At least that way I’d get to enjoy it while dying from my aneurysm.

Because of course he did.

What’s going to be their next trick? Launching a service that’ll watch the latest Netflix series for me and give me a summary when it’s done?

It’s Oracle: It’s not like they deliver value either way.

Well, that’s hella impressive.

Was the headline AI authored?

When it comes to GIS, I’ve mainly done consultancy work with Bentley’s products over the years, but QGIS is really, really good and getting better which is great for everyone. Competition is great, open source collaboration is even better.

I had torrents in mind. You could host them directly I suppose, but discoverability would be an issue.

Linux installer ISO images. Perfectly legal, and very helpful.

Quite possibly one of the best things that ever came out of IBM, and one my my favorite products of 1979 (along with “Alien”). Of course, Weisenbaum had a thing or two to say about the ELIZA Effect previously in 1966. As usual, nobody listened.

Excellent. Now let’s see all those juicy copyright violations.

I’ve got to be honest here: That’s not as hot as I thought it would be :(

I agree, and there are a number of other biases to consider. Here’s some I can think of:

• Firefox will mainly be running of desktops, laptops and smartphones. I would expect QA to be significantly better for this type of device than, say, consumer grade routers or TV boxes. But more concerning to me is stuff like cheap ATMs, industrial control systems (although Siemens have great QA) and elevator control systems etc. Infrastructure, not consumer toy, and Mozilla obviously aren’t the right people to say anything about the state of any of that.
• While Mozilla is currently estimating approximately 200 million installs, some of those - especially on Linux - will have disabled telemetry. I know I do. With that said, I can’t recall the last time I had a FF CTD (crash to desktop) but I suspect when I did, it wasn’t even a bug but an OOM (out-of-memory) kill because I was browsing on something like a 2Gb RAM micro-portable with insufficient swap. FF is one impressively stable piece of software these days.
• Firefox usage is not evenly globally distributed, and I have no way to reliably assess whether FF has a larger or smaller proportional usage in regions that may rely more on older or refurbished hardware, which I would expect to have higher HW error rates (although I cannot prove that either - I can’t find any good public aggregate data for RAM MTBF trends over time, but I’d be very interested if somebody else knows where to find authoritative answers on that).

(Un)fortunately, this may be the most Mozilla can provide in terms on insight. Their users tend to be particularly sensitive of perceived or practical privacy violations, so I understand - and appreciate - their caution in gathering data.

I don’t see the problem. It’s not threatening - barring exceptionally poor personal hygiene perhaps.

No, I’d missed that one, so thank you very much for the link. It was - as is typical of Doctorow’s musings - a very good read, which I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone else who’re interested.

598,524 rentable humans

Yeah. I’m done. If anybody needs me, I’ll be over here writing open source code in my spare time without externalizing my cognitive capability. I guess I’ll seek out a new career in public sanitation to pay the rent. At least that way, I’ll know I’m making an unambiguous positive contribution to society.

Quite apart from all other considerations, my problem with all this is: LLMs are no longer tools assisting us. We are tools assisting them. I don’t want to spend my life as an “LLM output checker”.

How long is that going to even work assuming you can find people willing to do it? Right now it occasionally does, but at what point will the group of people with the skills required to do so have shrunk and their abilities degraded to the point where everything devolves into a blind leading the blind scenario? LLMs have been trained on our code. Now we’re being trained on theirs, and it’s not going to end well.

Fair question. I find it unnerving, because there’s very little a software developer can meaningfully do if they cannot rely on the integrity of the hardware upon which their software is running, at least not without significant costs, and ultimately if the problem is bad enough even those would fail. This finding seems to indicate that a lot of hardware is much, much less reliable than I would have thought. I’ve written software for almost thirty years and across numerous platforms at this point, and the thought that I cannot assume a value stored in RAM to reliably retain it’s value fills me with the kind of dread I wouldn’t be able to explain to someone uninitiated without a major digression. Almost everything you do on any computing device - whether a server or a smart phone relies on the assumption of that kind of trust. And this seems to show that assumption is not merely flawed, but badly flawed.

Suppose you were a car mechanic confronted with a survey that 10 percent of cars were leaking breaking fluid - or fuel. That might illustrate how this makes me feel.

Cool, and this is an admittedly completely OT gripe not specific to this particular site, but:

I had to allow scripts from code.angularjs.org, ajax.googleapis.com, cdn.jsdelivr.net and unpkg.com… To load a bit of text on the front page that might as well have been, oh, i don’t know, HTML. It’s just a non-interactive website for goodness sake. Links, text, images. 228Kb javascript in total adding 0.5s to the page load time, for no apparent reason.

Well, that’s unnerving.