I wish there was a way to fund nothing but Firefox development without the rest of the bloated mess that is Mozilla getting a cent from me. I don't want their moronic CEO who is chasing trends like this LLM idiocy to get a fucking dime while the browser itself is starved of money and resources. Fuck, I'm more than happy to pay a monthly subscription fee for FF, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, just look at something like Kagi!

I'm still a happy Firefox & Thunderbird user because ultimately it's still the only one that has at least a modicum of respect for its users, but all the recent AI pushes is making me annoyed with Mozilla because it's just so pointless.

If you trust your employees so little, why even bother employing them in the first place though? And for what it's worth, I'm equally capable of slacking both in-office and at home and I'm definitely not alone in that one, it's just that the slacking is more often in the form of socializing, eating snacks, taking toilet and smoke breaks etc.

We have a choice thankfully, so no one really slacks in person or remotely because surprise surprise, when you treat your employees like human beings and not cogs in the machine they're actually motivated to do good work, who'd'a thunk it?

I live in Utrecht and despite living very close to Utrecht Centraal, it still takes me 45 minutes to get to Amsterdam where my office is. Count late trains and general rush hour, so for me it can take 2h out of my day easily if I'm unlucky (thankfully where I work we count commute time into the work day, the very first time I saw my manager I saw him sprint out the door at 3PM on the dot because he had a lengthy commute lol)

I have quite literally never, not once, "cross-pollinated" ideas in office. I'm not saying it has never happened, but anecdotally even when my entire team is there, other teams are simply not working on the same scope of work that we would be at the time, so there's no cross pollination of any kind.

I mean, I've heard good ideas being discussed, but at the end of the day we all have our in-progress projects and tickets, and future projects already planned out, so those good ideas never make it to fruition because everyone is busy anyways and doesn't have the time or resources to do anything about it. So in reality, those "cross-pollination" talks become nothing more but socialization moments, which is fine, but to force everyone into a miserable commute just to achieve a bit of socializing is insanity to me.

I think this is mostly historical baggage unfortunately. Every codebase I've ever worked in there was a huge push to only use native ES6 functionality, like Sets, Maps, all the Iterable methods etc., but there was still a large chunk of files that were written before these were standardized and widely used, so you get mixes of Lodash and a bunch of other cursed shit.

Refactoring these also isn't always trivial either, so it's a long journey to fully get rid of something like Lodash from an old project

If they even had any Serb users to begin with I'd genuinely be amazed.

Also (I'm a Serb, I'm allowed to hate on my own country don't worry) who the fuck visits Serbia, much less to visit some random search engine's office?

They mention their founder is Serb and they have employees in Belgrade. Maybe they know some of their employees are already renting a coworking space in Belgrade and would be happy to work together in the same space.

It can be seen as a combination of benefits given to employees (motivation boost) + marketing.

Random data point: I'm in the UK and have visited Serbia twice for Skiing and time in Belgrade. It was a cool place.

Can't keep Slivovitz a secret forever and Kala Megdan is one of the most amazing experiences in Europe.

You know what you are talking about :)

I’ve visited Serbia and also Belgrade and I had a great time there. Lovely people, great food.

It's great for motorcycling :)

Considering it's Serbia, I doubt the office costs that much to lease for them :P

Interesting choice for sure though, would be far from my first choice (as a Serb myself)

Okay, and why do you need to share whatever info you collect with thousands of random data "partners" if it's just for you to keep track of whatever made up thing you say you need to track? Because in reality that's what GDPR exposed, that random ecomm website selling socks or whatever is sharing everything they know about you with a billion random companies for some unknowable reason.

I'm convinced there's a psyop on this site when it comes to GDPR, and I'm only half-joking. If people would bother to read those intrusive banners, they'd notice that their info is being harvested and shared with hundreds, even thousands of "partners". In what universe is this something we should be okay with? Why exactly does some random ecommerce site need to harvest my data and share it with a bajillion "partners" of theirs? Why are we okay with that?

I hate that the psychotic data harvesting assholes behind all these dark patterns emerged victorious by just straight up lying to people and deluding them into thinking GDPR was the issue, and not them and their shitty dark pattern banners