Unlurker|Replay|About
AI search engine – How to prevent bots?
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Check out a demo of a similar tool we created ( https://model-guessr.com/ ) that was bot-gated by Roundtable Proof of Human. Happy to talk more details about PoH (disclaimer: I'm a cofounder and this is my YC S23 company)
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Depends on the "widget mode" you choose: https://developers.cloudflare.com/turnstile/concepts/widget/#widget-modes
AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas' (finalroundai.com)
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This is performative bullshit pandering to the increased skepticism around AI. He wouldn't be saying that if AI investment was still in full swing.
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4) Junior devs have an incomparably superior context window.
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Relevant post by Kent Beck from 12th Dec 2025: The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got-better > The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced. The time freed this way isn’t invested in another unprofitable feature, though, it’s invested in learning. [...] > If you’re an engineering manager thinking about hiring: The junior bet has gotten better. Not because juniors have changed, but because the genie, used well, accelerates learning.
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Which is a less dumb idea: replacing new grad junior devs with AI or H1Bs?
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What about new grad H1Bs?
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Well, yeah. Then who will become the senior engineers in 10-15 years?
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You think bosses are planning more than one or two quarters ahead?
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Obviously after 10-15 years of experience working as a developer AI will be a senior dev. Probably will get promoted to management with all that experience.
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Promoting your best engineers to management sometimes gets you a great manager, but often gets you a mediocre or just-about-competent manager at the cost of a great engineer. I'm a big fan of the "staff engineer" track as a way to avoid this problem. Your 10-15 year engineers who don't vibe with management should be able to continue earning managerial salaries and having the biggest impact possible. https://staffeng.com/about/
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10-15 years? Sadly, most people are declared senior after like 2 years of work.
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Pretty sure Anthropic is hoping the answer is Claude.
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Pretty sure Antropic knows their hopes won't come true. They just won't tell you that.
Firefox is becoming an AI browser and the internet is not at all happy about it (pcgamer.com)
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What does it take to make a rebranded fork of Firefox popular similar to Brave or Edge? Ideally the fork should compete with Chrome and not Firefox for market share while acting as a hedge/warning against bad decisions from Mozilla and its leadership.
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I have been not happy about it up until this post. While reading the article, I thought about it differently. What Firefox provides today isn't drawing in new users. Those of us who use Firefox do so for a number of reasons related to privacy or security or what not. I simultaneously like being able to use ChatGPT to look stuff up and I hate that I'm feeding the machine a profile of me. I don't use ChatGPT nearly as much anymore mostly because of that sick feeling I get in my stomach knowing whatever I tell it will absolutely be abused in some way some how. Nobody is building a very good "thing" that lets you use AI services with a solid layer of protection. That is a new market that deserves a product. I'm not saying that I think putting AI in Firefox is a good idea. Just that I can finally see the motivation. Personally, I think the "solution" should be some kind of stand alone product that maybe has integrations into Firefox if you have both of them installed. Keep it in it's own cage. Make the only possibility of it existing on my system be me choosing to install a specific app. And if I'm going to do that, let me also use it outside of Firefox if I want. But at least now I see a reason for what seems like such a bone headed decision.
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If I can turn it off as they claim I don't care too much other than it's development time wasted towards something I won't be using. They could have spent time fixing some of the sites that don't work correctly, implementing standards that are missing or just improving performance and memory usage. All of those things would be welcome as would some improvements on the mobile version it's not super usable I find it kind of irritating.
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Am I happy about it? No. But I don't understand the huge backlash in all the comments yesterday. It felt like everyone overreacted. For me, Firefox still checks off the most boxes of what I want in a browser.
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So guys. What do I replace firefox with? I'm on Debian, and my requirements is that I'm able to run uBlock Origin. In addition containers and vertical tabs would be nice to have. What are the options here?
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Why replace Firefox? The headline and linked article don't seem to match reality at all. It's just a bunch of clickbait nonsense.
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This person also said in an interview that he'd consider blocking uBlock Origin from Firefox. Evidence is piling up against this person.
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Waterfox.
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Ladybird can't arrive sooner
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ladybird can take all the time they need, servo is the one I'm waiting for
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Servo is pretty well run, and their regular donations have been improving. Details below if you want to also help https://servo.org/blog/2025/12/15/november-in-servo/#donations
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Yes, this seems to suck. But I've been wrong about plenty before. I'll keep an open mind.
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It's the governments' fail.. this kind of software can't be profitable, so it should be funded via grants for common good.. these did not arrive though.
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What does the military use?
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Seriously. All things considered, browsers are extremely cheap to fund. The fact that no government has come forward to spearhead this movement is damning to the concept of the state. And no, I obviously don't want to fund Mozilla, a hilariously incompetent entity that hates its users.
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The U.S. isn’t anti-socialism, it’s anti-public benefit. We’ll socialize losses for banks to pay bonuses, but funding shared infrastructure that serves citizens is a bridge too far.
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Speedrunning to the grave it seems.
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This is what you get for not caring about projects like thorium or the Firefox version of it. I’ve still got my ublock origin in a far faster version of my web browser than what normies use.
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How is it funded? Is that just some guy doing this for fun? What if there's an offer to buy it? How sustainable this is?
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If "not caring" == "never heard of it" then I'm with you. Not like I don't pay attention either.
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Man is there anything left that isn't a total invasion of privacy??
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Yes. Brave Helium LibreWolf
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> Brave I'm not interested in crypto right now, thanks for asking.
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Tor
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I've actually been using Tor more and more as secondary to Firefox. Hey, I wonder if "exactly like Tor minus connecting to the Tor network" exists. No, don't tell me this is just Firefox, that's not true.
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> Brave Did brave's attempt to provide an alternative funding model to ads actually go anywhere?
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Yeah, straight into the cryptocurrency trash heap.
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living off-grid
Tell HN: HN Was Down
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In other words, productivity in tech skyrocketed for hours..though it seems some work was flavoured with irrational anger.
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[delayed]
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hn applied ycombinator too strictly
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I was able to view the site without being signed in (i.e. private window) but any browser I was logged into wouldn't load. I'm sure it's a coincidence but it started working again shortly after emailing hn@ycombinator.com
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We need a serious post mortem for this
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Smart. Have to use that error budget before year end...
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I always hated the late use-it-or-loose-it at the end of the year where you end up buying the things that were denied requests from earlier in the year. You just cost me half a year of using the damn thing.
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I got confused by the "minutes ago" thing. Working with full dates in the HTML and doing a tiny JavaScript that calculates the "minutes ago" would actually be a neat improvement.
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Hi, Got an error an hour ago on phone, not loged. Anyway, glad to see you back. Paris 1812. Cheers from France.
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Thought it had something to do with some model updates, like Gemini Flash 3 for a moment.
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I got stuck in an infinite loop. Try opening HN -> it's down, better check HN to see everyone talking about a major website being down -> Try opening HN -> loop
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Thought for a second I got banned for something lol
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I thought I was being rate-limited for opening posts too fast, which has happened before. After more than an hour I thought, "wow this is pretty harsh" and "so much of my exposure to learning things is directly tied to HN posts". I was lost lol.
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I was quiet surprised really. HN almost never goes down.
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Maybe PG is more involved now and hired the "10,000 lines of AI code a day" person who made a deployment mistake? https://x.com/paulg/status/1953289830982664236?s=46
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Is this still a valid account for HN status? It says it’s the official one, but with the changes at Twitter to no longer show chronological feeds (at least for users that aren’t logged in), it’s rather useless. The top 5 listed post (for me) are seemingly random from 2014 - 2022. https://x.com/HNStatus Is there a better place to check, beyond a basic down detector that may provide more insight or signal that the outage is acknowledged?
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Only way I have figured out how to to change the "Following" sort order back to chronoligical is from the mobile app: click the down arrow on the "Following" tab. Change the sort from "popular" to "most recent." Seems to reset it on the web view, too.
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https://hn.hund.io/ Is a status page, no idea if official or not, but it didn't register here for some reason. I didn't read the post text, it's identified there haha, my bad! I wish the text post text wasn't grey, I gloss over it too easily.
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This site said HN was fine and green the entire time it was down.
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A lot of the outage indicators failed. Someone needs to create an outage indicator reliability dashboard.
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So a downdetectorsdowndetector.com but for Hacker News?
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And an outage reliability indicator for that outage reliability indicator.
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A lot of them got fooled by the caching; pages for signed-out users are cached heavily and those kept returning successful responses even if the actual backend server was down.
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This site also got it right: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news I believe it's because they accept user reports.
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Yes! Now we see what a difference it makes.
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It was the first time since I started using this website (August last year) that it was down. I'm still impressed nonetheless. I'd like to know what caused the outage and how it could have been prevented, for learning purposes.
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I wake up, and look at HackerNews lol. This morning sucked hahaha
[dead]
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I remember my first beer.
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That Markov chain spiraled out of control
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Perhaps Grok was not trained to go so much time with 0 responses due to the downtime?
Just a month ago, I got downvoted to -2 for saying HN for being self-hosted hasn't shown up as more reliable than something behind Cloudflare. My point is made. Edit: Now it happens again. Knee jerk defenses all the way down.
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Complaining about downvotes usually gets you more downvotes, so the response here isn't really that surprising.
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Unless the downtime was caused by something Cloudflare would've prevented, this downtime would've happened regardless of being behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare adds another single point of failure.
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It's absolutely irresistible downvoting people who preemptively complain about being downvoted like you do. It really made my day. Post another complaint so I can do it again please! It's not knee jerk when you explicitly ask for it, by leading with a complaint about downvoting, instead of just making your point and letting it fall or rise on its own merits. You're the one who put the idea of downvoting you into my head in the first place.
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Could this be a self-inflicted bug? In that case, the broader point still stands: cloud providers can cause outages that are outside your direct realm of responsibility.
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Your VPS server and your data center and the ISP your data center uses and the AS system your ISP uses all can cause outages outside your direct realm of responsibility.
I got irrationally angry when it refused to load the website
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you could refuse to be angry to mock it
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You handle your irrational anger much better than whatevermrfukz who keeps pooping his pants.
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Interesting that you mention that, how do you keep track of his comments? Some sort of plugin/scraper?
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> how do you keep track of his comments? You can just look at them, turn on showdead in your profile and you'll see a bunch of flag-killed comments in this discussion by whatevermrfukz. No need for a plugin or scraper.
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thank you
First AWS/Azure/Cloudflare and now HN?!?
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Time to update the meme: https://preview.redd.it/cloudflare-had-a-rough-day-today-and-lot-of-us-have-felt-it-v0-x26encesx02g1.png?auto=webp&s=173af4140ab3770be1fef7abfe5c2bb5a8d6709a
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We can live without the former, but not HN!
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You won't be employed without the former.
When it was down my thought was "damnit, I'll actually have a productive workday now."
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Next time you can avoid that fate by opening HN in a private browsing (or whatever your browser calls its equivalent) window. This outage, like the vast majority of HN outages, only affected logged in requests. I suppose you could also just clear your HN cookies in regular browsing window, but then when they fix it you'd have to log in again.
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hahaha
TIL I have a "open Hacker News" hand reflex
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If you're looking to put the brakes on that, I've used LeechBlock to add a 5-second timer to opening a new HN window (along with other block schedules). The timer even fails if it loses focus, so it really helps slow you down. https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/
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I’ve turned on no procrast mode and set it to ten minutes per hour. Helped me a lot!
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I learn more reading the comments here than anywhere else. Thanks everyone for my addiction.
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So do I, but it was such a shock that I just passed out, and when I woke up, it was back up.
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I say. Vibe coded 4 apps once I got past that, on my way to half a billion in ARR already.
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It just reinforces for me that addiction is a human problem not a problem with technology I know dang basically works tirelessly to not change the format in order to not induce those addictive patterns but yet here we all are
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But, would the addiction become worse if HN changed, or would there be a point where they could cure it?
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This one is at least healthy-ish for the mind. I’d much rather hacker news than any other news. Social Media is an emotional rage-bait cesspool these days. If it’s not for Hacker News those of us who abstain from the rest would be living in the dark.
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It's a website with the smartest people in the world. The level of conversations here are unrivaled in internet communities. It's understandable to be addicted. Lol. I visit this place multiple times a day.
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> It's a website with the smartest people in the world. Nice joke! At least, I hope it was a joke...
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Now now, HN does have its unusually high share of "Very Stable Geniuses" and "High I.Q. Individuals", we have to acknowledge that.
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It's really not 'the smartest people.' It's people interested in tech, and often in making-a-lot-of-money-in-tech. It does have a lot of people with significant industry experience, which is cool.
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> It's really not 'the smartest people.' This was especially obvious during Covid, I even stopped visiting because the comment section was so crazy.
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Same! Right there with "every day must begin with coffee"
Yeah I couldn't log in for a bit this morning. It's concerning how often and how many times I tried. Glad it's resolved.
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Next time try not to beat a dead horse expecting it to resurrect. :)
Ask HN: Was HN just down for anyone else?
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I'll admit this ruined my morning
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Mostly a dupe of this Tell HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301921
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Yup, France here , Paris 1809. HN was down about an hour ago. Glad to see it back ! Cheers.
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It was down if you tried to access it while authenticated (i.e. you have a cookie). It was loading fine for unauthenticated sessions (e.g. incognito).
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Could have been accidental flagging of sorts. Didn't work on PC for few minutes while showing fine on phone.
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https://www.stevenjgarner.com/HN-Down-2025-12-17-07-48-UTC-0600.png
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Yes, I had to touch grass this morning.
Yeah & chatgpt was trying to gaslight me - claiming it was my fault. Happy to put that bum in its place...
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You use ChatGPT to know it a site is down?
Yes, and I'm a little ashamed to admit my morning routine wasn't the same without it.
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This was more impactful to my day than the last AWS and CloudFlare outages...
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At least during those outages I could procrastinate on HN.
Interestingly it stayed up if you weren't logged in.
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Not completely, I'm not logged in on my work laptop and it was only working some of the time (and not like some pages were cached and some weren't, I was refreshing the same page and sometimes it worked and sometimes not).
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That's how I concluded that it wasn't a ban on my account but rather more serious.
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also went down if you went to login, and people's individual pages were also down. So as far as I saw the front page was up as long as you were not logged in, however I'm not sure if that wasn't just luck of the draw, I had one experience where it looked like maybe the front page was sometimes down for not logged in users as well. on edit: ok others pointed out it was cached pages I saw. explains it.
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That only worked for a while, eventually I couldn't load comment pages even logged out.
Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor
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If you go to their website and click the "Personalize" toast at the top and enter a random domain (e.g., google.com, hydroflask.com, etc.) it will change all the copy on the site for you.
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Thank you yes, we perhaps should have made that a little clearer in the post body :')
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What types of info are you looking at when you are personalizing? One idea would be to track what recent technologies/products they’ve bought recently (or what products they’re using) using Bloomberry. ie. If they’ve started using Okta, it might mean they’re investing in security tools [1] [1] bloomberry.com
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Felix handles our personalisation pipeline so will let him chime-in. We do some fast-scraping (cached where possible) to understand the host site, and pull in as much extra page data as possible. We also use other (firmographic) sources like Apollo.io. Neat idea to track the technologies they've bought _recently_ though! I think capturing buying signals (and inferring intent that way) would be a neat addition to the pipeline!
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Ok, your UI/UX is amazing, the experience is awesome. But for me, I don't immediately understand what you do and for whom. What I understand: You tailor my website to the visitor on my site (landing page), which would be pretty cool as an add on. What I don't understand: How you would do that, how do you create a personalized experience for a visitor you don't know something about?
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Glad to hear you enjoyed the UI/UX and experience! The ‘how’ is a key question - right now the visitor inputs what company they’re from, and with that info we send out a research agent that compiles a) context on that company, and b) combines that with the deeper research its already done on your domain — essentially it marries up what it knows about you, with what it quickly learns about the visitor, to the customise whatever sections of the website you’ve given Kenobi permission to transform Obviously a lot of companies have vastly different personas, and this is a harder problem to solve which we are working on.
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I am trying to make a constructive feedback and not just critical if I sound that way by anychance. I spent a bit of time but it's hard to get the product. Instead of the team photo on home page, you could show some images of what you mean by the product personalization. Honestly people don't have much time to read through and understand a product , which has a simple value proposition.
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> You could show some images of what you mean by the product personalization This is a great point, we've heard this elsewhere so I will be adding a section to our site for this. Thanks!
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There are so many problems with this idea (privacy, security, accessibility, deceptive advertising, design) that I'm impressed it actually got funded. If you're just going to have a LLM generate most of the content, why even sell this as a personalization thing and just have a LLM generate the entire website on the fly per request?
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Fair criticism! We actually got funded for a different idea (this was a pivot) so perhaps you're onto something.... Jokes aside -- and to address your points.... Privacy: Visitors currently opt-in and provide only the company they are from (no other PII). Security: Our current version handles only text (we have images + dynamic content in the works), but we do our best to build a sanitisation pipeline around this, it's the same kind of problem that any arbitrary-code widget builder needs to account for. Accessibility: I'm keen to hear what concerns or ideas you have here since we are interpolating content and copying existing structure (so that a11y is kept as intact as possible). Advertising: Companies choose to integrate this themselves on their own website, so if anything we see it as forming part of their marketing strategy.
Gemini 3 Flash: frontier intelligence built for speed (blog.google)
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I never have, do not, and conceivably never will use gemini models, or any other models that require me to perform inference on Alphabet/Google's servers (i.e. gemma models I can run locally or on other providers are fine), but kudos to the team over there for the work here, this does look really impressive. This kind of competition is good for everyone, even people like me who will probably never touch any gemini model.
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I’m wondering why Claude Opus 4.5 is missing from the benchmarks table.
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Does anyone else understand what the difference is between Gemini 3 'Thinking' and 'Pro'? Thinking "Solves complex problems" and Pro "Thinks longer for advanced math & code". I assume that these are just different reasoning levels for Gemini 3, but I can't even find mention of there being 2 versions anywhere, and the API doesn't even mention the Thinking-Pro dichotomy.
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Since it now includes 4 thinking levels (minimal-high) I'd really appreciate if we got some benchmarks across the whole sweep (and not just what's presumably high). Flash is meant to be a model for lower cost, latency-sensitive tasks. Long thinking times will both make TTFT >> 10s (often unacceptable) and also won't really be that cheap?
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Glad to see big improvement in the SimpleQA Verified benchmark (28->69%), which is meant to measure factuality (built-in, i.e. without adding grounding resources). That's one benchmark where all models seemed to have low scores until recently. Can't wait to see a model go over 90%... then will be years till the competition is over number of 9s in such a factuality benchmark, but that'd be glorious.
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Quick pricing comparison: https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=100000&ot=10000&sel=gemini-3-flash-preview%2Cgemini-3-pro-preview%2Cgemini-3-pro-preview-200k%2Cgpt-5.2%2Cclaude-opus-4-5%2Cclaude-sonnet-4.5%2Cclaude-4.5-haiku%2Cgpt-5-mini It's 1/4 the price of Gemini 3 Pro ≤200k and 1/8 the price of Gemini 3 Pro >200k - notable that the new Flash model doesn’t have a price increase after that 200,000 token point. It’s also twice the price of GPT-5 Mini for input, half the price of Claude 4.5 Haiku.
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This is the first flash/mini model that doesn't make a complete ass of itself when I prompt for the following: "Tell me as much as possible about Skatval in Norway. Not general information. Only what is uniquely true for Skatval." Skatval is a small local area I live in, so I know when it's bullshitting. Usually, I get a long-winded answer that is PURE Barnum-statement, like "Skatval is a rural area known for its beautiful fields and mountains" and bla bla bla. Even with minimal thinking (it seems to do none), it gives an extremely good answer. I am really happy about this. I also noticed it had VERY good scores on tool-use, terminal, and agentic stuff. If that is TRUE, it might be awesome for coding. I'm tentatively optimistic about this.
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So much for "Monopolies get lazy, they just rent seek and don't innovate"
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Also so much for the "wall, stagnation, no more data" folks. Womp womp.
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The LLM market has no moats so no one "feels" like a monopoly, rightfully.
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Ok, I was a bit addicted to Opus 4.5 and was starting to feel like there's nothing like it. Turns out Gemini 3 Flash is pretty close. The Gemini CLI is not as good but the model more than makes up for it. The weird part is Gemini 3 Pro is nowhere as good an experience. Maybe because its just so slow.
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It has a SimpleQA score of 69%, a benchmark that tests knowledge on extremely niche facts, that's actually ridiculously high (Gemini 2.5 *Pro* had 55%) and reflects either training on the test set or some sort of cracked way to pack a ton of parametric knowledge into a Flash Model. I'm speculating but Google might have figured out some training magic trick to balance out the information storage in model capacity. That or this flash model has huge number of parameters or something.
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>or some sort of cracked way to pack a ton of parametric knowledge into a Flash Model. More experts with a lower pertentage of active ones -> more sparsity.
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I'm sure it's good, I thought the last one was too, but it seems like the backdoor way to increase prices is to release a new model
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If the model is better in that it resolves the task with fewer iterations then the i/o token pricing may be a wash or lower.
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Wild how this beats 2.5 Pro in every single benchmark. Don't think this was true for Haiku 4.5 vs Sonnet 3.5.
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Sonnet 3.5 might have been better than opus 3. That's my recollection anyhow
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OpenAI is pretty firmly in the rear-view mirror now.
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Google Antigravity is a buggy mess at the moment, but I believe it will eventually eat Cursor as well. The £20/mo tier currentluy has the highest usage limits on the market, including Google models and Sonnet and Opus 4.5.
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Disappointed to see continued increased pricing for 3 Flash (up from $0.30/$2.50 to $0.50/$3.00 for 1M input/output tokens). I'm more excited to see 3 Flash Lite. Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite needs a lot more steering than regular 2.5 Flash, but it is a very capable model and combined with the 50% batch mode discount it is CHEAP ($0.05/$0.20).
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Have you seen any indications that there will be a Lite version?
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It is interesting to see the "DeepMind" branding completely vanish from the post. This feels like the final consolidation of the Google Brain merger. The technical report mentions a new "MoE-lite" architecture. Does anyone have details on the parameter count? If this is under 20B params active, the distillation techniques they are using are lightyears ahead of everyone else.
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I wonder if this suffers from the same issue as 3 Pro, that it frequently "thinks" for a long time about date incongruity, insisting that it is 2024, and that information it receives must be incorrect or hypothetical. Just avoiding/fixing that would probably speed up a good chunk of my own queries.
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Omg, it was so frustrating to say: Summarize recent working arxiv url And then it tells me the date is from the future and it simply refuses to fetch the URL.
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this is why samsung is stopping production in flash
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This is why they stopped The Flash after season 9 in 2023.
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Pricing is $0.5 / $3 per million input / output tokens. 2.5 Flash was $0.3 / $2.5. That's 66% increase in input tokens and 20% increase in output token pricing. For comparison, from 2.5 Pro ($1.25 / $10) to 3 Pro ($2 / $12), there was 60% increase in input tokens and 20% increase in output tokens pricing.
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Calculating price increases is made more complex by the difference in token usage. From https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3-flash/ : > Gemini 3 Flash is able to modulate how much it thinks. It may think longer for more complex use cases, but it also uses 30% fewer tokens on average than 2.5 Pro.
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Is there a way to try this without a Google account?
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Just use openrouter or a similar aggregator.
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Will be interesting to see what their quota is. Gemini 3.0 Pro only gives you 250 / day until you spam them with enough BS requests to increase your total spend > $250.
You can get your HN profile analyzed and roasted by it. It's pretty funny :) https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com
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This is exactly why you keep your personal life off the internet
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This is hilarious. The personalized pie charts and XKCD-style comics are great, and the roast-style humor is perfect. I do feel like it's not an entirely accurate caricature (recency bias? limited context?), but it's close enough. Good work! You should do a "show HN" if you're not worried about it costing you too much.
This is awesome. No preview release either, which is great to production. They are pushing the prices higher with each release though: API pricing is up to $0.5/M for input and $3/M for output For comparison: Gemini 3.0 Flash: $0.50/M for input and $3.00/M for output Gemini 2.5 Flash: $0.30/M for input and $2.50/M for output Gemini 2.0 Flash: $0.15/M for input and $0.60/M for output Gemini 1.5 Flash: $0.075/M for input and $0.30/M for output (after price drop) Gemini 3.0 Pro: $2.00/M for input and $12/M for output Gemini 2.5 Pro: $1.25/M for input and $10/M for output Gemini 1.5 Pro: $1.25/M for input and $5/M for output I think image input pricing went up even more. Correction: It is a preview model...
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Are these the current prices or the prices at the time the models were released?
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I'm more curious how Gemini 3 flash lite performs/is priced when it comes out. Because it may be that for most non coding tasks the distinction isn't between pro and flash but between flash and flash lite.
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Thanks that was a great breakup of cost. I just assumed before that it was the same pricing. The pricing probably comes from the confidence and the buzz around Gemini 3.0 as one of the best performing models. But competetion is hot in the area and it's not too far where we get similar performing models for cheaper price.
I've been using the preview flash model exclusively since it came out, the speed and quality of response is all I need at the moment. Although still using Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 for dev work. Google keeps their models very "fresh" and I tend to get more correct answers when asking about Azure or O365 issues, ironically copilot will talk about now deleted or deprecated features more often.
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I've found copilot within the Azure portal to be basically useless for solving most problems.
Thinking along the line of speed, I wonder if a model that can reason and use tools at 60fps would be able to control a robot with raw instructions and perform skilled physical work currently limited by the text-only output of LLMs. Also helps that the Gemini series is really good at multimodal processing with images and audio. Maybe they can also encode sensory inputs in a similar way. Pipe dream right now, but 50 years later? Maybe
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Believe it or not, there's Gemini Robotics, which seems to be exactly what you're talking about: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/ Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43344082
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Much sooner, hardware, power, software, even AI model design, inference hardware, cache, everything being improved , it's exponential.
I would be less salty if they gave us 3 Flash Lite at same price as 2.5 Flash or cheaper with better capability, but they still focus on the pricier models :(
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Same! I want to do some data stuff from documents and 2.0 pricing was amazing, but the constant increases go the wrong way for this task :/
Even before this release the tools (for me: Claude Code and Gemini for other stuff) reached a "good enough" plateau that means any other company is going to have a hard time making me (I think soon most users) want to switch. Unless a new release from a different company has a real paradigm shift, they're simply sufficient. This was not true in 2023/2024 IMO. With this release the "good enough" and "cheap enough" intersect so hard that I wonder if this is an existential threat to those other companies.
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I asked a similar question yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290797
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Why wouldn't you switch? The cost to switch is near zero for me. Some tools have built in model selectors. Direct CLI/IDE plug-ins practically the same UI.
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But for me the previous models were routinely wrong time wasters that overall added no speed increase taking the lottery of whether they'd be correct into account.
Two quick questions to Gemini/AI Studio users: 1, has anyone actually found 3 Pro better than 2.5 (on non code tasks)? I struggle to find a difference beyond the quicker reasoning time and fewer tokens. 2, has anyone found any non-thinking models better than 2.5 or 3 Pro? So far I find the thinking ones significantly ahead of non thinking models (of any company for that matter.)
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I think it's probably actually better at math. Though still not enough to be useful in my research in a substantial way. Though I suspect this will change suddenly at some point as the models move past a certain threshold (also it is heavily limited by the fact that the models are very bad at not giving wrong proofs/counterexamples) so that even if the models are giving useful rates of successes, the labor to sort through a bunch of trash makes it hard to justify.
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Not for coding but for the design aspect, 3 outshines 2.5
Don’t let the “flash” name fool you, this is an amazing model. I have been playing with it for the past few weeks, it’s genuinely my new favorite; it’s so fast and it has such a vast world knowledge that it’s more performant than Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 extra high, for a fraction (basically order of magnitude less!!) of the inference time and price
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Oh wow - I recently tried 3 Pro preview and it was too slow for me. After reading your comment I ran my product benchmark against 2.5 flash, 2.5 pro and 3.0 flash. The results are better AND the response times have stayed the same. What an insane gain - especially considering the price compared to 2.5 Pro. I'm about to get much better results for 1/3rd of the price. Not sure what magic Google did here, but would love to hear a more technical deep dive comparing what they do different in Pro and Flash models to achieve such a performance. Also wondering, how did you get early access? I'm using the Gemini API quite a lot and have a quite nice internal benchmark suite for it, so would love to toy with the new ones as they come out.
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Just to point this out: many of these frontier models cost isn't that far away from two orders of magnitude more than what DeepSeek charges. It doesn't compare the same, no, but with coaxing I find it to be a pretty capable competent coding model & capable of answering a lot of general queries pretty satisfactorily (but if it's a short session, why economize?). $0.28/m in, $0.42/m out. Opus 4.5 is $5/$25 (17x/60x). I've been playing around with other models recently (Kimi, GPT Codex, Qwen, others) to try to better appreciate the difference. I knew there was a big price difference, but watching myself feeding dollars into the machine rather than nickles has also founded in me quite the reverse appreciation too. I only assume "if you're not getting charged, you are the product" has to be somewhat in play here. But when working on open source code, I don't mind.
"minimal" is a bit weird. > Matches the “no thinking” setting for most queries. The model may think very minimally for complex coding tasks. Minimizes latency for chat or high throughput applications. I'd prefer a hard "no thinking" rule than what this is.
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It still supports the legacy mode of setting the budget, you can set it to 0 and it would be equivalent to none reasoning effort like gpt 5.1/5.2
Deepmind Page: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/flash/ Developer Blog: https://blog.google/technology/developers/build-with-gemini-3-flash/ Model Card [pdf]: https://deepmind.google/models/model-cards/gemini-3-flash/ Gemini 3 Flash in Search AI mode: https://blog.google/products/search/google-ai-mode-update-gemini-3-flash/
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For anyone from the Gemini team reading this: these links should all be prominent in the announcement posts. I always have to hunt around for them!
Coursera to combine with Udemy (investor.coursera.com)
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Are the contents of these websites current enough to keep up with new technologies? I know universities have been slow to evolve with AI generally …
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I was a Udemy instructor for ~10 years selling tech courses but focused more on delivering courses through my own site for the last ~5-6 years. Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer ranked or promoted by Udemy, for years. I have no evidence of this but my personal opinion is their ranking is probably not fully automated and they have special offers and deals with certain instructors and if you're not a part of this club, oh well. Again, it's all speculation but I can only go by what my numbers are. They were small scale life changing and now nothing but the quality of the courses I produced didn't change. It doesn't make sense. Of course it could be one big coincidence too, but this has been tracked and analyzed over years.
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Speculating, but perhaps it needs to be updated once in a while? Last modified might be a (dumb) factor.
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The best courses I wanted to take are split between Coursera, Udemy, and EdX. The first two can give certificates cheaply. A merger could be really helpful if they do it in a month or two. ;)
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Previously I asked how did MOOCs, which were such an early 2010s hyped tech trend, fall so far from its promise. Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612710
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IMO the market is getting distupted by more live audience and curated platforms like Maven.
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both have had questionable content for a while, it's a wonder people are still paying for them. especially given that LLMs exist (and youtube for that matter).
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If I were a professor at a decent school, I'd probably look at the landscape of MOOCs and go "Why am I spending any time on this?" It seemed like something new and potentially exciting at one point. I certainly wouldn't today.
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This feels like another nail in the coffin of the open, optimistic internet we all dreamed of in 2012, and it makes me sad.
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As a Udemy course instructor, I am not sure what to think. I was not able to opt-out of the new AI features.
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Coursera courses used to be good when I still had time to do courses, while udemy was very trashy low effort for my tastes. I am surprised Coursera became as bad as everyone says, I kind of refuse to believe it. But I don't have any spare time right now to study stuff edit: omg I just looked at coursera and it's so bad! it's all "AI this" "AI that" who uses all that stuff? who wants that? the whole site looks so sad now. the OGs are still there but there is so much crap around it
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Interesting development. I had assumed a private equity company was behind this, but it seems like a deal brokered between two public companies, maybe struggling to show growth. Something tells me the outcome will likely be the same -- years of trying to get competing systems to get aligned or absorbed, attrition of all the most important people who are ready to move on and do more interesting work, and ultimately a poorer experience for the customer. But what do I know.
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Big move. This feels less like a typical merger and more like a bet that AI-driven skills platforms need real scale to matter. Curious to see whether this actually improves learning quality and outcomes—or just creates a larger marketplace with the same challenges.
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For JavaScript I’ve found Scrimba to be worlds better than anything on Udemy or Coursera
This same week, Egghead ( https://egghead.io ) started offering $500 lifetime access to everything they ever made or will make. There's definitely some excellent material in their catalog. But the signals sure seem to point toward the decline of centralized human-created coursework.
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Egghead.io is not worth it, the courses there have a shelf life even shorter than frontendmasters. Authors mostly use it to dump their wares then never update the course afterwards while breaking API changes litter their backlog making most content, unless it was released in the last 3 months, worthless. Absolutely not worth it since the courses are on par with random youtube tutorials IMO. Also really dislike the pattern of some popular frontend frameworks selling basic documentation in the form of "courses."
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Whose lifetime?
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(meta: genuinely curious why my observation was downvoted. I may take a further karma hit for mentioning it but worth it if it elicits a meaningful response. what gives?)
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It sounds like a product pitch and these 'lifetime payment things' are ALWAYS curtailed if the product actually survives.
The reality is that most of these courses exist for the certificate not the course material. People still job hunting for entry level roles just want to pad out their LinkedIn.
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You and I may not like it, but the reality is that so much of "education" is about certifications. And MOOC certifications were never worth much. I have taken unrequired training courses over the years and did other self-guided training, but a LOT of online training was never worth much as a formal certification thing and that's where a lot of the money goes. (Look at executive MBA programs vs. online courses.)
The ongoing enshittification of Coursera, Udacity, and EdX is sad to watch.
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Wonder how Khan Academy is doing these days.
What are the best online courses you’ve taken? On Coursera, I did Andrew Ng’s machine learning course and Dan Boneh’s cryptography course and both were excellent. Time well spent IMHO. The next thing I want to take is a WinDbg course. Udemy has one that looks pretty good. I should probably also find a modern assembly language course…
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On Coursera I really liked the Roman Architecture course from Yale: https://www.coursera.org/learn/roman-architecture The instructor is really passionnate about what she's talking about, which really makes the subject more interesting than I thought it would be.
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I recently bought a course on the Spring Boot from codewithmosh. Despite spring boot being a dry subject, it was probably the best intro backend course I’d ever taken!
Both have garbage content at this point - Coursera was great when they launched, top quality material and university-level instruction. Now it's just bottom of the barrel scraps. YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
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My biggest issue with Udemy courses is that it's not easy to vet the instructor. User ratings are unreliable since beginners aren't really in a position to evaluate a teacher's expertise. If Udemy's pitch were “Learn X as Taught by Notable People in the Field,” I would have signed up in a heartbeat. - 3D Graphics taught by Michael Abrash - Card Manipulation taught by Jeff McBride - Pianistic Ergonomics taught by Edna Golandsky
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I don't know much about Coursera, but Udemy has always been quite bad since I remember. Most drawing/painting courses are taught from people who are juniors at best. The quality is laughable compared to what you can get for free from Marco Bucci/Sinix/Proko channels. And honestly, even those high-quality videos won't teach you how to draw anyway. That being said, I didn't realize how bad Udemy art courses were when I got started. I think that's a life lesson for me especially in the era of LLM.
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I tried that out in my field of expertise, to calibrate my expectations. ChatGPT invented multiple references to non-existent but plausibly-titled papers written by me . I think of that when asking questions about areas I don’t know. That was about 18mo ago, so maybe this kind of hallucination is under control these days.
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Turns out Gell-Mann amnesia applies to LLMs too.
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Considering hallucinations, that seems risky. How do you double check what you were taught?
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Don't ask them to teach you, ask them to make a self-study syllabus/roadmap with online references. It's likely that it ingested the work of others in exactly this scenario, so it shouldn't confabulate as easily.
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Hallucinations has made huge progress over last 3 years
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Yep, now there are way more sophisticated. Same amount, though.
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The same way you double check with any other method you prefer? Duh. LLMs are vastly superior to compile and spread knowledge than any other thing preceding them.
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You double check every university lecture you've been apart of?
As someone who had to drop out of school in the 2008 crisis (family trouble), I owe a good chunk of my learning to the first era of online teaching. Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted. Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit. If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
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> If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot. How is that a viable model?
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Making the world a better place sometimes is incompatible with a profitable business model.
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Maybe improving the world is a good idea regardless of whether it's a viable model? Anyway, in this case, the cost to the university is quite low and there's no real loss of income, as the real value the vast majority of people pay for is clearly in the status that comes from being there in person and getting the diploma.
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Almost my entire education has been OJT (On the Job Training). I'm a high school dropout, with a G.E.D. I've spent my entire life, looking up the noses of folks that just assume they are better than me. Gets a bit grating, but the plus side is, is that I have to prove myself, over, and over. Besides that annoyance, it's been excellent. Directing my own learning has been amazing. Having to prove myself, over and over, and over again, has taught me to deliver results , because no one is willing to front me anything, or give me the benefit of the doubt. Delivery is my "at rest" state, and that kind of thing is hard to teach (Play A Boy Named Sue , by Johnny Cash). What you talk about works well for people like me (and you, from the sound of it), but a lot of folks need more structure. A lot of institutions also need that paper. There are many doors that are closed to people like us. My first formal school was a fly-by-night tech school, created to milk the GI Bill, after Vietnam. The school has long since, fallen to dust, but it was exactly what I needed, at the time. It taught me structure, troubleshooting, and problem-solving. When I left, I was ready to immediately jump into the deep end. I like the idea of vocation-oriented post-K12 schooling, including things like union apprenticeships. The problem is that, in the US, these aren't really supported by "The Establishment," so we tend to get rather dodgy outfits (like the one I attended). I have heard that German University is highly vocation-oriented. I've been impressed by many of the Germans with whom I've worked. I feel that they are extremely results-driven. That may be because of the particular company that I worked for, and the types of engineers that our field attracts, though.
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> If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot. I learn well this way. You learn well this way. However, the big revelation from the early experiments with online courses and MOOCs is that most people don’t. Fundamentals of math, history, physics, and other core topics aren’t changing except maybe for some context on current applications (e.g. how math applies to machine learning, how historical context relates to current events). Those same online course recordings you watched are still valid. There is some room for improvement with new recordings with new gear and better audio, but it’s marginal. Once those courses are recorded and released, we don’t need to keep doing it every year over and over again. The material is out there, it’s just not popular to self-learn at a self-directed pace.
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> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted. Does anyone remember what happened to UC Berkeley? They had a lot of their courses recorded and uploaded to youtube; an absolute joy. Then, some [beep] sued them for not making the recording accessible enough, i.e. not providing captions alongside the recordings. And they had to take down all their published courses! Because if someone cannot make use of those courses, then no-one can! Such a shame! Especially considering how these days, captions can be generated automatically for anyone who really needs them.
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Iirc the complaint was that machine generated captions were not good enough :(. Yeah it's pretty sad.
I bought quite a few courses at udemy, none at coursera though, but I ended up not taking them, instead I used youtube to get some video, and LLM to get the text context these days. Youtube is the true gem, if it spins out of google it could take on netflix at least. In short, google might be undervalued a lot just because of youtube, for entertainment and education purposes.
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I get so much decision fatigue when choosing a course series on YouTube. On every technical topic, there are like 15 people making courses anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 hours.
For a basic crash course in Python, is there anything better than the top rated Udemy course, can YT offer something better ? I really don't mind paying the 12$ it costs on Udemy.
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You will never do better than https://www.pythonmorsels.com/ This is what you get when you have an educator completely dedicated to a single topic and surpasses all expectations of education.
Dead end for what? Quality recordings of real lectures have been amazing for self improvement. I've never gone into it expecting a meaningful certificate, just meaning for me living my life.
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You're probably in the small minority at least when it comes to forking over material dollars. Most people spending money, at least beyond trade paperback range, are probably looking for something that has at least a plausible connection to real income.
Turns out that an online certificate isn't worth anything when layoffs happen and the market is oversaturated with people who have real degrees. MOOCs have their place, but it's a very narrow set of disciplines.
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I'm not sure offline certificates mean a whole lot when layoffs matter either. But MOOCs and other purely online options just didn't result in any meaningful certification especially outside of a connection to established universities. And, given that, people/companies weren't interested in paying significant bucks for them. It was probably a useful experiment. Just not a very successful one. And once the experiment faltered, schools/professors became less interested in putting money and energy into it. All the evidence is that most of the students/potential students who weren't already motivated to pursuing independent learning didn't really connect to all this online material.
Yeah ditto. I don't know when it happened, but the Coursera courses I tried at first (around 2012 I think?) were very high quality -- I thought it was clearly a competitor to traditional brick and mortar. Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort. I am not as familiar with the other online schools that focus on quality (like WGU). I am surprised they have not eaten traditional schools lunches, since the actual quality of instruction is often very variable (I am a former professor, for the most part profs have little oversight in how they run classes). Market for lemons maybe? Another aspect I am surprised at is that the big companies have not just started their own schools. UT-Dallas where I was at for a few years was basically started to help train up folks for Texas Instruments. (RAND Pardee school is kind-of an exemplar, although that is not focused on software engineering.) I debate sometimes I shouldn't bother with hiring seniors and just train up everyone. If you have 10k software engineers does it not make sense to just have that level of training internally?
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Unfortunately the get rich quick/grifter community realised that online courses was a way to make money.
Both Udemy and Coursera are public companies?
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Was also news to me!
I'm not sure how much it has to do with LLMs. It feels more like it was sort of a fad thing and, especially once any certification value essentially fell off the back of the truck (and therefore no one really willing to pay)--much less any real value delivered to people who weren't already autodidacts--it sort of faded away. From where I was at the time Linkedin Learning (or whatever it was called) was a sometimes vaguely useful company benefit for random stuff but I'm not sure to what degree anyone even tracked who used it.
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I think what killed all MOOC learning was that they ALL saw this giant TAM for corporate training and thought.. we have to get into that market. That is what hollowed out the value.. all the incentives are inverse to building long term value. Everything becomes check box driven product development to close the next "big deal" and then no development is done to really enhance the core of the system or the core value to the learner. It becauses now it morphs into can we show value to the clients/decision makers/learning admins?
LLMs typically still require some interactivity, no? Much easier to watch some videos in many cases.
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watching a few good videos is a great way to FEEL like you're learning. just cuz you watch a 15 hour videoo course on c doesn't mean you can write c any more than watching a 2 hour video course on kung foo means you can kick like bruce lee The best Elearning platform I've found is mathacademy. no videos. just short texts on how to solve a problem and then a bunch of problems with increasing difficulty. much more efficent if you want to actually learn a skill. TLDR: you learn by DOING
Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself? (infosec.press)
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Clearly Google have an iron hand over Mozilla. They want it to remain semi-alive for competitiveness purposes but also ad-block free in order to keep the last user's attention to ads. There might be an under the table agreement between G and the CEO that we will never find. After a while Firefox might become abandoned because nobody in power wants it any more.
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The profit model is being payed (as CEO) to dismantle Firefox into oblivion and no more.
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Disabling ad blocking goes hand in hand with an "AI Browser" strategy. Ad blocking relies on the ability to use filters to block network requests at the browser level, and visual elements at the DOM level. "AI Browsers" are designed to add bloat to the browsing experience, by offering to summarize something, or providing contextual information like say, a product recommendation that pulls data from a third party site. Network request and DOM element blocking would instantly negate that. I've moved to Librewolf myself.
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On the contrary, ad blockers and 'AI browsers' goes hand in hand. On one side is naive browser that displays pages as-is, on the other is user agent that shows what is relevant to the user. Ad blockers are just more static / more deterministic variants of that.
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I think people are wildly overreacting. There is a new CEO and he wants to make a splash so the throws around "AI" that's it. Of course there will be AI related features in firefox, there already are! Wait and see what the actual specifics are before reacting? Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive. Perhaps we need a fork of firefox that is sustained by donations and is backed by a non-profit explicilty chartered to make decisions based on community feedback? I don't see a problem with that wikipedia-like approach, I don't think any of the forks today have a good/viable org structure that is fully non-profit (as in it won't seek profit at all). Mozilla has bade some bad decisions recently, but they're a far cry from the world-ended outcry they're getting. If we don't donate to Mozilla and we don't pay them money, then we have to be the product at some point. Even if they don't it to be that way, they have to placate to some other business interests. I hope the EU also pays attention, perhaps some of their OSS funding can help setup an alternate org.
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> If we don't donate to Mozilla 1. Why would I donate to Mozilla? Mozilla hates me. 2. When Mozilla was 30% of the browser market rather than 3%, they could have easily cleaned up on donations. If they had made whatever extension transition that they thought they needed to do but while protecting all contemporary extension capabilities and not using it as a power grab to limit user control, they'd still have 30% of the market. If they hadn't made the business decision to permanently be a wonky Chrome, people wouldn't think of them as a wonky Chrome. 3. Mozilla has plenty of money. If you can't create a sustainable browser with a billion and a half dollars in the bank and a fully-featured browser , it's because you don't want to. You already have the browser, you can't whine about how complicated it is to create a browser. Pay developers with the interest. Stop paying these useless weirdo executives a fortune. But enough about Mozilla. If you're some Bitcoin or startup billionaire, I'll ask you the same thing. Firefox is sitting right there and licensed correctly. You want people to respect you and remember you nicely when you're dead? Take it, fork it, put that same billion and a half into a trust, and save an open door to the Internet at a time when it's really needed. You've won in life, it will be easy to make people trust you if your ambition is just to do good. Steal Firefox, put it on the right track, and people will flock back to it. I know Ladybird is interesting, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
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>>> Also, a small minor detail here: We're not paying for firefox! why are so many people feeling entitled? Mozilla has to do something other than beg Google to survive. Because some of us have supported, donated to, advocated for, and participated in the firefox and mozilla communities over the years, and feel betrayed by the abandonment of principles, kowtowing to adtech surveillance "features", and overall enshittification of a once beloved browser that we hoped would allow for an alternative to the chrome blob, as they once were to the atrocity that was internet explorer. It's perfectly reasonable to call out foundations and organizations that utterly abandon and fail to live up to principles. Mozilla is just a PR wing for Alphabet and whitewashing the chromification of all browsers, at this point. Ladybug and some other alternatives will come around. I don't see any future in which Mozilla returns to principles - the people leeching off / running the foundation won't ever be interested in returning to a principled stance, but to change the brand, or pursue profit, or some other outcome that is divergent from the expectations and consideration of the original supporters. They keep trying to commodify and branch out and waste insane amounts of money on nonsense, and hire CEOs that lose the plot before they ever start the job. Mozilla is functionally dead, for whatever vision of it a lot of us might once have had. By the time they'd have a chance to fix anything, maybe it'll be practical to have an AI whip up a new browser engine and we'll all have bespoke, feature complete privacy respecting browsers built on the fly.
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Did you read the article? Don't answer that because I can see you didn't from your response.
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Waiting until the thing is done to voice your opinions on the thing is a very poor strategy if you want to have any influence over what the thing turns out to even be.
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Why do there have to be AI features in Firefox? No one wants them. They make the browser less secure. They distract from the mission.
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Because the AI implementations they’ve already done are shit? Buttons on by default, features that are annoying to remove for normal users (the context menu ‘search with chatbot’). It’s just garbage, get this shit out of here. Stop adding things to my window without permission and stop with the popups announcing them to me. Anyone who seriously wants this will seek it out. Leave the rest of us alone.
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Yeah I dunno why they didn't just let it be an official add-on or whatever. I use AI a lot and even I don't want this shit everywhere.
The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox. The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.
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"political reasons" like espousing the level of hatred that makes your queer, Bay Area employees distrust you? OK.
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I'd say it's complicated. If you are running a company in San Francisco I think you want to be sensitive to the culture there. That cause of gay marriage that he opposed was not one of these radicalism for the sake of radicalism queer positions you see on Twitter-dervied platforms but something mainstream at the root. I think of how on The Bulwark podcasts you hear gay people with a conservative but never-Trump viewpoint describing their cozy family life and it just sounds so sweet... and mainstream making the opposition to it not seem so mainstream. On the other hand I think San Francisco is part of the Mozilla problem because it is less than an hour on the 101 to go see people at Facebook and Google yet they are distant from the 99% of of web developers and web users that live somewhere else whose use Firefox because they don't like what Chrome stands for. I wish Mozilla was in Boulder or Minneapolis or Cleveland or Dublin or some other second-tier but vibrant city where they might have the capacity to listen to us rather than be in the same monoculture that brings us Chrome and Instagram.
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Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better. But (2) you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions. People with an axe to grind always hide what Brendan Eich did behind "politics" which is a dishonest slight of hand.
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A) Firing a CEO because there is an immediate, massive public shaming of them is entirely rational from a business perspective B) This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?
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Civil rights are more important than the quality and usability of _any software_.
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I don't know, if the CEO of some software I used suddenly came out as anti-miscegenation, and started donating money to the cause, I'd stop using the software until the CEO was fired too.
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Exactly. It's one thing to be an idiot on Twitter, it's another for you to donate money to a cause specifically designed to deny rights to people - a cause that was actually successful for a time. That's something that speaks to a fundamental lack of empathy that I'm not sure he's ever directly addressed. But in any case, I've heard this argument before, and the timeline doesn't make sense. At the time he resigned, Chrome was very firmly ahead of Firefox, and given his track record with Brave, the idea that Eich would have single-handedly saved Mozilla is also pretty dubious to me. It seems like a disingenuous and lazy talking point tailor made to blame the demise of Firefox on a culture war politics, when in reality it's the fact that Google was willing to throw much more time and resources at the browser market than a non-profit, unimpeded by the same sort of anti-trust and lack of development that brought Internet Explorer low.
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Firing someone for being opposed to same-sex marriage is political in the same way firing someone for robbing a bank is.
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wat
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Really? Having an opinion endorsed by the mainstream doctrine of several world religions with billions of adherents is the same as robbing a bank? That being said, I disagree with Eich and it probably made sense for the org to let him go given how his views might impact public perception of Mozilla.
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Does it feel good to be on the side of millions of like-minded bigots?
I'm going to repost/merge a few comments I made about this a while ago: I dropped firefox 9 months so after they updated their privacy policy and removed "we don't sell your data" from their FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612 Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they can serve you sponsored suggestions when you're searching for things in their search bar and stuff and sharing out some of that data with third parties etc. Firefox was bringing in half a billion a year for the last decade, if they would've just invested that money in low risk money market accounts (instead of paying their csuite executives millions of dollars in salary and putting the rest on non-Firefox related related social causes), the company would be able to easily survive off the interest alone. I've been using Firefox since 2006 and have defended it for decades even when they've made questionable decisions that have gotten everybody upset with them. But this time it wasn't just making stupid decisions to try and fund the company, this time they actuality sold out their own customers. In public announcement in the above link explaining why they removed "we don't sell your data" from the FAQ, the rationality was that some jurisdictions define selling data weirdly, they cited California's definition as an example but California's definition is exactly what I would consider the definition of selling my personal data. They're justifying this by saying that they need it to stay alive since they're not going to be getting money from Google anymore, but I argue that you shouldn't sell out your customer base on the very specific reason anyone would choose you. I would rather pay a monthly fee to use Firefox to support them, but even if you gave them $500 million today they would just squander it away like they've done since forever so I really don't have any solution I can think of which frustrates me. I switched to Orion (and use Safari if a site doesn't work in Orion), which can be a little buggy at times but I'm happy that it's not based on chrome at least.
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The funny thing about removing "we don't sell your data" is that Mozilla before that was giving your data away for free. Now they just could be compensated.
The web without ublock origin is a hellscape. Whenever I try another browser, I immediately go back to firefox. Do these people even know their users? For example: Fedora Silverblue default Firefox install had an issue with some Youtube videos due to codecs. So I tried watching youtube on Chromium. Ads were so annoying I stopped watching by the second time I tried to watch a video. Stopped watching youtube until I uninstalled default firefox install and added Firefox from flathub. If the option to use a good adblocker gets taken away I 'll most likely dramatically reduce my web browsing. P.S. Maybe someone ports Vanadium to desktop Linux? If firefox goes away that 'd be my best case desktop browser. Using it on my mobile ;)
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That's not a niche power-user concern anymore, it's basic UX and safety
Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, I guess I can see the temptation to try to regain it by reaching out to others, but doing that at the expense of your core is a terrible business strategy. It's not like those users are all that sticky, they're leaving as Mozilla pisses them off, and likely Mozilla are going to be left with what they stand for - which these days is nothing. It's sad, I'm sure there was a better path Mozilla could have taken, but they've had a decade or more of terrible management. I wonder if the non-profit / corp structure hasn't helped, or if it's just a later-stage company with a management layer who are disconnected from the original company's mission and strategy.
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When you've already lost most of your mass-market appeal, the only defensible strategy left is to double down on the people who still care
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Every tech CEO loves to cosplay as "announcing the iPhone" 2007 Steve Jobs but nobody ever tries to cosplay as the "pulling Apple back from the brink by focusing on core competencies" 1997 Steve Jobs.
What’s the story on the TOS change? This is the first I’m hearing about it.
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A while ago they changed their TOS from something along the lines of "We will never sell your data" to "Your data is safe"
>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission. > It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”. Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M USD".
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How would it bring in $150m? Is that some tranche of funding Google is witholding from them until they disable extensions?
No, they are accurately observing that the "I don't want to do it" and "feels off mission" statements are FAR weaker than they can be and should be. Such weak statements are either a real mistake or show movement away from those principles which should be bedrock for Mozilla and towards some justification to abandon those principles. It's not like the industry has no precedents on this. "Don't Be Evil" was the motto of a company that is now one of the apex predators in the surveillance capitalism ecosystem. Unwise to try to dismiss and laugh off legitimate alarms.
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This is just tone policing. "we won't do this" But you didn't say you'd never do this. "okay we'll never do this" But you didn't say you'd never ever do this. "fine we'll never ever do this" But you didn't say that it's never entered your mind once. They said they won't do it and your interpretation is to demand they said it with more words? Come on, let's stop this nonsense. Can Firefox users ever be happy?
I’d happily pay $100 a year for Firefox WITH an adblocker as long as part of the money is put towards ongoing internet freedom and preventing attestation
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As with all the comments about "I'd pay X dollars to not be the product", it's been shown over and over again that paying money is not going to void corporate desire to simply double dip by raising prices while also showing ads.
The interpretation is not the problem. Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money. No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
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>Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money. I'm sorry but this is like borderline gibberish. You could rationally understand that there's a financial incentive to selling out... and choose not to sell out. Did you make it to the and? I didn't think so. The fact that you're simply able to assess that selling out has a dollar amount associated with it isn't a confession unless you're so pot committed to your Mozilla Derangement Syndrome that you've chosen to throw charitable interpretation out the window. You're entertaining a hypothetical that was already rejected, and your point of emphasis is that they didn't reject it hard enough to satisfy you. I'm sorry but that's the nothingburger of the century.
I have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades. If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB. The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.
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The web was usable without JavaScript once. (JS has few good uses, but is too excessive)
Is it him or is it you? I'd think within the Mozilla organization is a data trove of telemetry which renders a fairly good picture of how many users actually are using ad blockers.
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Each Firefox add-on has a counter of the number of users. It doesn't require some "data trove of telemetry".
The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken, the land grab was complete and the time to recoup the investment has come. Once the users were trapped for exploitation, it doesn’t make sense to have a browser that blocks ads. How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. They all end up doing one of those since the incentives are perverse, that’s why Google didn’t just ride the Firefox till the end and instead created the Chrome. It doesn’t make sense to have trillion dollars companies and everything to be free. The free part is until monopolies are created and walled gardens are full with people. Then comes the monetization and those companies don’t have some moral compass etc, they have KPI stock values and analytics and it’s very obvious that blocking ads isn’t good financially.
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> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. Yes, No, Yes? I don't demand constant updates. I don't want constant updates. Usually when a company updates software it becomes worse. I am happy with the initial version of 90% of the software I use, and all I want is bug fixes and security updates.
> The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken, Categorically untrue and weird revisionism. Basically the opposite of what actually happened.
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I agree with the untrue and revisionism bit, but I disagree with it being the opposite of what happened. People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible (rather than a tool used by academic and military institutions). It can be attributed to the downfall of Gopher. It can be attributed to the rise of Netscape and Internet Explorer. While the early web was nowhere near as commercial as it is today, we quickly saw the development of search engines and (ad supported) hosting services that were. By the time 2000's hit, VC money was very much starting to drive the game. In the minds of most people, the Internet was only 5 to 10 years old at that point. (The actual Internet may be much older, but few people took notice of it until the mid-1990's.)
If the users don't want the feature, then pushing it on them is not user first. It's that simple.
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That's an impossible bar to clear though. Because there are ALWAYS features that some users doesn't want.
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