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For Firefox, I think that disabling the telemetry and the studies is not going to help Mozilla improve the browser.

I'm not convinced that's their goal any more. The number of users turning off or ignoring AI features is probably considered a problem, not a signal.

Every single thing for the past 10 years has had (opt-out, which most people didn't) telemetry and that correlates with a decline in quality, not improvement.

My suspicion is that this is due to three things:

- Use of analytics tends to replace user trials/interviews entirely, trading away rich signals for weaker ones

- Analytics can be used to justify otherwise unpopular or ill-advised changes

- When combined with certain changes (e.g. making features harder to access), the numbers can be “steered” in a particular direction to favor a particular outcome and better enable the last point (“Looks like nobody’s using that thing we hid behind an obscure feature flag! Guess we’re safe to remove it entirely now!”).

In theory telemetry/analytics have strong potential for improving software quality, but more often than not they’re just massaged and misused by product managers bent on pushing the software a particular direction.


> Use of analytics tends to replace user trials/interviews entirely, trading away rich signals for weaker ones

Yeah, this is huge. The 30-day A/B test is a scourge on the industry.


Telemetry in the hands of software craftsmen with a supporting business model will probably support improved software.

Telemetry in the hands of stakeholders whose stakes are business/career KPMs will probably serve those, and the software experience will follow.


And not giving IKEA access to cameras in your home won't let them improve the furniture.

But it might be accepted if the furniture cost $0.

One could hope if it happens enough they'd be jostled out of the McNamarra fallacy tarpit they've ended up in, though maybe that is too optimistic.

They don't care about improving the browser anymore. They just want to make it into an AI browser.

For Firefox they had a decade+ to stop making useless wasteful choices that killed any good will towards the company.

I still use Firefox but I, frankly, feel it's stagnated. On mobile I'm in the process of changing habits to something else (auto reflex sometimes still opens Ffox, but lately I'm circling back to opera, which I stopped using on desktop what... 20 years ago?)

All this to say, I don't think Mozilla is doing much with all the telemetry data it's gathered all these years


IIUC, contactless payment via apple pay does have a secondary card number of sorts that's linked to your original card.

I once accidentally paid for AppleCare with apple pay (a mistake), so when at some point I switched phones I had to get new secondary card numbers tied to my physical cards. The old secondaries went away when I wiped my old phone, so AppleCare was no longer able to draw the monthly payment. The number in the invoice was likewise not the original physical card number, but some other number.

Whether the secondary numbers are easier or impossible to track is certainly a question, but I believe there's always a number.


It can only apply shader(s) to the current frame I think. To produce the crt ghosting you'd probably need access to the previous frame (not an expert).


I've tried the shaders in the following repo with ghostty. They definitely work. I ended up keeping a cursor trail shader. https://github.com/0xhckr/ghostty-shaders


Yes, correct! If you check out https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference, the iPreviousCursor is available, so it can be used against the iCurrentCursor to produce a fading effect. But I think the entire previous framebuffer isn't there (yet).


https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/configuring-networks-di...

(You need to setup your DNS to respond in a certain way for a canary domain)


One step closer to the sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who.


Hey! I was using CLIPS in my network management PhD work, but life happened and I was absorbed by my profession. Maybe one day I'll dig up the half finished material and continue, who knows.

CLIPS is one of those definitely underrated gems, many many thanks for what you are doing!


Fantastic. Thanks for chiming in!


Why is this downvoted? It's 100% relevant.

David Grann is a well known New Yorker contributor and, before the book, has also written an article named "Lost City of Z": https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/09/19/the-lost-city-...


Mac Mini with the M2 Pro can drive 3 monitors, Macbook Pro with the M2 Pro only 2.


M2 Pro can always drive 3. The MBP just has one display built-in, so can drive 2 more.


Unfortunately tho, iirc, clamshell mode does not get you the use of an additional external display.


Fortunately it's not like StackOverflow has been used as training data for LLMs, right?


Well, yes. Point is, GPT-4 read the entire StackOverflow and then some, comprehended it, and now is a better interface to it, more specific and free of all the bullshit that's part of the regular web.


If you feel more comfortable with Python for the task at hand, why not use it?

That's good and it's actually the Perl way, Perl was always about helping getting stuff done.


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