There have been many tools that were sold as developer replacements over the years.
- Microsoft FrontPage
- Adobe Dreamweaver
- A litany of glorified WYSIWYG editors
- WordPress
- Wix
- Power Apps/SharePoint
...and so on.
Business owners have been getting sexually aroused at the prospect of taking a developer's salary and putting it in their own pockets for decades. Each iteration of this wet dream has only locked businesses into "low code" systems that require even more, highly-specialized developers to operate. Right now, and probably for a while, Devon, et al. is on par with the drag-and-drop automagical app building snake oil stuff.
LLMs are useful to help developers be more productive, which does translate to lay-offs, but until someone creates an AI that can translate the absolute fevered gibberish that comes out of business people's heads into a profitable piece of software, this is just MS FrontPage v100.0.
Just like an entire industry sprang up around fixing WordPress websites that business owners thought they could do themselves, pretty soon we'll start seeing job postings for AI-Generated Spaghetti Unravellers.
I'm (half seriously) imagining a future were software engineers are mostly consultants that show up and talk with business folks, then talk with the local robot, and get the project to actually work. Bill $1k per hour.
It is important to keep Firefox solvent and operational as it is the last real independent browser. Everything else is built on Chromium (or Webkit), which are owned and spied upon by Google (and Apple?)
I definitely agree. I’m just incredibly suspicious—and sick—of obnoxious ads, especially when they’re being pushed by companies whose products play a pretty major role in what I do online. We’ve seen how disgusting some of those smart TV manufacturers were willing to get: unremovable home screen ads, selling user data, etc. I think that happened in large part because some marketing weasel was like “hey, what if we…” and the rest of us didn’t say “no, never, we will punish you for that.”
At least, not in time. Right now, Mozilla is dipping a toe in the water, and it needs to be made unignorably clear to them that mistreating what remains of their userbase is not the answer.
Yes. I'm sure a similar conversation happened during the first radio show, or the first magazine. Now the slippery slope has given us ads on billboards, on the radio, every three minutes on television, each inch of public space including right in your face at the urinal, on blimps, pulled behind airplanes, written in the sky, on the inside and outside of taxis and buses and trucks, in every store on every shelf, you are barraged while trapped at the gas pump, before a movie you already paid to see, they hire people to wave signs in your face while waiting at stoplights, and advertising is baked in to every electron of the Internet... you get the point; it's extremely bad for your personal mental health and that of society in general.
If we don't complain and let them know that subjecting us to sleazy ads is intolerable, where will it end?
A browser is a tool that we have to use for work. It is impossible to block bait-and-switch ads built in like this. It's bait-and-switch because the expected behavior is to display the changelog, not an advertisement for Disney.
I put enormous effort into blocking as much advertising and marketing from my life as is humanly possible. I have written my own browser plugins and scripts, I have created network-wide blockers, I do not listen to the radio, I do not watch television, I do not look at billboards.
I use Firefox to protect my privacy from advertisers and to block ads. So you may be able to imaging my rage when Firefox updated and automatically loaded this full-page ad from Our Dark Lord Disney:
It's no secret that Mozilla needs cash. But I imagine this move is counter-productive as a lot of people like me, who support them monetarily as much as I can by purchasing their various apps and services, are driven away by loathsome ads.
I think this kind of mentality can only be properly appreciated when you've attempted it for yourself. It's a lot of work, but I think that reclaiming the ability to better regulate your focus/attention is absolutely worth it.
It's honestly like quitting your drug of choice (e.g. even just coffee or alcohol) and observing the affect it has on you after using it again for a long time. Only in this case, there is no "upside" to these (forced) capitulations.
Advertising has become so entrenched that it acts as if it has absolute right to your hijack your attention, and this landscape respects no boundaries. Apple in particular drives me nuts doing the same thing: pitching their arcade or wifi hot-spot partnerships with absolutely no opt-out mechanism.
> Do you mean regulating your own focus in face of ads?
Quite the opposite. I have really poor ability to tune them out, especially any audio portions. Once in front of me, they get under my skin easily and this isn't something I feel comfortable trying to just accept, despite how much "easier" it'd make things.
> Because it does not get better. As you begin to adapt to them, the ads change.
Agreed 100%, thus why zero tolerance is the only permissible option for me.
Here is a wager I don't wanna win: the "apps are constantly force-updated" world merges with the marketing world so that downtime is filled with ads. It's devilishly perfect: you're eagerly waiting to use the thing, so you're already a captive audience.
Interesting. Yes; it is a slimy bait-and-switch ad for Disney's newest animated series - ultimately an ad for their streaming service. I will not support them by posting links here.
Vivaldi, by one of the creators (and former CEO of the original Opera, still seems decent, they don't have any bullshit like a "buy now pay later" extension or a rendering engine that inserts ads.
Safari does not seem to have a robust adblocker solution. I could be mistaken but it seems like you can only install extensions through their app store? So convoluted compared to Chrome. It is blazing fast though. :/
I've been using an adblocker on Safari in combination with either NextDNS or PiHole. Works not too bad. Only reason I use Firefox/Chrome is because I'm a frontend dev.
This is disgusting. I mean, if they said "ok, you know what, we can't survive without ads. So here go the ads" - I'd be sad, but I'd understand. But they make it look like "oh no, we still hate ads, and are totally independent, but this new $INSERT_OUR_SPONSOR_PRODUCT_HERE is so good, we can't help but advertising it anyway!". They are capitalizing on their accumulated image of non-commercial independent entity to push Disney products. I hope at least they got some really good money from it, because this is something you can only sell once, after this it's worthless.
Can you open that page, hit F12 and look for the trackers, analytic scripts etc?
I hate this "We forced you to update, also we are the privacy, also we absolutely can fingerprint you because we forced you to see this page you didn't asked to look".
Business owners have been getting sexually aroused at the prospect of taking a developer's salary and putting it in their own pockets for decades. Each iteration of this wet dream has only locked businesses into "low code" systems that require even more, highly-specialized developers to operate. Right now, and probably for a while, Devon, et al. is on par with the drag-and-drop automagical app building snake oil stuff.
LLMs are useful to help developers be more productive, which does translate to lay-offs, but until someone creates an AI that can translate the absolute fevered gibberish that comes out of business people's heads into a profitable piece of software, this is just MS FrontPage v100.0.
Just like an entire industry sprang up around fixing WordPress websites that business owners thought they could do themselves, pretty soon we'll start seeing job postings for AI-Generated Spaghetti Unravellers.
I'm (half seriously) imagining a future were software engineers are mostly consultants that show up and talk with business folks, then talk with the local robot, and get the project to actually work. Bill $1k per hour.