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In some roundabout way, it’s really pathetic that the evil corporations of our times are merely dopamine peddling advertisers, and not something more sinister.

I guess we should count ourselves lucky..


Meta has been responsible for a lot worse than merely dopamine peddling.

Yeah back in the day evil companies used to kill people in 3rd world countries and give their workers horrible diseases and injuries. I guess this is better?

Back in the day evil companies would overthrow governments and starve children.

It feels a bit darker that the US government is doing it now and being cheered on by their faithful voters in the name of religion and tax breaks for the wealthy and company leaders kowtowing and outright bribing in the open for favorable treatment.

Back in the day?

Let's see how many people we have in poverty and poor, unaffordable medical conditions in the US in 10 years due to government destruction/stagnation and a lack of controls on the impacts of AI.


[laughs in Burmese]

Which is based on Apple Webkit? The winner is always the last marketable brand.


Both are based on khtml. We could be living in a very different world if all that effort stayed inside the KDE ecosystem


Which came from "the KDE HTML Widget" AKA khtmlw. Wonder if that's the furthest we can go?

> if all that effort stayed inside the KDE ecosystem

Probably nowhere, people rather not do anything that contribute to something that does decisions they disagree with. Forking is beautiful, and I think improves things more than it hurts. Think of all the things we wouldn't have if it wasn't for forking projects :)


On the other hand if that had stopped google from having a browser they push into total dominance with the help of sleazy methods, maybe that would have been better overall.


I still prefer a open source chromium base vs a proprietary IE (or whatever else) Web Engine dominating.

(Fixing IE6 issues was no fun)

Also I do believe, the main reason chrome got dominance is simply because it got better from a technical POV.

I started webdev on FF with firebug. But at some point chrome just got faster with superior dev tools. And their dev tools kept improving while FF stagnated and rather started and maintained u related social campaigns and otherwise engaged with shady tracking as well.


> I still prefer a open source chromium base vs a proprietary IE (or whatever else) Web Engine dominating.

Okay but that's not the tradeoff I was suggesting for consideration. Ideally nothing would have dominated, but if something was going to win I don't think it would have been IE retaking all of firefox's ground. And while I liked Opera at the time, that takeover is even less likely.

> Also I do believe, the main reason chrome got dominance is simply because it got better from a technical POV.

Partly it was technical prowess. But google pushing it on their web pages and paying to put an "install chrome" checkbox into the installers of unrelated programs was a big factor in chrome not just spreading but taking over.


> And their dev tools kept improving while FF stagnated and rather started and maintained u related social campaigns and otherwise engaged with shady tracking as well.

Since when you don't touch Firefox or try the dev tools ?


Where did I say anything like that?

(Wrote via FF)

I use FF for browsing, but every time I think of starting dev tools, maybe even just to have a look at some sites source code .. I quickly close them again and open chrome instead.

I wouldn't know where to start, to list all the things I miss in FF dev tools.

The only interesting thing for me they had, the 3D visualizer of the dom tree, they stopped years ago.


We might not have had Mozilla/Phoenix/Firefox in the first place if so either, who I'd like to think been a net-positive for the web since inception. At least I remember being saved by Firefox when the options were pretty much Internet Explorer or Opera on a Windows machine.


> they push into total dominance with the help of sleazy methods

Ah, yes. The famously sleazy "automatic security updates" and "performance."

It is amazing how people forget what the internet was like before Chrome. You could choose between IE, Firefox, or (shudder) Opera. IE was awful, Opera was weird, and the only thing that Firefox did better than customization was crash.

Now everyone uses Chrome/WebKit, because it just works. Mozilla abandoning Servo is awful, but considering that Servo was indirectly funded by Google in the first place... well, it's really hard to look at what Google has done to browsing and say that we're worse off than we were before.


Have you read about the process of "enshittification"?


Bah! Just another "Hello World" fork if you ask me.


> Both are based on khtml. We could be living in a very different world if all that effort stayed inside the KDE ecosystem

How so?

Do you think thousands of googlers and apple engineers could be reasonably managed by some KDE opensource contributors? Or do you imagine google and apple would have taken over KDE? (Does anyone want that? Sounds horrible.)


I think they meant we wouldn’t have had Safari, Chrome, Node, Electron, VSCode, Obsidian? Maybe no TyeScript or React either (before V8, JavaScript engines sucked). The world might have adopted more of Mozilla.


Note that these are somewhat different kinds of "based on".

Chromium is an upstream dependency (by way of Electron) for VSCode.

WebKit was an upstream dependency of Chromium, but is no more since the Blink/WebKit hard fork.


that's a bit misleading. it was based on webcore which apple had forked from khtml. however google found apple's addition to be a drag and i think very little of it (if anything at all, besides the khtml foundation) survived "the great cleanup" and rewrite that became blink. so actually webkit was a just transitional phase that led to a dead end and it is more accurate to say that blink is based on khtml.


It's "based on WebKit" like English is based on Germanic languages.


English is a Germanic language. It’s part of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic family of languages.


This fact adds nothing to the discussion


That drives exactly $0 of Apple's revenue. It's only a win if you care about things that don't matter.


And Apple is not even the last node in the chain.

WebKit came from KDE's khtml

Every year is the year of Linux.


Amen.

Now, let’s dream of doing some things!


For me it helps to simply search for willingness to pay. The push-pull between your conceived offering and the customer’s perceived value, tend to turn these persona assumptions into something testable. Then, once true WtP is established, you can model a persona, but in my experience, too much wishful thinking goes into world modeling unless you go outside right away.


My lazy answer is to search for ADC on https://cds.cern.ch


Add this to an open ended Morrowind sequel- with a tint of Minecraft and LLM driven narrative - and you would have caught the 18yo me in an infinite loop. Danger stuff, pure alchemy in fact…


That may be an interpretation. Another is that many have difficulty regulating their feelings, and “venting” the discomfort in this semi-controlled manner is a socially acceptable release because it invites others to do the same to you, and you all minimize the risk of catastrophic attacks under tension.


Yes! I’ve noticed that when people struggle to manage their emotions, it often comes out in a kind of jabbing or teasing way. It’s usually not really about the other person, it’s more a reflection of their own insecurities. For example, the guy jabbing his friend for being short is probably not that tall himself and may feel insecure about it deep down. There could be some unprocessed feelings around it. The genuinely tall person usually couldn’t care less. The thought of making that jab doesn’t really even surface lol


Only when it’s dark, overcast, winter or really cold. Otherwise it’s mainly due to the extreme overcapacity required to handle distributed unreliable energy sources as well as an increasing fleet of electric cars, stressing every last kilometer of the grid. And windmills, a reliance on methane gas as gap-filling and a few other issues. (Sorry, I know snarking is frowned upon on HN - but we choose this collective delusion over the hellish, yet stable, Cherenkov light of nuclear)


How will you make the electricity cheaper when nuclear power requires above 20 cents/kWh excluding transmission costs and everything else to get built in 2025?

You also do know that said nuclear plants won't deliver a new kWh to the grid until the 2040s?

What problem are you even solving?


Yes, large scale infrastructure projects takes time. 15 years is not really that long.

I would rather we started rebuilding our energy infrastructure today than later…


Assuming the LLM is more competent than the user, it will still require “absorptive capacity” for the user to meaningfully use the output.

Many discuss AI without considering that unless the LLM is going to take over the entire process, those interacting with it, must be sufficiently skilled to do the integration and management themselves.

This goes for organizations and industries as well. Which is why many companies struggle with merely digitalizing their products.


And yet, not everything is so pretty at CERN.

Just consider their Large Hamster Collider! It’s a travesty, and last I head, they were colliding billions of hamster per second. You also got to ask what they do with the resulting elephants and whatnot coming out of those relativistic collisions.


Oh that's an easy one, they go to the Geneva Zoo and from there they get trafficked all over the world. It's essentially whitewashing of hamsters on an elephantine scale. We got one of those here as well, it looks like the real deal from a distance but up close the illusion falls apart. The thing that will get you is all the little eyes staring at you and the incessant mewing sounds.


I hope they're humanely harvesting their eyeballs for boba before putting them in the collider. Such a waste otherwise.

https://img.ifunny.co/images/c736301a01cc03ff1f03dac1c8b87f7...


I remember when Outpost.com's initial gerbil collision tests led to public outcry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZIwetqq3H8


Hamsters can be kind of assholes though. At least my sister's hamster was one.



I always suspected platypuses are the evolutionary equivalent of fake news. And now we know!


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