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I've been wondering recently if you could classify Mozilla under the Bullshit Job heading. It seems they only exist at the moment to prevent Google from being r

I've been wondering recently if you could classify Mozilla under the Bullshit Job heading. It seems they only exist at the moment to prevent Google from being regulated. Their stances on privacy and an open web don't seem to impact the browser any more than a chrome add-on would. Even this post is all about preventing Google from doing something malicious instead of the value they add. Is this an efficient society, to spend the lives of hundreds of extremely intelligent people duplicating solutions purely to slow down another organization? Isn't there a better solution to this?

tsimionescu 6y ago
Frank Herbert has a few writings [0] about a future galactic state that moves at such speed that they have needed to create an official Bureau of Sabotage, whose purpose it is to allow down the working of government to the point that it can be considered and understood in all its implications by the people. Perhaps we really are at that state in some ways/places, where just slowing down is a net good. Does the web really need all of this progress? Or is it more being dragged at increasing speeds in a harmful direction? [0] I know about "Whipping Star" and "The Dosadi Experiment", but there may be others.
- asdasfasdfasdf 6y ago
  This is a very good question, especially when you consider who exactly is driving the "progress" of the web right now.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> Is this an efficient society, to spend the lives of hundreds of extremely intelligent people duplicating solutions purely to slow down another organization? Isn't there a better solution to this? Monocultures are a Bad Thing, even if it seems inefficient to have multiple competing implementations of a standard. Unfortunately the article does a poor job exploring why, it just rambles about slow-moving standards, so here's a short article from the IndieWeb folks [0]. It's good that we have various browsers, operating systems, compilers, standard library implementations, etc. (Crypto might be the exception, as implementations are very hard to get right, very costly to get wrong, and are highly reusable.) [0] https://indieweb.org/monoculture#Disadvantages https://indieweb.org/monoculture#Disadvantages

tsimionescu 6y ago

Frank Herbert has a few writings [0] about a future galactic state that moves at such speed that they have needed to create an official Bureau of Sabotage, whose purpose it is to allow down the working of government to the point that it can be considered and understood in all its implications by the people. Perhaps we really are at that state in some ways/places, where just slowing down is a net good. Does the web really need all of this progress? Or is it more being dragged at increasing speeds in a harmful direction? [0] I know about "Whipping Star" and "The Dosadi Experiment", but there may be others.

asdasfasdfasdf 6y ago
This is a very good question, especially when you consider who exactly is driving the "progress" of the web right now.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

> Is this an efficient society, to spend the lives of hundreds of extremely intelligent people duplicating solutions purely to slow down another organization? Isn't there a better solution to this? Monocultures are a Bad Thing, even if it seems inefficient to have multiple competing implementations of a standard. Unfortunately the article does a poor job exploring why, it just rambles about slow-moving standards, so here's a short article from the IndieWeb folks [0]. It's good that we have various browsers, operating systems, compilers, standard library implementations, etc. (Crypto might be the exception, as implementations are very hard to get right, very costly to get wrong, and are highly reusable.) [0] https://indieweb.org/monoculture#Disadvantages https://indieweb.org/monoculture#Disadvantages