I am currently at the stage from where I admire the software world from outside, trying to be competent one day at a time. The author is a badass for landing tailscale!
Can confirm that catzkorn is a badass.
Readit Newsdblohm7 commented on A love letter to my future employer (2020) catzkorn.dev/blog/love-le... · Posted by u/luu
I wish Firefox wasn't so insecure.
On Android, although a built-in isolatedProcess API [1] is available for them to use, there is no sandboxing. No sandboxing on the web in 2025 (!!!). This has been an issue for so many years, yet Mozilla refuses to address it [2]. Chromium does do proper sandboxing on Android, and additionally restricts what syscalls a process can access. Other alternatives, such as Vanadium have even stronger sandbox implementations [3]
On desktop, it's a similar story. Site isolation has had numerous bad issues that haven't been fixed for many years [4][5][6], and especially the Linux builds have had bad sandbox escape vulnerabilities that Chromium is not susceptible to. This is mostly due to architectural differences, like [7] and [8].
The idea of someone being able to take over your computer by just visiting a site is scary. It's beyond me why Mozilla does not prioritise security over yet another sidequest that will slowly bankrupt them.
[1] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/service-...
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1565196
[3] https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
[4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832
[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1484019
[6] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707955
(Former Mozilla engineer)
Your complaints about Android are valid (I should know, I used to work on trying to get Android sandboxed), but site isolation on desktop has been out for a long time.
Respectfully, posting a bunch of bug numbers whose context you aren't familiar with is not a valid representation of the state of things.
"Let every 40-year-old be measured by the shittiest thing they said when they were 19"
Even if he said something in his role as CEO of Facebook?
"Young people are just smarter" and so on...
dblohm7 commented on To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your head the-nerve-blog.ghost.io/t... · Posted by u/mprast
I don't do this often, but when I do, it's almost always when writing non-trivial concurrent code. I'll often "fuzz" the scheduling of multiple tasks around the region of code I'm working on to prove to myself that it works.
1. Canadian elections outside of Alberta have a different dynamic because they are a three/four horse race - and in certain election cycles, they have a lot of strategic voting (this last one was a good example of it).
2. Canadian Liberals aren't US MAGA, when they win an election they don't spend six months in caucus to figure out how they can do their best to punish the provinces and people that didn't vote for them.
There's a lot of far-right propaganda in Alberta that implies #2 is happening, but it's not actually factual. Its oil & gas sector has reached record output under the Trudeau government, and Carney is not exactly looking to kill it, either.
Transfer payments are really the only legitimate grievance Alberta should have with the federal government. All of its other problems are either imagined, self-inflicted, are caused by other provinces, or are caused by the US.
> All of its other problems are... caused by other provinces
I'm going to gently push back on that one a bit. Partially, yes, but also in part due to the federal government deferring to provinces in cases where it actually has the constitutional authority to override them.
This basically confirms my suspicions that:
— Firefox OS would've worked
— Mozilla leadership has always been interested in chasing fads
— Letting smart, motivated people work on cool shit is necessary to create the future.
cries in Bell Labs
I worked at Mozilla during this time, originally on desktop and later on mobile.
I think the fundamental problem then (and still a problem today) is that Mozilla only ever had the budget to do Desktop XOR Mobile. Not both.
They basically mortgaged Desktop Firefox to build Firefox OS, but when things didn't pan out was quickly as they liked, they had to revert back to Desktop to save the cash cow.
After that experience, upper management became averse to mobile, to the extent that it was (and probably still is) very difficult to get resources allocated to mobile implementations of Gecko features that are supposed to be cross-platform. In practice many of those features are never implemented with mobile in mind.
I have no insider knowledge but from my perspective the reason Firefox OS failed is the same reason WebOS failed and the same reason Windows Phone failed: apps. If you didn't have the apps users wanted they wouldn't buy into your platform, it really was as simple as that.
That said I think Mozilla were right to try. The phone ecosystem we live in today is locked down and tightly controlled by tech giants. Leveraging web tech to bridge that gap made sense, even if it had drawbacks. But it was a competitive environment where they needed to nail absolutely everything first time and just couldn't pull it off.
> I have no insider knowledge but from my perspective the reason Firefox OS failed is the same reason WebOS failed and the same reason Windows Phone failed: apps.
I was at Mozilla during this time, and I remember a huge blocker was WhatsApp. They were not interested in porting, but at the time it was essentially the killer app in the same emerging markets that Firefox OS was targeting.
dblohm7 commented on The concurrency trap: How an atomic counter stalled a pipeline conviva.com/platform/the-... · Posted by u/delifue
> While we knew where to look, this investigation had already taken weeks and things took a turn for the worse when we hit the issue again on February 23rd.
It blows me away an issue like this could take weeks to track down. If I were in any leadership position at this company I'd be rolling heads with the lack of telemetry or domain knowledge for these systems.
I can't say I'm surprised, TBH. I had a rough idea of where the problem might lie just by reading the title of the post. But I was fortunate enough to do an undergraduate degree where concurrency was actually taught, plus I've learned a lot over the years working in highly-concurrent, asynchronous environments.
Concurrent programming has been mainstream for some time now, but I don't think the level of expertise of most engineers has kept up. That becomes most apparent when software starts hitting concurrency pitfalls: performance problems, deadlocks, UAFs, and so on...
I, personally, would find it hard to donate to Mozilla knowing the CEO is paid $6 million a year. Compared to the size of the firm that’s a huge amount of pay.
At this point I plan to donate to Ladybird instead. Excited for that project.
Thunderbird donations go directly toward funding the Thunderbird project, not the Mozilla Foundation or the Mozilla Corporation.