I think the benefit is supposed to be the locking feature. Any human that sees [email protected] and wants to circumvent your filters to get to your main inbox (typically for sales purposes) can figure out to email [email protected]. With this product, the email is undeliverable unless they label their emails correctly.
Exactly. Even bots can strip the "+" and bombard you with junk. With a prefix inbox you can invent any suffix. I have a "service" prefix that I add suffixes to it when I need: "service-netflix", "service$bank", "service.newsletter-1". I don't need to pre-create each one, only "service" is enough and then any suffix locks to the sender. They can't sell your email. And they may never know to invent a new suffix because they don't know where the prefix starts. You can make it "sdfawetr" if you want.
Isn't the majority of AI compute training and not inference? Saying "It doesn't matter if the AI companies fold because I can run models on my computer" is like saying "I don't care if the farm closes because I get my food from the grocery store"
You are correct, but I think it's much more like consumer culture doesn't and never will care about any of these details.
Specifically with regard to AI, the consumers aren't even aware of the "grocery store" either. They're being served from a silver platter. What matters most is the quality of results, not the methods. You can disagree all you want for whatever (good and compelling) reasons, but it doesn't change the fact that many people do not even buy groceries now and doordash everything.
If it turns out that you can put a mobile kitchen in their backyard that cooks up everything without them realizing, it makes no difference to the consumer.
Realistically, yes there's a finite amount of training data, hence the plateau in capability we've seen for at least a year. I think we're likely to see a consolidation and compression of all of this into local models. The economics don't support the expected growth of the current arrangement either. There simply isn't that much distinct data out there as initially assumed.
I think that's a symptom of Matt generating a website for "an Automattician". They had a working relationship. If I died today, my husband would remember my life as someone who laughed and cried, my work might think of me as someone more inquisitive and analytical.
I think they mean rather than acqui-hire, acquiring in order to hire the team. They hired the team they wanted individually to specifically avoid acquiring this company.
Gutted. Poached is a bad word for it which already describes a different thing that is a component of this thing. If you can combine "poach" and acquire in a witty way, go for it.
"Hi-quired," although not sonorous, is at least a new word for a specific thing, instead of a word for a closely related thing that would just confuse anyone who heard it. I might've just gone for "Hire-quired" because it's obvious what it means and it seems a little bit easier to say.
Poaching is when one illegally hunts wildlife. People are not animals, and hiring them is not harming them. It is a terrible term to apply to human beings.
Most people know what poaching means without making that association. It’s a perfectly legitimate term across all forms of employment, in both negative and positive contexts.
Do we also need to retire ‘head hunting’, because it brings to mind cartoonishly outdated notions of savagery?
Within the employment context, is it ever a negative? Only from the perspective of the competitor? But to society as a whole, "poaching" (hiring) employees is clearly a massive win.
There are many thousands of words that mean more than one thing. If you go out of your way to deliberately misapply one meaning to another, in a way that's offensive, that's on you. Nobody's asking or forcing you to do that.
Do you object if someone says, "I adopted a new strategy"? After all, children are adopted, and one could say that using this phrase trivializes a deeply important human relationship.
Do you object if someone says, "She's a fan of my work"? After all, a fan is a machine that blows air. It could be said that referring to a person as a fan reduces them to an appliance whose purpose is to serve someone else.
Do you object if someone says, "I have a date tonight"? After all, a date is a fruit. Someone could say that calling a romantic partner a "date" is to objectify them and reduce them to something consumed for pleasure.
To clarify, what I am objecting to is taking a term for something with a massive negative societal impact, and trying to apply it to something that has a massive societal positive impact, in order to make the positive thing sound like a negative thing. I am all for the evolution of language, especially when it serves society.
> To clarify, what I am objecting to is taking a term for something with a massive negative societal impact, and trying to apply it to something...
No one is "taking a term" and "trying to apply" it to anything. The word has multiple meanings/uses, full stop.
What you are objecting to is one of its meanings (attracting employees from a competitor), because you don't like the negative connotation of another of its meanings (stealing game). And that's because you believe that the latter meaning's negative connotation will make the former also feel more negative. But I submit that that's just in your head, and the heads of a few others, and the vast majority of people are able to keep two definitions quite separate.
If you hire the core of a company that constitutes its competitive advantage and abandon the corporate shell and its looming legal liabilities, you might have just hi-quired a business.
As a Firefox user, I hope this works. As someone who works in IT, people are going to try and install Chrome at all costs and your ticket queues will be clogged with people saying a computer is broken or has no internet access if it doesn't have Chrome on it.
For general-purpose use this may be true. For specialized Web-based tools, like access to medical or legal systems, not as much: the users are conditioned to work with a specific browser (many remember MSIE-only apps), and are used to the idea that their workstation has all kinds of Internet access limitations, along with a corporate policy that expressly forbids arbitrary browsing.
Have done small to medium institutional rollouts of Firefox in different orgs, some of which were on top of a Linux base and others a Windows base. Windows deployments include Firefox in the base image and configuration is managed with AD and Ansible. Linux deployments manage configuration with Ansible. The preinstalled browsers were removed or disabled.
All users received an orientation and were informed that Firefox is the only approved browser.
Firefox was pinned to the desktop and taskbar, usually with the name "INTERNET" as the web browser is commonly known here.
The number of support tickets was very small. Usually if a user reported a problem with the web browser, it was a page that was also broken in Chrome or some other network issue.
Users reacted positively when they saw that there are no ads in Firefox. uBlock Origin was preinstalled.
Without ads and tracking scripts the web browser is massively faster, which also was perceived by users.
If there is any initial resistance to Firefox, it usually melts quickly.
The only bother has been the frequent UI updates to Firefox, which occasionally cause frustration until we apply a new configuration to revert whatever fresh horrors Firefox designers have birthed. With ESR, these problems are less frequent.
I hope this Firefox Enterprise freezes the UI to the classic "tabs look like tabs" aesthetic, maintaining the option of vertical tabs.
It's absolutely insane to me that more orgs aren't rolling out things like uBlock Origin. In fact, at my bigbrain sillycunt valley job I am forbidden by policy from installing it (though no technical control in place). It's the simplest, highest ROI protection you can use on the web imo.
I briefly read institutional as 'intentional', with both in mind, the standardization of experience is something that's really wroth thinking about.
One feeling I am starting to get is server side web apps might make more of a re-emergence, because putting so much application and business logic in the front end serves as a bigger footprint for possible security issues.
With respect to resistance to browsers (or preference for something else), I agree that users seek familiarity and those who got to start with Firefox do still remember it.
Mozilla is just one org, but it's relative independence will hopefully provide other perspectives to using a web browser as a universal interface, not just for humans, but our new sentence-dna containing friends.
I wish this was true. At my org we had to add Chrome to the base image because otherwise we get so many tickets/calls about it even though we provide it via an internal software distribution service that any user has access to. People like what they like and are very resistant to change.
I've found this to be one of those issues that just seems completely normal when you first hear it but when you dig into the actual users, the "why" starts to get lost.
My anec-data on the subject seems to imply it affects a very specific segment of people: The "I only use a (usually Windows) computer at work" folks. The odd part of that is that almost all of them seem to own iPhones or iPads (specifically not Android devices) and since they use these devices, exclusively, outside of work and one can assume they're probably opening Safari for browsing, why do they have such a strong association that Chrome must be "the browser." This segment, though, seems to make up a large majority of "knowledge workers" outside of IT.
Now, like probably a lot of us here, I'm the tech support for everyone who knows I "play with computers professionally." One of the first things I do is remove the Chrome and Edge icon from the task bar[0] and add Firefox with a small set of extensions that generally keep me from having to revisit them due to malware. I usually just tell them "The button you use to get on the Internet changed but it's the same." ... and Bob's your uncle. I return a year later, the same Firefox icon is in the same place, updated several versions and all is well. They all vaguely knew they were using something different before, some knew it was called Chrome or Edge, but "the icon changed" is all I've had to say for probably a decade since the two browsers' core functionality is close enough that they generally cover every site the older generation would be expected to visit.
It feels like a variation of "they've got enough knowledge to be dangerous."
[0] I don't think I've ever seen my parents, aunts/uncles, extended older family every try to find a program through that menu that pops up when you click the button that used to be called the "Start" button. :)
Assuming this is not NYC: how many of the people in the group you're describing drive reliable, used cars that they own outright, and how many lease new? I think I know which, and if so, it would go a long way towards characterizing their mindset.
I think it's a status play, for people who have been convinced that status is tantamount to utility. If you lower yourself to options that aren't well-known to be high status, or at least known - particularly ones that require tinkering of any sort - you are wasting time, and worse, you are signalling to other people that you're a time-waster, that your time isn't valuable, and that your choice to waste time rather than use the default or high-status option shows that you have a defect in judgment.
Many years ago I installed Firefox 0.6 on my mother-in-law’s laptop and gave it the IE logo - she never noticed, it never got updated, but she never had any malware problems.
An earlier company I worked at had this same issue with Internet Explorer. It was after IE had been deprecated by microsoft as a browser but our IT department still had it as a downloadable application. Most of my team's on-call issues were from internal users using IE to access our site, even after we added an IE compatible popup that would tell them NOT to use IE.
Chrome, or Firefox are third party browsers to the operating system.
The internet explorer/edge issues were due to a web browser that was built into the operating system, and owned by the operating system company (Microsoft in this case).
There was a popular trend for a while that IE was the windows feature that let you download a different browser.
Apple had a similar run with Safari and from what I recall had to change.
In my workplace a lot of people used to like firefox because it was the only browser on which the pac proxy setting was not enforced by group policy so it allowed them to have their corporate apps to actually work regardless of the network they were connected to.
They lost fierefox a few months ago due to new compamy policy and with it lost access to some apps when working from home. We know it is related to the proxy config but company is so big and processes are such a mess nobody knows who should be contacted and by which email alias or service now ticket.
By both worlds I guess I assumed that the only reason people use Firefox is that it isn’t tied to an advertising company that wants to enshittify the internet at the expense of my user experience because I saw nothing else about Firefox that I liked better than Chrome.
Also, half the sites on the Internet don’t work properly on anything but chrome. At home, I’m an ardent and committed Firefox user, at work, I use Chrome like everyone else (and keep anything personal as far away from it as I can).
Completely agree. I've used Firefox as my primary browser for over twenty years and it's less than once a week that I come across something that needs Chrome.
Even then you're watching them from those broadcast stations. The live channel feeds in those apps is from your local station, and if you're watching any local news it's also clips from your station's newscast. You'll be impacted by fewer perspectives as stations consolidate.
Is easy to think about content from a consumer mindset that everything just exists for you, but no the stuff on the internet is made by real people who are impacted by the works around them.
All this debate about how politics are defined or how bias is measured. My question is why should I care? Grok identifying as Mechahitler didn't drag me any further right, why would ChatGPT be able to drag me left? If you vote the way AI tells you, that's already a problem regardless of what it said.
I sort of agree with this in the abstract. The problem is that concretely, these LLMs are being used to decide whether you receive healthcare, government benefits, or whether your job/agency gets cut. So they have already had real world consequences due to DOGE, Insurance companies, and other uses. I certainly don't find either the methodology or graphical conclusions of this link very valuable.
One can argue what fraction of the several million children's (under 5) deaths are (going to be) due to cuts by DOGE to USAID (and later congressional appropriations) from Grok recommendations/justifications, what fraction were politically pre-determined, and which are "just deserts", but it would be hard to put it at zero.
> I sort of agree with this in the abstract. The problem is that concretely, these LLMs are being used to decide whether you receive healthcare, government benefits, or whether your job/agency gets cut. So they have already had real world consequences due to DOGE, Insurance companies, and other uses.
But you can't assume that the AI's bias in a policy debate is the same as its bias in unrelated use cases.
For example, it is totally plausible an AI might display subtle bias against minority applicants in hiring, while simultaneously acting as a zealous advocate for affirmative action when asked to debate policy or politics.
I'd say about half of Steam players aren't male. The "video games are for boys" thing is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy because anyone who believes that will obviously not play with a woman.
I think that it's true that games are definitely being played by both males and females today, but I think that statistics is that mobile games skew female, and PC games skew male.
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