Google pay Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars each year to place Google as the default browser. It's by far their biggest income stream. In 2023 it was reported as 75% of their revenue.
There's no world in which 75% of your revenue coming from Google doesn't influence what you do. Even if it's not the main driver of all decisions, pissing off Google is a huge risk for them.
If the plaintiff pays 500 million to the judge and the defendant goes to jail, there's no proof that the judge wouldn't have made the same decision without the 500 million. If you're a fool, you'll sneer and ask "Where's the proof?"
Well if you bring up law how about: innocent until proven guilty?
Google is not bribing Mozilla...they probably keep them alive to avoid all kinds of monopoly lawsuits. With their market share however, you would need more prove to justify further conspiracies...
Great for shareholders, terrible for consumers. This is what we get when we allow rampant consolidation and throw out the idea of regulated competition.
It's not like there's really any competition anyway. Prices are going up, I can't switch from Netflix to HBO, because the content is available across platforms.
If Netflix just moves the HBO content to Netflix then that's one subscription less for a lot of people, so even if Netflix subscription goes up, many will still save money.
There is more competition than ever. That is why these legacy companies are being bought and sold.
Amazon/Apple/Comcast/Disney/Netflix/Oracle are all in the business of selling video, plus they are competing for attention with Youtube/Tiktok/Reddit/HN/etc.
There is also Sony and Lionsgate and A24 not selling direct to customers.
At university in the UK it's almost always maximums rather than minimums. It's damn hard as well, you never get the word count you actually need to fully cover the subject and always end up desperately counting those last few as you trim it down. My university would cap your grade if you went over the count by a certain % as well.
I do think it made me better at writing though, and it certainly made me aware of how much people are actually willing to read.
I've been on a similar journey this past month, although it sounds like mine went a little more successfully. I've managed to get a repo setup which contains a nix flake with nix-darwin configuration, and it also calls into some home-manager modules which I also use on a linux device as well. I do agree, the nix language isn't particularly to my taste either.
I know you're hoping to go from first principals but I'm happy to share the repo if you want (email in my profile).
Aside from that, what issues did you run into? I'm keen to know if I've just not gone deep enough and will soon hit something.
This is what I'd like to see as well. These collaboration tools are really good, but I barely use them because they always assume that you and your team are using the same editor. Most of the time that's just not the case, so I've used them a handful of times but beyond that there's little opportunity.
It's probably not an issue the Zed team will experience as they're all naturally using their own editor. Hopefully it's on their radar though.
> because they always assume that you and your team are using the same editor.
Network effects are probably a strength for a company, not a drawback (which it is for the user of course). Even VSCode has some notion of network effects, such as their proprietary extension store.
I live in a city in the UK and use the train to commute daily. Return travel on a peak train costs me £8.40 (arriving at work before 9am), and £6.50 if I go in after peak (arriving at work after 9am).
Every year without fail this goes up by a noticable amount, but the service is still unreliable. Looking back at my travel history, the train has either been late to arrive or late to get to my destination around 30% of the time. That delays can vary a lot as well between about 10mins (this morning for example) to 30 minutes on average.
But that's the average picture, the winters get so much worse for my route. There's a tunnel just before our station which frequently has water pouring through when it rains heavily which means no trains can run until it stops. Several times I've left my house with all the trains listed as running on-time and arrived at the station to be told by the (very nice) guard that he doesn't expect there to be any trains through until mid day.
They also get very crowded, at least on my route. They're meant to send a 3 carriage train but will frequently end up with only 2 carriages because they had a problem with one of them. This usually delays people boarding which means the resulting journey is around £8.40 for no seat and a 10-15 minute delay.
The UK rail sure isn't the worst in the world by any stretch. When a journey goes well it's seemless and I'm a big fan. But a lot of the time it feels like you're being bent over, especially when after several weeks of reduced services due to strikes you're suddenly met with a price hike of 5% with no improvement in the services reliability. All of that is just when you're talking about commuting as well. Any time I'm forced to head to London it's a miserable emptying of my wallet.
All of this is just my daily experience, but I'm so sick of this failed experiment. Each year it costs more, the service is just as unreliable, and the profits all leave the UK.
Maybe my expectations aren't reasonable, but it's something I'm effectively forced to use daily because of house prices.
> Looking back at my travel history, the train has either been late to arrive or late to get to my destination around 30% of the time. That delays can vary a lot as well between about 10mins (this morning for example) to 30 minutes on average.
That £8.40 will be £6.30 after claiming the delay repay for 30 minute delay. Only happening 30% of the time so that would work out to £7.77
Still it would be better if they were always on time.
Professionally, my team just made our big new launch of a feedback collection tool - https://www.sunbeam.cx/asklet. It tries to go just a little beyond the "give us a star rating" and collect some more detailed feedback without being too in-your-face or annoying.
In my spare time I've been working on a small service for making sure I remember friends and families birthdays. I think it's really important but with friends all having kids it's becoming more and more to keep track of in the calendar. I'm putting together a small web app which takes in the birthday and sends me a reminder a set amount of time away, with some suggestions for birthday gifts.
The suggestions right now are just ones that I've entered as I've come across ideas throughout the year for people. But I want to try and plug in known interests and see if I can do a better recommendation for myself. I'm hoping to keep it quite small as I don't want to take the spirit out of remembering people's birthdays, but I do want to be more consistent.
The attempts at collaborative tools in Zed was always far more interesting to me than the AI stuff. Don't get me wrong, their AI stuff is nice and works well for me, but it's hardly necessary in an editor with how good Claude Code and others are.
But the times I've used the collaboration tooling in Zed have been really excellent. It just sucks it's not getting much attention recently. In particular I'd really like to see some movement on something that works across multiple different editors on this front.
I'm glad to hear they're still thinking about these kind of features.
Yeah, I am also glad that they are not exclusive about how you use AI which is what makes it better. They need to stop marketing the AI stuff it puts off some people. They need to advertise how versatile they are.
I really like forgejo, but the git hosting bit is really just one feature for me. Their ci/cd runners, package repos and such are all things I need and forgejo includes in one nice bundle.
If I was just using it for git hosting I'd probably go for something more light weight to be honest.
The pace of new things coming to the ecosystem hasn't slowed at all, but it's happening beyond the language itself now.
Just look at projects like Nx, LiveBook, Explorer, Flame, and Nerves. All are making big steps forward and releasing new and interesting things.
As someone who uses the stack daily this is really wonderful. In the elixir world you just don't really have the problem where two tools don't work well together because they're built around very different versions of the language and runtime. I can pick up any elixir based tool and knowledge I can slot it into my tool chain or project and it'll just work.
To me this is even more exciting because it suggests a stable foundation, and makes it easy to adopt new developments. But I appreciate those projects aren't discussed as much on HN.
There's no world in which 75% of your revenue coming from Google doesn't influence what you do. Even if it's not the main driver of all decisions, pissing off Google is a huge risk for them.