dao-

> ChatGPT gave me a very balanced view. Though it neglected to mention any of Trump's anti-democratic tendencies

Do you hear yourself? How was it "very balanced" then?

> it's walking a very delicate line.

Perhaps even more delicate than the line DeepSeek and friends need to walk.

Are you kidding? LLMs are used for warfare and autonomous weapons systems.

We have an alignment problem with corporations. It's sort of baked in with capitalism.

OpenAI isn't even concerned with human values so this whole debate is moot.

> ...Hugging Face incident, OpenAI let a swarm of agents out by mistake...

This still seems charitable, and I wonder if the author even knows the full story and would be allowed to tell all of it.

It seems hard to imagine OpenAI being this incompetent. My working assumption is that they very much want agents to be able to do this kind of thing; them doing it is part of training, and they exploit it to feed the investment hype too.

If not fully intentional it's at the very least negligent. They just don't seem to care. In this very basic sense, OpenAI is the criminal you should be concerned about.

I don't understand why you'd think they're a "semi ethical company."

There is a color photo, but the rose isn't actually blue.

Yes, we have tried having a better browser. Still trying. :)

When I said cannibalize I didn't mean in terms of market share but by absorbing talent in particular.

It's a bit naive to say it won because it's faster. They also used all kinds of shady marketing, strong arming, deals to have Chrome preinstalled on computers, and multiplied monopoly power that comes with controlling search and video and ads and a web browser.

> They did dirty stuff with Chrome, they do addiction optimization, but they also provide great free services, fight endless wars against spammers, and provide reliable secure infrastructure to a lot of other people, and lots of other good things.

As mconnor liked to say, there is no free lunch. :)

> I would never have joined the Chrome team, or worked on addictiveness, but I felt fine about working on optimization projects to make Google more efficient, which is basically what I did for my first few years there.

Ultimately, I don't think you can divide your niche from the corporation's primary goals (especially if you think it was your duty to be a good employee), so I disagree with your rationalization but kudos for at least having a moral compass and trying not to lose sight of it.

> It's pretty hard to live in the world and be completely disconnected from anything unethical.

Sure, but I don't think that should be an excuse for being fairly well connected.

roc used to work for Mozilla though, and witnessed Google cannibalizing us for Chrome in order to feed its ad business. Between then and now there has not been a time when it wasn't all about the money.

> I definitely want my future work to be unambiguously pro-human.

Stay away from the lucrative then? Why did you ever think it was a good idea to start at Google? I don't think Jesus would have approved.

Drop the hyperbole for a second. It was a choice screen, a far cry from force-feeding. I'll grant you, somewhat wide adoption is almost a given when putting this kind of UI in front of all users, but that still doesn't mean that it was a mistake or a net loss to give folks who wouldn't normally customize Firefox a chance to do so. So, what's your point?

> How much public opinion is worth burning for how much increased usage of a new theme feature? In my opinion, very little.

I think we're squarely in the "very little" range here in terms of how much public backlash we saw. You might be overestimating how widely folks got angry the same way you got angry, or perhaps we weren't monitoring the right forums and channels when releasing the feature, who knows.

There's for sure a lesson to be learned in here. The product owner who had decided and pushed for making it seem like colorways were ephemeral has long left Mozilla, so you're preaching to the choir at this point.

I still don't consider colorways a failure, all things considered. To me, the fact that colorways are still some of the most used themes outweighs you remembering that you were angry three or so years ago, but thanks for the feedback.