Month: October 2023

Posted on in mozilla

Eight-Year Moziversary

At the end of my post for my seven-year moziversary, I made some predictions about what was to be and now has been the next year of work. And I got them pretty spot-on:

Predictions for the next year of Moz Work:

  • There’ll be another All Hands
  • Glean will continue to gain ground in Firefox Desktop
  • “FOG Migration” will not happen

There was an all hands. It was in Montreal. It was fun to have folks come to a city I knew a little bit (though I’m still sore we didn’t get June 2020’s Toronto All-Hands). Poutine. Bagels. And a cirque-themed closing party.

Glean continued to gain ground on Firefox Desktop. Last year’s post mentioned over 100 Glean probes in Firefox Desktop. The current count as of time of writing is 368. Now, some of this is due to some projects our team have undertaken, but a lot of it is organic.

This is despite “FOG Migration” not happening. Firefox leadership remained uninterested in the prospect of migrating data collections to begin being sent in Glean. Though in Montreal there were some conversations that suggest that this might be changing.

So, what have I been up to? Well, I discovered in January that a legacy data collection system (PingCentre) was subject to some data loss that was incompatible with how the data was being used (( You can imagine that data loss would be acceptable for certain things like performance measurement or feedback, so long as you could characterize the loss (e.g. you lose stuff randomly? Only the small numbers? Only the feedback from Ottawa?). It’s less acceptable for retention or revenue. )). By March, replacing PingCentre had become a top-level OKR and I was managing the project.

So this year has been spent growing an appreciation for Project Management as a discipline. I now have more opinions about work tracking than I ever dreamed I’d have (though, no, I’ve not set up Kanban or anything else).

I’ve also continued my practice of basically never saying No to someone who had a question for me. As much as I bemoan the new tendency of questions being asked over direct message instead of in a topic channel where anyone can help, it does bring me no little joy to partner in a data exploration, consult on answering awkward privacy/data questions from contributors, or debug someone’s test file “out loud” so they can follow along. It really is the people that make Mozilla special, so helping them feels like a high calling.

Which is why I find our continued focus on “AI” to be so baffling. So much of “AI” we hear about is dragging the humanity out of the Internet that Mozilla is so keen to protect. We seem to be just as bad as the Valley for using “AI” to mean everything from outstanding work on local machine translation (now available in Firefox 118), to LLMs spouting out incorrect answers when you ask them to explain CSS. I hope we provide some clarity about what we mean when we say “AI”, and draw a thick line between what we’re doing and the grifts being peddled all around us at great cost to truth and the environment.

I understand that we need to be in a business to be able to speak about it. It’s why I’m excited that we’re giving social media some attention. I can’t wait to see what those teams create for the world. But the way everything became “AI” so fast sounds like chasing the hype cycle.

As for me, what do I expect to do? First, I expect to finish up the year by migrating Use Counters to Glean. Then… who knows? Maybe the results of the Events Work Week will exceed expectations and require more investment. Maybe I’ll find another data collection system in Firefox Desktop that’s dropping between 2% and 15% of all data that’ll need replacing. Maybe I’ll finally get to rewrite the IPC layer so it leaves the main thread alone. Yeah, okay maybe not.

Predictions for the next year of moz work:

  • I’ll work on client code in Firefox Desktop
  • I’ll not blog as much as I’d like
  • We continue to support existing collections in all of Legacy Telemetry’s core systems
  • There’ll be an All Hands (safe bet, as Dublin was announced in Montreal), and at least one more will be announced
  • Glean will continue to be used more on Firefox Desktop, and not just because Use Counters will juice the numbers (I will no doubt ascribe this increase to be disproportionately due to the (well-received) Glean talk I (finally) gave to a Firefox Front-End Engineering team)
  • “FOG Migration” will not happen, but new top-down guidance will be handed down expanding the circumstances where Glean is explicitly stated to be the data collection system system of choice in Firefox Desktop (and not just because it provides the best API to Legacy Telemetry)
  • We will quietly stop talking about AI so much, in the same way most firms have stopped talking about Web3 this year
  • I will publish the moziversary blog post actually _on_ my moziversary, unlike this year

Let’s see how that pans out.

:chutten

Posted on in musings

So I’ve Finished: Stray (PS5)

I recently finished playing Stray on the PS5. I accumulated a fair amount, but not all, of the game’s achievements over about seven hours of play. Stray is a moody, environmentally-rich platformer/puzzler where you play as a cat in a dystopian future. Spoilers follow.

I think the folks at BlueTwelve Studio may have underestimated just how much people just want to play as a cat. Not just in how many people reacted so enthusiastically to the game’s marketing, but in its gameplay. If they’d known, they never would have shipped with the “Show Cat Death” slider set to on, and they wouldn’t have spent so much time on running and shooting segments. Then you’d just be a cat with a drone buddy on a tour trying to reclaim its memories and collect badges for fetch quests and little optional puzzles.

If someone were to tell me that Stray was a showcase for the developers’ environmental design capabilities, I’d believe them. Every corner of every level had interesting and usually-unique stuff in it. The verticality of the dystopian slums that feels made for the cat, the dirt, the boxes, the books, the wires, the air conditioners… all of it was so wonderful. And so perfect to be explored from a camera positioned near a cat’s height off the floor. No corners cut here: the world invites scrutiny.

Now, corners felt cut a little in the character animation. It was an excellent choice to populate the world with robots: like how early Pixar went with toys because their tech could only really texture smooth things like plastic at the scale they needed, this made most loops and hitches in animation read as diagetic. The robots were just being robotic. Which I like. Very clever. But then when you press the dedicated meow button (there’s a dedicated meow button!) the cat doesn’t look like it’s meowing. It sounds like it is, but the animation is… not quite there. Like there was some amount of effort, but not enough.

And there’s not enough that I can do as a cat! Too much is scripted: you can only wind your way around the legs of a select few robots, you can only sleep in certain piles… and you can’t be held or pet? What’s with that?

Maybe the fault is mine: I was hoping to find in Stray a cat simulator. It has enough plot to exercise the setting and motivate us to move our cat through the stunningly-decorated (though oddly orientalistic) neon stacks. It has music to evoke and maintain a somber, contemplative mood. It has characters you want to help and you want to subvert. It lets you be sneaky and snarky.

But it also has a death mechanic. And a gun.

I dunno. I liked it. I liked being the cat, even when the game wanted to game instead of letting me be the cat. I liked knocking things over. I liked messing with robots for no reason. I liked jumping on air conditioners and signs and pipes and vending machines.

More games like this, please!