Right, but it does gate the actual installation behind a secondary approval in a trustworthy prompt that the page author doesn't control. The page author could of course make a dangerous-but-trustworthy-looking app that would pass muster for the user's approval, but at that point it's not any different than social engineering the installation of any regular malware, e.g. convincing a user to download and execute a dangerous binary.
Prompting for installation opens a dialog controlled and populated by the browser that has the name and author of the app to be installed. You can test it on the example page here, linked from the article:
Kind of surprising. I had interpreted these tokenmaxxing initiatives at some of the larger companies as R&D investment, motivating employees to find the useful applications of a new technology with fairly broad applicability. Obviously some people gamed it, but I wonder if everyone gamed it or if opening the floodgates made for any useful discoveries.
Coincidentally, Florida was the same state that barred and later disbarred Jack Thompson, the nutcase lawyer behind a lot of the video game litigation.
Agreed. I don't know how they plan to enforce this but this is way better than some other articles that have come up indicating educational bans on AI use, in-person proctoring, verbal assessments, pen and paper exams etc. This is the first attempt at an approach I've seen that doesn't seek to isolate education from reality; students that are effective at integrating AI into their work and actually understand what they're doing are going to get jobs, which is ultimately the goal of school.
If I were the rsync maintainer after this I'd unpublish it everywhere I had control over, delete the repo and turn off my computer to go walk in the park. The linked thread is insane.
Crazy to watch the death of open source happen in real time like this. Why would anyone share any code to open themselves up for all of these wannabe main characters to pile on them? Given the choice I'd rather have a bunch of slop coded PR contributions to wade through than whatever this entitled nightmare raider thread is.
However you feel about AI, pretty obviously not cool behavior. It would be functionally the same kind of targeted punishment if I had a hidden script in my open-source project that detected if you were on Windows and purposely bricked your machine in line with my ideological preferences. I could instead publish under a "Fuck Micro$oft License" that just forbids you from running it on Windows, have contribution guidelines that forbid development on Windows etc, instead of releasing malware.
Also seems bad for the long-term health of this project, given that the owner can't be trusted and that AI is not going away I wouldn't be surprised to see a fork take over.
They target it because it's the best distribution platform we have, the tech stack is unified, and managing native apps has only gotten less attractive over time. Chrome, the only native app that matters to most users, re-opens your tabs on the rare occasion it crashes. Most native apps are much less reliable than that.
I often think that especially on HN React is just a four-letter word proxying some broader complaint about the interactive web and that most people complaining about it don't actually understand what problems it solves. In general if you show me the source to any sufficiently complex web app that doesn't depend on React, I'll dig through it and find the analogue to React you built inside it.
IMO odd to frame this around the frontend and not all of software development. "The Cloud" and middleman products on top in various iterations over the last fifteen years has deskilled literally all backend work, going back even further to like, Wordpress. The remaining challenges are operating at scales that most software businesses would be wasting time optimizing for, and taste. LLMs are very good at making computers talk to each other, but taste describes the fuzzier boundary where computer meets people, and people are much more finicky and challenging to integrate with than computers.
I don't doubt that they were a bit overstaffed, but it doesn't seem unreasonable when you consider that "Messenger" is an umbrella that includes video calling, payments, games, integrations with business chatbots, Uber/Lyft integrations etc, across web/iOS/Android/Quest, internationally. If you took every feature Messenger has and multiplied it by even ~3 engineers for each one you could fill a few floors pretty quickly.
Simple registration I have less of a problem with for some of the reasons you listed. Cross-reference with vet records, have fines specifically for missing rabies vaccinations etc for the sake of public health, sure. Maybe even bill me a nominal paperwork amount for the initial registration, maybe waive it for adoptions or make it an automatic thing the shelter does and builds into their fees. Having an annual subscription to my own dog is what seems ridiculous.
In theory the fees for car registration go towards maintaining the infrastructure that cars make use of. Taking a dog out in public doesn't have many similar externalities, and there are already targeted fines for off-leash dogs or for failing to clean up after them. I live in an area with a decent amount of dog-friendly public infrastructure, but that just seems like it would fall under regular parks funding, and I don't get a bill every year asking me how much time I spent at the park.
As far as where the funding goes, I'm sure that could be done better. Everyone in the county benefits from funded animal control and shelters. By adopting my dog from a shelter I have actually reduced the burden of responsibility on the local shelter system, which then seems backwards to tax me for.
Registration + annual fees aside though, door-to-door dog inspections are where I would absolutely draw the line. That we have any room at all to fund that is crazy to me.
I was going to comment "dog license???" but I looked it up for my county and I had no idea this was a thing. I'm in awe. I adopted an adult dog ~9 years ago. He has issued literally one single bark in that span. He stays indoors or in my fenced-in yard 100% of the time because of some health issues. I'm supposed to pay an annual fee for this or they'll fine me?? Nobody ever told me this, not the shelter, not the vet he goes to regularly who presumably has the ability to check this.
There are also apparently canvassers paid by the county who go door to door checking for this?! I'm not the kind of person to typically nitpick about where my taxes are going, but...I retroactively and broadly apologize for every lighthearted jab I may have ever made about TV licensing in the UK. This is beyond dumb in comparison. And my condolences, the fact that this system leads to them harassing you in this way is completely insane.
If they are they need to fix how the Claude Code CLI asks for feedback, or make the feedback UI a lot more obvious. I keep experiencing the following scenario.
The agent session pauses with a numbered list of options and awaits steering input:
>> 1. Do the sane thing you asked for (Recommended)
>> 2. Do something dumb
>> 3. Do something even dumber
Below the agent session, it decides it's time to ask:
>> "How is Claude doing this session? 1) Bad 2) Good 3) Great"
I type "1", because that's the steering option I want. The UI prioritizes this input as a response to the feedback prompt without any further confirmation: "Claude is doing Bad. Thanks!"
I've done this so many times so far and I can't imagine I'm the only one, at some scale that has to poison any learning they're doing with this data.
Seconding the other comments here. I forgot to close the carrying case on mine (original LCD) and it fell out down a flight of wooden stairs, destroying the screen. I bought an OEM replacement screen from iFixit and swapped it out in an hour or so and the rest of it was sturdy enough to begin with that it still looks brand new. And IIRC the screen replacement was ranked as one of the more challenging repairs to do compared to replacing most other pieces.
I had a deeply maddening experience at one job where somebody was reviewing a Typescript PR of mine. In their first copy-pasted review there was a suggestion that I do something slightly differently; it wasn't something I had a strong opinion on and they were more familiar with the codebase, so I made the suggested change to just keep the peace and get the change out.
In their followup review, again copy-pasted, it made a new recommendation - which was the way I had done it originally. Absolutely no human conviction behind the review, just copy-paste ping-pong feedback.
The way I got around it was by implementing my original change again, and writing a stronger defense of it, with lots of references, and calling out as many downsides to their initial recommendation as possible, in an attempt to prompt-inject and overwhelm whatever model they were feeding my work into, and it worked. It gave me a very grim view of the near future.
Yep, I noticed recently that on their official research portal they stopped publishing anything publicly in I think 2021. The last couple of articles before that were along these lines:
Duolingo is a game, they publish papers studying the addictive properties of their product I comparison to slot machines. They are incentivized heavily to not produce fluent learners. If he's being pushed in another direction to learn, for whatever reason, all the better for him.
I could have been clearer, but the group I'm describing is only the Mormons I've known, and I don't mean militant in a bad way - professional, polished, hardworking. I'm sure there are lazy Mormons as there are lazy people in any large population, I just haven't met one.
Utah is such a special, creepy little standout enclave among the states. I've worked with a few Mormon coworkers who are genuinely wonderful people whom I adore, but they are, as a group, militant in a way that's hard to describe.
I have childhood memories of visiting my grandparents, who lived near a town with a paper mill. Going to town, going to a restaurant etc, meant being inundated with the horrible smell produced by that mill, within a radius of miles. It was a fact of life there. Genuinely hard to imagine a data center producing worse waste products than that.