> intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox

This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted.

I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.

They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.

> This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.

I am a former Mozilla Corporation employee, so I am more willing to criticize the current state of MoCo culture as a whole...

> They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.

I would say it really depends on the nature of the patches being contributed; if they are not inconsistent with project goals and not excessively burdensome, I'd hope that they in theory would be considered.

However, I will say that MoCo culture was already much different by the late 2010s than it was in the early 2010s. When I joined MoCo in 2012, there were multiple managers I interacted with who openly valued community interaction and encouraged their reports to set quarterly goals relating to mentoring external contributors. IMHO that encouragement had died off by the late 2010s.

When you left, do you have a sense for how many developers were actually working on Firefox full-time? I'm curious because people always say that Firefox would be impossible to fund, pointing to Mozilla's expenses, but I've never seen someone actually put forward the math for what portion of those expenses are actually Firefox.

Oh geez, it's been long enough that I don't really remember the specifics. In the hundreds, for sure.

had a positive experience recently on an issue and getting it fixed, people were helpful and instructive. For drive-by newbies there's an initial penalty to dig into Mozilla tooling. Lowering the threshold there will attract more contributors.

This is really telling of the current vibe I get from Firefox, and why I feel resistant to support them beyond “It’s a bit more private than default Chrome”

Companies gonna company and expand in the wrong direction if they forget were they come frome.

I've heard it as "If someone goes in, then it'll be empty!"

One of my favorite videos of Louis Armstrong performing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_CnEotIqMKg

The waves when the water is first entering the area is called numeric dispersion, it's a consequence of discretizing. It can be mitigated somewhat by smoothing the entering wall of water so that there's not a sharp discontinuity.

I don't think so, the waves are actual shock waves which are a solution to the Riemann problem for the shallow water equations because they are nonlinear hyperbolic equations. You can find them even before you start introducing any numerical grid or discretization.

See e.g. the classic exposition by Leveque:

https://www.clawpack.org/riemann_book/html/Shallow_water.htm...

Very interesting, my mistake! I'm more familiar with acoustics and assumed it was the same phenomenon, but it looks like I jumped to a mistaken conclusion.

I agree 100% with this comment -- you can clearly see the energy separating into its component frequencies as the solution evolves. The reason is that different frequencies of the solution propagate at different speeds. Smoothing the discontinuity would indeed reduce the high frequency components, such that the effects wouldn't appear so extreme. The shallow water equations only allow for one shock wave mode as far as I recall, it wouldn't explain why we seem to get increasingly more shocks as the solution evolves.

Interesting, thanks! Is it kinda like the Gibbs phenomenon?

Take a look at the other reply, which says it's actually not dispersion. My mistake!

Yeah I've seen it, no worries! :)

See also Thompson sampling[+] for a different approach to multi-armed bandits that doesn't depend on explicitly distinguishing between explore-exploit.

[+] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_sampling

I've read about this -- decided not to include in the blog because wasn't very easy to analogize to the problem in an especially unique way. Still interesting though!

The linked proof doesn't work when the floor is too steep.

I wrote about it here: https://haggainuchi.com/wobblytable.html

My preferred proof goes through a theorem of Dyson that any continuous real valued function on the sphere attains equal values on some square on a great circle.

Also it does not work if the floor is even and one leg of the table is shorter than the others, which I suspect is the reason for the "wobble" in many cases.

IMO this proof is a good example of science taking itself much too important.

Is it? My experience is that most of the time in practice uneven legs of four legged objects are within a small enough tolerance margin that they can be considered mostly equal, but floors are surprisingly less even than we initially suspect, their vertical variability being perceptually dwarfed by their overall surface.

I think it is. The research paper is probably most useful when printed out, folded and placed under the short leg.

> criticisms of a pure math theorem being applied to physics

Next you're going to tell me the Moving sofa problem isn't really about moving sofas!

I've also experienced this. My guess (I don't know for sure) is not so much "so you can't go behind their back and cut them out of a fee", but rather "get you to commit time to them so they have a chance of forming a personal connection".

I haven't had hardly any of them push back when I (extremely curtly) ask for more details. I usually say something like "company name / role description / location / comp? I don't have the time to take calls for every message at that level of detail when I'll probably end up not interested"

Usually they provide the details after that, though sometimes they try to drip it over multiple messages. That's why I think it's not about the fees.

Edit: I've never thought to ask them that directly! Maybe they'd be forthcoming about it.

I use a vibrating alarm on my cell phone under my pillow (off to the side, not directly under my head).

I sleep with both earplugs and a white noise machine, so an audio-based alarm can't work for me. (City living! the garbage trucks come for some house on the block on every weeknight.)

I still have traumatic memories of my radio-alarm-tuned-to-static waking me up for high school, and when the garbage trucks used to wake me up before I started with earplugs and noise machine, I'd wake up with a jolt of adrenaline, so I relate to your "gunshot" comment. The vibrating alarm doesn't trigger that for me.

Nice explanation. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who used to feel negatively about the "SSO tax" and then switched to feeling positive/neutral about it — what changed your mind and why? Vice versa, too. (Not interested in rehashing arguments about why it's good or bad.)

When I was a kid I enjoyed Kathleen Krull's "Lives of the Composers" -- and it looks like she's written a whole bunch of similar books (e.g. Writers, Artists, Athletes, etc). They're illustrated too.