josefover the last few years ive been puzzled at a lot of the stuff i've seen come out of mozilla. there's just like, very little explanation for all the unforced errors and cringe messaging and like, weirdly just doing exactly the wrong thing in bizarre and novel ways and not even profiting from it. something about that "join the rebel alliance of better AI" thing has finally brought me clarity. perhaps they're just really stupid
it's a weird moment, where i guess you spend years or decades having an "implicit respect", that is, that you assume by default the people who make/represent/control the thing you like must know what they're doing, and then something reveals that maybe it's not true, and never was. it's pretty hard to actually break that kind of unquestioned trust. but by god, they're trying
i think when it becomes apparent to enough people that they are Dumb, they'll freak out and try to pivot to "no, we're not Dumb! we're actually Evil" because that's actually a lot less embarrassing for them
Matthew Skala
LR
TrimTab 🇺🇦@jk
As a decades long Firefox user who's seen all their screwups, my take is that the mozilla team today are feckless cowards who are too dumb and cowardly to see the gaping market gap that needs filling: a humanist browser that doesn't ride the bullshit stochastic parrot hype train.
They have also in their history soared to great heights and fallen to great lows and are terrified of revenue loss.
They must return to their roots to survive IMHO.
The Net is Vast and Infinite@TrimTab @jk
> feckless cowards who are too dumb and cowardly to see the gaping market gap that needs filling: a humanist browser that doesn't ride the bullshit stochastic parrot hype train
The sheer amount of forks that aim to remove a lot of the 'additions' (aka bullshit stochastic parrot hype train features) that Mozilla have added to Firefox would be a wakeup call for them, I would have thought...
💙🩷💜Brett🐡🍉🐧@[email protected] i think you're right
aj
Kevin Granade@jk it's worse than stupid, they're a *corporation*. This means whoever their leadership is, they're pulled from the ranks of "corporate leadership" who fundamentally don't give a shit about anything and are highly incentivized by the structure of how corporations work to seek growth at all costs.
It's not that they have particularly stupid people in charge, they didn't get unlucky, this is a corporation working the way corporations are designed to work.
It's not that they have particularly stupid people in charge, they didn't get unlucky, this is a corporation working the way corporations are designed to work.
wb x64@jk @kevingranade this.
Nonprofit corporations not exempt, especially when funded by large/corporate donors.
Basically bureaucracy has an incentive to perpetuate and increase itself until you have a whole class of i.e. insurance execs and hospital management and university adminstration taking all the money away from both students and teachers, patients and doctors. And shareholders on top of that.
@wilbr @kevingranade i've gone back and forth throughout my life on "people and their individual values and behavior are at fault" vs "no, incentives and the structure of the system are to blame!" and so on. after a couple decades of deliberation, ive settled on "inadequate systems nurture inadequate people who nurture inadequate systems" or perhaps "it takes two to tango"
@wilbr @jk yes! I'm not saying the people making these decisions at Mozilla aren't stupid! They absolutely are, these are incredibly dumb unforced errors! But they are dumb unforced errors that the decision makers are not going to feel any meaningful repercussions for.
The way corporations work reinforces this idiocy instead of discouraging it. You can get lucky and have people who care for a while, but ultimately by being incorporated you have stacked the deck against long term success.
@jk @kevingranade to be clear in my area incorporation just means a legal entity that's not a human; co-ops and associations etc can be "corporations" and not suffer the same ills as a publicly traded for-profit C Corp (or even 501c3 nonprofit corporation with a CEO and employees) but yeah the point is well made
@jk @wilbr yea I off-handedly called it "corporation", but there is no specific term I'm aware of that precisely addresses this.
My point cross-cuts such designations, co-ops and other organizations that aim to avoid these pressures must take definite action to set up their governance in a way that avoids these pitfalls, and what I offhandedly called a corporation is an organizationn that does not take these measures or instead embraces profit-seeking as a motive in itself.
My point cross-cuts such designations, co-ops and other organizations that aim to avoid these pressures must take definite action to set up their governance in a way that avoids these pitfalls, and what I offhandedly called a corporation is an organizationn that does not take these measures or instead embraces profit-seeking as a motive in itself.
@kevingranade @jk joker_we_live_in_a_society.jpg
aerique@jk I think they have orders from their overlords at Google to actively sabotage Firefox so there will be only one browser (engine) left.
@aerique https://mastodon.social/@jk/111749535910951398 ive thought this for a while. i am 15% sure that it is true
JP@jk one unignorable fact is that, culturally and literally (for many of their workers), Mozilla is still in Silicon Valley. their employees have friends who work at the other more openly profit-maximizing tech companies in the area and as a result most of the ideas in their heads come more and less directly from people like Marc Andreessen. they're living inside the monster.