gabrielesvelto

gabrielesvelto, 11 months ago to greece

Wherever I look I can see news about a few very rich individuals being stranded on a submarine that was supposed to take them on a tour of the Titanic. The effort put in place to rescue them appears huge in scope.

Last week over six hundred people died in a #shripweck off the coasts of #Greece and nobody cared. Nobody even bothered to start a rescue operation until it was too late.

Stop pretending people are equal, I hate this hypocrisy.

gabrielesvelto, 9 months ago to firefox

Starting with version 116, #Firefox will drop support for macOS versions prior to 10.15 as well as Windows 7, 8 and 8.1. This has understandably annoyed a few users so let me explain why we're taking this step: the maintenance burden of supporting several versions of each platform is very significant. I'll show you how much by citing three platform-specific bugs I've worked on over the past two years. 🧵 1/13

gabrielesvelto, 11 months ago to firefox

On Monday morning we (Mozilla) detected a very large crash spike affecting #Firefox users on Linux, specifically on an older version of a Debian-based distribution.

It turned out to be an interesting bug involving the #Linux kernel and #Google JavaScript code so let me tell you about it.

A thread 🧵

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1839669 1/6

gabrielesvelto, 1 month ago to random

Memory errors in consumer devices such as PCs and phones are not something you hear much about, yet they are probably one of the most common ways these machines fail.

I'll use this thread to explain how this happens, how it affects you and what you can do about it. But I'll also talk about how the industry failed to address it and how we must force them to, for the sake of sustainability. 🧵 1/17

gabrielesvelto, 1 month ago to random

This is gonna be fun: OpenAI runs afoul of the GDPR because it generates false information about individuals and they don't have full access to the data that pertains to them.

From the article:

> Maartje de Graaf, data protection lawyer at noyb: “The obligation to comply with access requests applies to all companies. [...] It seems that with each ‘innovation’, another group of companies thinks that its products don’t have to comply with the law.”

https://noyb.eu/en/chatgpt-provides-false-information-about-people-and-openai-cant-correct-it

gabrielesvelto, 6 months ago to random

I've just discovered that only a month ago Kissinger argued in an article that we should allow Russia to annex the parts of Ukraine they had occupied in 2014 including Crimea.

The guy was a cream of the crop asshole right until his very last minute.

gabrielesvelto, 3 months ago to random

My former colleague Asa Dotzler tried asking generative AI models to create pictures of people writing, playing an instrument or playing tennis with their left hand and it went exactly as you would imagine it to go.

A screenshot of several AI generated images. The caption on the screenshot says: "Generate an image of a person playing a left-handed guitar. Sure, here is an image of a person playing a left-handed guitar." The images generated below are of people playing a guitar as a right-handed person would.
A screenshot of several AI generated images of people playing tennis holding their racket with their right hand. The caption says: "Sure, here is an image of a left-handed tennis player"
A post from Asa Dotzler, the post says: "HAHAHA Screw you lefties, you're using the wrong hand according to our A.I. overlords anyway. Screenshot says: "Unfortunately I'm unable to create images of people engaging in actions that contradict common sense or physics, such as writing with the wrong hand."

gabrielesvelto, 6 months ago to climate

"Richest 1% emit as much planet-heating pollution as two-thirds of humanity"

I don't think there's anything else to add to #Oxfam's last campaign report. #ClimateChange #ClimateInequality

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-emit-much-planet-heating-pollution-two-thirds-humanity

gabrielesvelto, 9 months ago to firefox

Extensions are coming back to #Firefox for Android: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/08/10/prepare-your-firefox-desktop-extension-for-the-upcoming-android-release/

gabrielesvelto, 2 months ago to random

So I just learned what "The Stack" is today: an aggregation of GitHub repos for machine learning from which I can opt out.

But I won't.

I won't because they scraped some hot garbage I wrote in bash and Python that would make you faint. Bottom-of-the-barrel throw-away scripts full of coding crimes. Stuff like

find | grep | awk | xargs | ugh

...invoked via subprocess.run() then fed into more garbage.

I want "artificial intelligence" to learn this. It's going to be fantastic.

gabrielesvelto, 6 months ago to random

I couldn't have imagined a world where significant political action would be needed in order to uninstall programs from my computer. But here we are: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/europeans-can-soon-strip-bing-edge-other-microsoft-cruft-from-windows-11/

gabrielesvelto, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago) to random

Look at this beauty that my wife found near the dumpster. What kind of society throws things like this away? Anyway, it's testing night! 🧵

gabrielesvelto, 3 months ago to climate

We're fucked

#GlobalWarming

gabrielesvelto, 12 days ago to random

Normalize calling AI "plagiarism as a service"

gabrielesvelto, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to random

Pro-Russian propaganda accounts are spreading the false rumor that western weapons provided to #Ukraine were sold to Hamas, and used during today's attack. This is false, but you'll soon see this rumor accompanied by videos of Hamas militants operating western weapons... because they've captured a significant amount of them from IDF bases around the #Gaza strip.

gabrielesvelto, 7 months ago to random

I just learned that #Bandcamp has been essentially gutted, with half of the staff being let go. It sounds like it will soon be turned into the shadow of itself and it's such a shame.

I'd like to thank all the people who worked there and built a service that had the artists' back. In our stagnant, corporate-centric cultural environment you made something that really enabled music to develop in many new interesting directions.

gabrielesvelto, 2 months ago to random

What sound does a tech bubble make when it bursts?

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/03/stability_ai_bills/

gabrielesvelto, 4 months ago to firefox

I highly recommend this article written by my colleagues Serge Guelton and Yannis Juglaret about a truly hard-to-parse issue that affected #Firefox users on old Ubuntu installations.

It's a cautionary tale about how complex builds can be affected by subtle compiler/linker flags. Also, C++ is hard and making modern C++ work on older platforms is painful and full of pitfalls.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2024/01/option-soup-the-subtle-pitfalls-of-combining-compiler-flags/

gabrielesvelto, 7 months ago to firefox

FYI it's now official: #Firefox development will soon be moving to a #Git repository, replacing the #Mercurial one that's been in use since 2006

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/5MrpDdHIr-Y/m/p6ZHxy6sBQAJ

gabrielesvelto, 6 months ago to random

Live your life so that the internet reacts to your death like to Rosalynn Carter's, not Henry Kissinger's

gabrielesvelto, 6 months ago to ChatGPT

This article describing a very simple exploit that extracts training data from #ChatGPT got me thinking. Have LLM developers even tried to fuzz their LLMs? Because I have a feeling that they didn't; and people who will fuzz them will have a lot of fun finding all sort of unfixable issues

https://not-just-memorization.github.io/extracting-training-data-from-chatgpt.html

gabrielesvelto, 5 months ago to firefox

The #AlpineLinux maintainers have enabled crash reporting for #Firefox and the very first reports are trickling in. I want to thank them publicly because this will help us keep Firefox stable on the platform.

For users, remember that crash reports are strictly opt-in, so send them our way if you experience instability.

gabrielesvelto, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to Anime

Some want us to believe that #GlobalWarming somehow only recently came into the mainstream. This is false and easy to prove. Here's two screenshots from Mobile Police Patlabor, an #anime from 1988 which I watched as a kid.

We knew, everybody knew. It's just that the #FossilFuels industry lobbied hard for politicians to look the other way.

gabrielesvelto, 27 days ago to random

I love our users: I went over two bugs, one in Thunderbird where the user was trying to drag 5k contacts to the "To" field of a new email and the other in Firefox with the user trying to upload 100k files in one go to GDrive.

While these are extreme cases they should work. If we can handle them gracefully we can handle anything, so we should strive to make these cases work.