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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2020

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  • It’s probably a coincidence that shortly after Mozilla acquires an ad company, they “accidentally” remove an ad blocker.

    I mean I’m of two minds here. One, there’s an epidemic of intellectually lazy, kneejerk Mozilla hate and it’s time to turn the tide on that.

    But on the other hand, even as a Mozilla fanboy I can see how this is a really bad look, and really indefensible. I think it’s more of a huge error of judgment, and if there are other huge errors, I can begin to see a problem, but I think they have too much of a positive track record in their history to just go reaching for the tinfoil hats so quickly.






  • The best I can think of is that the explainer language used to justify the extension’s removal was just boilerplate language that got copy+pasted here because someone clicked the wrong button. But even that makes a mockery of the review process.

    I think “oops clicked wrong button” would be slightly more defensible, but not by much. If they truly rejected the extension for content in it that it does not have, it’s hard to see how a human could make that mistake even accidentally. But maybe there’s something I’m missing.



  • I had an alienware Steam Machine and it was perfectly fine.

    I think the criticisms of the Steam Machine suffered from what I would call the Verge Syndrome, which is only being able to comprehend things in a binary of instant success or failure, with no in between and no comprehension of other definitions of success.

    Steam Machines were a low risk initiative that were fine for what the were. They did not have a ring of death, they didn’t have a blue screen, the OS itself was not glitchy, they didn’t lose money, and they didn’t fail any stated goals. They got the Proton ecosystem up and running, and got the ball rolling on hardware partnerships, which led to the smash success of the Steam Deck which would not have been otherwise possible.









  • Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances

    So I went ahead and read that article and goodness gracious, does anybody actually read these links??? Because that link is a complete nothingburger. It’s a blog post from someone who never read a 990 before (standard nonprofit disclosure form) who thinks every other line of is proof of a scandal. But it’s not, it’s just a big word salad that is too long to read, so nobody will bother.

    The most significant charge is (1) that the CEO makes too much and (2) the author doesn’t like that they contract out work to consultants who think diversity is good. And everything after that is LESS significant.

    Every point made, so far as I can tell:

    • Have assets worth $1.1 billion as of 2021
    • Mozilla spent less on “expenses” from 2021 relative to 2020
    • Revenue went up over the same time
    • A lot of revenue was from royalties (e.g. agreements for default search)
    • They disagree with the wording on a donate form about whether Mozilla “relies” on individual donations
    • The CEO made $5.6MM
    • They pulled out one expense, which appears to have been training/education relating to social justice topics
    • They pull out a few more individual expenses and weren’t sure what they were.

    This isn’t secret documents being handed to Deep Throat in a dark parking lot. There’s no smoking gun, no smoke, just a PDF with ordinary tables of expenses and revenue, and consultants who did diversity training. If that’s shady then, get ready to be mad about every non-profit ever.