Over the years, I've found that the best ideas come to me when walking to the bathroom and back. Especially when I'm trying to come up with a good solution to a difficult programming problem. Just getting up from the screen and engaging in some mindless physical activity seems to cause my subconscious to spit out surprising insights that I wouldn't have come up with if I had been 100% focused on the problem at hand. It's really a bit of a mystery how the human brain sometimes works this way.
Can we perhaps take this opportunity to pour one out for Matt Levine? I can't think of any writer/journalist who can bring an often esoteric topic like present day financial shenanigans to life with such clear, intuitive and bitingly funny writing. His coverage of the whole Elon/Twitter saga alone is second to none.
I think I once read a comment on here that the command-line parsing logic of ffmpeg is Turing-complete. It's probably telling that I can't remember if that was meant as a joke or to be taken seriously. And I say this with nothing but admiration for the tool.
This very much resonates with my experience. I've seen this very process take place when working at a small tech startup that ended up being bought by a non-tech giant keen on undergoing a "digitalization" initiative. Our prior processes were lightweight, goal-oriented and effective. No one bothered calling them "agile", they were just the natural way to deal with an ever changing landscape of customer and system requirements.
After the buy-out we were told to undergo a thorough transformation into this brand new unified top-down software development process the company had some consultants design for them. Complete with a baffling array of buzzword driven "agile" development practices and project/squad/team/chapter manager/lead/head roles to be filled. The more you kept inquiring what exactly those roles should entail, the more conflicting and vaguer the answers got until you realized that no one had the faintest idea how any of this was supposed to actually mesh together in practice. The license packages for the expensive project planning software we were to use where long paid however.
Fun fact: Gauss is said to have commented on this equation that "if this was not immediately apparent to you upon being told it, you would never be a first-class mathematician".
Firefox makes money by its search deal with Google, in other words: by funneling their users towards Google. This pretty much also boils down to "making money by showing you ads". Google's search ads, to be precise. Now you can say: "But I can turn this off", but then you'd also turn off their source of revenue.
Brave's stated goal is to establish an alternative ad-based business model that's long-term viable without the user being tracked. Will this be successful? Who knows, but at least they're trying to find a business model that respects your privacy while being long-term sustainable. Firefox's model doesn't, at least the way it works now.
>Firefox makes money by its search deal with Google
Of course, development costs a lot. They will not need to rely on Google in the future if more people donate to them regularly. Consider donating to Firefox.
Considering most of their jobs are in mountain view, a very expensive col and developer salary area, they should consider moving somewhere more economical if they expect to live on handouts.
Why should we have to support their over priced office space?
I suspect that if you ask them, they're not in Mountain View for fun, they're there for the access to top tier tech talent. Browser rendering engines and java script engines are serious engineering, needing good engineers. It's not the only place in the world you can find them, but it's a good one.
Because they're still doing important work, and deserve to have nice things? Why does working at a non profit mean that you should have a bad quality of life?
You don't have to support them, but if their product provides value to you, it's worth considering
I think this miss the point. This seems more in the line to "Duolingo to Silicon Valley workers: Move to Pittsburgh, where you can actually afford a home" call[1].
That is, it's not about less good quality of life, just less high salary possible only in places with less high level of misc. inflation.
Plus passed some level, I doubt higher salaries make good corollary with high quality of life. Not that you can't have a sane happy life with a lot of money, of course. But :
- it doesn't seem to to be a requirement, see for example the case of Matthieu Ricard[2]
- large salary, or more generally acquiring a social status broadly recognized as great success doesn't prevent from terrible quality of life. Arguably, even you go with Camus saying "Un geste comme le suicide se prépare dans le silence du cœur au même titre qu’une grande oeuvre", not all people in [3] committed suicide out of a situation where they felt they had good quality of life.
You're not wrong, but to many people, the appearance of a non-profit (notwithstanding the legal status of Mozilla Corp) operating in an extremely high CoL region isn't good.
If SV doesn't trigger that for you, think about, say, a non-profit headquartered in Monaco, that asks for donations so that its employees can have a nice home and QoL in Monaco with salaries several multiples of your own for comparable work.
Firefox is persuing other revenue sources as well, such as a paid premium browser. My last hope against the advertising economy is this model taking off.
Same, I intend to pay for their premium browser. I've been using Firefox for years. Chrome couldn't get me to shift over. I only use Chrome when testing front-end code and I don't do front-end development anymore.
I already pay YouTube for no ads, so I agree. I would do the same for TV to an extent, too many Netflix competitors popping up, I don't have time to spend hundreds of dollars on those, I wont be consuming enough content to justify them. I do spend way too much time online, I usually pay for no ads on mobile games / apps.
In 2014, Relotius sold two stories to the monthly magazine of a Swiss paper, both interviews with hairdressers. The second one (still online: https://folio.nzz.ch/2014/februar/blondinen-faerben-ihr-haar...), a supposed interview with a Finnish hairdresser immediately received a comment from someone in Finland ("this report seems to be fiction"), complaining that the mentioned salon doesn't actually exist, the mentioned prices were all wrong and the mentioned name had the wrong gender. The magazine printed a correction and decided to no longer work with the author.
No offense to Finnish hairdressers, but if someone completely fabricates a story this meaningless, it's reasonable to assume that he's a pathological liar and not a single written word of his can be taken seriously.
Given that the guy was such a pathological liar, even about trivial matters, I find it very hard to believe that no one supposedly ever had any suspicion about the truthfulness of writing.
I also want to urge anyone with even just a fleeting interest in mathematical topics like this to go out looking for said BBC documentary. It's a marvelous portrait of the characters and backstories behind this proof.
This (highly stylized) rendering of the opening of Bach's Matthew Passion has helped me appreciate the structure of this extraordinary piece of music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAafyK44fCc
