> Must generate quite an upside for them if it is indeed a strategy.
This is the same Airtel that auto opened payments bank accounts without customer consent or knowledge while getting a sim card. They even got cash deposited into those accounts from the govt direct benefit schemes while keeping their customers in the dark.
I'm sure its completely "accidental" and they'll have more of these glitches and mistakes in the future.
There is a current "show your personal site" post on top of HN [1] with 1500+ comments. I wonder how many of those sites are or will be hammered by AI bots in the next few days to steal/scrape content.
If this can be used as a temporary guard against AI bots, that would have been a good opportunity to test it out.
My site is hosted on Cloudflare and I trust its protection way more than flavor of the month method. This probably won't be patched anytime soon but I'd rather have some people click my link and not just avoid it along with AI because it looks fishy :)
I've been considering how feasible it would be to build a modern form of the denial of service low orbit ion cannon by having various LLMs hammer sites until they break. I'm sure anything important already has Cloudflare style DDOS mitigation so maybe it's not as effective. Still, I think it's only a matter of time before someone figures it out.
There have been several amplification attacks using various protocols for DDOS too...
Glad I’m not the only one who felt icky seeing that post.
I agree my tinfoil hat signal told me this was the perfect way to ask people for bespoke, hand crafted content - which of course AI will love to slurp up to keep feeding the bear.
The occasional idiot who would zoom past everyone dangerously on their new powerful and expensive toy is replaced by the idiot who loves to show off the new found torque on their ev bike.
The only difference is before you would've heard the idiot sneaking up. Now, its a lot more silent and dangerous.
> Main issue is having a parking space with a charger and/or having to pay for it
Agree. New apartments in metros are coming up with shared charging spaces but the supposed cost benefit of owning ev is offset by high prices at these chargers. Also as ev adoption grows, you are only looking at more competition in the future for these limited charging slots. Builders for logistical reasons or out of just pure greed are really not keen on allowing installation of charging points at own parking spots.
This seems to be one of the main challenges to overcome even for those who are willing to adopt an ev vehicle.
It is more easier to secure revenue/funding from Google once they retain existing market share and gain more. They need to improve the product for that to happen.
With all the distractions they are abandoning their primary product and they are bleeding whatever miniscule market share they have. This means Google has more leverage over them and can eventually stop the funding once their market share drops beyond a threshold say 0.5% because we all know antitrust is not a strong reason anymore to keep FF alive based on trends of recent rulings.
If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share. That worked in the early 2000s when the competition (internet explorer) was utterly stagnant and the internet-using population was composed predominantly of techies willing to try new things. Browsers are commodities now, and most people aren't going to try a new browser when they're already using Chrome / Safari on their mobile device with all of the integrations that are available between the two.
Chrome gained marketshare not just because it was a good product but because they paid Adobe, Oracle, and legions of freeware antivirus providers lots of $$$ to put a checked-by-default box in their installers to install Google Chrome and make it the default browser for anyone not paying enough attention to uncheck the boxes, and because they targeted Firefox users visiting google.com with popups advertising how much better Chrome was. Mozilla could never do that and they would be excoriated if they tried. And as I mentioned, many of the aspects of Chrome that were indeed superior, were met with kicking and screaming when Mozilla tried to follow, e.g. choosing performance over the XUL extension ecosystem.
Sadly I think their best hope to regain marketshare is to indirectly benefit from Linux to capturing marketshare from Windows.
>If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share.
Exactly right. They did the dang thing with Project Quantum, a massive rewrite of the browser, a massive leap forward in stability and performance. The thing everyone asked for. And they..... continued to lose market share. Because there are other factors, like monopoly power, and distribution lock-in.
You don't have to imagine what it looks like for a browser company to lap the field with an excellent development team, creative revenue raising ideas, being ahead of the curve on mobile, having best in class stability and performance, and building out features that their core user base loves and swears by. Because Opera was that company in the 2000s and 2010s.
But even Opera had to sell to a new ownership group and abandon their Presto engine for Chromium. Because, like Spock said, you can make every decision correctly and still lose. Which is kind of depressing, but it at least helpfully bursts the bubble of people claiming changes in market share are a one-to-one relationship to specific decisions about which features to build in a browser.
End users are easily influenced but they could have targeted developers.
I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative. End user dont really care if their favourite markdown editor or notes software is based on electron or gecko but it would have made sure that developers do not target, develop and test for only chromium based browsers.
That would probably also be considered a "distraction" by HN. Electron isn't built by the Chrome team.
It also wouldn't be directly revenue diversification. You can't beat Electron by selling an alternative.
Firefox has somewhat tried to target developers. There's Developer Edition with a "direct to the dev tools" focus. Firefox's Dev Tools still generally are somewhat ahead of Safari's and Chrome's (though not always Edge's, even in the Edgmium era one of the few teams that still exists that doesn't upstream everything immediately is Edge's Dev Tools work). Firefox was directly ahead on Flexbox and CSS Grid debugging tools, though now everyone else has copied them. (Not to mention that the history of Dev Tools in the first place all points back to Firebug and other Firefox extensions that went mainstream and then made sense to prioritize as out-of-the-box tools.)
Firefox probably can't do much more to target developers on its own, from a browser perspective. Targeting developers doesn't seem to move the needle enough in marketshare, either.
It's not just Electron that developers are stuck in "develop and test for only chromium based browsers" modes. There's also all the top-down pressure in corporate environments to standardize on only one browser to "cut down" on "testing costs". There are the board room-driven development cycles of "I only care if it looks good on the CEO's iPhone" or "the CEO is into Android this year, that's the focus, everything else is garbage". There's also the hard to avoid spiral of "Firefox marketshare is low, don't worry about it" to more sites not working as well in Firefox to Firefox marketshare getting lower to more "don't worry about it" websites and so on.
Developers are no longer a significant fraction of the pie, and a significant fraction of those are web developers or do web development, and those users will in all likelihood primarily use what their users are using, which isn't Firefox.
I disliked the black bars release(v3 I think) so much that I moved back to KDE and then also tried lxqt, xfce and i3 but never GNOME. If not for that release I would have probably been stuck with only GNOME and never try other options.
Cinnamon and MATE are the directions I’d have preferred for Gnome to go. It’s a good thing devs like this aren’t designing cars. I really don’t want to steer my car with the foot pedals and throttle with my hands.
> Your job isn’t to complete tickets that fulfill a list of asks from your product manager. Your job is to build software that solves users problems.
The main benefit of understanding the purpose and real world usage of your software is that you can ask the right questions while planning and implementing the software/feature/bug-fix and that you don't make any wrong assumptions.
In a situation where you have conflicting requirements or concerns regarding the change, you'll eventually be hit with "PM knows the product & customer better" or the explicit "your job is to deliver what is asked".
My naive over engineered retro kind of solution would be
1. Add a pointer mode into the os
2. Build touchpad/trackball type sensor tracking gestures using non capacitive sensors probably at the nav bar level and on the bottom edges or just the right edge(sorry left handed folks)
May be not resume driven. But hearing MS and AI, I can't help but wonder if this is result of one of those mandates by "leadership" where everyone is forced to come up with a AI use case or hack.
isn't this is exactly the point of innovation and mandates?
"leadership" or real leaders, want people to experiment a lot, so some of them will come up with novel ideas and either decide to build it on their own and get rich or build internally and make company rich.
Not always, but in many cases when someone becomes rich with innovation, it is probably because there was a benefit to a society (excluding gambling, porn, social media addictions)
This is the same Airtel that auto opened payments bank accounts without customer consent or knowledge while getting a sim card. They even got cash deposited into those accounts from the govt direct benefit schemes while keeping their customers in the dark.
I'm sure its completely "accidental" and they'll have more of these glitches and mistakes in the future.
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