onnes

Furry Physicist and Lead Engineer

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bcj
@bcj

Apparently Mozilla is doing a smallish (60 person) layoff. The cuts seems to be other projects and not Firefox itself but I can't say I love seeing this:

Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.

Also, maybe this reads better in some broader context but I can't imagine people were excited for this:

With mozilla.social, we made a big bet in 2023 to build a safer, better social media experience, based on Mastodon and the Fediverse. Our initial approach was based on a belief that Mozilla needed to quickly reach large scale in order to effectively shape the future of social media

Even if Mozilla had a spotless record and I thought there was nothing salvageable about how Mastodon is being run, becoming load-bearing quickly so you can 'effectively shape' a project doesn't seem like a way of winning friends


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in reply to @bcj's post:

wonder if the AI thing is so that AI companies can pay them to hook into their browser for cash like the google search default scandal, but with safeguards in front or whatever. it won't work but like... when has that stopped anyone

Yeah, I can't tell how much of this is a sort of hail mary revenue hope and how much is them buying into the hype. Them adding the LLM stuff to MDN seemed like them thinking it would be helpful and the idea of FakeSpot (the thing the memo claims 'kicked off' their interest), a tool that summarizes product review sections while filtering out fake reviews, is fine I guess but it's another thing to be gamed and it doesn't link back to the reviews it quotes from so that seems dubious. I'd sort of rather these were business moves and not something they think is actually good