I'm very pro-AI and i think LLMs are an important technical step in achieving it (even if in the end it might turn out that LLMs helped achieve AI by showing how not to do it). But they suffer from premature commercialization. I'm very much against trying to sell them as the ultimate solution to everything. And another issue, not related to the technical aspect, is that business practices of certain self-styled "AI companies" calls for guillotining of their upper management.
Flash was cool, but it was also a spectacular dumpster file. Honestly I'm sort of glad Google&Apple killed it. Yes it was an amazing medium, but it feels almost like Adobe kept thinking about it as an animation studio and didn't care to run it as an application platform with all the concerns it entails (i. e. security). And support of anything that's not Windows, while technically present, was abysmal. HTML5, with all it sins and warts, is a better platform, even if it has much higher entry barrier.
During the Flash era, creativity flourished. It was accessible, too. Seven year olds could use it.
Flash was getting better and better. It could have become an open standard had Jobs not murdered it to keep runtimes off iPhone. He was worried about competition. The battery and security issues were technical problems and fully solvable.
The companies that filled the web void - Google and Apple - both had their own selfish reasons not to propose a successor. And they haven't helped anyone else step up to the plate. It would be impossible now.
Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web.
Smartphones might have pushed us forward, but the app layer held us back.
The 1990s and 2000s web saw what AOL and Microsoft were trying to lock us into and instead opted for open and flexible.
Platformization locked us into hyperscaler rails where they get action on everything we do. This has slowed us down tremendously, and a lot of the free energy and innovation capital of the system goes to taxation.
The thing is, HTML5 is far more technically capable than Flash ever was. It was competitive even at the time: Flash's main thing was 2D vector graphics, but iOS Safari has supported both Canvas and SVG since at least 2010, possibly from day one.
But the creation tools and the culture never really lined up the same way, and developers focused on creating apps instead.
For non-games, HTML has always been technically superior. iOS Safari may have a long history of rendering bugs, but it beats Flash/AIR, which always looked very out-of-place even on desktop.
I do wonder what would have happened in an alternate universe where either Flash or HTML5 took off on mobile instead of apps. We would have both the upsides of openness, and the downsides of worse performance and platform integration and the lack of an easy payment rail. Pretty much the same situation we still see on desktop today.
We wouldn't have had the same "gold rush" from the early App Store, which happened in large part because of the ease of making money. There would probably be more focus on free stuff with ads, like Android but more so.
I second everything except the fact that Adobe was behind Flash, which IMO is what killed it in the first place (with ten years of hindsight, I can say this confidently). I still do creative, non-standard work, but in a free way using pure vanilla JS (using Haxe).
Adobe's mistake was keeping the system proprietary instead of letting it be free. Since then, I've left that ecosystem and what a relief!
(I know I'm mixing different levels here, and my personal experience isn't really an argument).
ps: HTML scope is way more advanced than whatever Flash could have been.
> Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web.
No they wouldn't. We've forgotten just how bad and sloppy flash apps were. The handful of companies that used Adobe Flex turned out awful POS that barely worked. It occupied the same space that Electron does today -- bloated, slow, and permitting cheap-ass devs to utilize cheap talent to develop 'apps' with all the finesse of a sledgehammer
As a kid I loved flash, I was making interactive apps in AS2/3 in high school. But I watched in horror as it became the de facto platform for crapware
> It occupied the same space that Electron does today
This. Except Electron crap at least runs on top of a well-designed and relatively reliable platform (HTML/Chromium) - and sometimes the crap even offer an actual PWA version with all the sandbox benefits a real browser has to offer. Flash didn't even had that.
And let's be realistic, there will always be demand for a crap-running platform for vendors that don't care (or just have their core values elsewhere).
> And let's be realistic, there will always be demand for a crap-running platform for vendors that don't care (or just have their core values elsewhere).
My kingdom for some way of gatekeeping platforms so that entities like this are forbidden from participating
- Lack of gatekeeping was THE advantage that made Web viable and competitive against traditional media.
- You can't gatekeep crapmakers without also gatekeeping that kid in his parent's basement with an awesome idea.
- Crapmakers with enough money will punch through any gatekeeping.
- Sometimes you have to accept that vendors don't care. Can't expect a transport company to give too much love to their timetables app. Yes, they are expected to hire someone competent to do it, but the "someone competent" also rarely care. Still better than having no access to the timetables.
No, there was gatekeeping, it was knowledge. You had to be knowledgeable enough to work the system. You had to have the time to dedicate to learning the system and how the internet and how computers worked. Those twin gates kept the internet as it was in its early days.
Unfortunately every peabrained enterpreneur saw that and began eroding the moat until it was gone. The knowledge required to build things has been on a steady decline, and now with AI that decline has completely destroyed it. Now, every fucking hack with an "idea" is not only able to act on them but now they act like they are as good as the people who paid a heavy price to get to the same level through years of study and hard work.
The issues were fully solvable but Adobe didn't care to solve them. Apparently, someone else was supposed to fix their proprietary platform with paid development tools. /s
Given Europe's productivity gap with the US, they appear they are becoming even further a vassal. They will survive, but they further lose their leverage with each year. We see this in international politics as the US pivots away from Europe and towards Asia. (Although Russia's decline has also made it less necessary too)
If you want Europe to rejoin 'great powers', as 'survival', yes they need AI.
Productivity in producing slop? Because that's the only thing LLMs are good for so far. And by the time this change the GPUs installed today will become obsolete.
Lifeforms around deep sea hydrothermal vent is fully independent from photosynthesis. Even if the sun would have gone off, they would still have been able to sustain themselves for hundreds of millions of years. And the supposed ancestor to eucaryotes (e. g. Asgard archaea) have been discovered in probes from a deep vent. So the whole thing doesn't sound too convincing.
What puzzles me the most is the sheer incompetency of people who designed and approved "Pathways". Seriously, just how little did they care to know their target audience?
> * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous me
I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works".
> It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't.
Drivers are a pain point and will probably stay so until the market share is too large for the hardware vendors to ignore. Which probably aren't happening any time soon, sadly.
This is not a driver issue I'm talking about. It's a "best way to adjust the white balance is with this GTK+-2.0 app that hasn't seen maintenance since the Bush administration" issue.
> I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works".
The UI framework for macOS has not changed in any substantial design-update-requiring ways since OS X was first released. They did add stuff (animations as a core concept, most notably).
The UI framework for Windows has changed even less, though it's more of a mess because there are several different ones, with an unclear relationship to each other. win32 won't hurt though, and it hasn't changed in any significant ways since dinosaurs roamed the silicon savannahs.
The UI framework for Linux ... oh wait, there isn't one.
You are trying to portrait it as an exchange between equal parties which it isn't. I am totally entitled not to have to use a thrid-party-controlled device to access government services. Or my bank account.
remote attestation is just fancy digital signatures with hardware protected secret keys. Are you freaking out about digital signatures used anywhere else?
It absolutely does. Emphasis on use. The last thing I need is my bank requiring me to use a Poettering-certified distribution because anything else is "insecure".
You are acting very entitled thinking you can dictate the conditions under which you can connect to other people's computers. This is a "it takes two to tango" situation. I'm sure YOU would refuse to connect to any bank that refuses to use TLS.
Entities other than me being able to control what runs on the device I physically posses is absolutely not acceptable in any way. Screw your clients, screw you shareholders and screw you.
Assuming you're using systemd, you already gave up control over your system. The road to hell was already paved. Now, you would have to go out of your way to retain control.
In the great scheme of things, this period where systemd was intentionally designed and developed and funded to hurt your autonomy but seemed temporarily innocuous will be a rounding error.
Nah man, yo are FUDing. systemd might have some poor design choices and arrogant maintainers, but at least I can drop it at any time and my bank wouldn't freak out about it. This one… It's a whole another level.
I don't think Mr Pottering was brought by accident, maybe his decade of contribution making sure systemd services can be manipulated by a supervisor (in the case of wsl and ms) is a valuable asset.
Systemd don't even need to change much to become the devil itself, it just have to upstream merge changes already consolidated in the past 5 years or so...
But logically it's safe because for this to become a problem systemd would have to be adopted by the majority of distributions and its maintainers would have to concede to the pressure of big corps and such...oh, wait
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