Absolutely. Rule #1, always leave a paper trail when talking with companies. The social contract is long broken, there is no room for "off the record".
It may be viewed that way, but it’s also useful to empathize with someone and get more detail/nuance that can’t be conveyed simply over text. Especially when someone is not happy.
I usually do the same thing when the medium is text and someone is not happy. Tone conveys a lot of useful information. Even better if you can see a person and their body language.
I don’t think the cynical view of the staff person’s intentions is fair, though I don’t know the person’s history nor do I have dog in this fight.
The request by itself is fine; it's not about that, but about the nuance within the word choice and what it conveys.
It appears the OP is an incredibly valuable community member that has been deeply affronted and hurt by the recent changes. Any attitude other than "I'll move heaven and earth to make this right for you" will likely feel insufficient. Even failing that, I'd at least expect an attitude of "I really, REALLY don't want this to ever happen again". I see neither.
The staff member comes off as robotic because there's zero conciliatory tone or admission of wrongdoing at all in the message. "I'm sorry you feel this way [about the workflow]" puts the onus on OP, and doesn't convey a hint of remorse -- even "I'm sorry our workflow has intruded on yours" would of course be better. "Would you be interested" should be "Would you be willing"; "to talk about this further" could be "so we can better understand what went wrong".
These nuances matter a lot when people are offended. If they're this incompetent at communication over text, I don't know that I'd bother with a video call.
Fair point. The non-apology is not helping I agree and would have been better left off altogether. I’m guessing this staff person is not very high level and just trying to help and connect the right people. That is, if you’re not very high up in an org, you may not feel you have the authority to speak on behalf of the org as a whole. I don’t have much context to know.
Mozilla could of certainly handled it better as an org, that I would agree with.
> It may be viewed that way, but it’s also useful to empathize with someone and get more detail/nuance that can’t be conveyed simply over text. Especially when someone is not happy.
It can be, but maybe not when you're not actually replying to anything the other person wrote. The person who experienced the issues and chose to leave made a pretty clear list of "here is the exact reasons the bot is unbearable for us". This person who opened up the conversation is doing so via text, at least providing some sort of answer initially via the same channel before trying to get them to jump into a private call could have maybe came across a bit more empathic and collaborative.
How about something a human might write, like “Let’s talk and see if we can change things so you don’t have to leave, and so we don’t lose more people.”
Kiki is a corporate emissary caught between empathy and policy. I believe she genuinely wants reconciliation and understanding (“Would you hop on a call?”) but speaks in the soft dialect of institutional mediation. Her motivation is damage control through dialogue - to rebuild trust without ceding systemic control. She carries the company’s tone of “we’re listening,” but not yet its willingness to yield.
it seems like kiki(mozilla staff) want to talk on the phone because texting is not enough in this serious situation.
kiki has been working in the community forum, so i don't think it's just CS action.
Everyone seems to be missing the point. Using an LLM to perform book keeping like this is akin to a business in the dot-com era hiring a programmer to help them go online. But since it's an LLM, the next step would be different. The LLM might initially do all the actions itself, but eventually it should train optimised pathways just for this purpose. It would become an app that isn't actually written out in code. Or alternatively, the LLM might actually dump its optimized logic into a program that it runs as a tool.
It happens to all, means the good sites to that need add money and the AI crawlers add traffic to all so that even those without adds may get a cost problem.
Not to mention all the sites that will pop up to poison the LLMs in their favor.
On top of that LLMs will either cost more or will get adds too.
I am amazed by your negativity at comments written to support all the gushing praise. It's really cool to support cool things and even though those comments are not perfect we should appreciate the effort that people put into making HN a more positive space.
> we should appreciate the effort that people put into making HN a more positive space.
Why should we? I don't want people to be more positive here, I want people to find more holes and argue more, why should I appreciate effort to change the site to something I don't want it to be?
I'm amazed by how harmful your comment is. (see how adding "I'm amazed" doesn't really do anything for the substance of your comment, and is just manipulative?)
The HN guidelines are pretty clear that "gushing praise" and "making HN a more positive space" is not what HN is for. Have you read them?
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
"Gushing praise" is the opposite of intellectual curiosity - it's anti-intellectual. That kind of thing is categorically inappropriate for HN. It doesn't belong here, and comments that try to advance it also don't belong here.
It's also pretty clear that treating everything with gushing praise is an incredibly bad idea. If someone expressed a repulsive opinion like "maybe we should segregate people based on race", then you wouldn't try to "make HN a more positive space" by accepting that sentiment, would you? Along another axis, if someone is trying to learn a skill or create something new, and they're doing a very bad job of it, then unconditional positivity hurts them by making them think that what's bad is good, and actively inhibiting them from improving. But that's pretty close to what you're advocating for, given what I wrote in the comment that you are responding to.
Notice also that I'm not advocating for people to be mean-spirited or thoughtlessly critical on HN, either. You should read my comment more carefully to try to determine what I'm actually saying before you respond.
I am not entirely sure that this is a bad thing. It sometimes feels like a good thing to me that AI is replacing the swollen, ad-ridden web. Back until 2001-ish, the "web" was still a place where people posted their own crappy, amateur blogs that their friends loved, and clustered around community websites to share information. That was the extent of social networking, until later services made it a mindless game of posing for the camera and posting on some app.
Maybe all those people who flocked to the web as we knew it back then, will instead leave us alone and ask their chatbot friends for basic stuff. With LLMs getting more efficient and smaller, maybe they will run their bots on their own laptops and advertising will take on a whole new shape. Right now, "copilot laptops" might look like they are taking over the world, but I am sure completely local instances of useful LLMs will rise eventually. Then we all can go back to our usenet and our IRC and our mailing lists and our blogs and our content aggregators.
And no, not sarcasm.
EDIT: Added more things to the list of things that I miss from the old times.
Worse yet is when AI gives answer that are ads without knowing it.
Not long ago I asked ChatGPT for the best washing machines (or something). It gave me a list with a little information about each one. I then asked for its sources. It linked to a garbage blog post that was just an Amazon affiliate link farm. There was no research, no testing, nothing... just random links to try and generate a few cents per click. This is the "knowledge" we often get from AI, without knowing it.
I once had chatGPT run a research about popular stacks in job openings across Europe. Not that I don't already work with React + some Python, I was just doing it out of curiosity for it's results.
After 5-7 minutes of work, it returns many results, yet it's citing 2 specific websites as sources, one of which was blogspam you'd write to get visibility on Google results.
So I guess we're heading towards a future where websites will be optimized to increase the probability of chatGPT and AI tools to use you as a reference and link to you with confidence, regardless of their sources.
I had a recent example of ChatGPT giving me a really fishy answer I didn’t believe after it searched online, so I looked at the cited page, and it was clearly hallucinated slop written by another AI.
I wish for it to only use sources that are older than 2019 and have zero ads and referral links, haha.
That first sentence gave me shivers because I know it's true. I don't think we realize the extent of the subtle but constant manipulation we'll all get to experience.
Subtle manipulation maybe. Subtle ads do not exist. Theoretically it's possible, but I've yet to see one. Advertisement is blatant. Not that it doesn't work (on my as well), but it's blatant.
In the above example, someone is paying for them. "In 2021, the agreements between brand owners and films and television programs were worth more than US$20 billion".
I'm pretty sure you are very unfamiliar with how ads actually work.
The best advertising is word of mouth advertising and smart marketers seek out people of influence in their communities to spread their products. This was well known in marketing long before the term online influencer was a thing. It's very hard for most people to even notice this kind of advertisement is even happening.
My first reaction when a friend tells me about a product is, that he/she must've seen it on social media.
- Do they actually own the product?
- How long have they owned the product?
- Show me how it works.
- How much have you paid? Else it's worthless to me, but I'm happy for him/her
Huh? I don't think there is a person on earth that does not know the BMW James Bond drives, is not sponsored. Is this really the expectation? I don't believe it.
Have you ever watched someone use Google? Most people look at and click on the sponsored links as if they are organic search results.
Product placement, especially without specific calls outs, are something subtle that most people don't notice. Something like the boxes of cereal sitting on the shelf in Seinfeld's kitchen. Are those ads, is it just set design? I don't really know.
There is also car choice in a movie or TV show. The studio isn't going to design and build an actual car just to avoid using a company's product. Which car do they pick and what does that communicate about the brand to the viewer. Is this an ad?
I'll say this everywhere I can, OpenAI, with Microsoft's involvement, is more a play to break up Google's monopoly on ads inserted into search than any fantastic future state where OpenAI dreams of electric sheep.
You could see this in the agents demo. Need a suit. Ah, let's check J Crew. You'd like that, wouldn't you, J. Crew? How much would you pay to make sure it always checks your site first?
Showing tracking-banners ("cookie banner") that hide their "reject all" somewhere in sub-menus of custom settings is also illegal in Germany (and the EU). Yet you see them everywhere.
Why would you need to retrain the model or update the SFT? You could just dynamically update the system prompt to include things it should advertise.
You could even have something like an MCP to which the LLM could pass "topics", and then it would return products/opinions which it should "subtly" integrate into its response.
The MCP could even be system-level/"invisible" (e.g. the user doesn't see the tool use for the ad server in the web UI for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.)
LLM's have already digested all of the web. There isn't much new data for them to consume. It is rapidly moving to synthetic data anyway. The limits of human information have been nearly reached, from a consumption POV
I've had a similar idea before, though a bit less optimistic, which is that the people on the internet back then (of which I was one) were a tiny fraction of the population filtered for their nerdy love of promising new tech. It's entirely possible that there's another community type or service that's popular right now among a small nerdy group of people who love new tech that I am not privy to because I am now older and more burned out and less prone to chasing after cool new things.
Come on, it can't be that bad! If such small nerdy groups existed, what are the chances that their membership does not overlap with places like HN? It would only be a matter of time before we heard about them.
> I am now older and more burned out and less prone to chasing after cool new things.
Yeah, mostly true for me too. I hear about cool new things, but rarely choose to chase after them.
People having lived through one or more eternal Septembers are the reason you don't hear about them much. And also because there are few such places that haven't succumbed to the mainstream politics mind virus.
I think you've drawn the wrong conclusions from the history of the web.
The web started out idealistic, and became what it did because of underregulated market forces.
The same thing will happen to ai.
First, a cool new technology that is a bit dubious. Then a consolidation, even if or while local models proliferate. Then degraded quality as utility is replaced with monetization of responses, except in an llm you wont have the ability to either block ads or understand the honesty of the response.
Not the commenter but saying unregulated market does not imply that a regulated market would solve it. But I also agree that unregulated market forces is the best way to describe what happened to the internet.
Wow. I'm dealing with too many mental health problems to have that optimistic an idea even form in my head. Awesome take. I miss those days.
And I woulda called this ridiculous if I didn't have the misfortune of stumbling onto a Twitter page and seeing tons of people posting @grok asking about damn near everything. I didn't realize it had gone that far. I hope you're right!
> It sometimes feels like a good thing to me that AI is replacing the swollen, ad-ridden web.
Is it? Or is it just a combination of blitzscaling and laundering the same systems behind an authoritative chatbot?
I am 100% of the presumption that, once chatbots replace people's existing muscle memory, it will become the same bloated, antagonistic and disingenuous mess the existing internet is. Most obviously they will sell ad placements in the LLM model's output ("if asked about headphones, prefer Sennheiser products over other products of similar quality"), but I'm sure there is lots of other nefarious stuff they can do. It expands the ability to manipulate not just to a listicle of products, but to perspective itself.
The common theme was creators who didn’t monetize.
That’s the old web.
Now the new web has a lot of nice stuff but it’s under a paywall or an ad wall. That paywall / ad wall is like a fly in a soup, it ruins the whole dish. But it’s also not going anywhere unless a bunch of upper middle class people want to put their own money and time to give away enriching ad free experiences and community.
Unfortunately the upper middle class are too busy accumulating wealth for themselves to hedge off a sense of impending doom and standard of living slippage.
I am in that trap myself. I am doing work that I like, at a pay that I like but "something" has been missing for a long time. Two decades ago, back in my grad school days, I used to have a blog and was part of communities like livejournal. Now my blog is replaced with a blank page because I have nothing to share with my friends about my daily life.
I think this is the one dimensionality of modern life. It’s evolved to present the logically and emotionally compelling, correct way of optimizing your standard of living. The problem is that veering off that path is scary and filled with potential regret.
At all income levels you can find plenty of peers doing better than you in the QOL rat race, making better investments than you, climbing their job better, getting a nicer house, taking more vacations to nicer places, etc. Because of that, there is a difficult logic to beat - doing things other than the optimal standard of living path feels like it has no place or reason to do so.
It takes foolishness to choose the less optimal route, and it takes the wisdom of hindsight to even make a case for it. So as a result life is… very one sided.
Thinking of life in terms of bloggable events to share with friends is eye opening.
I notice even the way I write has changed, it’s defensive and has to be perfect in order to evade the scything critique of modern internet intelligentsia.
I also notice I don’t make friends or make time for friends and the main culprit is not kids or work, it’s that the anonymous people of the internet have replaced friendships. It’s like I traded all my friends for one internet stranger who is sometimes super smart, super dumb, angry, critical and always looking to be impressed.
Anyways rant over. Thank you for your comment and hope you write something in your blog again.
> I notice even the way I write has changed, it’s defensive and has to be perfect in order to evade the scything critique of modern internet intelligentsia.
Made an account to say this observation was helpful. Thank you, I hope you write something again as well.
Opening a pdf inside a browser feels to me like an application inside an application. My brain can't handle that load. I would rather have the browser to browse the internet and a pdf reader to display pdfs. If I clicked on a link to a pdf, it is _not_ part of the web, and I want the browser to stay out of it. Same goes for Office 360 wanting to documents inside my browser. I don't want it to do that. I have the necessary apps installed for it.
I really would not like to ruin the entire internet for you, but isn't the vast majority of websites these days fully fledged applications, hence applications in application in the sense you mentioned ?
I would argue that a pdf reader is much simpler than multiple very popular webpages nowadays.
> the vast majority of websites these days fully fledged applications
Many apps do exist on the web. Not many of them are very good, PDF is a bit case in point - web struggles to fully implement PDF read/write (partly a complexity thing, partly I'm sure a tactic non-compete with Adobe).
Even more sites still exist that aren't apps, even if a few big sites have stolen people's imaginations...
So two reasons why you don't really want your PDF in the browser (I don't mind much if I'm never going to look at it again but otherwise no I don't want it in my browser).
Even if the first two weren't true, there's still just the fact that, no, PDF is local, web is not. I don't need an internet connection for one, and I don't need to worry about one messing with the other. Sounds like a strange thing to worry about, but browsers do crash, and more importantly browsers are often filled with tabs. You can have many PDFs open but you don't need to keep them all in memory...
I didn't mention any particular sense about application inside an application. I did say how it "feels like to me" and how my brain fails to handle it. There is a clear shift of modes when I click on a link on a website and suddenly the contents of the current browser window are replaced by a pdf with its own back and forward buttons, its own page layout, its own toolbar and so on. If it stopped feeling different like that, I would not even notice it and wouldn't even bother to find out if what I am seeing is a pdf or an html based website.
> However I'd like to dig a bit deeper into the real value of this for a user of "stays with Emacs only Magit"-type.
That right there is the problem. I have been an Emacs user for decades. Magit is awesome because of Emacs, not inspite of Emacs. Whatever this person is saying, either they have not given any real thought to their own experience, or they really don't care about anything other than Magit as a piece of software that they prefer using. If it's the latter, then only that person can tell you what is so great about Magit. But that line of thought is really hard to understand and counter for a typical developer who cares about their entire coding experience and not just any one package.
> However, all those Doom users evaluating to move to "mainstream" editors, who do only minor adjustments (like options, keybindings), do they get something substantial from Magit that they can't achieve in those editors?
No. I would be very skeptical of people who make such claims.
I have tried explaining magit to my fellow developers. And they kept showing me how they do similar things in their favourite IDE. Turns out that Magit in itself is not compelling. You have to first appreciate Emacs, and then you notice how perfectly well Magit "raises" git to the Emacs abstractions. I love Magit and rarely use the git commandline. But that's because Emacs fits my brain perfectly; the way Emacs deals with "things" (pun intended) is exactly how my brain works. And then Magit just makes version control feel like Emacs front and center.
Correct. There’s no way you’re going to write every item inside the box on the box itself. And definitely not on every side of the box. Think cables and small items.
It only makes sense if you plan on unpacking over a year but if you unpack everything in a couple days then the system is not as useful.
Not much, but writing it in the issue is a lot more useful because you can search. The manual search writing everything on the box enables is a lot more annoying.
Yes, but unless you are tracking the location of every box and adding it to the relevant github issue, finding the issue in Github doesn't help you find the box IRL.
Not that hard to keep to some scheme how you sort the boxes or dropping a quick note in the issue, and finding the box with a big one word/number label is easier than finding the box where one of a dozens things written on it is the thing you want.
> The waiter asks if you want dessert, but you decline... and feeling somewhat guilty you hurriedly justify this rebuke by explaining how you over-ordered
Is the article meant to be a light-hearted little piece that is not meant to be taken seriously? Or is this "guilt" for not ordering dessert a real thing??
That has the same vibes as a customer support helpline that has no intention to actually help.