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smarnach

234 karma · joined December 18, 2016

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smarnach··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
American AI companies pirated hundreds of thousands of books, scraped the web against the express wish of site owners, extracted all public GitHub repositories without the explicit consent of code authors and distilled all of that information, basically the entire knowledge humanity built over thousands of years, into large language models. The way these models were built was ethically questionable. The models are out there now, and time can't be rolled back, but I still don't think the companies who built the models by ignoring intellectual property rights deserve any special protection of their own intellectual property.
smarnach··on Codex just found a "workaround" of not having sudo on my PC
Except for the M in LAMP.
smarnach··on Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
I did not come to any conclusion. I called out a baseless claim.

A few pints about Ladybird:

* It's an awesome project, and they appear to be pretty efficient. * Greenfield projects always move faster than big codebases that are 30 years old. * Bigger teams always have more overhead than smaller teams. * Ladybird only does a small fraction of the things Firefox does. It's an important fraction, but still a small one. * The Ladybird GitHub repository has 1.3k contributors. Not sure where the number 10 comes from. * Only part of the people at Mozilla are engineers working on Firefox. There's also management, legal, marketing, HR and all the other folks you need to run a corporation. There's also engineers working on other products, backend services and infrastructure not required by Ladybird in its current stage.

None of the points above are quantitative, so Ladybird and Firefox are also hard to compare. I personally do think the Firefox org at Mozilla is pretty efficient for what it is; not based on the points above, but rather based on having worked at Mozilla for more than six years.

smarnach··on Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
I wasn't able to reproduce the back button hijack. It never asks me for an email address, regardless of what I try.
smarnach··on Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
How did you come to the conclusion that 750 people is a lot to build a web browser? The Chrome-adjacent teams at Google are about 4,000 people, and that doesn't even include all the people at Google providing infrastructure (e.g. servers, workplace, HR, legal etc.).

Comparing Firefox to Chromium-based browsers doesn't make much sense since these browsers don't develop their own web engine.

smarnach··on Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
They are not entirely separate from Mozilla. The MZLA Technologies Corporation is a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. They have access to some of Mozilla's common infrastructure, but are otherwise entirely funded by donations. Donations to MZLA only fund Thunderbird and no other products.
smarnach··on Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica
We get a statistically meaningful result about an upper bound of the incident rate. We get no statistically meaningful lower bound.
smarnach··on Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica
Sure, but we shouldn't stretch the analogy too far. Die rolls are discrete events, while miles driven are continuous. We expect the number of sixes we get to follow a binomial distribution, while we expect the number of accidents to follow a Poisson distribution. Either way, trying to guess the mean value of the distribution after a single incident of the event will never give you a statistically meaningful lower bound, only an upper bound.
smarnach··on Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica
> we should default to the calculation of 2-4x the rate.

No we should not. We should accept that we don't have any statistically meaningful number at all, since we only have a single incident.

Let's assume we roll a standard die once and it shows a six. Statistically, we only expect a six in one sixth of the cases. But we already got one on a single roll! Concluding Waymo vehicles hit 2 to 4 times as many children as human drivers is like concluding the die in the example is six times as likely to show a six as a fair die.

smarnach··on Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest
The distance from Earth to Mars is about 3 to 22 light minutes, not 20 to 90. That doesn't change anything about your point, except the capacity is lower.
smarnach··on Anthropic acquires Bun
That's as far from being a general JS executing speed benchmark as it could be. It essentially just times the startup speed.
smarnach··on Anthropic acquires Bun
The claim I responded to is that Bun is "at least twice as fast" as Deno. This sounds a lot more general than Bun being twice as fast in cherry-picked microbenchmarks. I wasn't able to find any benchmark that found meaningful differences between the two runtimes for real-world workloads. (Example: https://hackernoon.com/myth-vs-reality-real-world-runtime-pe...)
smarnach··on Anthropic acquires Bun
I only claimed there is absolutely zero chance that Bun is twice as fast at executing general JavaScript as Deno. The example doesn't give any insight into the relative speeds of Bun and Deno, as fast as I can tell.
smarnach··on Anthropic acquires Bun
Twice as fast at executing JavaScript? There's absolutely zero chance this is true. A JavaScript engine that's twice as fast as V8 in general doesn't exist. There may be 5 or 10 percent difference, but nothing really meaningful.
smarnach··on I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
Are you using the Ubuntu Snap to train Firefox? If so, you can switch to the native Debian packages released directly by Mozilla. They don't do that sandboxing stuff, and they are a lot faster. I don't notice any speed difference between Chromium und Firefox even on a Raspberry Pi.
smarnach··on Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover
He also links a Wikipedia article stating that more than 60 percent of Londoners were born in Britain to prove his point that only a third of Londoners are "native Brits". That doesn't leave much room for interpretation.
smarnach··on US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
Not even that. There's no rule in the GDPR to disclose the use of cookies. The regulation doesn't actually mention cookies at all, except maybe in an example. Instead, any data collection that's obviously required to do what the user requests (including session and shopping cart cookies) doesn't require any explicit consent. Only additional data collection, whether performed by cookies or any other means, requires consent.

That's why there are websites without cookie banners, like GitHub. It's not even hard to do that; it's just that most companies don't bother, because they know the EU will be blamed anyway.

smarnach··on You Wouldn't Download a Hacker News
Similarly, the Rust query will include "trust", "antitrust", "frustration" and a bunch of other words
smarnach··on Amazon's AI crawler is making my Git server unstable
They are not complaining. You configured Google Search Console to notify you about problems that affect the search ranking of your site, and that's what they do. if you don't want to receive these messages, turn them off in Google Search Console.
smarnach··on Orbit by Mozilla
Can you substantiate this a bit more? Do you have a link?
smarnach··on NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9
It had a reusable orbiter, not a reusable first stage.
smarnach··on Apple blocks PC emulator in iOS App Store and third-party app stores
I've never seen that. can you give me an example search term?
smarnach··on Boeing 737-800 makes emergency landing after its engine cowling detached
Why do you think that this happens multiple times every day? Do you have any sources, or are you just making things up?
smarnach··on How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
I think that's vastly overstating how bad it is. Maybe it's different if you are a German citizen. Just as an example, I never did anything other than signing the contract to get a job. I filled in a single form for each of my two kids when they were born. We got the forms in the hospital and just left them there. Similarly for registering a car -- there was a single simple form.
smarnach··on Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
The link about the Google "data breach" appears to be about some tax companies being sued for using Google Analytics tracking pixels. Calling this a data breach may be a bit of a stretch.
smarnach··on Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens Internet security
You are correct that no browser is looking at CAA records, because it would be wrong to do so. CAA records don't retroactively revoke certificates that have already been issued. Their only purpose is for CAs to check them before issuing a certificate.
smarnach··on Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens Internet security
CAA records only apply at the time a certificate is issued, and they only need to be considered by CAs. If the CAA record is changed later, all certificates that have already been issued continue to be valid, even if the new CAA record does not allow the issuing CA anymore. So looking at CAA records would be useless for browsers anyway.
smarnach··on Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens Internet security
There definitely isn't a law mandating Javascript engines to follow the Ecmascript standard, which would be the equivalent of what's happening here.
smarnach··on Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from pioneer to Google's weird neighbor
Yes, I'm an employee of Mozilla Corporation, and I'm involved with Firefox backend services (some of which are also used by Thunderbird).
smarnach··on Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from pioneer to Google's weird neighbor
I'm still not sure what you want to express. The CEO of MZLA technologies is appointed by, and reports to the Mozilla board of directors. Of course the Mozilla Foundation has influence on the Thunderbird project. Moreover, the employees of MZLA join Mozilla's yearly "all-hands", together with everyone else working for Mozilla. The progress of the Thunderbird project is reported at Mozilla monthly internal meetings. I have a hard time understanding what else you'd expect to call the relationship "not ceremonial". MZLA Technologies and the Mozilla Corporation are different, but their relationship to the foundation is rather similar.
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