1
Firefox Was Always Enough
There are many concerns about Mozilla right now, and reason to be concerned. While I am no longer with Mozilla, it’s still a place that supported me for many years; I believe in Mozilla and want the project to succeed.
Ian Bicking
On the internet I’m a computer programmer. Not on the internet I am also a computer programmer, but I also have a wife and two daughters. I live in Minneapolis, in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood. On the internet I live here; on social media I am active on Mastodon , Blue Sky , a little on Threads .
- Popular posts
- 10
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- #303 personal
Visit ianbicking.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2013 – Feb 2023
Society, Policy & Culture 3Software Engineering 3Life, Learning & Writing 3Design & UX 2AI & Machine Learning 2Web & Frontend 1
2
Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
I’m thinking about this now because Mozilla would like to diversify its revenue in the next few years, and one constraint we have is that everything we do is open source.
3
Infinite AI Array
making new string and list classes that call gpt3 under the hood so you can access elements beyond the final one. no more index errors!
4
Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked to Try
I have been part of the Firefox Test Pilot team for several years. I had a long list of things I wanted to build. Some I didn’t personally want to build, but I thought they were interesting ideas. I didn’t get very far through this list at all, and now that Test Pilot is being retired I am unlikely to get to them in…
5
Saying goodbye to Python
This post is long overdue; this isn’t a declaration of intent (any intent was long ago made real), just my reflection about my own path. I left the Python world a long time ago but I never took a chance to say goodbye.
6
“Users want control” is a shoulder shrug
Making the claim “users want control” is the same as saying you don’t know what users want, you don’t know what is good, and you don’t know what their goals are.
7
World Building with GPT
I’ve been doing lots of experiments with GPT , though I’ve only written about one until now… the more serious something is the harder it is to call it finished or identify the outcomes. Here I’ll describe something a bit lighter: world building, or specifically city building, with GPT .
8
The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker
I recently listened to a discussion of knowledge work in the browser. Along the way people imagined idealized workflows and the tools that could enable them. This result felt familiar from concept videos since forever (such as this old Mozilla concept video ):
9
Thoughts on Voice Interfaces
I’ve been working on the Consumer Voice Products team in Mozilla for about a year now. My primary project has been Firefox Voice , but our mandate is larger.
10
Why Isn’t Programming Futuristic?
If you think someone is asking a rhetorical question, it is usually most interesting to treat it as though it is a legitimate question. Especially if we’re talking about something hard — driving down to underlying assumptions through this questioning process is interesting.