“#Mozilla is made up of several organizations, one of which is the #MozillaCorporation, which develops Firefox and other technologies, and another is its nonprofit and tax-exempt #MozillaFoundation, which oversees Mozilla’s corporate governance structure and sets the browser maker’s policies. Much of Mozilla’s work focused on advocating for #privacy, #inclusion, and #decentralization of #technologies, and “to create #safer, more #transparent online experiences for #everyone,” which ultimately benefit the #browser maker and its #users.

Announcing the layoffs in an email to all employees on October 30, the Mozilla Foundation’s executive director #NabihaSyed confirmed that two of the foundation’s major divisions — #Advocacy and #GlobalPrograms — are “no longer a part of our structure.””

There you go. One side of Mozilla builds the tools of the Internet, the other does… I can’t for the life of me see what. It’s the #MozillaFoundation who cant engineer the tools that are doing “deals” with others to make things safer.

The power to make change for the better of the Internet is being moved from direct impact, ie: basic technology and applied applications TO soft corporate influence through manifestos, papers, jobs and pay for influencers and collaborations with third parties…

I know what is more effective. Basic engineering and applied products because it scales.

#WhiteCollar / #Layoffs / #CorporatePolicy <https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/05/mozilla-foundation-lays-off-30-staff-drops-advocacy-division/>

“#FreeOur Feeds is overseen by these nine: #NabihaSyed, executive director at #Mozilla Foundation; #RobinBerjon, independent technologist; #MarkSurman, president at Mozilla Foundation; #MalloryKnodel, executive director at #SocialWebFoundation; #EliPariser, co-founder of #Avaaz; #PhilBeaudoin, entrepreneur; #MarcFaddoul, co-founder of #AIForensics; #DeeptiDoshi, co-director at #New_ Public; and #SherifElsayedAli, executive director at #FutureofTechnologyInstitute.

And the group arrives with endorsements from a set of celebrities, academics, entrepreneurs, politicians, journalists, and activists, including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Harvard Business School Professor Emerita Shoshana Zuboff, Incredible Hulk actor Mark Ruffalo, and activist and author Cory Doctorow.”

So this is the kind of grab bag technology Mozilla is backing to “secure the Internet” while slurping user data?

<https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/14/free_our_feeds_decentralized_social_media/>

.> ... large-scale AI models are indeed big water consumers. For example, training GPT‑3 in Microsoft’s state-of-the-art U.S. data centers can directly consume 700,000 liters of clean freshwater (enough to produce 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla electric vehicles), and the water consumption would have been tripled if training were done in Microsoft’s data centers in Asia. These numbers do not include the off-site water footprint associated with electricity generation.

.> ChatGPT needs a 500-ml bottle of water for a short conversation of roughly 20 to 50 questions and answers, depending on when and where the model is deployed. Given ChatGPT’s huge user base, the total water footprint for inference can be enormous.

.> ... if we only consider carbon footprint reduction (say, by scheduling more AI training around noon), we’ll likely end up with higher water consumption, which is not truly sustainable for AI.

.> ... the vast majority of data centers still use potable water and cooling towers. For example, even tech giants such as Google heavily rely on cooling towers and consume billions of liters of potable water each year. Such huge water consumption has produced a stress on the local water infrastructure; Google’s data center used more than a quarter of all the water in The Dalles, Ore.

.> ... some AI conferences have requested that authors declare their AI models’ carbon footprint in their papers; we believe that with transparency and awareness, authors can also declare their AI models’ water footprint as part of the environmental impact.