Hive mind would imply that people are simply following along and not making decisions on their own. I read the article and was thinking that the way they went about it was a fairly good use of AI to actually implement code.

Then I read the article posted by someone in this comment section about how the author and creator of ladybird is not only a homophobic asshole but an out and out racist. If you support him and use this then you are, by association, a homophobe and a racist.

So fuck you 🖕 as well.

Came here to say this.

Sigh of course it's a Nordic thing. I should have guessed. White nationalists also love other Heathen/Norse symbolism.

Good to be careful, so thanks for educating me.

If any creator can separate work from personal and the product is good I really couldn't care less with what they use their own time for.

I'm pretty sure you could find people with other unsavoury opinions in the devteams for both chrome and firefox, what then?

If any creator can separate work from personal and the product is good I really couldn't care less with what they use their own time for.

I'm pretty sure you could find people with other unsavoury opinions in the devteams for both chrome and firefox, what then? Lynx?

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz - This kinda covers the "engine without JS" part, it's a bit more limited, but also in alpha. It's part of the dioxus project, they use it for rendering UI on desktop.

I haven't looked at the code, but the mem safety may be out if the translation just slapped unsafe and transmute everywhere.

And "working code" is often very hard to replace, it can be hard to justify code changes when the original "works just the same". So, I would expect the weird ported code to live on unless there is a major effort to rewrite it.

There's no reason to believe it's mostly unsafe. And even if that's the case, changing from unsafe rust to safe is less of a leap than cpp to rust.

Gross

Having done some C to rust auto-translation some time ago, it definitely was wildly unsafe. Maybe it's better now, but there is no reason to assume it's mostly safe now either. Even recently I did some regular vibe coding to test it out, and it generated some very questionable code.

Even if there is zero "unsafe", there could be loads of unchecked array accesses, or unwraps causing panics, which while "safe", will cause crashes.

Fixing unsafe can be a mixed bag, some will be easy, some will require much deeper changes. And without looking at the code, impossible to say which it will be.

God that screenshot is giving me severe second hand embarrassment

The author explains why he chose the name on his site. I don’t think this is a neo-nazi / white nationalist thing despite the irony.

Google's monopoly is a bigger problem than one guy having confused ideas, to me.

Yeah he picked it back in 2000s and its aged badly. Not his fault

One could just hard-fork Chromium...

Chromium needs no introduction (used to be an interesting browser until Google's mask "don't be evil" fell and straightforwardly revealed their corporate face and farce), Firefox have been "welcoming the new AI overlords" for a while, text browsers (such as Lynx) are far from feasible for a CAPTCHA(and Anubis)-driven web...

To me the hope lies in Firefox forks

The things people criticize are so fucking brainless these days. AI this, slop that.

Not a single one of you made fun of "let's rewrite it in Rust." You can't even elevate to the level of mildly funny parroting.

@INeedMana@piefed.zip @technology@lemmy.worldYeah, me too. Unfortunately, the forks can only get so far in removing upstream AI garbage and other proprietary/corporate-oriented whistles-and-bells. If, say, some AI feature becomes so ingrained inside Firefox upstream, so deeply it ends up becoming some hard dependency for fundamental functioning of the browser (i.e. a feature that, if removed at the code-level, would render Firefox simply unable to function), no WaterFox, IronFox, Fennec or LibreWolf would be able to keep up with the latest versions: they'd either need to do a hard fork trying to independently maintain an entire codebase for a browser, or they'd need to use downgraded versions. Not even to say about licensing shenanigans. We've seen many open-source projects suddenly changing their licensing to include legalese thin letters. We've seen open-source projects requiring developers to sign up some kind of NDA before being allowed to contribute with code. Seems like initially-open licenses aren't written on stone when it comes to big projects, and Firefox is a big project.The universe of open-source software is being slowly hijacked by corporate interests. This is not different with Firefox, which (as I said in another reply to someone in this thread a few minutes ago) is Mozilla's main product (if not the main product, it's certainly among their main projects). The same Mozilla which has been pivoting to AI (e.g. acquisition of Anonym; subtle phrasing changes from "About Firefox" page which used to state how "Firefox will never sell your data", now this phrase is gone).I use WaterFox on a daily basis. It's by far the best browser I've been using. I tried LibreWolf but it doesn't really likes my Portuguese ABNT2 keyboard (which has accents I use often), even after disabling ResistFingerprint, so I ended up sticking with WaterFox. On mobile, I use Fennec on a daily basis, and I'm worried about the end of "sideloading" on Android which will likely mess with its installation. But I'm aware of how both browsers rely on upstream code from Mozilla Firefox, whose enshittification is already an ongoing phenomenon. And that's really depressing when it comes to the future of browser landscape, because we're hoping for a true alternative. Servo is the last bastion of said hope (until it gets EEE'd by corporate interests, given how Linux Foundation itself is increasingly surrounded by corpos.I'm more of a GNU/Stallman person who values autonomy and ness as non-negotiable principles. I'm only using Android because I'm stuck with it due to certain societal impositions (banks and gov apps), otherwise I'd be long using a custom phone, which wouldn't even be Linux, but something way more "unorthodox" for a phone such as FreeBSD or Illumos/OpenIndianna, systems of which I already used on a PC environment and got quite fond of.

“Let’s stop halfway through our multi-year project to rewrite it in another language” is peak nerd shiny distraction. I say this as one who resists the urge every day. Way to delay your project by several more years, clown.

I've suddenly lost all interest in this browser's development. From what I've heard, LLMs are pretty bad at generating Rust code for some reason. If they used LLM to bulk convert C++ code to Rust, the quality of the code is questionable at best.

Oh now that's interesting. I've always wondered (not knowing much about how they're made) if it would be possible to make a desktop compositor for Linux that simply uses HTML and CSS. One could even natively embed local pages in it.

Gnome shell uses JS and CSS (i beleive anyway), and the w11 start menu is supposedly react native, so I think the answer is definitely yes.

Go on, do it.

Gnome shell uses JS

I knew there was a reason why it sucked so much!

Surely you read the article?

"The requirement from the start was byte-for-byte identical output from both pipelines. "

The bytecode from C++ is identical to the Rust output.

I don't think you should be able to make claims like this without hard proof.

Do you have any information about this?

Edit: So I found out where you read that, and that article is wayyy over thinking that comment.

I think the Twitter comment could be taken multiple ways and it would be fair to give them the benefit of the doubt.

All things considered the way they're approaching the migration is fine enough - they're only moving specific portions at a time, they're not stopping C++ development, and they're making sure it doesn't introduce regressions. Adopting a memory-safe language for something like a browser makes sense because it completely eliminates that class of vulnerabilities.

The problem is the way they're approaching the code itself. From their wording, it sounds like they're relying on AI heavily for both writing and reviewing the code. Rust has a steeper learning curve than most languages and is very different from C++. They even mention in the blog that their current Rust code looks like C++ code ported over. If they don't take the time to actually learn Rust before adopting it, it'll just lead to security logic issues that their AI couldn't catch because C++ and Rust don't always behave the same way. And that's completely ignoring all of the other ethical/technical issues with AI

Be that as it may, the time to choose Rust was at the beginning. It existed then, but they made their technology choice. Continuing to develop in C++ while doing the migration just means more throwaway code and duplicated effort. This decision is truly the worst of both worlds.

No one can separate their creative idea from the rest of the brain. Any fool that thinks that's possible is straight up stupid.

How many times do I have to give him the benefit of the doubt though?

First it was the "using they in documentation is political ideology" Github issue, then he publicly defended DHH when people called him out for being a white supremacist, he implied tech companies are discriminating against white people with diversity policies, and he tweeted that he hopes young people will carry on Charlie Kirk's legacy.

If one or two of these things happened in isolation, I could maybe understand giving him the benefit of the doubt as a non-American (for that last one) non-native English speaker. But all of these things taken together? I personally don't think I can look past that.

To be fair I hadn't heard of some of these, so I think you're right. I wouldn't go so far as as to say he's a white supremacist but it definitely seems like he has an "ideology"

Edit: The more I read about it the more it's pissing me off. Especially defending DHH who wrote that trash article about London (I'm not a Londoner but I'm a Brit who's there enough with work to know he's talking absolute shit).

I don't think it's possible to write rust code that compiles to the exact same binary as c++. compilers make different optimizations, and make overall a different structure, especially across languages.

I think they meant the rust library produces the same output from the same input as the c++ library.

if llms indeed generate worse rust code than for other languages, that's not that big of a problem because the compiler will catch a lot of mistakes. if it compiles, it will run, and no memory safety bugs unless unsafe is also used. the llm could pick the wrong functions for some uses, but that should be caught relatively easily with testing, which can be automated partly

edit: I was wrong, they indeed say that. this is weird.

That's fair, I assume most people probably aren't following ladybird that closely so it's easy to miss. It just bothers me because shrugging off small individual problems and ignoring a bigger trend is arguably what let people like DHH get a platform in the first place.

artisan AI prompts. we are supposed to be paying extra!

We've seen open-source projects requiring developers to sign up some kind of NDA before being allowed to contribute with code.

you mean the DCOs? those are nothing like NDAs. if not, which ones you mean?

common ladybird l

@WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works @technology@lemmy.worldPossibly. I don't know the specific acronym they use, but regardless of the acronym: to me, it smells and looks like NDAs insofar it's some kind of analogous version of a "secretive initiation ritual" for a developer who's just trying to help an open-source community. It's an agreement where the developer accepts that anything they contribute free-of-charge is going to be used for enterprise (paid) purposes and any contribution is subject to be altered or removed as the management pleases, sometimes it also involves NDA if private (often "enterprise/premium edition") repos are intertwined with the open-source ("community edition") repos. The ideal open-source, at least to me, would require a developer, developer no matter who they are or how long their experience is, whenever they wanted to contribute with their coding skills, to simply do a PR or fork a repo, with no bureaucratic or "selling the soul to the Great Corporate" requirements for doing so. Developing is already mentally demanding for a developer, and adding licensing shenanigans to the equation only complicates things, because now the developer, who's used to talk the language of computers, would need to become knowledgeable about ambiguous social cues, corporate legalese and the differences between a "MIT" and a "GPL" (that's one of the main reasons why I'm quite fond of WTFNMFPL licensing: no legalese).