Snarwin

u/Snarwin@fedia.io
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It could also be that the "direct blog post to video" format doesn't cut it.

This specific format is strongly associated with low-effort content-farm channels that repackage other people's posts from sites like Reddit and Medium.

The real underlying issue here is that the OS interfaces these programs rely on are extremely error-prone and difficult to use correctly. A naive implementation of these system utilities in any language is basically guaranteed to stumble into bugs and vulnerabilities like the ones described in the linked message.

People don't want Firefox translation because they "want AI," though. They want it because being able to translate web pages is a useful feature. I think it's quite telling that nowhere in the linked article does the author actually defend Firefox's new "Window AI" feature as useful. Instead, the only argument he can make for it is that AI is popular.

If Henry Ford had given his users what they wanted, he would have built a faster horse.

Users want AI right now because a lot of people have spent a lot of money to convince them they want it. A few years ago, they wanted crypto and VR; a few more years from now, they'll want something else. We're already seeing evidence that the current AI boom is an unsustainable bubble. Will "hundreds of millions of users" still be using ChatGPT after OpenAI's investors get tired of losing billions of dollars every year, and decide it's time to start squeezing their customers for more cash?

This kind of trend-chasing is what happens when the people in charge have no real principles or vision underlying their actions. Firefox didn't beat Internet Explorer by following the crowd; it won by delivering a product that was better, and doing things nobody else had done before (like tabs). In order to do that, the people making it had to have a strong vision of what a "better" browser would look like.

The company said that users can opt out of having their data processed for advertising purposes by turning off a setting related to “technical and interaction data” on both desktop and mobile at any time. [Emphasis added.]

This is the real story. Having opt-out data collection is one thing, but misleading users about how they use the data they collect is just slimy.

I appreciate that this article highlights the value of using of named functions in functional-style code. Too often, programmers assume that "functional programming" means using lambdas everywhere, when in my experience, lambdas are actually a (very mild) code smell.