Hacker News: JohnPDickerson

New comment by JohnPDickerson in "Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS"

JohnPDickerson — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:28:07 +0000

Handy is an awesome project, highly recommended - many of our engineers and PMs use it! CJ, Handy's creator, recently joined us as a Builder in Residence at Mozilla.ai. So for those interested in deploying a more raw/lightweight approach to local speech-to-text (or other multimodal) models, feel free to check out llamafile - which includes whisperfile, a single-file whisper.cpp + cosmopolitan framework-based executable. We're hoping to build some bridges between the two projects as well. https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile

New comment by JohnPDickerson in "Show HN: Cq – Stack Overflow for AI coding agents"

JohnPDickerson — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:49:07 +0000

Common question, thanks for asking! We’re a public benefit corporation spun out from, and primarily owned by, the Mozilla Foundation. We're focused on democratizing access to AI tech, on enabling non-AI experts to benefit from and control their own AI tools, and on empowering the open source AI ecosystem. We're a small team relative to the "main" Mozilla, which lets us experiment a bit more easily.

We do run into this branding question frequently, and will add some clarity to the website.

New comment by JohnPDickerson in "I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla"

JohnPDickerson — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:08:16 +0000

> I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up.

Chiming in here as a Mozillian focused on AI not specifically related to Firefox - I agree! Just a heads up that a separate public benefit corporation, Mozilla.ai, exists and is supporting a suite of commercially-licensed, open source, general AI dev and enablement tools. That includes mcpd, what we're calling "requirements.txt for MCP", meant to enable more trusted automated interfacing between machines.

A goal here is to support developers looking to build out AI-enabled systems that interact with each other and with the Internet, be that through a traditional browser or some other way.

You may enjoy some of our projects: https://www.mozilla.ai/open-tools/choice-first-stack

New comment by JohnPDickerson in "Show HN: Any-LLM – Lightweight router to access any LLM Provider"

JohnPDickerson — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 23:01:06 +0000

Good feedback. Some of this is intentional - as an independent and growing ~20-person company, we're able to operate more quickly than the larger Mozilla organizations, and we're purposefully distancing ourselves from the associated bureaucracy that comes with any large organization. We are very much in line with the Mozilla ethos around personal ownership, privacy, control, and agency. We're figuring out how to best push on those principles in the world of AI, and appreciate feedback and contributions from the community.

New comment by JohnPDickerson in "Show HN: Any-LLM – Lightweight router to access any LLM Provider"

JohnPDickerson — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 22:52:05 +0000

Common question, thanks for asking! We’re a public benefit corporation focused on democratizing access to AI tech, on enabling non-AI experts to benefit from and control their own AI tools, and on empowering the open source AI ecosystem. Our majority shareholder is the Mozilla Foundation - the other shareholders being our employees, soon :). As access to knowledge and people shifts due to AI, we’re working to make sure people retain choice, ownership, privacy, and dignity.

We're very small compared to the Mozilla mothership, but moving quickly to support open source AI in any way we can.

New comment by JohnPDickerson in "PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs"

JohnPDickerson — Wed, 25 May 2022 01:19:20 +0000

Oh, you're right! Good catch, I agree that the numbers are accurately reflected as you had originally written them. Thanks again for compiling all this information, really helpful service to the broad community.

New comment by JohnPDickerson in "PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs"

JohnPDickerson — Mon, 23 May 2022 18:58:30 +0000

Jeff, thanks so much for putting that stipend information together; I'm sure your list has started discussions amongst students and amongst faculty at many institutions. The variance in stipends was eye-opening to me, and clearly they all need to go up.

The posted numbers for my home institution, the University of Maryland, are a bit off; current offers are $25k for 9-month and up to $36k for 12-month, if funded on an RA over the summer. That RA summer funding is not guaranteed. Again, clearly, this needs to go up.

New comment by JohnPDickerson in "Adversarial.io – Fighting mass image recognition"

JohnPDickerson — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 20:06:18 +0000

Folks interested in this kind of work should check out an upcoming ICLR paper, "LowKey: Leveraging Adversarial Attacks to Protect Social Media Users from Facial Recognition", from Tom Goldstein's group at Maryland.

Similar pitch -- use a small adversarial perturbation to trick a classifier -- but LowKey is targeted at industry-grade black-box facial recognition systems, and also takes into account the "human perceptibility" of the perturbation used. Manages to fool both Amazon Rekognition and the Azure face recognition systems almost always.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07922