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yoasif.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
yoasif
@yoasif.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Immigrant native New Yorker. Product person. Into open data and open source. Ex-moderator of the Firefox sub-reddit.

Into #retrocomputing #firefox #haikuos #ux […]

🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://mastodon.social/@yoasif, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
Reposted by yoasif
Crews today dismantled plaques telling the stories of enslaved people who lived in the President's House in Philadelphia following orders by President Trump and Interior Secretary Burgum to remove content at national parks that “inappropriately disparage” the US. 6abc.com/post/philade...
Slavery exhibits at President's House in Philadelphia removed after Trump administration directive
Crews dismantled plaques telling the stories of the nine enslaved people who lived in the President's House and were owned by George Washington.
6abc.com
January 23, 2026 at 1:26 AM
"According to Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, they were each charged with conspiracy to deprive rights, a federal crime."

The dog killer is accusing the protestors of doing what she and her deportation force are doing every day in Minnesota and elsewhere.

Irony is dead […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 22, 2026 at 11:58 PM
Don't lose hope. Do something!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/j3jIaOnASCE

Wise words from Tressie McMillan Cottom on #pbs #politics
January 22, 2026 at 6:35 PM
Reposted by yoasif
I finally figured out something LLMs can do that people can’t do. Apparently LLMs can do productive work without going into an office.
January 15, 2026 at 12:59 PM
Reposted by yoasif
RE: https://wandering.shop/@susankayequinn/115901357070406663

Canceled our recurring donations to #wikipedia this morning. I will not support the exploitation of free labor, particularly to the benefit of megacorps boiling our oceans with #ai.
wandering.shop
January 16, 2026 at 3:59 PM
Reposted by yoasif
I really dont understand why anyone would want to carry on giving free work to these companies who make vast profits at the expense of the planet.

I probably won't donate anymore. They dont need my money, I'll give to a smaller outfit who do.

#wikipedia #ai #genai #chatbots

Six more AI […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 16, 2026 at 4:54 PM
Reposted by yoasif
The main reason people aren’t moving to a cheaper place is

You’ve moved to a cheaper place with your remote job. Cool

Your company reduces your salary 20% because of cost of living adjustments (they will).

Cool, now you live in the sticks, make less money. Maybe somewhere you don’t know […]
Original post on hachyderm.io
hachyderm.io
January 16, 2026 at 5:31 PM
Reposted by yoasif
Every major software project should appoint a UX Czar who has the authority to kill a feature if they have reason to believe it will royally piss off any more than a mere fraction of the userbase of the product.

New features should always benefit *a reasonable subset* of the total users of the […]
Original post on indieweb.social
indieweb.social
January 16, 2026 at 2:37 AM
Reposted by yoasif
Did the typical Wikipedia editor expect that their contributions would go to the betterment of humanity, or to make a slopware vendor richer? Can't have it both ways.

Also, taking on Microsoft and Facebook as *customers* is significantly worse than taking them on as *donors*. When I noted that […]
Original post on wandering.shop
wandering.shop
January 16, 2026 at 2:37 AM
RE: https://nomenloony.com/@nomenloony/115901387844687996

Amazing that #wikipedia is telling contributors to work for free for the #ai companies.

Why can't they just hire researchers to update the articles themselves? Oh right, because volunteers are cheaper.

Here's a question volunteers […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 15, 2026 at 11:38 PM
Reposted by yoasif
Chuck Schumer again says that in 2026 Senate Dems will be focused on “affordability.” He is a disgrace as Senate minority leader. The Trump executive branch is occupying a U.S. city, rounding up people on the basis of their skin color, shooting at and killing citizens for peacefully protesting […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 15, 2026 at 10:31 PM
Reposted by yoasif
Thanks for spending a week doing unpaid make-believe work for TechCompany, plus another week of intense interviews, before we decided to go with an internal candidate and/or blackballed your application for "culture fit”. Here is the first of several emails begging you to take a survey about […]
Original post on masto.nyc
masto.nyc
January 15, 2026 at 6:21 PM
Reposted by yoasif
New #firefox behavior just dropped? I *have* to install the automatically downloaded update right now? It can't wait? 🙄
January 15, 2026 at 2:27 PM
Reposted by yoasif
The tech industry is full of stupid CEOs who were once brilliant programmers. It's very much an office nerd culture thing to think that "the wrong people are in charge" and to not understand that it's power itself that makes competence impossible.
January 14, 2026 at 6:10 PM
Simon Willison on porting OSS code:

> I think that if “they might train on my code is enough to drive you away from open source, your open source values are distinct enough from mine that I’m not ready to invest significantly in keeping you. I’ll put that effort into welcoming the newcomers […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 14, 2026 at 8:12 PM
Reposted by yoasif
Timely ICE reminder.
January 13, 2026 at 10:43 PM
Reposted by yoasif
The Joy of Coding returns today with Episode 425! Come join me while I #Livehack on #firefox !

We're going to continue with the mechanism we started planning last week, to hide / change various New Tab settings during the first 48 hours of a profile's lifetime. Let's see if we can get some […]
Original post on fosstodon.org
fosstodon.org
January 14, 2026 at 4:33 PM
Reposted by yoasif
Suddenly I start getting sponsored widgets in my Firefox new tab page.
Uh hell no. I'm concerned about where #firefox will go.
January 14, 2026 at 3:22 PM
Reposted by yoasif
New blog post! A close look at Tahoe menu icons https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons
Looking at the first principles of icon design—and how Apple failed to apply all of them in macOS Tahoe
tonsky.me
January 5, 2026 at 11:10 AM
Reposted by yoasif
This is fucking disgusting and I can understand why it would prompt Thompson to resign.

They are literally going to pass on investigating the open murder of Good and will instead are pressing to investigate her widow's ideological background for whatever dirt they can use to blame the victims […]
Original post on hoosier.social
hoosier.social
January 13, 2026 at 6:33 PM
Reposted by yoasif
BEHOLD! The GNOME Tablet! Also Bazaar

#postmarketos #gnome #linux #tablet #xiaomipad5 #bazaar
January 13, 2026 at 1:30 AM
Reposted by yoasif
Twelve(!) years ago on this day, I started my job at #mozilla

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2014/01/13/this-is-my-first-day-at-mozilla/

(I was there for almost five years, left again in late 2018: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/11/18/im-leaving-mozilla/)
This is my first day at Mozilla
I’m now a Senior Network Engineer at Mozilla. Today is my first day as an employee. Here’s my summary of how I got here and how the process has been so far, from my perspective. ## Mozilla is an American company OK, that’s not news to anyone and neither is it to me. I’m starting off with this because I’m not American. I’m a Swede, and I live in Sweden. When working and communicating with my fellow people at the mothership I of course get the slight cultural differences that are American versus Swedish. It’s not a problem because I’ve gotten quite used to working with Americans at work over the years but going through an entire recruiting and starting-a-new-job process entirely in English with Americans is new to me. ## Interviewing So when I was opening up to my social network to start looking for new assignments since I decided to end my previous one, I was approached by a friend who works for Mozilla. Of course I was interested to work for Mozilla! So I had a Skype interview with a recruiter first, and then with two engineers. During evenings of course since Mozilla like many other tech companies are mainly in the west coast of the US, meaning -9 hours from me. After those initial interviews I had to struggle with myself since I was in this luxury position of having no less than **two** other very interesting projects being suggested. How do you pick the best one out of three really good alternatives? I actually had to wrestle with all the details and factors involved and I decided that this lead was the best out of the three. If Mozilla wanted me, I’d go for that option. So I took 4 days off from my current work and flew out to Mountain View California one day in November 2013. It takes some 17 hours to get there, I had a spare day to get somewhat adjusted to the time zone and then I fired off no less than five 45 minute interviews in a row that Wednesday. Then I got a ride back to SFO and I took the plane back home. I’ve been a consultant for 16 years and I’ve done way over 30 projects during this time. I’ve been interviewed for all of them, and a bunch more that I didn’t end up getting. You can say I’m quite experienced in getting interviewed for work. What I’ve learned is to stay honest, just be me and have an as good time as possible but in the end it really isn’t possible to tell how the other end interprets me and my answers and if I match what they desire. ## Getting hired They didn’t reject me. I got the offer. I said yes. I signed the papers. So one of the most frequent questions I’ve got when I told friends about my new job: > So you’re not gonna be a consultant anymore? And no, I’m not. This option only came in the form of an employment or not at all, and I decided I wanted to do this rather than the alternatives. I’ve done consultant based development since 1996 and now I’m not anymore! Of course I still have tight bounds to Haxx and I certainly won’t exclude that I’ll return there one day. My agreement also allows me to spend some time on curl development. Don’t you worry about that. I feel confident that I will only increase my commitment and efforts there. ## Getting anxious Once I had accepted the job I immediately wanted to start and by golly I got a harder time trying to motivate myself do good the period until that assignment ended. I’ve had more phone meetings, I’ve checked out code and repeatedly rebuilt Firefox since then, I’ve read Bugzilla entries and perhaps most of all I’ve participated in Mozilla’s “onboarding program” which is a web based system that gives me tasks and asks questions and provides information, all in an effort to give them the information about me that they need and give me the proper info on Mozilla, what it is about, its background and what we’re doing ahead. (See how smoothly I used “we” there?) Anxiously waiting for The Day. This may sound a bit melodramatic to some, but I do kind of feel like my life is changing a bit now into something it wasn’t before. ## Starting a new job working remotely at day one Today is The Day. I assume not everyone of you reading this have done it, but I start my first day at my new work for my new employer on the upper floor of my house, completely alone. I work from home, remotely and I’m also mostly isolated from a large portion of my colleagues by time zones. So I grab my coffee and walk up the stairs to my home office. I sit down and I dive in. Source code. Lots of source code. There’s a steep learning curve here, but I’m not afraid of some hard work and I like a challenge, I like code, I like open source and I like internet protocols. And I have good coffee. Mozilla. I’m here. I’ve started. Today.
daniel.haxx.se
January 13, 2026 at 10:51 AM