nayroclade

As I understand it, funding was provided by NLnet[1], a longstanding Dutch non-profit that focuses on supporting open internet technologies. The funding was provided specifically for reviving Servo. By the looks of it, the money itself mostly comes from the EU, which has various grant programmes to fund open access technology, digital sovereignty, etc. Given several Servo contributors worked for Igalia, I expect they submitted a proposal to NLnet for them to fund Servo development, and it was successful.

[1] https://nlnet.nl/project/Servo/

You can edit the query on wpt.fyi to compare web platform test results for Flow, Ladybird and Servo.

Perhaps, but training AIs relies on the existence of libraries like Tailwind, sites like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, etc. If people stop using all those businesses and services and projects and they eventually disappear, we're stuck relying on asking LLMs whose knowledge is based on a dated snapshot of an internet that no longer exists.

True, but after this led to the disasters of WW1 and WW2, there was a genuine international effort to constrain it. Of course, it was a deeply imperfect system, especially with the cold war going on, but it was still an improvement on the naked imperialism and genocide that preceded it. Unfortunately, it appears we're rapidly regressing to the former situation, except this time with atomic weapons.

Actually it says the desalinated water is too expensive even for farming, it’s only used for heavy industries, so it’s certainly not a solution for the domestic supply of 9 million people.

And don’t confuse moving the capital city with actually relocating Tehran. Tehran’s not going anywhere. What they’re proposing is building a new capital city, but it’ll be the rich and the political and religious elite who move there. The millions of poor and powerless living in Tehran will get left behind. Some will be able to migrate south, but many won’t.

Perhaps not, but you can bet that they were told the opposite when Zuckerberg was recruiting them. Indeed, ring fencing the lab does suggest some real attempt to do it.

I'd be wary about interpreting a simple trend of App Store / Google Play apps without other context. Both are walled gardens, with developer fees and review processes managed by gatekeepers with an incentive and an ability to artificially control the rate of new apps. I would ask: What is the trend of app store review waiting times? What is the trend of rejections? What is the trend of delistings?

If a US company operates in a different country as well, it has to abide by the laws of that country, or leave it. For example, Adobe's acquisition of Figma was blocked by the UK and EU regulators, despite them both being US companies headquartered in San Francisco. They could have chosen to leave the UK and EU markets entirely, in which case their merger would have been able to proceed, but they wouldn't have been able to sell anything to UK/EU citizens.

Apparently they didn't forget. Lionsgate did all the necessary work, then someone sent the "wrong file" to HBO Max, and it seems nobody checked it properly before uploading it!

Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal. I remember when I was watching Frasier on Amazon Prime, a bunch of the episodes had been configured to play in the wrong aspect ratio. Clearly nobody had ever bothered to check them.

If you think you can't get into this kind of Kafkaesque billing nightmare with any large vendor, then I have some bad news for you...

The core argument here, as far as I can discern it, seems to be: A trillion dollars has been spent scaling LLMs in an attempt to create AGI. Since scaling alone looks like it won't produce AGI, that money has been wasted.

This is a frankly bizarre argument. Firstly, it presupposes that _only_ way AI becomes useful is if turns into AGI. But that isn't true: Existing LLMs can do a variety of economically valuable tasks, such as coding, even when not being AGI. Perhaps the economic worth of non-AGI will never equal what it costs to build an operate it, but it seems way too early to make that judgement and declare any non-AGI AI as worthless.

Secondly, even if scaling alone won't reach AGI, that doesn't mean that you can reach AGI _without_ scaling. Even when new and better architectures are developed, it still seems likely that, between two models with an equivalent architecture, the one with more data and compute research will be more powerful. And waiting for better architectures before you try to scale means you will never start. 50 years from now, researchers will have much better architectures. Does that mean we should wait 50 years before trying to scale them? How about 100 years? At what point do you say, we're never going to discover anything better, so now we can try scaling?

IMO it is usually a mistake to integrate AI as a separate chat function in the UI. AI(s) be integrated into existing chat and collaboration features via @ tagging. E.g. in something like Figma or Google Docs, you should be able to add comments, tag @ai, and ask it for feedback or to make changes just as you would if you were collaborating with a human. Putting the AI inside its own private chat button often makes it feel like a Clippy-esque gimmick.

It also generally portrays almost everyone around him at Bletchley as some level of ignorant, stupid or maliciously obstructive, despite the fact that most of them were brilliant mathematicians and engineers whose contribution equalled his. But the real story of an incredible collaborative effort is sacrificed for a facile Hollywood narrative of a single, misunderstood genius single-handedly saving the day. It’s honestly one of the worst films ever made.

Enjoy democracy, EU-style

I'd much rather be on a cruise ship than a lifeboat, but that doesn't mean cruise ships shouldn't have lifeboats.

No serious advocate of settling Mars, Venus or anywhere else in space seriously believes it will be easier than remaining on Earth, nor are they suggesting that it means we can abandon the Earth entirely, or care less about protecting its biosphere. They simply understand that, no matter much of a relative paradise the Earth is, so long as 100% of humanity exists there then we are placing all our species' eggs at the bottom of a single basket's gravity-well. It will do us absolutely no good if we solve climate change, war, poverty, disease, etc. only to get wiped out by the next comet or mega-asteroid that smashes into us. And, statistically, eventually one will.

That episode presents quite a plausible scenario for why notable historical figures might be cloned, in my opinion: Participants in a contemporary power struggle wanting to use their talismanic status for political ends.

The impression I've gotten from the reading I've done on these sorts of conditions is that part of the reason doctors are reluctant to do research is because it such a fraught area that anyone who engages with it are targeted by groups of sufferers. Even researchers who favour a biological cause can be subject to unwelcome attention and harassment.

These sufferers are not all, and probably not even most, of the total, but they are organised and militant, and fully convinced of two things: That their condition has a 100% biological cause, and that they cannot trust the medical and scientific establishment. Even if they are completely right, it has created a situation where the cost of getting involved as a medical professional are just too high, so it has become a self-perpetuating situation.

CRA seems pretty much abandoned. I wouldn’t recommend it for anything nowadays. There are much better options for both starter and serious apps.

"Good enough" for what? We're in the middle of an AI arms race. Why do you believe people would choose to run the same LLMs on cheaper equipment instead of using the greater efficiency to train and run even larger LLMs?

Given LLM performance seems to scale with their size, this would result in more powerful models, which would grow the applicability, use and importance of AI, which would in turn grow the use and importance of Nvidia's hardware.

So this theory doesn't really stack up for me.

When I read about something like this, my first thought is always, is this something we could have evolved ourselves? And if so, what haven’t we? Thicker mucus seems like something we have evolved, so was there some survival trade-off, perhaps in terms of general quality of respiration, that meant we didn’t?

I think you encounter this idea of effort adding value a lot in the arts. If a book (or film, album, etc.) is particularly long or "difficult", it can add something to the experience and achievement of reading it. And correspondingly there is an inherent suspicion of anything that is just too readable or popular, the feeling being that anything so easily consumed must be of little value.

Humans do great in groups until they get bigger than the size of a larger hunter-gatherer tribe, say more than a few dozen individuals. Basically, the point at which it becomes impossible for everyone to know everyone else, and you need to replace informal, personal organisation with formalised and impersonal structures.

Humans are not rats, but nor do we really behave like other primates. We have evolved to co-operate socially and we do it very, very well, including (and perhaps especially) in resource-constrained environments. And we even engage in self-domestication to weed out individuals who attempt to dominate or cheat in such situations.

But the problem with modern society is it throws all of that evolved ability out of the window. We are attempting to learn how to co-exist and thrive while living in cities of millions of strangers, while living lifestyles their bear no relation at all to traditional human life. In a way, it's a miracle that we do as well as we do.

> This thread gives me the vibes of arguing for the sake of arguing.

You must be new around here

This article seems like a wilful attempt to rewrite history by ignoring, distorting or inventing a lot of things.

- Web standards didn't move fast enough for developers and users. People _wanted_ things like games, streaming videos and online shopping, which were impossible to do properly with web standard technologies for much of the 90s and 2000s. This wasn't driven by "big corporations" and Macromedia was never a big corporation anyway.

- How have React, or Angular for that matter, "failed"? How are they things not to bet a career on? React remains the default choice for most web app development as it has been for over a decade now. And I still see plenty of Angular jobs, far more than are looking for web components, the supposed standardised alternative.

- Web standards are _not_ decentralised in any way, shape or form. They are organised through a handful of centralised organisations, mainly the W3C, which are controlled by their major funders. Who are, surprise surprise, large corporations. Yes, the are somewhat open to outside participation, but it still is browser vendor employees who do most of the key work and make the key decisions, with Google/Chrome being the dominant player.

- Many, if not most, web standard technologies are invented by small numbers of engineers working for large corporations with no different incentives than those working on the technologies the author disparages. Canvas and CSS animations were created by Apple. Web components were created by Google. They were then adopted and standardised by other corporate employees.

- What "churn" have React and Angular really suffered? React was released in 2013 and has seen only one really major change — Hooks — in that time. Otherwise it has been a remarkably stable base to build software on. Most of the "churn" has actually occurred at the _community_ level, through the rise and fall of various open-source tools and libraries.

- The progress of web standards has not been the consistently slow but irresistible tide the author claims. Progress in the late 90s and 2000s was essentially nonexistent, being held back by Microsoft/IE's lack of interest and then the huge mass of users stuck on outdated browser versions. Then, once evergreen browsers reached a critical mass, progress sped up enormously, and in the modern era it easily outpaces the supposed churn of frameworks like React and Angular.

I’m sure Flash was great for Flash developers. But speaking as someone who remembers the plague of slow and unusable Flash websites in the 90s and 2000s, it was not good for users and I’m very glad it’s dead.

"The state" is not a monolith. Anti-fraud enforcement is handled by agencies with limited budgets and resources. Often they are deliberately underfunded and understaffed precisely so they cannot cause too much damage and embarrassment by going after really big targets.

Saying it’s a subrange implies you can perceive differences in tone within it. In which case, reframe the question as “is this shade of teal closer to the blue or green end of the subrange” if you like.

The current state of the UK water industry doesn't seem to support this theory. Privatisation has only lead to water companies like Thames Water taking on unsustainable debt while paying out billions in dividends, underinvesting in infrastructure, and polluting like crazy. Now they are demanding permission from the regulator to massively hike prices, because the foreign investment funds that own them are apparently unwilling to countenance the idea of losing any money on their investments.

Infrastructure like public transport and utilities are not, and never will be, functional markets, and regulation is always captured or ineffective in the long term. Privatisation is only a method to let financial markets pillage public goods.

If these +1000 humans remain similar to us, then I imagine they will resurrect people for much the same reasons we would do so now, if we could:

- Proof: At first, dead people will be resurrected just to prove that it can be done.

- Research: The dead person was a witness to / participant in a historically significant event about which historians want to learn more. Or is a semi-random choice for learning about life at a particular time and place.

- Fame: The dead person is a historically significant figure and people want to meet them / profit from them.

- Connection to a living person: The dead person is identified as a direct ancestor of someone alive and they are curious to meet them, or they feel a responsibility to bring them back.

- Connection to the resurrected: Resurrected people will want to bring back their family and friends, and may push those in control to make this happen.

- Ethics: Some people and cultures may come to think they have a moral obligation to resurrect as many people as possible.

- Just because: Someone with the means to thought it would be cool to bring a random person back and see their reaction.

The audiobooks of the Wolf Hall trilogy are fantastic as well. They're read by Ben Miles, who played Cromwell in the RSC adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and collaborated directly with Mantel on the stage adaptation of the Mirror & The Light. His take on the character is excellent, far superior to Mark Rylance in the TV version, who I thought was badly miscast.