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Osmose

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I am a computer programmer!

Twitter: @Osmose

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a-million-little-things.ghost.io 4y ago

On Motivation and Sustainability

Osmose
1pts0
github.com 7y ago

The Economics of Package Management

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58pts6
www.mkelly.me 8y ago

Data Collection at Mozilla: Browser Errors

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blog.mozilla.org 9y ago

Distrusting New WoSign and StartCom Certificates

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8pts1
twitter.com 10y ago

JSON Inspector in Firefox Developer Edition

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1pts0
refract.mkelly.me 11y ago

Refract – Turn any website into an installable application

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blog.mozilla.org 11y ago

Panasonic Making Firefox OS Smart TVs

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blog.mozilla.org 11y ago

New Search Strategy for Firefox

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430pts344
openstandard.mozilla.org 11y ago

The Open Standard, a news site about open, transparent, collaborative systems

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7pts1
www.humblebundle.com 11y ago

Humble Mozilla Bundle

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blog.mozilla.org 11y ago

Chris Beard Named CEO of Mozilla

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162pts141
thenextweb.com 12y ago

Firefox OS coming to TVs, tablets, and desktops

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1pts0
harpjs.com 12y ago

Harp – Open-source web server with built-in pre-processing

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96pts30
air.mozilla.org 13y ago

Poetic APIs - Erik Rose

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code.google.com 14y ago

Chrome limits off-store extension installs

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www.viddler.com 15y ago

IBM's Watson supercomputer plays a round of Jeopardy against grand champions

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github.com 15y ago

500M+ Dump of Kinect Sensor Data

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pixelverse.org 16y ago

Flixel ported to Unity

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1pts0
my.barackobama.com 16y ago

Streaming Bipartisan Meeting on Health Reform

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Some fun historical context behind the outline algorithm and why it didn't catch on: https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=25003

In short, the W3C adopted it because they thought it was a good idea, while browsers and screen readers both refused to adopt it for various reasons like ambiguity with existing web content or concerns about screen readers having to implement and maintain their own independent outline algorithm implementations. 8 years and an entire standards organization after the thread above, the WHATWG finally dropped it.

LLMs are not a general public benefit. Artists whose work is trained upon by text-to-image models aren't made any more whole just because Meta has to share its weights—it just means it's even cheaper for the folks impersonating them or effortlessly ripping off their style to keep doing so.

Meta really does not need to be subsidized when they have so many resources at hand—if LLMs are really hard to train without that much data, then perhaps that's a flaw with the approach instead of something the world has to accommodate.

Bun 1.1 2 years ago

The speed increases are nothing to sneeze at; I've moved a few Vite projects over to Bun and even without specific optimizations it's still noticeably faster.

A specific use case where Bun beat the pants out of Node for me was making a standalone executable. Node has a very VERY in-development API for this that requires a lot of work and doesn't support much, and all the other options (pkg, NEXE, ncc, nodejs-static) are out-of-date, unmaintained, support a single OS, etc.

`bun build --compile` worked out-of-the-box for me, with the caveat of not supporting native node libraries at the time—this 1.1 release fixes that issue.

You have a narrow view of what a beautiful experience is. It does not require professional-level voice acting.

It is not unfair that, in order to have voice acting, you must have someone perform voice acting. You don't have the natural right to professional-level voice acting for free, nor do you need it to create beautiful things.

The tech is simply something that may be possible, and it has tradeoffs, and claiming that it's an accessibility problem does not grant you permission to ignore the tradeoffs.

The lightness with which you treat forcing tens of thousands of people to change their career is absurd. Indie games are hardly suffering for a lack of voice acting, even if you only look at it from a market perspective and ignore that voice acting is a creative interpretation and not simply reading the words the way the director wants.

Yes, we should avoid using it because it will upend the lives of a significant amount of artists for the primary benefit of "some indie games will have more voice acting and big game companies will be able to save money on voice actors". That's not worth it, how could you think it is?

I've refused to work on AI-related initiatives at previous jobs, and will again if they ever come up. I have deep ethical objections about LLMs in terms of power use, consent for providing training data, fitness and safety of LLM-powered solutions for problems that cannot afford errors, and the potential and already-happening effects of replacing human workers without a suitable safety net for when their incomes disappear.

Crucially, I do not think predictions that all these issues will improve is a good enough justification to keep innovating before they have improved. Harm caused now is not undone just because we fixed the flaws later.

In that sense: I think feeling weird about the hype train is completely normal, but for different reasons. I do not want any complicity in legitimizing LLMs.

Besides ethical concerns, I also think the myriad applications of LLMs are mostly misguided market waste. In that sense, profiting off the hype could be seen as you simply slurping up some of that waste for yourself, and while I don't like that function of the system, I think the system is the issue rather than you trying to exist within it. If you don't share my ethical concerns or aren't objecting to the market's function of trying all ideas and assuming the good ones profit, then you're probably not really doing anything scummy by your own standards.

He has generally great insights about principles to aim for, which is part of the answer, but no, he does not have the entire answer. His insights are inspiration for others who contribute their own parts to potential answers—that's how open collaboration works.

Kids playing Zelda for free might be spending their opportunity cost Money on Xbox instead.

...I don't follow? You're suggesting businesses have a right to attention?

But Yuzu wasn't acting in good faith. The team saw abuse firsthand and embraced it.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, they had rules against ROM distribution and some of the links shared as evidence that they didn't have been by unrelated people.

I believe that Yuzu includes a standalone implementation of the Switch firmware but can run user-provided firmware because a few games have compatibility issues, and it doesn't run Nintendo's own OS software (you can't run the Switch system menu on it, for example).

But to your larger point: Nintendo being mad about people sharing Switch ROMs or Yuzu funding their work shouldn't have any bearing on the actual legal question of whether Yuzu violates the DMCA anti-circumvention clause. Dolphin argued after legal consultation that inclusion of these keys qualifies under exceptions for interoperability; Yuzu doesn't include the keys at all. It doesn't appear to have been a question tested in the courts yet.

That point _does_ matter if you're making a moral argument about whether Yuzu crossed a line, but given that emulation has been commonplace for almost the entirety of Nintendo's video game business and it has done very little to stop them from staying on top of the game industry, but has enabled millions to experience and be inspired by games they would've otherwise never have been able to play, I'm not terribly convinced that $23k a month in donations is wrong for people putting in serious engineering work into a project that enables that.

Because they can't form a union in the first place due to union busting tactics like compulsory meetings that talk about how unions are bad, hiring consultants that spread fear and misinformation, or just threatening your livelihood by firing you for even attempting to form one.

There's a power imbalance—enforcement exists to help balance the scales so that an efficient negotiation between workers and the company can happen.

Sure you in theory vote for union leaders, but in practice it ends up being just as bad as any other politics

This is not at all universally true? A union can be dysfunctional just like any other collaboration between people—that's hardly a reason to not even try.

Specifically, I joined the Glitch union along with my coworkers in 2020, and we were pretty united on what we wanted to negotiate for. The union more than paid for the effort we put in to forming it and our dues when it won severance and health coverage for those hit by layoffs later.

What is the difference between being fired and being told we don't have any work for you? Labors often do lose their job - they may still be in the union and thus early in line if there is another job, but they don't have control of when jobs come up.

What does this have to do with a union improving the power balance in negotiations between employees and a company? If you're suggesting that even with a union companies can find ways to get rid of you, well, that's one of the very things unions can fight against with the help of the labor board being threatened in the article above.

Rightness and legality are intertwined in a world where laws are slower than public opinion and people can voluntarily choose to do more than only what the law allows for.

But a more direct criticism of the legal aspect would be: getting a job is voluntary from a legal perspective, how does that make joining the associated union a compelled action? The union is part of the job.

Besides, union security agreements already _are_ heavily regulated in the US.

What gets me about opposition to unions as limiting a free market is that unions solve a very real problem with the efficiency of employee negotiations. A union is a much more efficient way to discover what the employees want from their workplaces than negotiating individually with them one by one.

When negotiations break down, the union makes it clear and potentially strikes or takes other steps to pressure the company. When individual employee negotiations break down, you get churn and underperformance and dissatisfaction. People will often see burnout or mismanagement and assume it's an individual issue vs a breakdown in the contract between workers and the company.

The point of a union is that if you don't like it you can advocate to it for changes with less of a power imbalance than if it was the company that you didn't like. The union can't fire you like the company can.

To paraphrase a common argument about why we don't need unions, if you don't like the union, why not just find another job?

If your actual point is that "The virtual DOM is faster than a slow-but-common pattern of DOM mutation" then, sure. We have different experiences in how common wiping out the entire DOM really was in apps not using frameworks but differing experiences is normal.

But in a comment thread of people saying the virtual DOM is not faster than equivalent manual DOM mutations you can understand why "The virtual DOM was faster than the DOM" got understood differently since it lacked that clarification.

You're right that it was difficult, that's part of why React caught on. But lots of apps did it anyway—its not as impossible as you make it seem if you take the time to write some abstractions around checking what needs to be done or centralizing all DOM operations to reduce the chance of other code modifying then. I worked on multiple complex web apps that did things like this. It's just tedious and error-prone.

None of those links say that React is faster than using no framework, just that it is fast, presumably compared to other frameworks or techniques before that did DOM replacement.

I guess you could say that not being specific was misleading but we'd have to agree to disagree on that. I _did_ work on the web a decade ago and my recollection is that it wasn't ever unclear that React's performance claims were that it was fast for a framework and not faster than equivalent manual DOM mutations.

Your second statement that the virtual DOM lets you skip unnecessary DOM mutations is true, but the first statement is inaccurate because "DOM" is not equivalent to "regenerate and replace all the DOM nodes with updated ones".

Prior to React, performant apps that weren't using frameworks that regenerated the entire DOM tree would simply manually mutate the DOM nodes based on what it was doing. If your app was loading a new comment, it would find the list of comment nodes and append a new one to it, same as a virtual DOM would.

The problem is that this could be error-prone in large apps—are you even sure that the comment list is still on the page? If it's not, do you need to add it to the page or is this a completely new view and you're reacting to a network request that finished after the user navigated away from the page? That's the kind of finnicky manual work that React helped simplify, but the performance was the same as an app manually mutating the DOM plus the extra virtual DOM comparisons.

it was explicitly pushed and advertised as such

I'm sure React fans who misunderstood the virtual DOM (which was explicitly advertised because it was the most popular part of React[1] vs the other parts that people were more critical of) may have said this, but I never saw the project itself advertising itself as faster than vanilla JS, only that it could be faster than competing frameworks, _especially_ ones that rebuilt the DOM unnecessarily.

I dunno, I used Redux for a few years

Redux is a different library than React. State management across an app is a problem even for non-React applications, it's not like React _uniquely requires_ work to address state management.

I don't see why your dissatisfaction with Redux has anything to do with React making a very specific and buggy part of building web apps easier to manage in return for a performance cost and following its API.

[1]: See mention near the end of https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/youre-missing-the-point-of-r...