Even better, they took actual extensions and made them built-in and impossible to remove. The work was already done to keep a lightweight browser with extra features in option, and they reverted it.

It’s been going for years now. We just don’t want to move away because, frankly, there’s little viable alternatives.

“curated wallpapers” including random generated stuff, and “shares profits” on a 50/50 basis, for a shitty app developed by what looks like three fivers in a trench coat.

The point is, they don’t get “competent”. They get better at assembling pieces they were given. And a proper stack with competent developers will already have moved that redundancy out of the codebase. For whatever remains, thinking is the longest part. And LLM can’t improve that once the problem gets a tiny bit complex. Of course, I could end up having a good rough idea of what the code should look like, describe that to an LLM, and have it write actual code with proper variable names and all, but once I reach the point I can describe accurately the thing I want, it’s usually as fast to type it. With the added value that it’s easier to double check.

What remains is providing good insight on new things, and understanding complex requirements. While there is room for improvement, it seems more and more obvious that LLM are not the answer: theoretically, they are not the right tool, and seeing the various level of improvements we’re seeing, they definitely did not prove us wrong. The technology is good at some things, but not at getting “competent”.

Also, you sweep out the privacy and licensing issues, which are big no-no too.

LLM have their uses, I outline some. And in these uses, there are clear rooms for improvements. For reference, the solution I currently use puts me at accepting around 10% of the automatic suggestions. Out of these, I’d say a third needs reworking. Obviously if that moved up to like, 90% suggestions that seems decent and with less need to fix them afterward, it’d be great. Unfortunately, since you can’t trust these, you would still have to review the output carefully, making the whole operation probably not that big of a time saver anyway.

Coding doesn’t allow much leeway. Other activities which allow more leeway for mistakes can probably benefit a lot more. Translation, for example, can be acceptable, in particular because some mishaps may automatically be corrected by readers/listeners. But with code, any single mistake will lead to issues down the way.

It is perfectly possible to run anti-cheat that are roughly as good (or as bad, as it often turns out) without full admin privilege and running as kernel-level drivers. Coupled with server-side validation, which seems to be a dying breed, you’d also weed out a ton of cheaters while missing the most motivated of them.

As someone who lurks around in different communities (to some extent; Steam forums, reddit, lemmy, mastodon, and a few game-centered discord servers), the issue is not much against anti-cheat for online play. It’s the nature of these piece of software that is the issue. It would not be the same if the anti-cheat was also forced on solo gameplay, but it is not the case here.

(bonus points for systems that allow playing on non-protected servers, but that’s asking a bit too much from some publishers I suppose)

Aside from it being code you don’t want on your machine

Code you don’t want on your machine, that have sometimes more permissions than you yourself have on your own files, is completely opaque, and have the legitimacy to keep constant outgoing network data that you can’t audit.

Yes, aside for that, no reason at all. No problem with a huge risk on your privacy for moderate results that don’t particularly benefit you in the long run.

(and all that is assuming that they’re not nefarious to begin with, which is almost impossible to prove)

systemd, as a service manager, is decent. Not necessarily a huge improvement for most use cases.

systemd, the feature creep that decides to pull every single possible use case into itself to manage everything in one place, with qwirks because making a “generic, do everything” piece of software is not a good idea, is not that great.

systemd, the group of tools that decided to manage everything by rewriting everything from scratch and suffering from the same issue that were fixed decades ago, just because “we can do better” while changing all well known interfaces and causing a schism with either double workload or dropping support for half the landscape from other software developer is really stupid.

If half the energy that got spent in the “systemd” ecosystem was spent in existing projects and solutions that already addressed these same issues, it’s likely we’d be in a far better place. Alas, it’s a new ecosystem, so we spend a lot of energy getting to the same point we were before. And it’s likely that when we get close to that, something new will show up and start the cycle again.

• issues with model training sources
• business sending their whole codebase to third party (copilot etc.) instead of local models
• time gain is not that substantial in most case, as the actual “writing code” part is not the part that takes most time, thinking and checking it is
• “chatting” in natural language to describe something that have a precise spec is less efficient than just writing code for most tasks as long as you’re half-competent. We’ve known that since customer/developer meetings have existed.
• the dev have to actually be competent enough to review the changes/output. In a way, “peer reviewing” becomes mandatory; it’s long, can be fastidious, and generated code really needs to be double checked at every corner (talking from experience here; even a generated one-liner can have issues)
• some business thinking that LLM outputs are “good enough”, firing/moving away people that can actually do said review, leading to more issues down the line
• actual debugging of non-trivial problems ends up sending me in a lot of directions, getting a useful output is unreliable at best
• making new things will sometimes confuse LLM, making them a time loss at best, and producing even worst code sometimes
• using code chatbot to help with common, menial tasks is irrelevant, as these tasks have already been done and sort of “optimized out” in library and reusable code. At best you could pull some of this in your own codebase, making it worst to maintain in the long term

Those are the downside I can think of on the top of my head, for having used AI coding assistance (mostly local solutions for privacy reasons). There are upsides too:

• sometimes, it does produce useful output in which I only have to edit a few parts to make it works
• local autocomplete is sometimes almost as useful as the regular contextual autocomplete
• the chatbot turning short code into longer “natural language” explanations can sometimes act as a rubber duck in aiding for debugging

Note the “sometimes”. I don’t have actual numbers because tracking that would be like, hell, but the times it does something actually impressive are rare enough that I still bother my coworker with it when it happens. For most of the downside, it’s not even a matter of the tool becoming better, it’s the usefulness to begin with that’s uncertain. It does, however, come at a large cost (money, privacy in some cases, time, and apparently ecological too) that is not at all outweighed by the rare “gains”.

The ethos of Mozilla

That’s the thing that changed.

Native package manager > Native binaries > AppImage > Flatpak.

Yes, snap isn’t even on the scale.

They’re planning on making a version where everything is a snap. Performance and usability may come later, who knows.

The goal is not always to “take control” of the whole system. A cryptolocker that makes all your files unreadable will happily run in user space.

Also, you’re forgetting that windows also have UAC, and that people will happily type the admin password of their device when asked to, because they’ve been conditioned to not care by badly made stuff. And, while win+r is unlikely to work in most Linux DE I know about, triggering a visual prompt that ask for your password is also a thing.

There is not much difference between common Linux distro and windows as far as seizing user files with malware is concerned, aside from the fact that no website will care to try telling you “press alt+space” instead of “win+r”.

There’s too much US specific legal mumbo jumbo and administration terms in there for me, but seeing that there’s a bit of resistance against this whole “ban books” thing is good.

If the alternative to “the nukes” is “gets steamrolled the old fashioned way” anyway, it’s not really an alternative.

I’m slightly worried about the really big guns russia supposedly have, but only slightly. At this point, it’s not like there’s a big red “launch” button on putin’s desk; it’d have to go through a few people that may have the actual big picture in their mind.

Inertia?

Now you have a visual interpretation of the concept of a plan.

At this point I’m almost expecting to see banners to “Christmas 2025 sales”.

So, saying people should “get used to cloud gaming and subscription only” in the future gets a free pass, even if the people that said it are the one trying to create cloud gaming and suscription only games?

No worries, at no point in recent years have I been feeling I “owned” a ubisoft game. Not even played them. I’m that committed to follow thge instructions of some dipshit.