Yeah, that guy’s not joking.

It’s not some kayfabe act. He is sincere in all of that posturing assholery.

Block and move on.

Sometimes an engineer has an idea and gets offended that it doesn’t exist.

We’re like wizards. The miracles you want are practical, mundane, boring. The miracles we want are whimsical bullshit. Guess which ones get done sooner.

I have no idea why you’d do this.

But bravo.

The userbase’s downvote-happy inability to take criticism barely matters.

The other half of what’s wrong with .ml is the blatant censorship all over the goddamn site.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

This is dumb. Corporate divestment, sure, of course, fuck their money and their power structures. But open-source developers are not generally gung-ho about the war effort… let alone propping up their local military-industrial complex.

Open-source is politics.

The FOSS story, yes. But the code is out there. Even the stuff they weren’t supposed to share.

Can you name any userbase more ready to pirate the shit out of a third-party fork? Maybe the people still using Media Player Classic.

The browser should not be aiding it, regardless of how nice it acts. The most important extensions - by a fucking mile - are ad-blockers. They represent a crystal clear separation of websites delivering data versus what the user chooses to do with it. All threats to that distinction are a foot in the door for losing control of how your computer does what you want.

Quite frankly Mozilla’s been an obstacle to Firefox for many years. I don’t trust them and I don’t like them. This is yet another desperate pivot that squanders some of their vanishing goodwill and market share.

they should force WhatsApp/Apple/Signal/Telegram to scan all our private messages

Average person: “Fuck right off.”

for suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM)

Average person: “OH WELL I GUESS IT’S OKAY THEN.”

And the author spent a year hassling Mozilla about how killing XUL plugins would make his wildly popular plugin nearly impossible. Did they move one iota to help that? Nope. Did they adopt DTA functionality natively, like they’d absorbed Pocket? Did they fuck. Their mantra for two straight decades has been “just rewrite!” and they cannot imagine why they kept hemorrhaging devs and plugins and users once Chrome slimed its way into everyone’s options.

Never give Nintendo money.

There’s a dozen Firefox extensions that really matter, at any given time. Mozilla has never appeared to give a particular shit about any of them. Paying special attention based on popularity wouldn’t be ideal, but for fuck’s sake, their passive-aggressive treatment keeps burning out the developers who fuel their ecosystem, and it would take vanishingly little effort to shield their keystone plugins.

If their active neglect had ruined both uBlock and DownThemAll - I’m not sure I’d be using Firefox anymore, and I’ve been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox. Why the fuck would anyone normal even consider it?

wd40

We are all such dorks.

I have to admit - my initial outrage over Copilot training on open-source code has vanished.

Now that these networks are trained on literally anything they can grab, including extremely copyrighted movies… we’ve seen that they’re either thoroughly transformative soup, or else the worst compression and search tools you’ve ever seen. There’s not really a middle ground. The image models where people have teased out lookalike frames for Dune or whatever aren’t good at much else. The language models that try to answer questions as more than dream-sequence autocomplete poetry will confidently regurgitate dangerous nonsense because they’re immune to sarcasm.

The comparisons to a human learning from code by reading it are half-right. There are systems that discern relevant information without copying specific examples. They’re just utterly terrible at applying that information. Frankly, so are the ones copying specific examples. Once again, we’ve advanced the state of “AI,” and the A went a lot further than the I.

And I cannot get offended on Warner Brothers’ behalf if a bunch of their DVDs were sluiced into a model that can draw Superman. I don’t even care when people copy their movies wholesale. Extracting the essence of an iconic character from those movies is obviously a transformative use. If some program will emit “slow motion zoom on Superman slapping Elon Musk,” just from typing that, that’s cool as hell and I refuse to pretend otherwise. It’s far more interesting than whatever legal fictions both criminalized 1700s bootlegging and encouraged Walt Disney’s corpse to keep drawing.

So consider the inverse:

Someone trains a Copilot clone on a dataset including the leaked Windows source code.

Do you expect these corporations to suddenly claim their thing is being infringed upon, in front of any judge with two working eyes?

More importantly - do you think that stupid robot would be any help what-so-ever to Wine developers? I don’t. These networks are good at patterns, not specifics. Good is being generous. If I wanted that illicit network to shamelessly clone Windows code, I expect the brace style would definitely match, the syntax might parse, and the actual program would do approximately dick.

Neural networks feel like magic when hideously complex inputs have sparse approximate outputs. A zillion images could satisfy the request, “draw a cube.” Deep networks given a thousand human examples will discern some abstract concept of cube-ness… and also the fact you handed those thousand humans a blue pen. It’s simply not a good match for coding. Software development is largely about hideously complex outputs that satisfy sparse inputs in a very specific way. One line, one character, can screw things up in ways that feel incomprehensible. People have sneered about automation taking over coding since the punched-tape era, and there’s damn good reasons it keeps taking their jobs instead of ours. We’re not doing it on purpose. We’re always trying to make our work take less work. We simply do not know how to tell the machine to do what we do with machines. And apparently - neither do the machines.

I assumed he was big on Macs for their own sake. It’s a thing, for music geeks - and obviously he’s a fan of iPods, specifically. Surprised to hear his objectively correct summary of Windows versions.

Linux Mint is the most Windows-like Linux distro.

Ubuntu is the most Microsoft-like Linux project.

Mint is the distro that’s most like Windows, but Ubuntu is the project that’s most like Microsoft.