ashughes
@ashughes@feddit.uk
- Comment on No AI* Here - A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter - Waterfox Blog 1 week ago:
I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing or is about, even.
As someone who started their career as a volunteer at Mozilla and was fortunate enough to become an employee (although am no longer), I can say with a fair amount of confidence that this has been their standard operating mode for over a decade. Nothing I’ve seen from them since I was let go has shown me they’re operating any differently.
I still support Firefox because I oppose a browser monoculture owned by Google, and the advocacy work the Foundation is vitally important. The Corporation lost the plot ages ago though, and does more harm to Mozilla’s mission than any other player out there. No amount of re-orgs or pivots can fix this.
I hope, someday, for Firefox to be freed from the Corporation as a sustainable community run project (like Debian), with infrastructure sponsored by the Foundation and others who want to see it continue. Unfortunately the Corporation will never let Firefox go because its existential for them, and will be stuck in this panic cycle for as long as Google keeps them on life support.
Anyway, still using Firefox and pruning all the weeds from it each release, but it’s become exhausting.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Reading the “In Crime and Politics” section of the Calibri Wikipedia page, I can’t help but think the motivation here is so the State Department can release falsified documents predating 2006 without being found out.
- Comment on EU Chat Control didnt pass - proving the media got to alot of you 2 months ago:
Yeah, I can totally empathise. I used to work in QA for a couple different software companies, including around CVEs and security bug bounty programs. One company scaled back their QA department to near nothing, the other eliminated QA altogether, instead relying on devs to QA their own stuff or automation. It’s not going well for either of them.
- Comment on EU Chat Control didnt pass - proving the media got to alot of you 2 months ago:
Not going to downvote this because the source article is useful, but OP’s take is ludicrous. Have we really reached the point where ALL media is propaganda?
It might be time to unplug society and plug it back in again.
- Comment on EU Chat Control didnt pass - proving the media got to alot of you 2 months ago:
It reminds me of when climate hoaxers claim the hole in the ozone layer shrinking proves those campaigning to fix it were just fearmongering.
- Comment on Labour Party members just defected to Your Party en masse 2 months ago:
Bothsidesing whereby an organisation presents propaganda from the left and the right as equally factual to construct a straw man of a middle ground as truth is definitely bad, as is presenting one side’s propaganda as the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
I expect any legitimate news outlet to inform the public of the nuance on a given topic because it is within the nuance where the truth often lies. It is then helpful and informative to present how “both sides” are trying to frame that topic by excluding the nuance, thereby obscuring the truth. Journalism as a public service is there to inform me about what is happening in depth and in a debiased manner so I can think critically about it (if the UK has any news outlets that meet this standard, that’s news to me). Painting real, hard journalism as “bothsidesing” only serves to destroy the concept of nuance, which is just about the only thing both sides can agree on: destroy the middle ground and they’ll be able to keep us pawns fighting forever.
You may think having a Nigel Farage or Fox News for the left brings balance but it doesn’t. It only serves to keep us fighting each other rather than fighting the status quo. If you’re reading the Canary solely for entertainment and are able to consistently view it as such then fair enough I guess, just don’t call it news.
To be clear, I am not claiming that you personally are participating in any of the above, just calling out a general worrying trend I am witnessing in our discourse.
- Comment on YSK that fracking is not safe. People living near fracking sites are more likely to develop serious diseases 5 months ago:
Also literal fire for tap water
- Comment on "Would U.S. tech workers join a union?" survey average: 67% likely 1 year ago:
I spend most of my days working on healing myself with time in nature, and I’m developing a personal photography project connected to my natural surroundings. I also spend time working on my garden when weather permits and am learning to paint and draw when the weather is gloomy. All in all that keeps my days pretty packed and active, not even thinking about tech most days whereas before it was all consuming.
The majority of my career in tech was at Mozilla, followed by a relatively brief stint at Element. I’m lucky that I was able to spend my entire career working for companies whose missions and products I still champion. But even as good and well intentioned as they are, they cannot escape so-called “Silicon Valley” as they’re very much a part of it.
- Comment on "Would U.S. tech workers join a union?" survey average: 67% likely 1 year ago:
If you want to read about this on a website that isn’t full of ads and doesn’t just present as an ad for their own news app, here is the source material by Blind.com.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find a link to the raw survey data and I generally don’t trust surveys that aren’t accompanied by raw data.
I went looking for the data because 1901 respondents across 32 of the largest companies globally doesn’t seem like it would be statistically representative of any one company. If you assume the same sample size per company, which it probably isn’t but again that’s unverifiable because I couldn’t find the raw data, you’re looking at, what, 60 employees for a company the size of Google?
Look, I’m a recovering tech worker who left the industry because of the toxic work culture, having spent a quarter of my life at one of the good ones. Even there I saw the value of unions. No matter the industry, workers deserve the right to collective bargaining and fair treatment. But I don’t think surveys with unverifiable data help move that conversation forward.
Now, if I’m mistaken and someone finds a source link to the data that we can all verify, I’ll happily take another look and reconsider my opinion on it’s validity.