You're confused by the fact that people are fed up with various elites pushing for restrictive policies, then routinely bypassing and ignoring those policies when it comes to their personal lives? What is so confusing here?
This is a medevac flight and Auckland is the closest major city to where he was located. It's not clear that he's being treated differently than other people would be in the same situation.
>It's not clear that he's being treated differently than other people would be in the same situation.
Empathy and benefit of the doubt for billionaires who vacation in Fiji and whose kids get a medevac flight to a major city when something goes wrong would look a bit more sane if those were commonly afforded to normal people as well. Which they aren't.
If the guy was going there for a vacation, yes I would 100% agree with your sentiment. But from the story it sounds like his son had to be medivaced from Fiji.
Since this is a medical emergency I would imagine that they would grant this to whoever, not just Page.
Yes. Im sure they charter 4200 kilometer medevac flights for anybody, while country is on total lock down, and the emergency is so urgent whole thing takes >24 hours before the flight even takes off.
>“The day after the application was received, a New Zealand air ambulance staffed by a New Zealand ICU nurse-escort medevaced the child and an adult family member from Fiji to New Zealand,”
This is silly. I for one is fully ready to return to the office. Sacrificing two hours of my life to commute five days a week is a small price for making my boss feel more in control. And what's a bit of traffic congestion and burnt gasoline when it's offset by AMAZING culture of our open office? We will fix global warming in some other way. I am at my peal performance when I work in a bazaar-like environment with people walking and talking around my tiny desk. I miss the corporate propaganda on the walls and free snacks full of sugar and preservatives. I miss the germs and viruses that made me stronger. Even if I get Delta variant and suffer serious health damage to sit in the office, it's a perfectly reasonable tradeoff. The pointless shitcode I write at home is just not the same as the pointless shitcode I write at the office. I can't put my finger at what's missing, but something definitely does.
Why is “amazing culture” always parroted by managers who are typically loud and extroverted and think it is amazing because they get to strut around and dash from conference room to conference room.
If people dont want to go back then you by definition do not have an amazing in office culture.
If your culture is predicated on being in person, some less dysfunctional company is going to eat you alive.
Gaslighers gonna gaslight. You don't need a Ph.D. to see this "research" was guided by motivated reasoning rather than genuine desire to figure out what is going on.
What makes you say that, did you read the paper and find flaws in their methodology? Or does it disagree with your preconceived narrative and dismiss it out of hand?
I read the UC San Diego summary. As far as I can tell, their data is from an online poll. It’s well-known that online poll respondents are generally more interested in politics than average. It stands to reason that those considering leaving California may be much less interested in politics and thus undersampled. I didn’t see this potential sampling issue addressed in their write-up, though I’m a layman unfamiliar with the polling methodology they’ve used.
This is an excellent question/framing. The security model used in the industry right now is insane and doomed to fail, and yet it is relentlessly pushed forth and defended.
ECS (which I have not used) sounds a lot like Traits. The name and core concepts for Traits were defined in 2003 in an ECOOP paper [1]. I think traits were first implemented by Squeak Smalltalk in 2005.
Very similar although in an ECS the relationship is backwards, Entities get behaviour based on what data they contain rather than getting behaviour from traits and needing to add state to make them work.
The ECS approach can lead to some confusing things like adding a component to an Entity and having strange behaviour result as a system the programmer didn’t expect to be triggered is run. This can lead to systems having quite complex definitions based not just on the components the system needs to run but also on the components that shouldn’t be present and so on.
>In all my experience with OOP, it's always been inheritance that is the root of all evil.
It's not, though, and the fact that people keep repeating this meme shows that most developers don't even bother thinking about issues they face beyond superficial blamesplaining.
The reason inheritance causes so many issues in languages like Java is because they are statically typed and also use classes as types[1]. Classes must be somewhere in the inheritance tree, hence you are forced into some place of that tree. To make things worse, Java has many keywords that restrict what inheritor of a class can do (private, final, etc).
Inheritance is much less troublesome in, say, Smalltalk, since the language is dynamically typed. If someone expects you to implement Foo, you can (almost always) just implement its relevant methods without explicitly extending the class. Thus, a whole host of annoying scenarios simply does not occur.
--
[1] BTW, this breaks one of the fundamental commandments of classic OOP: you should not depend on implementation details of an object, only on its message protocol. Obviously, it's impossible to be independent of implementation details if some library forces you to use a particular class.
You're describing interface-based polymorphism, which is what go and rust use. In go, I can have a struct with methods that implements a particular interface by implementing all the methods described in that interface, but I can't inhereit from another struct. The person you're replying to called this out as a better system too.
Inheritance is bad. Inheritance is patching a class and overriding some of its methods, while leaving others intact. This brings all kinds of unexpected interplay between methods of different levels of overriding. A typical example is http://www.cse.psu.edu/~deh25/cmpsc473/jokes00/joke01.html
Ideally all "concrete classes" with method implementations should be final, and the polymorphism should be achieved via interfaces / typeclasses / traits, or purely abstract classes where these are not available. Reuse of implementation should be achieved via composition; there are several ergonomic ways to express it.
Haskell and, IIRC, Rust allow you to declare that a certain data type conforms to some interface, and describe how, by listing / adding the functions with necessary signatures.
This allows to have the upsides of structural polymorphism without losing static checks.
I think they're just talking about how you have to declare what trait a function implementation is for, rather than having it derived from the type signature alone. The `impl Trait`[0] syntax. In Go, you don't need to declare that the function implementations are being implemented for a particular interface, you just have to match the type signatures and function names.
Rust's way can help avoid some errors. You can't accidentally implement an interface, whereas in Go you can if you happen to implement a group of functions with appropriate names and type signatures. It's unlikely to cause actual bugs (you'd have to misuse the resulting implementation) but can be conceptually somewhat confusing.
> It's not, though, and the fact that people keep repeating this meme shows that most developers don't even bother thinking about issues they face beyond superficial blamesplaining.
I don't know that I'd say "inheritance is the root of all evil" (there are lots of antipatterns in OOP that are unrelated to inheritance, like Joe Armstrong's banana-gorilla-jungle observation) but I will say that inheritance is pretty close to useless in the best case and harmful in most cases. And I say this as someone who learned to program and then became a professional programmer when OOP was all the rage. I was taught OOP without the previous bias of other paradigms; it was only after learning other paradigms that I was able to articulate frustrations I was having with OOP. The implication that people who criticize inheritance in this way "haven't bothered to think" is patently false in the best case, and laughably arrogant in the worst case.
> The reason inheritance causes so many issues in languages like Java is because they are statically typed and also use classes as types[1]. Classes must be somewhere in the inheritance tree, hence you are forced into some place of that tree. To make things worse, Java has many keywords that restrict what inheritor of a class can do (private, final, etc).
Fear not, Python is dynamically typed and inheritance is a mess there as well.
> If someone expects you to implement Foo, you can (almost always) just implement its relevant methods without explicitly extending the class.
This is just structural subtyping (see Go's interfaces for a statically typed example of structural subtyping) also known as "duck typing". It seems like you're positing that the problems with inheritance derive from nominal subtyping (e.g., Java's `implements` keyword), but these things are orthogonal. Python has duck typing ("structural subtyping") and its inheritance is no less painful than Java's. Similarly, Rust has nominal subtyping (a type must explicitly implement a trait) and it has none of the inheritance-related problems that Python and Java have.
I feel like OOP always had the nerd catnip problem. Since the very beginning the various programming tutorials would have the contrived examples of animals and canines and dogs, or geometric shapes and triangles etc. which just managed to ring a particular very satisfying bell in people's heads. It was just such a neat concept with those examples that just made sense. How it turned out in practice is a different story but I feel this had a lot to do with the enthusiastic uptake.
1983 Smlltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation by Adele Goldberg and David Robson had pretty good example with none of this animal/mammal/dog crap. Not sure when the trend for giving awful examples like this really started, but I don't think it was "from the very beginning".
> Inheritance is much less troublesome in, say, Smalltalk, since the language is dynamically typed. If someone expects you to implement Foo, you can (almost always) just implement its relevant methods without explicitly extending the class.
Sorry, I don't understand this sentence. Isn't inheritance simply a way to avoid writing duplicate code? If you write the code to implement methods, isn't that not inheritance anymore?
Inheritance conflates code reuse ("avoid writing duplicate code") with polymorphism (allowing for multiple different instances to implement the same interface). It also allows for trampolining method calls up and down a hierarchy (a method in a base class might call another method which might be overridden by another class in the hierarchy).
Outside of OOP, we use composition for reuse and interfaces for polymorphism, and we don't trampoline method calls up and down a hierarchy because it's (probably?) always a bad idea. When we really need reuse and polymorphism, we can use both composition and interfaces, since the two are correctly orthogonal.
> Inheritance conflates code reuse ("avoid writing duplicate code") with polymorphism (allowing for multiple different instances to implement the same interface).
Note that languages like C++ allow for inheritance without polymorphism, i.e. pure implementation inheritance.
However, I also think that composition should be preferred whenever possible.
What the grandparent post means is that in dynamic languages you can just implement one of the "base" methods yourself instead of inheriting from a class that's bigger than you need, in order to avoid problems. I personally don't have an opinion on that, but it's not something I'd do myself.
Also, like the sibling said, inheritance is a tool that does multiple things: code reuse, which we call implementation inheritance, being the one everyone hates (the age-old advice is to use composition for code reuse instead), and interface inheritance being the one everyone loves.
Alan Kay spent the last 40 years educating people on OOP and system design. His talks and research papers are now widely available on the internet. There are free, modern and easy-to-use versions of Smalltalk. Anyone who still remains ignorant about fundamental ideas behind classic OOP and the paradigm's history is willfully ignorant.
Lots of OOP proponents disagree strongly with Kay’s definition of OOP, and his definition certainly doesn’t reflect the way the most popular self-described OOP languages are written today. Notably, Smalltalk has a negligible share of the market, so why should anyone waste time debating Kay/Smalltalk’s notions of OOP when they are at best niche?
Further, and more relevant to the thread at hand: it’s not clear to me that Kay’s notion of OOP considered inheritance to be a critical feature. To quote him:
> I felt somewhat the same way about inheritance as I did about types, in that both needed to be a lot better than they were in order to pay for the overheads and pitfalls of using them.
> Notably, Smalltalk has a negligible share of the market, so why should anyone waste time debating Kay/Smalltalk’s notions of OOP when they are at best niche?
Objective-C[0] is C with Smalltalk's "notions of OOP." Objective-C has been the dominant programming language for making macOS and iOS programs since OS-X was first released. Swift[1] is taking over the role Objective-C once held alone, but Swift's roots in Smalltalk's "notions of OOP" are easily discerned.
I think one problem here is that you can't really compare Objective-C to let's say Java as they are used for different purpose. Swift and Objective-C have negligable market share outisde of the Apple ecosystem, and Java or C# have a negligable market share inside. So it's not a Alan Kay OOP/not Alan Kay OOP split, but a rest of the world/Apple split.
I think I agree with you. However to the parents point: i think the implication is we might be enlightened about why Alan defines OOP the way he does when we contextualize it with Smalltalk, the language in which he used it. That's a fair point.
But again, you're right: most of us aren't familiar with Smalltalk and so find the very idea of reading such papers daunting at best. I think I'll finally try it though ...it can't be that hard of a language to grasp and it may well lead to some insights about why OOP, as defined by Mr. Kay, is defined as such.
> I think I agree with you. However to the parents point: i think the implication is we might be enlightened about why Alan defines OOP the way he does when we contextualize it with Smalltalk, the language in which he used it. That's a fair point.
I absolutely agree that understanding Kay and Smalltalk can help one become a better programmer and give context into the history of OOP. But it can't be interpreted as anything other than a semantic deflection in the context of a response to substantial criticism.
I've never heard this brought up before. What's the distinctions? The thing I've noticed and found lacking in modern OOP is that it tends to be class-based without metaclasses or metaprogramming. Is there something else? Static typing is also something that not in Smalltalk, but that shouldn't change the network shape of objects.
* OOP is about message passing (where message passing is NOT method invocations)
* OOP is about message passing (where message passing can be method invocations)
* OOP is about encapsulation (never mind that most/all paradigms make extensive, idiomatic use of encapsulation--some OOP proponents suggest encapsulation implies constructors that do lots of work, take ver few arguments, and make the class virtually untestable, others argue that this is an "abuse" of OOP or "bad programming")
* OOP is about inheritance
* OOP is a Kingdom-of-nouns programming style (effectively Joe Armstrong's "You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle" observation)
For all of these definitions, I've heard many OOP proponents argue that these things are not true OOP (typically without rebuke from other OOP proponents in the forum, bizarrely).
In my opinion, OOP must be defined by the things that distinguish it from other paradigms. Considering encapsulation and method calls are both fundamental to other paradigms, these cannot be defining characteristics of OOP. Additionally, any defining characteristic of OOP must be shared by languages that are virtually universally recognized as OOP, which means that message passing in a non-method-call sense must be excluded. That generally leaves inheritance, "extreme encapsulation" (untestable constructors), and kingdom-of-nouns programming styles.
I don't think the "class-based" thing is meaningful because apart from inheritance there's not much to distinguish a "class" from a struct in Go or Rust (in both cases you can associate methods to the struct for interface polymorphism) which are generally not considered to be "OOP languages" (and Go certainly doesn't have metaclasses or metaprogramming).
> Static typing is also something that not in Smalltalk, but that shouldn't change the network shape of objects.
I agree that static typing is not a defining characteristic of OOP, and I've never heard anyone argue that it is.
A thing common to OOP that's missing from this list is localizing data and behaviour together, and the tell-dont-ask way of getting things done in OOP.
I meant that the newer less-pure-OOP languages tend to be statically typed vs Smalltalk etc where objects have behaviours but not compile-time shapes.
* message passing in Smalltalk is implemented as method invocation (the same is in Java, C#, C++, ...)
* encapsulation in Smalltalk: all fields are private/hidden (but: all methods are public)
This only seems true for the case of simply defined methods. Differences arising from being able to do late binding is better described on Dynamic Dispatch wiki page[0].
After seeing how Twitter nuked Unity 2020 campaign[1] using "authenticity" as an excuse, and how that garnered zero attention from either tech or political media, I am hyper-skeptical of all claims regarding "authenticity". If you can't objectively demonstrate that something is inauthentic and just make claims based on authority/trust, how can anyone know that you're not simply trying to achieve a political goal of your own by spreading FUD?
Why does every article on mis- and dis-information I see on HN these days starts with some primer that encourages the audience to assume that it's predominantly the product of the political right? In this case the primer takes the following form:
> The utterance emerged in February 2019 from Fox & Friends presenter Pete Hegseth
This is in the first paragraph. Before the subject is properly introduced and defined, before the reader even begins processing what the article says about it, the author encourages the audience to think about how barbarous and primitive Fox News is, which is guaranteed to tint everything that follows.
This is a propaganda technique and it's becoming ubiquitous in modern writing.
If you'd gone a little bit further into the article, you'd have seen why. It's context. There's a whole discussion included where the event you're attributing to malicious priming is used as an example.
What's the alternative here? Leave the audience guessing about what's going on? Omitting the highly relevant fact the person under discussion is a TV presenter on a major news network? Going out of their way to obscure the source of a public comment so it's harder for their readers to verify? I really don't see what else they could have done.
The only quasi-reasonable alternative would be to have teased the fact, really let the readers come to the assumption the person is a crazy wacko that nobody would ever listen to, and _then_ drop the bomb he said this on Fox? Except that would turn it from an article on misinformation into a hit piece on Pete Hegseth and Fox, which I can only assume would have made you even less happy.
Seriously, what else were they supposed to do here?
I can think of a handful of "left" (for the US) outlets that I think produce content that's disinformation (for example, the first place I heard heavily play up the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was artificially created in a lab was on an obviously bullshit supplement-promoting program on the Pacifica network), and it should absolutely be appreciated that there are actors intentionally inflaming/manipulating discourse throughout the political spectrum.
But the fact is that few -- if any -- media projects where this is a consistent/repeated problem have the household recognition or reach in the way that Fox News or similar projects on the right do. Disinformation currently plays bigger and more intentional part of the political right. Not because it has to be that way (conservatism certainly doesn't require it), but key figures have accepted it as a significant part of their strategy.
I think there's a lot of stuff that goes around and left circles that is pretty bleeding heart sort of exaggeration. A lot of the "Now This" content is rather heavy handed.
But the vast majority of people on the right swallow as gospel every single bit of misinformation, and they are much more adept at getting the vast majority of the right in lock step with their misinformation. A great deal of Republicans for instance still believe that the election was somehow stolen, when it is now, because of all of the lost court cases, the most proven outcome in American election history. They believe the propaganda so much that even though they may agree with a lot of the facts that line up with the fact that it wasn't stolen, they still "believe in their hearts" that it "must've been stolen."
I don't know a better way to describe the most desired outcome of really effective propaganda than that.
It sounds like you are playing right into the OPs hands. Misinformation comes from both sides. And both sides tend to believe what their leaders tell them. You claim the best majority of the right believe the election was stolen. Joe many people felt Clinton won the prior election? The vast majority of those on the left believe CNN and NYT without question. And yet they have spouted more misinformation than almost anyone.
Yes exactly that is the exact definition of whataboutism, a classic propaganda tactic. At no time did you address the fact that I brought up that the rights propaganda is worse, nor do you bring up any aspect of refuting that they all believe this common delusion. All you tried to do is dismiss it by equating it to perhaps a lesser-believed delusion, and bring up the other side is somehow just as bad. That may be true.
Clearly, the right is worse, and I'm glad to see that you can't or don't choose to refute it any meaningful way. In a lot of traditional debate this would be a sign of concession.
> Joe many people felt Clinton won the prior election?
Your question is "whataboutism", but... the answer is: at least one order of magnitude less than the number of "conservatives" that believe the 2020 election was won by Trump. Probably multiple. Seriously. It's a vanishing fraction by comparison. Almost no one believes that systemic vote misrepresentation was a part of the 2016 election.
> The vast majority of those on the left believe CNN and NYT without question.
Do you actually know anyone on "the left"? Because my truly left-ish acquaintances despise the NYT and have a long list of specific sins they'll criticize it for going back 20 years.
> And yet they have spouted more misinformation than almost anyone.
Citation needed. Especially when this discussion is rooted in the problems of a network like Fox that, when sued, literally utilizes defenses in court such as "no reasonable person would believe our commentator" and "we have no obligation to report truthfully."
The NYT -- like any outlet -- has certainly made serious mistakes, but they have an entirely different relationship with accountability, as one would expect from a paper of record.
And here we get to the real issue you have. It's not that they started by introducing an example, but that they didn't 'both sides' it... or just pick exclusively on the left.
I don't think even this needs to be politically motivated. For this kind of article you want clear and obvious examples, that are also come up with enough credibility to not be outright ignored. Otherwise you have to get down into the weeds of a very particular situation to clearly establish that the example is misinformation, and not just information.
When it comes to obviously outlandish yet widely acknowledged statements... I don't think I have to go too far out on a limb to say the right is a particularly good place to look.
That's not to say it can't be politically motivated, but I don't think it needs to be.
They could have recognized that he was joking and doesn't actually believe that then it wouldn't be a useful anecdote. This article doesn't mention that at all and leaves the reader believing he's a "crazy wacko". That sounds like disinformation on the part of Nautilus to me.
This whole "Fox presenter doesn't believe in germs" thing is a falsehood believed by leftists because it gives them a satisfied feeling. They don't bother checking if it's true or not.
I don't understand the propaganda that you must be exposed to to not understand that that is exactly what the guy said? https://youtu.be/ZX-tRTD1lqU I mean I know he followed it up with a whole crap ton of qualifiers but if you look at this video that's pretty much exactly what he said.
Yes, he said it, but it's clearly a joke. The others a laughing. It's on a light-hearted chat show. Also you can see his palms and fingernails are clean. Why would it be true?
Right the I'm just joking defense. That's what everyone said about all of the horrible racist things that Trump said. That he was just joking. And then he looks straight into the camera and said that he never jokes.
It is clearly not a joke, in fact he is pleading the whole time how much it is not a joke.
Edit: I love also how you move the goal post from no way did he ever say it to yes of course he said it but it's a joke. Now that is disinformation.
I didn't say he didn't say it. You're making things up.
Are you seriously saying you believe he hasn't washed his hands for 10 years and doesn't believe in germs because he can't see them? What does he do when he spills sauce on his fingers? Wipe them on his shirt?
A concession to what? Yes, we agree with each other about what he said. I'm sure we also agree that water is wet. So what?
I think you should re-read each of the comments you replied to. Every one of yours has shown a major misunderstanding. It looks like you've ascribed your own preconceived words to me instead of reading my actual words.
I think the thing that I'm really driving at is my last edit, and maybe I was disingenuous in not getting there sooner, but he desperately needs a certain amount of people to believe that he doesn't wash his hands, or else he wouldn't have said that. There's a certain amount of truth in every joke after all.
So I actually kind of believe that maybe he most recently had he maybe hadn't washing his hands much, maybe, but what he really wanted to communicate was this sort of posturing thing, and that's why he can't actually like have a segment on the show where he talks about how of course he washes his hands, and why you can't Google anywhere finding him saying such a thing like of course I would wash my hands. Mark my words he will never ever claim to actually wash his hands. Even if he does. It isn't a joke, it's a specifically crafted message.
So when I'm saying that I believe that he doesn't wash his hands, it is literally because that is what he is saying. So yes I agree to your incredulity that no I don't really believe that, because it probably shouldn't be true, but I do believe strongly that he really does want everyone to believe it to be true, and that it wasn't a joke.
But now it is sort of in this liminal space, where he can laugh at the liberals because they didn't get the joke, the hypermasculine people can believe that it's true and that this person really knows what they believe that washing your hands is something that only pussies do, and then the run of the mill conservatives can now also laugh at the liberals for not getting the apparently obvious joke.
This is a pattern that holds with many conservative things, and I see that you're in this last group.
Have you considered that maybe the North American right is just that bad. Reality doesn't magically shift so that it always exists in the exact center of the North American political spectrum
I wouldn't say they are just as bad. They are also bad but they're bad in a very different way. The far right effectively has decided that objective reality doesn't exist at all. The truth is whatever they say it is and they will manufacture data as necessary. The far left on the other hand believes in data but is constrained by their inherent need to reduce every single problem to a combination of race, sex, or class, no matter how multi-faceted / complex the problems actually are. They start from the conclusion and work back to make the data fit. Where the far left and far right overlap is that they are both virulently populist, they both demonize their opponents, and they both believe in the absolute moral purity of their cause.
As an American, I'd say one side is always swept up in a religious fervor and the other is strung out on drugs. They switch roles every twenty years or so. The one doing drugs allows humor and the religious one doesn't.
They're going to switch again within the next two years, by my estimate. It'll be big, traditionalist sects (Catholic, Mormon, etc) on the right and cannabis on the left.
This the result of the two party systems. Bi-paetisan compromise is rare, and even then is often backdoored with legislation not actually discussed.
This leads to the two parties only ever being in an adversarial relationship.
In other systems, sometime you get to make a majority government with other parties. This differi means that in mutti-party systems the "party line" is "these guys are ok, and reasonable" every once in a while.
Not so in the two party system, where the winner-takes-all perpetual adversarial relationship generates a constant steam of "the others suck, are dumb, evil and want to destroy the country"
Also watching from a distance, what’re you talking about? The American right media moguls have fucked up Australian politicsalong with it, and no leftist moguls can claim the same.
One of these sides has literal, actual Nazis trying their level best to destroy democracy, supporting and protecting people who are murdering people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and others who don't fit into their fascist ideology, and remove most of the legal rights women have gained over the past century+.
The other side has...politicians who are too beholden to corporations to fight as hard as they should for progressive policies.
If you genuinely think that the American left is just as bad as the American right, then either you really haven't been paying attention, or...I guess you think the Nazis had a point or something?
I do. But it’s 2021. If I listed out a ton of problems on the left I’ll get a bunch of people on the left screaming “racist” and “nazi”, etc. Can’t have debates and arguments anymore.
MDN should be a separate company. Personally, I'm no longer interested in supporting Mozilla in any capacity. Their management behaves in a way that's consistent with the idea that it's barely more than controlled opposition to Google's Chrome team.
I don't get how the company had the head-count it did for so long and didn't even manage to tread water in relation to other browsers, for about a decade, let alone do anything new or interesting. Which parts were valuable and interesting? Rust/Servo, and MDN. Which parts get cut? Those.
I'd love to see them make a come-back, but it's been so damn long and they're showing so many strongly negative signs that I think they're long since rotted beyond hope, organizationally. Better they're replaced. I don't think they're an organization capable of replacing themselves with a better upstart of their own making, as Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox did to the Mozilla browser, nor of innovating—Pocket and a VPN service are their innovative monetization and self-sufficiency efforts. Not leaping into any number of promising avenues for web services that would benefit from having an open-source-friendly but well-capitalized backer offering a paid version with a built-in audience to push the Web and potentially the Internet forward, but... Pocket and a VPN. How do you miss the boat that badly? How many teams building the sorts of things Firefox should have been (Signal, Matrix, Gemini, IPFS, various open-source social network efforts like Mastodon, et c.) are small enough to comfortably fit within the Firefox org? Several, I imagine.
Their last big performance breakthrough was, IIRC, "now merely wastes as much battery as Chrome, which is itself notoriously wasteful". That after years of eating battery like mad.
