I believe an open source ranking algorithm is antithetical to good search, sadly. It hands spammers a recipe for how to push past legitimate sites to dominate the search results.
When companies add additional features to a product I use, I generally want to be notified about them so that I can make an informed decision about whether I want them enabled or disabled.
Torbrowser is a fork of Firefox, not a user. I'm not going to bother looking this up because pigs aren't flying yet, so I'll just state it as fact: the torbrowser fork does not include any of Firefox's AI code or functionality.
Firefox development is funded almost entirely out of Google's massive donations to Mozilla. For Google, it's no more than a regulatory hedge - something they can point at and say that Chromium and Webkit are not a duopoly. But the flip side is that if Firefox were to ever become a real threat, Google pulls funding and Firefox is toast.
So if we want Firefox to ever seriously compete with Google products, the first thing we need to do is fund Mozilla. When a company's entire capex comes from a monopolistic competitor that would rather see it dead, any talk about capex is bikeshedding.
I can't imagine a quality random sample could come from 52 users who self-selected to participate in a browser beta, then self-selected to post about it in a thread on the Mozilla Connect forum.
The reactions to Firefox's AI features likely range from moderately positive to extremely negative. People who feel moderately about something don't usually bother posting. It doesn't matter how many people feel that way.
I use AI in Firefox all the time. Obviously it seems like I'm in a minority.
* I summarize articles.
* When I need more context to understand an article, I ask AI what I'm missing.
* When I'm writing up something important, I ask AI to proofread it for me.
* When I'm using productivity web apps, I ask AI to help me learn the features.
* When I'm filling out convoluted forms, I ask AI what the writer could have possibly intended.
Non-exhaustive list. Each of these things has resulted in huge leaps in my productivity.
Instead of using Firefox, I should probably be using something like the ChatGPT Atlas browser - except it's super important to me to use a browser that is open source and respects my privacy, lets me opt out from the Chromium hegemony, and allows me full control not only over which AI agent I use, but also full control over the browser itself. With Firefox's AI features, only the data I want sent to an AI gets sent to an AI, and I can have confidence that the rest of my data stays private.
The real key for me is that Firefox's AI features are unobtrusive. They show up when I invoke them, then go away when I don't want to see them anymore. The Mozilla team seems to have struck a perfect balance with that so far, even going so far as to add "turn this off permanently" options directly in every AI-related shortcut and menu. If you don't want to use AI in your browser, it's not like you even have to dig through the settings. Just click the button that shows up. Technically speaking, this is actually more annoying for people who do use the AI features - in a reversal to the usual trope, the AI users are the ones forced to stare at a menu item that's useless to them all day.
As for me, if other browsers start to really leapfrog Firefox in terms of the useful kind of AI integration that accelerates my daily browsing tasks, I'll probably reluctantly switch away at some point. Thankfully, the vast majority of this can probably be done at the extension level, and it probably should be, rather than being directly integrated into the browser itself. That would be a win/win for everyone in my book. I just really don't want to give up Firefox or give up my productivity tools.
And before anyone asks, I did not use AI to write or proofread any part of this post. This one's all me.
> A degraded fleet is worse than no fleet here, there is no 2 are down, 8 are up here.
Ethereum runs at 100% throughput with 100% of its security guarantees, all the way up to a 33% outage of its validator set. So it stays running at 100% capacity even in a 3 down, 7 up scenario. This has been the case since EIP-1559 was implemented in 2021, and it has been empirically tested.
That's more favorable than Bitcoin, which degrades in capacity (though not security) during partial outages. A 30% miner outage means a 30% reduction in transaction throughput.
The entire point of blockchains is that they are able to thrive and run robustly in a "2 down, 8 up" scenario. That's the sole property they sacrifice so much to achieve compared to centralized database software.
> A better yet strained analogy is 10 cars with different parts that are not interchangeable, work differently and need different drivers. Maintenance nightmare.
Every client is drop-in interchangeable. You don't need different skills to run each one, any more than you need different driving skills to drive a Honda than to drive a Toyota. The only difference is their internals.
To continue with your analogy, you start reaping the rewards of diversity when one car is revealed to have a manufacturing defect and the whole world needs a specific replacement part all at once. This isn't that uncommon. What happens is that the part goes out of stock.
Car diversity causes no maintenance nightmare, because good mechanics are everywhere and they can fix the 500 most popular car models very cheaply despite their varying internals. With Ethereum client diversity, if one of the ten clients breaks down, the fix arrives within hours, for free over the internet - no mechanic trip needed.
> Contrast with say, an Airline fleet all of the same type of plane, interchangeable parts and pilots qualified in that model.
If an airline bought all Boeing 737 Max, which didn't seem like a bad choice at the time, their entire fleet would have been grounded from March 2019 to November 2020.
Southwest suffered a $435 million loss. Everyone who bet on a single aircraft, lost. Everyone who diversified their fleet pulled ahead.
> I am getting more concerned about physical threats after the recent incidents. I’m going to burn this identity now.
It's never a bad idea to burn an identity. But after these conversations, I'm not convinced of the reason.
> We don’t know exactly what happened between 0 and 1, but it’s not really that important, other than it’s “externally verifiable hash”, eg PoW.
Whether or not someone ran a particular piece of software on their computer for ten minutes in 2009, or even six days for that matter, is not important.
> Real Return”. I think the real return is -40% since PoS? And falling? The illusion of yield. It’s the same nonsense they use to get people to buy treasuries with yields under inflation. It’s Wall Street tricks dressed up as yield. That’s all that’s been reinvented here. It’s not some grand hack to bypass “waste”.
When you hold ETH (and stake it, which is easy), your percentage share of all outstanding ETH goes slowly up over time. When you hold BTC, your percentage share only goes down as more BTC are mined.
The "return" is that you accumulate more of the asset's market cap over time. If you don't value ETH, just don't buy it. If you like ETH, staking gets you more of it. The return is real in the sense that it's paid partially by transaction fee revenue, not by simply inflating the network by the same amount as the reward payouts.
> I agree going after the stakers won’t shut it down. But going after the central devs? Remember liberty reserve? Ethereum is just LR, and Solana is LR2 and Sui is LR3?
Alright so Ethereum has ten central dev teams working on ten clients across international borders. Bitcoin has one central dev team working on one central client. Which is more decentralized?
There were several significant double-spends. People were able to create fake transactions and scam each other.
Preventing people from sending fake transactions is Bitcoin's one reason for existence. People made out with a bunch of stolen money.
If everyone being able to send fake Bitcoins around and scam people doesn't count as downtime, I don't know what counts as downtime.
Showing fake bitcoins is actively worse than if the network refused to process transactions at all.
As a side note, due to its slashing system, Ethereum "fails closed" like this and refuses to confirm transactions if the network were majorly disrupted.
> There could have been loses on the centralized exchange side for the few hours of ambiguity. maybe there was 1 public report of loss at the time.
At the time, I remember several reports of relatively large losses (and gains, by the scammers). But the private losses are probably larger and they're just as important. When people (and exchanges) get scammed, they're generally incentivized to stay quiet about it.
> This is the lesson that ETH people were not around for.
The "ETH people" that matter - the protocol researchers and client developers and exchange CEOs - were for the most part all around during the early Bitcoin days.
> More moving parts; more failure cases. More client, more moving parts.
Ten cars have "more moving parts" than one car, and the fleet is much more prone to a failure of one of the parts in one of its cars.
When two parts break at once, it's better to have a fleet of eight working cars than one broken car in need of two repairs.
Thanks for the source, by the way. I think Satoshi was just as wrong there as he was when he thought Bitcoin would become a "peer to peer electronic cash system".
> I recall genesis block took 6 days of hashing at difficulty 1.
The genesis block (0) was hard-coded. Block 1 was mined 6 days later, but Satoshi wasn't hashing that whole time, he was just waiting.
Every block after the genesis block itself was subject to the difficulty adjustment process, including Block 1. So technically we know that Bitcoin is actually pre-mined by at least one block, since if anybody else knew about Bitcoin back then, it's certain they wouldn't have waited 6 days to mine Block 1 like Satoshi did.
> You just don’t see the value in the hardware and energy outlay for integrity.
To equal 10% of the current Bitcoin network hashrate (a good ballpark figure for having "enough to matter" when it comes to defending PoW consensus), you would need 2.5 million of these units, plus 2.5 million people willing to pay $145 and $52/yr in electricity to run them 24/7 next to their wifi routers, to earn $0.02 per day. Plus, of course, fiddle with the units every few months/years when they stop mining for whatever reason, like your partner changed the wifi password or a fan goes out.
How many people do you know who would want to take up that deal? It's not just me - nobody sees that value. Nobody wants to donate $200 to create an insignificant, marginal contribution to Bitcoin's theoretical security properties and earn $0.02 per day.
It's a lot more alluring to earn a real return on whatever ETH you're already holding by doing the exact same thing on Ethereum without needing to buy specialized mining hardware.
> PoS has no real world binding, and so must rely on humans for integrity.
Can you be more specific? Ethereum doesn't rely on humans for integrity any more than Bitcoin does. Conversely, Bitcoin doesn't rely on humans any less. Both protocols are nothing more than a set of rules that everyone agrees on, and everyone can collectively agree to change at any time.
> I don’t trust humans, you trust them too much.
You trust the CEOs of large mining farms that grow more and more concentrated year after year through economies of scale. You also trust that governments won't execute a single warrant to take over their country's largest centralized mining operation whenever it's convenient for them.
I trust a large set of of geographically distributed stakers. They can't grow any larger than they currently are, because staking has no economy of scale, and they can't be seized by governments, because it would require them to execute tens of thousands of warrants on tens of thousands of physical locations.
I don't believe he did, and I'm familiar with a lot of his writings. Do you have a source?
> Single Client = Good. multiple client = menace.
Two major bugs took 100% of the Bitcoin network down on two occasions.
In contrast, several major bugs temporarily took out small subsets of Ethereum validators several times, but the network remained operational throughout. Due to EIP-1559, the network was not even degraded at all in terms of performance or throughput.
Apparently you're right that I can't convince you otherwise. One network's major bugs have caused major outages, and another network's major bugs resulted in 100.0% uptime still being maintained, and you still think the one with the major outages has a better strategy to defend against bugs.
ETH price has been performing poorly lately, therefore PoS is "failing"?
That seems like quite the leap in logic to me.
I'd like to mention by the way that Bitcoin has had two egregious bugs that caused network downtime - once in 2010 and again in 2013. Ethereum has had 100% uptime since inception.
Part of this is due to Bitcoin having one reference implementation and Ethereum having five, so it's impossible for the entire network to run into the exact same software bug.
One bitaxe costs $145 and runs at about 400GH/s. That's $0.02 per day in gross revenue, before electricity expenditure. It breaks even at $0.05 per kWh, which is an electricity rate so cheap it's impossible to get most places in the world. Mining 20 sats per day - which are worth a tenth of a cent each - is completely meaningless.
Even if you could somehow get completely free electricity, you need to buy 1700 bitaxes at a cost of $240,000 to earn a modest $1k per month, or 5% annual return initially, which dwindles quickly as ASIC technology improves year-over-year. You never reach breakeven.
So the bitaxe is a novelty item. Economically viable mining is indeed just farms now.
> what you are missing is that PoS coins are printed from nothing.
Satoshi's coins were printed from running some lines of C he wrote on a desktop computer. That's just as "nothing".
> The original sin. From nothing. Worth nothing.
That's not how economics works. See my other reply about how software also comes "from nothing" but is obviously not worth nothing. All intellectual property comes "from nothing", but intellectual property powers the modern economy.
> PoS trends to zero.
Opinion.
> I can’t believe we are still arguing this with >2T market cap for BTC and ETH has actually shrunk since it moved to PoS. It’s going in the wrong direction…