The hard part is that the training looks like nothing from the outside, so it's easy to dismiss (in a way)

This is great. Puts Rick Rubin's appearance into perspective.

A lot of "doing nothing" advice gets framed as clearing the mind, yet sometimes the valuable part is finally letting the mind choose its own direction

Maybe the useful framing is: just don't optimize the break

Yep, I think it's basically meditation with the branding stripped off

I've found the same thing with short walks without headphones. The first few minutes feel almost irritating, like my brain is looking for something to latch onto. Then after a while the mental noise settles and work feels less aversive again...

Yep, there's some bad incentives and some rushed work, but calling it mostly incompetence or malice kind of ignores how much the underlying system has changed

But I'm not convinced the old consistency was purely a design victory... it was also a result of heavy constraints

In practice, I think it comes down to what you value more

This is how we keep the lights on

I do think projects like Waterfox are valuable precisely because they push back on some of Mozilla's product decisions