Aldo_MX

Brave surely is a major browser with 100+M MAU, not too distant from Firefox with 150+M MAU.

Decoupling material and cupertino makes a lot of sense.

Why do you expect an AI engineer to manually write prose?

  Location: Mexico City
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: TypeScript (Node.js + React), Redux, GraphQL
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aldomx/
  Email: aldomx@gmail.com

Who I am

Software developer, 30+ years of coding (18+ professionally). Started as a kid modding PC and Arcade games, and still doing that today: currently porting a WinXP-era game to mobile with the help of LLMs. That legacy codebase, with all its tech debt and ancient bugs, has taught me more about AI-assisted development than any professional project: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.amx.stepman...

What I've done

Led the migration of a 30M MAU website to TypeScript to cut production incidents from null-safety issues. Worked across PHP, .NET, Java, but gravitated to TypeScript/Node/React. I'm the person who doesn't wait for overseas teams to answer, and reads the code across a .NET Core backend, a Java/Spring payment service, and a bespoke Java microservice. LLMs lower the barrier, but it doesn't disappear.

What I'm looking for

Long-term remote role (ideally 5+ years). A team where knowledge sharing is a habit, not a nice-to-have. Where "why are we doing X?" is welcomed, and where ADRs come from real conversations instead of LLM auto-gen.

Let’s just say that Mozilla raised CEO salaries while laying off developers. The demand of transparency is well grounded on past behavior.

If I donate, I want more devs getting paid, not a CEO parasiting the non-profit.

This article is more skeptical:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ch...

That's not a realistic expectation.

Classic examples like:

  User: I'm feeling bad
  LLM: Have you considered k*****g yourself?

Are a good example of what an LLM "without censorship" looks like: Good at predicting the most common sequence of text (ex. the most common sarcastic reply from Reddit), but effectively useless.

In order to build a useful LLM (ie. one that actually follows instructions) you need to teach the LLM to prefer the most helpful answer, and that process by itself is already an implicit layer of "censorship" as it requires human supervision, and different humans have different perceptions on what the most helpful answer is, especially when their paycheck is conditioned to a list of "corporate values".

You can only pick between a parrot that repeats random text from the Internet, or a parrot lobotomized to follow the orders from their trainers (which occasionally repeats random text from the Internet, because the training isn't perfect).

Unsurprisingly, the lobotomized parrot is more useful to get actual work done, even if it won't tell you what the CIA[1] did to Mexican Students on October 2nd, 1968.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-45662739

> who is regularly running `npm update` or `cargo update` to keep local software up to date?

I do, religiously, as part of my routine to check for updates.

  n lts && npm uninstall -g corepack && npm update -g && n prune

Sometimes things break (that's how `npm uninstall -g corepack` became a part of my one-liner), but it is easier to update often than to neglect updates for years.

Then you get burglars in your shop instead of legitimate customers.

User Agents look the way they do because this is a recurring issue.

A browser without network effects gets blocked, they look for a way to bypass the blocking, then they become mainstream and now the de-facto UA is larger than before.

I said "infiltrate" as in "send their best engineers as undercover agents to work at TSMC".

This restriction makes no sense.

The US says "18 countries may purchase our AI chips", but what I understand is "90% of the world may purchase Chinese AI chips".

China just needs to infiltrate Taiwan, which is geographically and culturally closer than the US.

That's probably retaliation over the patents for video streaming: https://www.broadcom.com/company/news/product-releases/61711

You'd be surprised to know the actual answer: Microsoft

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10I...

Fine print: You need a non-windows user agent, otherwise you get redirected to a windows-specific page with no ISOs.

As an aside, you might want to install Ventoy to your flashdrive:

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

That way you just need to copy the ISO to the flashdrive.

Why the entitled tone demanding "to clarify which exactly key features"?

It is the right of developers to say "I don't want to support your browser" and you should respect that decision even if you disagree with it.

As a reality check, see this ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390936

It took Firefox 17 years of back and forth with developers to add parity with an Internet Explorer feature that Chrome supported since version 1. This late in the game IE is already dead for good.

Not everybody has infinite time or infinite money to support Firefox, as an aside, you knew what you signed up for when you made Firefox your main browser.

So please, change the "clarify why you don't support Firefox" tone with "I want to make the site work with Firefox, how can I help you?". And good luck making the Firefox team change their mind when they decide not to support X feature, because it is also their right to do not implement the whole spectrum of features that Chrome supports.

> For Rust to lose everywhere would require C++ to win against Rust. Not sure if that's possible.

Or a new C-like language, like Zig.

Maybe the answer is smaller groups?

Remember that the EU Commission has not said a word about the new fee that Apple added, but that fee looks against the spirit of the DMA, so it is likely that Apple will be forced to give up that fee considering they already charge an annual membership for the developer account.

Apple overplayed their anti-competitive card, so now they'll be permanently scrutinized.

No, I was talking about 100 years ago.

Oh yeah, forbidding developers from telling their customers that they can buy a subscription for less money in their website is definitely not illegal.

The fact that Apple is now regulated is definitely not a symptom of the illegality of their terms. Definitely not.

Because everyone else basically said "the new conditions are bad, I won't risk my business", but in the particular case of Epic they're banned from Apple's walled garden, so even the terrible terms are better than nothing.

"better"? You're giving Epic too much credit. Just see the Play Store competitors like Samsung or Huawei: Full of ads, and in general a terrible experience.

> At least in the U.S. business owners have the right to refuse service or turn away a customer to protect their patrons and business.

But this is not about Apple's right as a company to refuse any business with Epic, they still have that right.

This is about Apple not complying with a law that targets them due to their anti-competitive behavior; a law that requires them to give the means to operate an App Store competitor to anyone who requests it.

Apple is the one who decided to require an Apple developer account in order to operate an App Store competitor, so they effectively gave up their right to refuse any business with Epic by adding this unnecessary requirement.

To people confused about "students tipping teachers", this is the context:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/21/in-a-reversal-apple-is-now...

Then buy 51% of shares, do a hostile takeover and stop their anti-competitive madness before it is too late.

You don't need to do radical changes, just small actions like do not steal the tips students send to teachers.

Going full-goblin mode and demanding 30% of all the money that moves through a phone is what is destroying Apple.

The US used to have huge oil or railroad companies, but also scruples to regulate them when they grew too big.

My expectation is that a government would do an investigation first, but I believe that a split would look like this:

  - The computing hardware company
  - The accessory hardware company
  - The operating system company
  - The software company
  - The cloud services company
  - The app store company
  - The music & video company
  - The messaging company

So yeah, a split looks scary.

No, by being anti-competitive. Most countries have laws against monopolies, and it was naive to expect that countries would wait until you destroy the competition to enforce those laws.

It won't end, Apple is too big now, the alternatives are:

  1. Split Apple into smaller companies
  2. Operate Apple like an utility company

They did this to themselves, and it's only downhill from this point.

No, I'm arguing that if Apple feels entitled to steal 30% of my hard earned money, then the open source maintainers should also feel the same entitlement, because without their work there would be no iOS, and no App Store.

Apple owes their existence to the Open Source maintainers the same way Apple claims I owe my existence to their proprietary APIs.

If Apple wanted to destroy Spotify they would simply drop prices by 30%, and Spotify would be unable to compete with that pricing because of the Apple tax.

Why should Apple have that much leverage? They didn't even "build the platform", they took an Open Source platform, put the Apple logo to it, and then proceeded to EEE like good old Microsoft.

Apple is in the wrong here, or they charge the Apple tax to music apps, or they have Apple music. They can't have both.

OTOH, I don't see Apple paying 30% of their revenue to the Open Source maintainers that made "the platform" possible.