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?

The most anticipated release of 2013.

Frankie Boyle: “Humans actually make quite poor shields. That’s why we invented… the shield.”

I had hopes for recurrent systems becoming kinda… Dixie Flatline. Maybe not general enough to learn, but spooky enough to evaluate claims.

Well thank god that’s not what I wrote. What does run on corn flakes is natural GI… in several senses.

You do all this on three pounds of wet meat powered by cornflakes.

The idea we’ll never recreate it through deliberate effort is absurd.

What you mean is, LLMs probably aren’t how we get there. Which is fair. “Spicy autocorrect” is a limited approach with occasionally spooky results. It does a bunch of stuff people insisted would never happen without AGI - but that’s how this always goes. The products of human intelligence have always shown some hard-to-define qualities which humans can eventually distinguish from our efforts to make a machine produce anything similar.

Just remember the distinction got narrower.

Like adding vertical tabs?

Having fucked an entire ecosystem of UI-modifying plugins, seven years prior. Still not matching the functionality of that decades-running, userbase-driven experimentation. I want my goddamn multi-row tabs back.

Mozilla doesn’t get kudos for tiny improvements as if they cancel out huge blunders. Killing vertical tabs by killing XUL also severely limited DownThemAll, and they spent a year ignoring pleas from the guy that gave their browser and their browser alone the best download plugin to-date. He eventually managed to “just rewrite!” and claw most functionality back from Chrome’s tightassed tool-kit. Most authors did not. Most authors had not, since the browser fucking launched. I can barely remember how much functionality I’ve lost, thanks to Mozilla refusing to respect plugin devs and formalize any lasting API. The best bits did come back, thanks to other authors who also missed those features… until they too burned out and fucked off.

But hey! Mozilla also made some clever tweaks inside the only software project that advertises their true passion for smartphones I mean chat I mean crypto I mean AI I mean $nextbigtrend, so it’s squaresies.

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.

Oldies

Yeah that’ll happen.

Classic rock

NO CLASSIC ROCK IS A SPECIFIC GENRE GOD DAMMIT EMINEM WILL NEVER QUALIFY BECAUSE HE’S NOT A FUCKING ROCK ARTIST

Mods are asleep, post… as before.

Yes, after twenty years of refusing to stabilize any part of that interface.

Chrome is absolutely the villain in this context. But Mozilla has been fucking itself over since the single-digit version numbers.

Linux Mint is the most Windows-like Linux distro.

Ubuntu is the most Microsoft-like Linux project.

Programming is the gradual collection of mantras.

when he had both the incumbent advantage and was still riding the post-9/11 patriotism wave

And slandering John Kerry, actual veteran and protestor, with “swiftboating” horseshit.

W’s media goons were some of the slimiest motherfuckers ever to darken Washington’s marble halls.

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

Nvidia’s grip on CUDA needs breaking, one way or another.

NTFS for the drive I had before jumping to Mint. Currently reporting several hundred gigabytes free, but refusing to make any new files, because… I don’t know. I’ll deal with it after an upcoming move.

The OS / home SSD is ext4, and so is the fat loud hard disk I recently purchased through an entire month of fighting Amazon over gift cards.