bamboo

The part you’re missing is that while C++ does have newer safer ways of doing memory management, all the old ways are still present, in wide use, and are easier. Basically, C++ makes it easy to do the wrong thing and hard to do the right thing, and most codebases are built around the wrong things. It’s often easier to just rewrite it in rust than it is to refactor an existing code base, so if you’re going to expend that effort why not do it in a language that has stronger safety guarantees, a better dependency and build management system, and a growing community?

Google’s the main backer but it’s technically an open standard. Apple is implementing support in iOS 18 too, reluctantly. Google also has non-standard extensions on top of it like e2e encryption. I wish they would standardize it but that’s a pretty important feature and maybe it’s ok that they brought it out before it could become standard.

I guess I don’t see the point of removing pocket from the build since it can be disabled in a standard Firefox build with a single about:config option. That’s what I do.

Taint analysis is a real thing that several papers have been published about, but the implementations aren’t in a state where they could be run in real time without massively hampering performance. Also they’re mostly focused on findings bugs in native applications rather than privacy on the web.

Heretical, you will burn in hell

True Temple OS has no networking

Tor browser is something else, I don't group it in with stuff like Librewolf.

For librewolf, I just took a look to try and figure out what binary blobs are being talked about. This is the repository I was looking at, I think its the right place: https://codeberg.org/librewolf/source/src/branch/main. There isn't much documentation on the patches besides the file names for the most part, but do you have any idea which of these relates to binary blobs? Or is it in the settings file? Really nothing I see here convinces me that this project is worth anybody's time over regular firefox, it just changes some defaults, disables pocket (they patch it out, but there's already a setting), and changes the branding. I don't disagree with most of their changes, I just don't see the point of maintaining and marketing an entire derivative browser for what could just be a settings hardening guide on a wiki somewhere.

We’re already seeing a slight leveling off compared to what we had previously. Right now there is a strong focus on optimization, getting models that can run on-device without losing too much quality. This will both help make LLMs sustainable financially and energy-wise, as well as mitigate the privacy and security concerns inherent to the first wave of cloud-based LLMs.

I don’t disagree with the idea that AI is being shoved into software without much purpose or thought, but that’s got little to do with whether it is here to stay or not. It’s here to stay for its many practical uses, be it new personal assistants like what Apple has shown off with Siri, text summarization like what is being added to browsers, rephrasing/tone checking like what is being added to office software, or code completion and debugging like what is being added to code editors. These applications have proved their worth, and even if some applications are just because hype, these applications are here to stay.

I do genuinely believe that these Firefox forks are mostly pointless rebrands of Firefox to satisfy a small crowd of people who are fine with Firefox but don’t want Firefox or Mozilla branding. Other than branding, they tweak the default config, pre-install ublock origin, and that’s about it. I guess this one exposes some already existing about:config flags in the settings UI. The best part is they are managed by small teams that run a few versions behind Firefox persistently, leaving 0-days unpatched and thus their users vulnerable. Their small userbase also opens their users up to tracking that wouldn’t be possible with larger browsers.

Writing it off as a fad is rather ignorant. Sure there’s a lot of hype and bullshit surrounding AI, but it already has strong use cases and earns a profit for the companies involved. It’s still the early years for the tech too, so it is reasonable to expect it to improve in the coming years, both in terms of accuracy and performance.

This is how I would describe my experience. Sometimes it’s crunch time and most of the time it’s fuck around time. After crunch time I always throw a tantrum about how if we only bothered with planning we could largely avoid it.