I can relate to this feeling, having encountered it many times in academia. But the inverse would also be true, would you stop reading yet another article that explains for the umpteenth time what library Y does? Not arguing for the author, but there’s certainly something about knowing and writing for your audience.
I kinda wondered myself if this was some kind of coordinated effort to make Firefox not work. It wouldn't surprise me if it was later discovered that Google paid some Linux subsystem maintainer to slip in some nefarious code somewhere that altered the way Linux implements rendering specifications ever so slightly such that Firefox appeared broken. Just the conspiracy theorist in me.
See, this is the kind of thing that makes Firefox cool. They have not only just as good of developer console tools as Chrome, they have forward thinking, truly user-oriented policies. They have had trouble in the recent past at securing funding, but something tells me their user philosophy might save them when all the others turn completely to corporate greed as their main operating mechanism (if they already haven't).
Your reply makes no sense. To the original point, if they had user-oriented policies, they'd have ad-blocking baked in by now. But they don't, and likely never will.
> Your reply makes no sense. To the original point, if they had user-oriented policies, they'd have ad-blocking baked in by now.
It's not black and white, and your inability to see the larger context is disturbing.
You could, by the same logic, criticize Mozilla for not serving you coffee which is certainly a "user-oriented policy" "baked-in" or rather "brewed-in". But we must be realistic about how far UOPs can be stretched, Mozilla is better than the rest, which includes large corps with far more money than them. If you can do better than Mozilla, I'm all ears.
Next, an ad-blocker needs continuous maintenance - someone started a good one long time ago and apparently loves to improve it and maintain the various lists it uses - why should Mozilla strain to compete with one of their best contributors? - that would be both rude and dumb, and they'd be wasting resources too. There's absolutely no upside to your proposition but you keep insisting.
> Next, an ad-blocker needs continuous maintenance - someone started a good one long time ago and apparently loves to improve it and maintain the various lists it uses - why should Mozilla strain to compete with one of their best contributors? - that would be both rude and dumb, and they'd be wasting resources too. There's absolutely no upside to your proposition but you keep insisting.
One would hope that's one of the more useful things an LLM could assist with if not now, very soon. In the meantime, there's no reason they couldn't have uBlock kept as an extension but bundled by default like they've done with other functionality over the years. Wait, never mind. There's one rea$on why they wouldn't, and it's already been $tated.
It is possible to write your own extension and still use it in Chrome as long as it's not bundled. It would be a huge pain to get the source for uBlock origin and implement it locally yourself, but it might be worth the pain to block ads.
The original uBO relies on Manifest V2, the API Chrome no longer supports. It's impossible to run full UBO (not Lite MV3 version) on current versions on Chrome.
Absolutely correct. If you always mow in the same direction, the grass always gets pushed in the same way by the lawnmowers blades and it will eventually morph to that direction and lose strength, which appears as grass that doesn't stand straight up, and it looks worse.
Here, the author used a much less domain-specific LLM and it sounds like it produced good results. This made me wonder about other's experiences using LLMs to produce both CAD and schematics/pcb layout. Are there any good references people could leave of the tools people are using for this kind of AI-assisted design that are producing acceptable results today?
I tried Flux.ai for electronics for example, and found it too confusing and not as helpful as I'd hoped. I'm hopeful that I can lean on generic AI tools in the future to augment some of the detailed design (while still applying thorough oversight and review of what's produced based on experience).
I wish I could just go forward to the world after AI has fulfilled 5% of its promise and everybody is much healthier and single-handedly capable of creating as much value as 1000-person companies used to create.
I actually think the world is a better place when there's at least a bit of scarcity and people can recognize each other for their different talents. A bit of tech is good but when everyone can create endless value in your hypothetical world, people will stop valuing the work of others like they do today.
I think this is always the mindset of people who are on the “correct” side of the previous technological regime.
Placing artificial constraints on output is always a mistake to me.
For example in music you used to have only a small amount of output because studio time was very expensive so you needed a record deal which only came about by an exec picking you. It meant there was some sort of quality bar on the radio, but it also stifled the creativity of everyone who couldn’t get into the studio.
Fast forward and the radio (or pick your curated channel) still exists but no one listens to it because there is an infinite amount of quality (and not quality! which is OK!) music that got created that fits the taste of the artist that was previously locked out.
More people are trying to be artists, but there are also more artists (music) than any time in history making a living.
Lack of scarcity is good. Universal opportunity means more completion, which makes it difficult, but artificially locking out all the people who who would love to compete is not the solution.
Maybe it’s not a good goal to get a billion people to like you or be on your platform, maybe just having a small handful is OK, and finding a small handful that value your work is now possible for a lot more people even if it makes it harder for a ton of people to value that same work.
> Fast forward and the radio (or pick your curated channel) still exists but no one listens to it because there is an infinite amount of quality (and not quality! which is OK!) music that got created that fits the taste of the artist that was previously locked out.
> More people are trying to be artists, but there are also more artists (music) than any time in history making a living.
> Lack of scarcity is good. Universal opportunity means more completion, which makes it difficult, but artificially locking out all the people who who would love to compete is not the solution.
I agree that some lockout is bad. But I was arguing for an optimal point in betweeen, not the other extreme like you mentioned, which is everyone being able to do everything.
Take the App store. It's a pretty low bar to get in. Anyone can publish an app on a mobile phone app store and as a result there are hundreds of low quality apps for everything and even maybe 20 decent apps and it's a frustrating experience to use because you have to browse through thousands to find one....
I wouldn't use the word lockout. But SOME barrier to entry is good. No barrier is as bad as a huge barrier.
You're talking about only the distribution here rather than production, which is a bit different. e.g., making music in a bedroom or using AI to create software increases the total amount of music and software in the world without tackling the question of who sees it.
I'll try to answer that part as well.
Of course, the content/product/output should be legal, but otherwise, who are you (or I) to judge what is quality? Is Wordle not quality because it's not GTA 6? Should I not be able to make a cool flashlight app because one already exists on the phone? I'd much rather a lot of false positives here than false negatives.
Ideally, you have almost no barrier and the proper discovery mechanisms. Allowing everyone to compete. This happens everytime increases in output happen.
iPhone video -> more videos -> better discovery mechanisms on Youtube/TikTok/IG.
Easier website hosting -> more websites -> web search.
That's why the biggest companies in the world (Google, Meta, Spotify, TikTok) have super low barriers becasue they realized they can't tell what good quality is or not. Most people complain that those platforms should be MORE open, not less. Ironically, I would argue the App Store is a great example of artificial scarcity (one app store with one forced business model) leading to a lower quality experience.
But again, this is all distribution, I can't see a world where I would ever want the creation of positive things to be made more difficult.
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