Browsers contain several high complexity pieces each of could take a while to build on its own, and interconnect them with reasonably verbose APIs that need to be implemented or at least stubbed out for code to not crash. There is also the difficulty of matching existing implementations quirk for quirk.
I guess the complexity is on-par with operating systems, but with the added compatibility problems that in order to be useful it doesn't just have to load sites intended to be compatible with it, it has to handle sites people actually use on the internet, and those are both a moving target, and tend to use lots of high complexity features that you have to build or at least stub out before the site will even work.
In all sincerity, this question is almost identical to "what's the most difficult thing about building an operating system" as a modern browser is tens of millions of lines of code that can run sophisticated applications. It has a network stack, half a dozen parsers, frame construction and reflow modules, composite, render and paint components, front end UI components, an extensibility framework, and more. Each one of these must enable supporting backward compatibility for 30 year old content as well as ridiculously complex contemporary web apps. And it has to load and render sites that a completely programming illiterate fool like me wrote. It must do this all in a performant and secure way using minimal system resources. Also, it probably also must run on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and maybe more.
Check out the list of all CSS specifications [1], and then open any one of them and see how lengthy and elaborate each is. Then do the same for each version of the spec published over the last thirty years. Before you can start, you must read and understand all of this at a great level of depth. Still, specifications never tell the complete story. You must be aware of all the nuances that are implied by each requirement in the spec and know how to handle the zillion corner cases that will crop up inevitably.
And this is just one part. Not even considering the fully sandboxed, mini operating system for running webapps.
Are these not the 'friction can be ignored' assumptions of economics? They are, of course, blatantly false. But that doesn't stop such models from effectively modelling real-world behavior.
Granted, I know a slight bit about general equilibrium theory, but nothing about DSGE.
I'm always surprised when people suggest using a different language if you want typing in Python. Python's (second?) largest appeal is probably its extensive ecosystem. Whenever people suggest just changing languages, I wonder if they work in isolation, without the need for certain packages or co-worker proficiency in that language.
I think people usually say it for a different reason.
Types are not enforced. You can annotate your code that looks correct to the type checker, but the actual data flow at runtime can be with different types.
And it happens quite often in large codebases. Sometimes external dependencies report wrong types, e.g., a tuple instead of a list. It's easy to make such a mistake when a library is written in a compiled language and just provides stubs for types. Tuples and lists share the same methods, so it will work fine for a lot of use cases. And since your type checker will force you to use a tuple instead of a list, you will never know that it's actually a list that can be modified unless you disable type checking and inspect the data.
To be pedantic compiled languages only check types at compile time as well. If you have a C library that takes void* then it can easily go wrong at runtime.
Typing has only been around since python 3.5. As someone who has formally learned 2.7 in university when 3.0 had already been around for a few years, I suppose there are many who still lag years behind what the language can do due to old codebases and fears of incompatibility.
I personally don't see downloadability as a significant factor in the morality of breaching security. If it's bad to hack a login screen to gain access to private information, why wouldn't it be bad to hack encryption to do the same thing? What moral dimension does downloadability alter?
I think the house analogy fails because you cannot duplicate a house, take it somewhere else, and attempt to break into it there. If you could, that would undoubtedly be seen as a violation.
I've never gotten a straight answer as to whether AGI is a good thing for humanity or the economy.
Real AGI would be alive and would be capable of art and music and suffering and community, of course. So there would really be no more need for humans except to shovel the coal (or bodies of other humans) into the furnace that power the Truly Valuable members is society, the superintelligent AIs, which all other aspects of our society will be structured towards serving.
Real AGI might realistically decide to go to war with us if we've leaned anything from current LLMs and their penchant for blackmail
Best case scenario for ASI is that they create enormous wealth and will keep humans around as pets because it costs essentially nothing, like in the Culture series by Ian Banks or The Polity series Neal Asher.
Humans are extremely costly in terms of the resources we need in order to survive, the space we take up, and the messes we make (everything from the shit and piss we generate to the wars/destruction/death/violence we inflict on pretty much everything around us). We'd make for entertaining pets, but we're the farthest thing from low maintenance. Even ignoring that all other animals on earth share many of the problems we'd impose on our owners we stand alone in having done devastating amounts of damage (some irreversible) to ourselves and our planet.
I'd hope that they'd keep a few of us around, but it's hard to see the logic in them keeping all of us and allowing us the freedom to live and breed the way we do right now.
No, AGI isn't a good thing. We should expect it to go badly, because there are so many ways it could be catastrophic. Bad outcomes might even be the default without intervention. We have virtually no idea how to drive good outcomes of AGI.
AGI isn't being pursued because it will be good, it's being pursued because it is believed to be more-or-less inevitable, and everyone wants to be the one holding the reins for the best odds of survival and/or being crowned god-emperor (this is pretty obviously sam altman's angle for example)
A surprisingly sticky belief when taught young enough. Anxiety about having been left behind every time you come home to an empty house is just a bonus.
Thankfully education about physics, first principles, and critical thinking got me out from under it. Hopefully they can do the same for the rest--if we get them young enough.
