I'm a computer science graduate with experience in embedded systems seeking to get a career in software engineering. In my free time I love learning all kinds of things, working on complex projects in various programming languages such as C++ and Rust, etc.
This doesn't actually change what I said. The imagined future is that people just use agents for shopping. Assuming the capitalistic economy we have constructed remains (and I've little reason to think it will vanish anytime soon), poor people, or people with low incomes, are certainly not going to be using high-end or even midrange models/agent providers. They will go for whatever sounds the best and which is the cheapest, regardless of it's quality or how gullible it is. So attempts like tfa to figure this problem out now are very useful indeed.
I think it's more that you don't understand just how poor many people are. Most people will go for cheaper models (assuming they even know what a model is to begin with) just because the more expensive ones are ones they literally can't afford because all of their money is spent on bills and necessities. Supposedly the cost of using models will just keep falling forever but I have my doubts (since that's not exactly how an economy actually works, nothing is truly free unless the government is paying for the entire thing). If we take the mindset of the technical illiterate average person, they will go for whatever sounds the best (and whatever costs the least) because gas is $5-$7 per gallon, the price of everything continues to rise, and on and on. I think it's probably smart not to be so dismissive of the struggles of the super-majority of people who are barely able to survive because money is in fact an obstacle, and the only way you'd get them to use a mode like GPT-6 Sol or Astra is by making it pretty much cost nothing, and that isn't how the real world works: someone is always paying for it, and the question is who.
I mean, I know why the format is used and what it does. That doesn't make any less of an abomination. Parsing it is an absolute clusterfuck, and accessibility for it is horrifically bad even in Acrobat. By contrast, something like HTML is far better, even if it doesn't necessarily display the document exactly the same way all the time on all devices.
I love typst. It's about time we have an authoring system like it that also let's you publish HTML versions of things you write with it instead of just PDFs. Papers in Academia for the longest time have been PDFs, which screen readers are terrible with, mainly because the PDF format is an abomination, and makes accessibility (let alone interoperability) unnecessarily painful.
If there's one thing to point to as an example of why we should make "smart fridges" and similar appliances not worth developing, it's things like this. Way way too easy for the company to just publish an update that breaks something like this. Imagine if you have a smart oven which gets an update and starts a very bad electrical fire because the company was stupid and decided it was a really smart idea to make an Oven that can connect to the internet. Wouldn't even surprise me if that's already happened.
Yes but we should not need an AI chatbot to solve problems which should be trivial for us to solve ourselves. Linux should just not have these issues, period.
> How much will you love them when you're locked out of something you can't do without?
I certainly wouldn't be happy if this did happen, but it would be my stupidity (or the stupidity of those who implemented it on the service/platform where the problem occurred) which I would blame more than the fault of the tool. I do keep all passkeys in Bitwarden now so that's something at least.
I love passkeys. Really. They completely eliminate the need for a password and OTP in most cases (when actually used as they were intended and not as a second factor only), although I always set up both in case. Although I will never, ever like how Google does it. I set up my first Google account with them and now Google absolutely refuses to allow me to authenticate to it because it wants a passkey I don't have (and of course there's no way of not using said passkey) or it wants me to use an Android phone I (also) don't have (I traded it in a couple years ago). And, of course, it provides absolutely no way around that problem. So eventually I just gave up and created a new one for the (rare) times I do need a Google account for anything.
Please explain how it is "unclear" that agents "can be self-aware"? As Wikipedia would say, citation needed. Just because an agent can write convincing enough to convince you that it's "self-aware" doesn't mean it really is, in fact, self-aware.
Claude for me absolutely loves to be overly nitpicky. Granted, I told it to push back on things that I suggest that are stupid and things like that, but it took that and transformed it into "nitpick everything I say down to the minutia. If I write something that isn't exactly true down to the precise wording, nitpick the wording and claim that I wasn't as precise as I should've been". Idk if it does this for anyone else but it does this to me all the time, and it's absolutely infuriating. And here I thought English was supposed to make programming and doing what I wanted to do easier. Never thought my own computer would nitpick my linguistic precision!
I absolutely love system76. Never owned one of their desktop machines, but I have a couple of their older laptops and they work fantastically for me. As in I can easily get a decade out of them and replace the batteries every few years. One of them is almost a decade old ironically enough.
The solution is to make the common features a part of a statically-linked library that you can pull into your apps. A web app is, IMO, never the answer when you want to address multiple audiences. It is bad for accessibility (because 99.999 percent of web app developers never consider accessibility) and it doesn't solve the problem that web apps are trying to solve (having 8 code bases all that have to remain in sync) because you will inevitably need your code to handle platform-specific differences, standards/conventions and whatnot.
I mean no, not really... Your the one making the claims that these AI companies really, really want regulation, nationalization, a slowdown, or whatever, and that they genuinely care about AI safety and it not killing us all. It's up to you to prove it, not for me to just believe you implicitly. So, please, provide the evidence, we're all very curious to see it.
> ... They have explicitly said repeatedly that they want regulation, oversight, nationalization, a global slowdown, etc.
And yet they do the exact opposite of all of the above. They do everything to get regulation just to create a moat because one doesn't exist. They preach about wanting a slowdown, nationalization, a complete pause, whatever have you... And yet they aren't slowing down the development voluntarily now are they? If anything, they are doing everything imaginable to speed up development to pump out models as fast as possible. If these ex-risk and AI companies actually gave a damn about regulation, or oversight, or a moratorium on AI development altogether, they would actually demonstrate this by completely ceasing development of all models immediately. Instead, they take riskier and riskier actions to try to "win" this supposed "arms race". So please excuse a bunch of us if we find it impossible to take them seriously on literally anything like this. If you have substantial evidence that they are actually ceasing AI model development like they want everybody else to do (except them, of course), then, by all means, present it.
Sorry but the pro-AI/AI boosters do the exact same thing when they say that people who don't use AI are "Luddites" and the like. And I'm pretty sure the Luddite thing has been going on for far longer than the AI psychosis labeling.
How is this idealistic? This is how digital information and copyright (if it is to apply to digital information) needs to work. It is absolutely absurd that I can buy something from you, but you can then turn around and say "well actually you just leased a license from me" and you then can break into my digital home and steel (ahem, "repossess") the digital copy for yourself without my consent. My logic is quite simple: if something would be nonsensical if applied to physical goods, then it is even more nonsensical for digital ones.
Obviously the general populous won't care about this, but it is something we should be striving for, as digital information is infinite once it has been transmitted over the internet.
IMO the better thing is to force these companies to dump this mindset that digital information is a finite resource. Sony's logic doesn't even make sense to begin with. If person A buys a game, that game does not suddenly become unavailable for person B to also buy. I mean, even copyright recognizes that it is possible for a rightsholder to own all rights to the master copy of a good but other people can own separate copies of the work without infringing on the rights of the rightsholder. Sony is just taking the maximalist view here because they want to keep the power of being able to control who and what has access to whatever they sell, for any arbitrary reason whatsoever.
You also won't have accessibility on Windows either unless you can somehow get it to enable accesskit integration. (I really don't get the open source norm that something like accessibility should be opt-in, particularly with UI toolkits and the like, but eh.)
I... Don't agree with this. If your users have followed your projects developments even remotely reasonably, you taking a few months to implement something or to figure something out is not a sign that the project is dead. It would be one thing if your project was completely inactive for like 2-3 years.
I would love to give Haiku a try. Indeed, I've looked at it's code before (it's quite good, or was, last time I looked at it). What prevents me is accessibility. To be fair to Haiku, implementing an actually good accessibility stack is genuinely a nightmare that AI isn't going to help much with, were you to ask it to help you with it. Primarily because many accessibility stacks (UIA, MSAA, IAccessible2, AT-SPI, ...) are massive collections of incredibly nasty hacks. I have yet to find an accessibility stack that is actually well-designed, thought out and future-proof. And screen readers are pretty much collections of good code alongside a bunch of app-specific workaround as well which just complicates things.
All of that said, I might fire it up if only to play with it from the console if I can get something like SSH working.
I'm curious why velocity is sooooo important. Every single AI discussion that I've read always always always mentions velocity or development speed as though that somehow is the ultimate goal. Why does it matter if your velocity isn't as fast as everyone else? Maybe taking things slowly might actually be a good thing.
I'm not at all trying to be overly critical or pissy; I'm genuinely curious as to why this is always the gain that AI brings as though it matters (or, rather, this is how it's always stated in one way or another). So I come from a place of confusion when asking this. Why should I care if you can write 100000 or 1000000 lines of code and push out 10 billion commits per minute? (Yes, I am intentionally exaggerating here to prove a point.) If anything, I would argue that increased velocity just brings about recklessness and unnecessary churn instead of accomplishing anything useful.
> Dlangui is so niche that I am amazed to even see it here.
Eh, I'm testing whether I can make it fully accessible, since I happen to like the D language itself. But the UI without my changes is entirely inaccessible.
> DearImGui is intended for thowing together some slap-dash UI widgets for debugging things like interactive rendering.
That's probably what it's intended for, but people use it for far more than that, which is a problem. Even if it weren't, it's inaccessibility is a problem.
> Do Qt built-in widgets have huge problems? Inwould assume that custom widgets invariably do because approximately nobody writes any accessibility handling for them.
Sometimes. Depends on the widget. I've had QLineEdit's crash apps when all-select-copy workflows have been used, or with NVDA on win32 you can't ordinarily read a multi-line QT QLineEdit or other multi-line input since the focus will remain on the first line, always. Webviews are entirely inaccessible at the moment.
Agreed. I'll say the same about accessibility. People really need to test for this more. If your app is not accessible I literally cannot use your app regardless of how useful it might be. This is pretty much why I currently don't use IDEs like Zed: even if I wanted to I can't because it presents no accessibility tree.
I know of at least 5 different UI frameworks in different languages which are partially accessible or completely inaccessible. Some include Dlangui, Tkinter (although this is getting better), DearImGui... Really any UI that decides to draw it's widgets by frame. QT also has some accessibility problems. In apps made with any of these, they are either impossible to use with assistive technology (and therefore the keyboard) or they are very difficult to use.
My logic for determining if a GUI is keyboard driven is pretty simple: if I can fire up a screen reader and completely drive your UI via the keyboard, then by definition your UI is keyboard-driven. If your app ever requires me to emulate mouse clicks to drive it, then it isn't entirely keyboard-driven and that should probably be fixed. This is even something that can be measured/tested for on platforms like Windows where you can both read the accessibility tree (which in itself is amazingly powerful particularly for testing) but you can also simulate arbitrary input.
> The web, and the browser by extension, is a multimedia platform.
Says who exactly though? The big companies and web devs who think your browser needs raw access to HIDs? Why exactly does a web browser need this level of access when a native application is far superior (and doesn't need to deal with the limitations of a web browser)? All this does is require that browsers be more and more complicated and be more and more invasive so that we can pretend that the web browser is our operating system. That in turn makes it harder and harder for web browsers to even be implemented in the first place.
I know, but my point was that this should just not be a thing. Our web browsers have become way too complicated and then you get outcomes like what tfa talks about.