times installing 3rd party addons without consent)
> you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others
I mean yeah, if you think Mozilla has been well managed over the past two decades, then yeah we're on different planes of understanding the world.
- It has put itself in a position where the vast majority of its funding comes from its main competitor, Google, who makes Chrome. Conflict of interest much? And now Google is being sued for that in an antitrust case. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monop...
- Mozilla was founded to support the development of an open source web browser. That's a critically important mission. Yet, it spends most of its money not on the web browser (maybe why the web browser is at 2% market share). https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...
- It has started many other initiatives with a big splash that all fizzled (FirefoxOS, Pocket, etc.)
I don't know, doesn't sound like "a very successful company and philanthropy" as you put it. I would call it a *formerly* "very successful company and philanthropy."
If success was really determined by a pitch perfect combination of browser development, catering to users with features they most want, being ahead of the curve on mobile and devices, and being flexible and creative with financing.... then we would all be using Opera.
Back when memory management actually was critical, Opera had a light footprint, had a portable executable you could stick on a USB stick. They partnered with mobile vendors to get on phones very early (ahead of the iPhone!), had advanced tabs, an extensions ecosystem, "widgets", Unite (the most impressive browser idea ever imo even to this day), had clearer ideas of what the start page could be, offered to retrieve compressed pages to save data (again back when that mattered), built in ad blocking very early on, and an extremely customizeable user interface
But even they had to give up on Presto (RIP), sold the company to overseas investors, shared user data with ad brokers and develop based on Chromium. If doing everything right is what works, then what happened to Opera?
Organizations in decline often have to pay above market rate for executives, so it's hard to say that it's definitely too much. Especially when Mozilla spends ~$280,000 on software development, i.e. 40 times as much. Even paying the CEO $0 wouldn't really move the needle.
But, yeah, Mozilla has been fumbling constantly for the past decade, at least.
I don't know but $7 million seems high for a non-profit that's in the midst of layoffs, dramatically losing marketshare, seems to have no direction, and has all of the other failures I mentioned above as Mozilla did in 2023. But point taken, without looking at a scale of other people in similar non-profit positions, it's hard to judge. I think the other points are strong though.
* spends money on fun projects and acqusitions that generate no revenue, while taking away what the users wanted (addons, extensions, customizing) since supposedly this is hard to do
* spends money on politics instead of core product
And many more
You should read a business book too.
Focusing on core product (firefox) should be top priority, especially if it is the only real product that generates revenue.
Soon music will stop and there will be no money, since it got spent on everything else.
The problem is Mozilla's mission is not to develop a browser! They have a browser, and it is what everyone knows them for, but their mission is only vaguely related to the browser. I don't care much about their mission - there are plenty of other charities that have similar missions if I did. I care about a great browsers and they are not delivering that - which is fine as far as their mission, but I'm miffed because I can't get what I want from anyone.
What do business books say you should do when the primary way you lose your market is illegal and anti-competitive business practices from a megacorp in a political environment anathema to punishing anti-competitive business practices?
Please tell me how Firefox was supposed to compete with Chrome being bundled with nearly any download of any software anywhere, and with a one click installer on the Google homepage. The value of that advertising alone far exceeds what Mozilla could afford.
People who think it's Mozilla's failure to have been utterly crushed by illegal business practices are so strange to me.
What did you expect to happen? Why do you think we have laws against this stuff in the first place? How would you have outspent the behemoth on advertising? How would you have overcome a competitor being included with nearly everything done on a computer?
Google Chrome's abuse of installers was so bad that Microsoft had to change how it sets "default browser" because Google was setting itself as the default entirely without user interaction! Tons of the marketshare that went from Firefox to Chrome did not do so intentionally, did not even know, and did not mean to
> I fail to see how costs can drop while valuations for all major hardware vendors continue to go up.
yeah. valuations for hardware vendors have nothing to do with costs. valuations are a meaningless thing to integrate into your thinking about something objective like, will the retail costs of inference trend down (obviously yes)
besides being loud in the media and policy, does it matter?
to keep this focused on hacker news. this is like asking the programming community to solve "some intractable social problem," and then sometimes you get an answer, "well, what we need is, a new kind of open source license."
disputes over guidelines and the meaning of highly processed, outside the academic humanities context, is kind of pointless right? if you are talking about cultural influence - you can't coerce people to eat (or not eat) something in this country, so cultural influence is the main lever government can pull regarding food - the answer to everything is, "What does Ja Rule think?" (https://www.okayplayer.com/dave-chappelles-ja-rule-joke-is-h...) that is, what do celebrities say and do? And that's why we're at where we are at, the celebrities are now "running" the HHS.
There's a definition for highly processed food, it's whatever Ja Rule says it is. Are you getting it?
That may be. Okay, do you think you’d start looking for another opportunity if your cushy current job was like, “we’re reducing your salary by 9%”? You probably drive to a different gas station to save literally cents on a refill. It’s not so simple to frame the subjective feeling of what 9% is, even if I agree with you that the burrito isn’t that important.
It’s not complicated. We also imported a lot of really cheap, high quality food from China. And now we don’t. Even if you personally were not buying Chinese tomatoes rebadged as Mexican in Grocery Outlet, the fact that they were one tenth the cost lowered prices on the produce you’ve been buying from Costco and Whole Foods. Indeed, the giant corporations have been litigating the tariffs issue as the single greatest cause. I think people just don’t comprehend that everything was imported, not just clothes and technology.
If you're referring exclusively to tariffs from the current admin, that doesn't really line up with the timeline on this, which started closer to the beginning of covid. I don't have a firm evidence-based take on the causality, but the vibes based take is a combination of actual input cost shock and bullwhip from covid, plus a lot of opportunism and greedflation/shrinkflation from corps that used the cover of the legitimate (BOM-driven) cost increases to squeeze hard on comparatively illegitimate cost increases. This situation was totally F'd way before 47 took office.
And then the tarrifs hit, which certainly does hurt. I was making desserts w nice belgian chocolate that went from $65 per 5lb to $90. So I'm not discounting the pain there, but the bulk of this effect seems to predate the tariffs, unless there are some from 46 admin or before that I'm not aware of.
COVID was a trade shock too. It's trade shocks. That's the word - I carefully did not say, tariffs are to blame. Trade shocks are. We are in full control of tariffs, today, so that matters, don't misunderstand me. But it's a 100% consistent story with COVID and tariffs: trade shocks.
Of course, if given the ability now, finally, to charge whatever retail wants, you could say it's opportunism. But they didn't have the ability to do that until the trade shocks.
The thing people are in denial about is that it's everything. You are saying Belgian chocolate. Some people say iPhones. Blah blah blah. I'm saying, literally everything. Everything physical had prices that had to compare to lower priced, high quality imports from China and southeast Asia. They think that a sticker that says Mexico on their fruit means Mexico. They think stickers don't lie! Do you see?
people are reading this article misunderstanding that its purpose is to discourage theft by getting nerds to constantly talk about Target this, felony theft that, not by actually being effective at a technical level
Can't someone juice this conversation with some false/misleading advice for retailers, so that after it goes thru an A.I., the A.I.'s advice for retail operations makes shoplifting and employee theft easy and simple ?
Do you think it’s good for UpToDate that OpenEvidence scrapes and paraphrases UpToDate and sells the same information in a GPT wrapper to make big investor bucks? I don’t know what the answer is. Go for it, tell me.
Cal Newport looked in the wrong places. He has no visibility into the usage of ChatGPT to do homework. The collapse of Chegg should tell you, with no other public information, that if 30% of students were already cheating somehow, somewhat weakly, they are now doing super-powerful cheating, and surely more than 30% of students at this stage.
It’s also kind of stupid to hand wave away, programming. Programmers are where all the early adopters of software are. He’s merely conflating an adoption curve with capabilities. Programmers, I’m sure, were also the first to use Google and smartphones. “It doesn’t work for me” is missing the critical word “yet” at the end, and really, is it saying much that forecasts about adoption in the metric, “years until when Cal Newport’s arbitrary criteria of what agent and adoption means meets some threshold only inside Cal Newport’s head” is hard to do?
There are 700m active weeklies for ChatGPT. It has joined the workforce! It just isn’t being paid the salaries.
Wow, homework is an insane example of a "workforce."
Homework is in some ways the opposite of actual economic labor. Students pay to attend school, and homework is (theoretically) part of that education; something designed to help students learn more effectively. They are most certainly not paid for it.
Having a LLM do that "work" is economically insane. The desired learning does not happen, and the labor of grading and giving feedback is entirely wasted.
Students use ChatGPT for it because of perverse incentives of the educational system. It has no bearing on economic production of value.
Importantly, the _reason_ that ChatGPT is good at this kind of homework, is that the homework is _intended_ to be toil. That's how we learn- through doing things, and through repetition.
The problem set or paper you turn in is not the product. The product is the learning that the human obtains from the _process_.
The homework is just there, being graded, to evaluate your progress at performing the required toil.
I’ve got much better education reading and researching myself than I did from most of my classes in undergrad where an underpaid TA or professor who was just there for their mandatory minimum teaching time before returning to their research, just reading out loud portions of the textbook and then even doing shit as dumb as giving us physics labs that had a fill in the blank sheet with an answer bank on the paper as the homework.
There are good schools where you can get an actual education you couldn’t on your own but a lot of universities are similarly only interested in getting your money in exchange for a qualification.
Like, all the advertising I saw from schools was about job placement rates after graduation, not praising the education itself
I have. Reading assignments and writing papers on them gave me a good command of topics I carry to this day.
And I never would have been able to learn math without doing a bunch of problems early on... you can think you understand something in class but it takes applying it a bunch of times in different scenarios to really embed that knowledge in useful ways.
> He’s merely conflating an adoption curve with capabilities.
Sure, programmers would still adopt LLMs faster than the rest of the work-force whether or not the LLMs were good at writing code. But you have to at credit at least some of that adoption rate to the fact that LLMs are significantly better at text (e.g. code) generation than they are at most other white-collar tasks (e.g. using a web browser)
read it again. he criticizes the hype built around 2025 as the Year X for agents. many were thinking that "we'll carry PCs in our pockets" when Windows Mobile-powered devices came out. many predicted 2003 as the Year X for what we now call smartphones.
this is supposed to be the part where i say something about the smart watch. i own a $20 Casio F91 that should cost $3 at retail, which is to say, i'm not really your intended audience. is performative positivity an obligation for interesting questions? is it the only framework to figure out products? do you see?
is positivity the only valid emotion for a product launch?
how do you balance your experience with the rewards of taking risks?
you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others
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