It is really important that no single project or company dominates the web. Any browser based on chromium is not going to be well received by people concerned about current engine diversity. Whatever people think of the Mozilla corp or foundation and their stewardship, there is a strong public interest in promoting wider use of the Gecko engine and any other Blink alternatives. Many here will be running forks like librewolf to remove Firefox features we don’t want or trust.

In a healthy ecosystem people will use a diversity of products that suit their individual tastes and needs and that is fine. Advocates warning against over dependence on Chromium are doing it with very good intentions. We don’t need everyone to switch. We only need enough to avoid a mono-culture and the death of the open web. There is plenty of room left for diversity and freedom of choice.

The majority don’t even think about what browser they are using and use what is installed by default. They are the real battle. If a fraction of them did some research and made an informed choice, even if many chose Chromium browsers, the ecosystem would be much healthier.

But apparently not smarter than CEOs or these con artists would all fuck off.

It is fucking amazing that people managing huge funds are prepared to throw money at complete fuckwits like this guy or that dumbarse Theranos lizard woman. If you have money clearly all you need to do is spout bullshit and roll a dice and you make more until you don’t.

What I don’t understand is why the fuck we elect people who suck up to these cunts. Like we have total control of who we vote for. And we still vote for door mats. What’s with that?

In general people have no fucking idea or just don’t want to know.

You can lay out the evidence of all the ways cigarettes will kill a person and a huge number of people will go ahead and smoke anyway. We are not an entirely rational species.

People have a massive capacity for self delusion. Even then a lot of people who accept the truth of living under corporate and government mass surveillance think the risks are acceptable or won’t be abused or are unavoidable in modern life. They are wrong but I can understand how their delusion brings them comfort.

That creepy guy from school. The one who SA’ed your friend. He has all your personal, family and business secrets now. But he pinky promises he won’t use it against you. Oh, you thought it was some altruistic super intelligence in a “cloud” that is there to help you. No, dude, thats Jesus, if you are into that stuff. This is just just another creep spying through your curtains. Always has been.

Linus hasn’t programmed much for years. He is a manager. I imagine lots of managers are seduced by vibe coding. Programming can be a real slog and takes so much time. Why walk when you can drive?

The problem isn’t with Linus losing his skills but sustainability of the entire FOSS space. I don’t think many young programmers are ever going to learn the lessons Linus did as a young person and those lessons are still very relevant for low level code working closely with hardware. When the pre-LLM programmers age out I think we are going to be treading water for years with LLM regurgitating variations on the same old human code without much direction or innovation.

It is arguably a different situation for something like webdev which is mostly paint by numbers or enterprise software that is solving the same problems over and over.

Not in the US fortunately, but I have been on summer family road trips that started as sunshine and fun and ended with the whole country in flames, evacuations and finding a route home through fires in multiple states. Phones and apps are great when they work. But AM radio and an independent public funded national broadcaster are quite literally going to be taken away over someones dead body.

Despite what their marketing says the service gets worse every time the price goes up. The word enshitification is overused and often misused but not where YouTube is concerned.

I have had premium family since it was red or something. It is my last streaming sub if you don’t count nebula which I never use. I still need to use smarttube and Firefox+ublock and various extensions as modern YouTube is a disaster.

I want to send google a message that here is someone prepared to pay money for a decent experience but they don’t give a shit. Its going to be very tough to win me back as a customer when I go which won’t be much longer.

If I saw them I would call the police. Especially if there are kids around. No 4th amendment here and no local police departments that can easily be bought off. The police might not find something incriminating every time.

Many projects require replicatable builds. Generative AI is driven by noise so I am not sure if it has any role in optimization or code gen. I guess we could share an RNG seed with source but honestly current tool chains are too slow as it is and ML would likely make it much worse. I want faster edit/compile/debug cycles and compilers already do insane optimisations. Ken Thompson’s Reflections on Trusting Trust becomes much scarier if your code generation is being driven by a black box of billions or parameters nobody understands. An adversary could embed anything in there.

The machine translation origins of LLMs make them really good at inspecting text and looking for things that look like known bugs. It must be a game changer for security researchers who already know what sort of problems to look for but don’t have enough hours in the day to search the haystack manually. If some of that knowledge was available in a good quality FOSS local code analysis tool it might be irresponsible not to use it. We can’t be dependent on commercial vendors and closed models.

Using LLMs to analyze code for problems makes a lot of sense. It is just an extension of the rule based analysis we already do. It is very much a better hammer rather than a replacement of labour/thinking/taste. The programming languages we use are often difficult for humans to reason about reliably and hide a lot of errors. Our programming languages still suck (yes even Rust). If one day clang of gcc ships with a local LLM to lint code for security problems I would probably run it occasionally even on my hobby code despite being an AI hater.

If people are identifying errors using LLMs and fixing them by hand I am fine with that. It seems like a good use of the technology. If they start vibe coding drivers I want it declared so I can disable them or move to BSD.

Sounds like a bullshit headline but it is an eternal truth that the owners of capital demand slave labour. Take the work houses away and they demand chattel slavery. Take the chattel slaves away and they want convict labour. Take the convict labour away and they want undocumented foreigners to exploit. Take that away and they casualise work and pay people in tips or commissions. Take that away and they export work to countries that will do all the things they can’t do at home.

The investment in LLMs is purely a scam at this point but much of the initial enthusiasm was driven by the disdain for labour. Highly skilled labour like engineers keep arguing with the MBAs that their cost cutting is going to kill people or destroy the company and that really upsets them and risks the bonuses and share buyback program.

While the drudgery of work isn’t great, I would much prefer the capital class invested in R&D and equipment to make their skilled, specialized workers more productive and improved our remuneration and conditions as happened in previous generations before the MBA apocalypse. Instead they are trying to cut us out. Too many people are living paycheck to paycheck and unable to afford housing as wealth inequality escalates.

Mistreatment of animals or brain cells in a box isn’t the same as putting a child to work in a mine but the mindset that drives us in this direction is.

Working my way through Person of Interest again. Just watched one where a search company was directing suicidal inquiries to ads instead of helplines. And that was before they get bought by the evil AI overlord. Its surreal seeing Palantir, Flock and all the tech companies race to implement a dystopia no sane person would ever want and there is so little push back. What the fuck is wrong with regular people?

It will take ages for them to build capacity and they will probably be wary of growing too fast since demand and prices could drop quickly when the AI boom goes bust. Likely CXMT is already supplying a lot of the consumer market under the stickers. China will be the big winners in the long term. This will be a gift for them.

Not sure it’s possible to fight machine generated slop on the big platforms now. People who invest a lot of time and effort are being squeezed out. Businesses that don’t give a fuck about quality upload multiple low effort videos a week across multiple channels getting massive views, probably most from gaming the system.

Sad for the people who spend months researching, writing and producing videos but this might be the end of the ride as far as making videos as a day job. The platform doesn’t value them or their loyal viewers.

The creators facing burnout who don’t leave out of disgust will join the slop machine and start championing it. Starting to see it already.

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If your so called free society has laws to protect child murderers and racists but nothing to support the right to join a labour union it’s not a free society. Go back to the beginning and try again.

There is no repair without firmware. All hardware needs to be documented and ship with source. It hasn’t been enough to be able to buy physical parts since perhaps the 80s or 90s. Everything is controlled by software. Without that right to repair is a joke. Meanwhile the surveillance industry and their well greased govt supporters are trying to lock down software. Can’t have it both ways.

Shut them down. It would be a huge net win for people everywhere. It is horrible seeing friends, family, clubs and institutions all captured by meta. They are a blight on society.