A desktop is many things to many people, some of which use computers very differently from how engineers use them. If a desktop was only a tool, background images, Xeyes, theming, and many other standard features wouldn’t exist. There are no themes for power drills.
Those kind of cosmetic features actually do have a functional use because they let you distinguish virtual desktops at a glance. I'd like to be able to specify different window manager themes for each virtual desktop.
There have certainly been huge changes regarding the handling of political topics. Such topics used to be an anathema in general, and then three years ago, there were four posts about the Palestine conflict on the front page for many hours in a single week, and IIRC, the mods even explicitly stated that this represented an “experiment” of sorts.
Not really. The answer is completely obvious: Take over and destroy the digital infrastructure that humans have spent the past 30 years connecting every aspect of civilization to.
Good luck ordering supplies for a hospital or grocery store today without the Internet. Paper catalogs are gone, fax machines are mostly gone, landlines are mostly gone, etc. etc. All the ways that used to be there for running things are gone, it’s all online.
I use servo to render e-ink UIs and screenshot them to push to the displays. About 10% of the memory usage and 5% of the render time as doing the same thing with headless chrome. It doesn’t handle every possible feature, but it handles enough that it’s never been an issue when it’s my only target rendering environment. I love it.
This sounds very cool! If you'd like to talk about your experience with the project on the Servo zulip (servo.zulipchat.com), we love hearing feedback from embedders.
Servo doesn't implement the whole web platform, but your own desktop app isn't the whole web. You can generally work around any limitations or missing features. And it might be lighter than CEF or whatever.
Couldn't agree more. Looking at [1], it seems to me like Servo has a much better adoption story than Ladybird. The latter seems to be just building a browser that's going to be crashy and not really work on the web. The former is addressing problem spaces where, even with the limitations of the half-finished state it's in, it can be usefully applied: WebView/Electron-replacement and headless browsers. Things not currently on this list that could/should be: HTML rendering for desktop E-Mail clients. Also, I wonder to what extent they're implementing paged media and capable of targetting PDF output or similar (like weasyprint). That could be another domain, where you don't need full web-scale abilities.
And yet, somehow, Ladybird seems to be the darling of the masses (in certain circles at least). Doing vibe-ports to Rust, while going closed-contribution also, in my mind, sits in a marked contrast to the origin story that initially generated so much goodwill.
Regardless of actual use as an (embedded) browser, it is useful in the sense that it can be used to provide (another) source of validation about whether specs and WPT [1] tests are properly and clearly defined. That helps for long term browser compatibility.
Making a new browser engine hurts browser compatibility more than it helps it. It now becomes one more target that needs to be tested against, limitations need to be kept tracked of, etc. The best thing for long term browser compatibility is focusing resources into Blink. In regards to the standard we can use LLMs to cross reference the spec, with tests, and with the implementation to make sure all match.
One could argue that effectively Blink is also not open source. At any rate users don't have power over it, as witnessed by the manifest v3 stuff jammed down our throats.
> The best thing for long term browser compatibility is focusing resources into Blink.
That’s what makes Google more dominant, and if you think that’s a good idea you should really put down your LLM and go read up on a bit of history. Do you want to live in a world where a single company controls your access to the web? Are you eager to navigate through ad pages with a little bit of web? To have even more of your data mined?
Browser diversity may be a bit annoying for developers, but it is good for users, and developers are users too. When there’s a lack of diversity, everyone but the dominant player is squeezed.
Google's dominance comes from market share not from owning upstream. If a different fork took 90% market share that fork would have the dominance and power.
And that market share is maintained by integration with Android and low-key sabotage of others browsers, especially Firefox. Similar to how Microsoft maintained its monopoly decades ago.
That can only happen if we don’t all focus resources on Blink, which is the point. By definition, we can only have other engines if diversity is a thing.
The problem isn’t specifically Google (though they are a problem), but any one individual company having all the power.
>That can only happen if we don’t all focus resources on Blink
Why? What's fundamentally stopping Edge market share from going to 90% that would go away if they switched back to their own browser engine?
>but any one individual company having all the power.
Open source means that anyone can make any change at any time. Google doesn't have all the power over what a fork does. A fork is still in full control.
yeah in a perfect world google dictates how the standard will evolve, we kill all competition so we're sure that you have only one target to build your software against, I'm sure a monopoly will greatly improves innovation and not be used to stiffen competition. /s
It's easier maintaining a fork of Blink than an entirely different engine. Google being the primary maintainer doesn't mean that browsers can't make large forks.
>work on other browser engines is not duplicated or wasted.
How is having N engine developers implement some new addition to the EMCAScript or CSS standard for each of their engines not duplicated work?
> It's easier maintaining a fork of Blink than an entirely different engine. Google being the primary maintainer doesn't mean that browsers can't make large forks.
Maintaining a fork is not fun as taking patches from the origin repo becomes more complicated the longer the fork exists and the bigger the divergence becomes.
> How is having N engine developers implement some new addition to the EMCAScript or CSS standard for each of their engines not duplicated work?
It would be duplicated only if they all maintained, say, a Blink fork.
It’s not really a finished product yet (in terms of being production-ready), but it would already be usable as an embedded kiosk for applications where you own the pages being accessed.
> but isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people can enjoy their work?
That’s an interesting question. I thought about it for a minute and was surprised that I came to the conclusion that the answer isn’t obviously “yes”.
An analogous question is “isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people are rich?”, and I think that question should make it clearer to many people why that is so.
> An analogous question is “isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people are rich?”
There’s a crucial difference between the two questions. “Rich” is a relative term: If everyone had the same amount of money, no one would be rich, you need someone to be worse off (poor) to have someone better off (rich). But someone enjoying their work has no bearing on someone else’s enjoyment of theirs.
you need someone to be worse off (poor) to have someone better off (rich).
The fact that so many people believe this is what bums me out.
You need to understand something: the people who want you to think this way do not have your best interests in mind, any more than the rabid right-wing Trumpers do.
In no way do I mean that someone has to suffer for someone else to thrive. We could (and should) all thrive and have our needs met.
I’m just saying the term is relative, like “tall” and “short”. If we were all the same height, no one would be tall or short, we’d just be. If we all had the same amount of money, no one would be rich or poor.
An economy isn't a zero-sum game. Wealth doesn't just pop into existence when someone in the government clicks a button on a screen. Money is created that way, but wealth isn't. It has to be created by creating something that someone else values enough to pay for willingly.
No one has to lose anything, in the sense that no one has to give up more than they think the product or service is worth to them. In your example, it's possible for everyone to grow taller.
Wealth, like gravity, distorts everything around it with excessive concentration.
It matters little how wealth is created. No one has to lose anything for the excessive concentration of wealth to cause the lives of everyone to be worse.
For the third time, that is not the argument. Read what I wrote and try to steal man a bit. Get your preconceived argument out of your head and understand we are in agreement. The difference between wealth and money isn’t in question, that is something you just added to the argument and decided with zero basis that I disagree.
The fact that so many people jump to conclusions and immediately dunk on others who agree with them is what bums me out.
What a waste of a conversation. Why are you spending time criticising those who support the same points?
What a waste of a conversation. Why are you spending time criticising those who support the same points?
All I know is what you wrote, sorry. Same shit we could all read on Reddit: "If everyone had the same amount of money, no one would be rich, you need someone to be worse off (poor) to have someone better off (rich)."
If you frequently find yourself misunderstood in this way, work on expressing yourself more clearly.
By your own admission, you read my words and associated them with other conversations had by other people on another website. In other words, “all you know” is the preconceived bias you have in your head leading you to rushed wrong assumptions.
> If you frequently find yourself misunderstood in this way
I don’t, no. There you go again, making unsubstantiated claims based on faulty assumptions.
> work on expressing yourself more clearly.
You were obviously the only person confused. That makes it abundantly clear the problem wasn’t with my explanation but your comprehension. Perhaps a little humbleness on your part is in order, as opposed to, you know, doubling-down on your own misinterpretation despite having been spoon fed multiple clarifications.
There are also various metaphysical theories that posit that the universe is algorithmically generated in some sense or the other, and from many of those theories it follows that simplicity is a fundamental feature of reality, which yields an even stronger version of Occam’s Razor.
You don't need the onerous assumption that the universe is algorithmically generated, just that all ways to reason about and communicate intelligently for the purpose of making decisions is digital.
Recklessness is a mens rea and given how often OpenAI and its spokespeople talk about safety and alignment, it's hard to argue they were unaware of the risk.
>it's hard to argue they were unaware of the risk.
So what does it mean for an owner of a german sheppard, who specifically got it because they want a ferocious dog that can bite intruders, then it turned out it bit the mailman? Should that be considered a crime (assault) in addition to paying the mailman's medical bills? That's not to say there's no circumstance where recklessness might be warranted, eg. if you let loose a bear in an elementary school, but you'd have to argue for more than "they hacked someone" and "they knew about the risks".
Owning a dog that has been trained to bite intrudes is a significant responsibility and owning such a dog without taking the correct precautions is criminal.
Yes, of course! Negligent cause of injury or whatever it’s called in your particular jurisdiction. Wasn’t difficult to find examples of cases just like that. It would be astonishingly unjust if the postman had to personally sue for damages in civil court! Your stance in this debate is, honestly, flabbergasting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/iksvmXBzuC
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