I agree with the other comments. Its super cool after it eventually loads.
For real world use I don't think its practical if its only goal is basic browser UX in Python versus JavaScript, but I can see amazing value in this for larger applications written in Python that need to make use of a Python GUI.
Absolutely. This shines when you actually want to display complex / animated / streaming data in larger applications; or if you want to create educative or training material on several pages (i.e apps here).
As an example, I once built an online stock/ticker app with it: smooth real-time updates in a nice plot. It would have been more complex with DOM based widgets (and probably less fun).
Another doom and gloom post about SkyNet killing all the children in AskHN.
Yes, there will still be very many programming jobs for humans.
Yes, AI will eventually kill all the programming jobs staffed by people who cannot program, the pretenders.
Is programming really all about writing code? Yes, mostly. Yes, soft skills and communication skills are more important but writing code is your bread and butter. If you do not understand your craft then those more important qualities don't matter. You have no baseline upon which to exercise those more important skills.
If you are the kind of person who cannot tell the difference between writing original code versus pretender then yes, I would absolutely look for a career change. If you write software as a hobby yet struggle to land a job in sea of pretenders then there is a dim light in your future that will only get brighter with time.
How to identify the pretenders:
* Ask the person to measure something. Provide the means to gather data but not the data itself.
* If they need a magic framework because data structures are scary, such as React because the DOM is a mad bedtime killer in the dark.
* If every decision point is a game of bike shedding or Halloween costume.
* When the goal is to look busy or appear as a hero savior, as opposed to just completing an assignment quickly.
* If tasked to write original work is scarier than death in a Saw movie.
I have nothing that fits that criteria exactly. I still write tests for test automation manually and that should be automated but new tests are only needed as features are created or retired, which is irregular and infrequent.
Throughout my career many people have believed such bullshit illuminated their productivity. What has gotten me promoted in the past was doing the opposite, as in trying to not appear busy. If you have to justify your existence then your reason for existing is not well justified.
I suspect these CVEs will be 100% ignored irrespective of their severity. I wrote JavaScript for employment for over 15 years.
Frameworks only exist for the employer to supplement hiring and for those developers that are reliant upon them their availability is the only thing that matters.
Budgets are driven by congress from input by industry, senior military leaders, and current operations. Perceived risk is a completely unrelated political reality for uninformed voters.
> Budgets are driven by congress from input by industry, senior military leaders, and current operations.
So, yes? I can certainly see why defense contractors would prefer stability i.e. a cold war over a real war. But in a less dangerous world there's less need for defense contractors. e.g. '93 last supper
> Perceived risk is a completely unrelated political reality for uninformed voters.
Doesn't seem relevant to this thread unless we interpreted dangerous differently.
It typically is the code that’s the bottleneck, but not writing the code. My career is littered with numerous delays from slow applications.
I am stuck with an editor based on Eclipse. It’s slow and periodicity pauses or crashes. I am stuck with build jobs that take 15-20 minutes. I am often stuck with web apps that take forever to do a task that should take 50ms max.
The list can go on and on. Every delay is a distraction that shatters my concentration. I still write code at work but I am in management now with dozens of other people and administrative distractions. When the software is slow it become my lowest priority. I don’t care who that impacts because if it really mattered we wouldn’t be held hostage by all this slow syrup of software pulling each of us under.
When I was laid off as a senior fullstack developer I received a few calls and interviews. There was one time when I received two competing offers with prestigious companies but both required relocation.
My learning about JavaScript employment is that, for the most part, it’s permanently a beginner’s area of software. If you have done that kind of work forever you have some hard choices to make: pretend to be an expert at really beginner things or wait a really long time for extremely rare opportunities to open. So I don’t do that work anymore. My 6 months of unemployment was largely self inflicted.
My other learning about software employment is that when you enter management your technical skills in a given language matter so much less. Other generalized factors become more important like strong communication skills, multitasking endurance, soft skills, a wide distribution of technical knowledge your developers won’t have.
I wonder if this is a generational thing of fresh young people that already cannot live without LLMs versus crusty old people that don’t want to require a super computer just to run a web browser that violates all their privacy.
To me this sounds like the point where people start looking at and developing alternatives to the browser/web.
Right and that means people have to send their data to an external service.
Give it X months (or years??) and people will realize this is actually a privacy/data autonomy issue.
It's just dominated right now by the anti-AI/anti-technology sentiment in the west. That will gradually go away as more people use AI and robotics and realize how wrong they were about it.
>Right and that means people have to send their data to an external service.
Nothing in this proposal claims it has to be a local AI. That just happens to be the implementation by Chrome and Edge (for now at least, I'd imagine Google will eventually start moving this API towards hosted Gemini).
That's an important aspect of this that should really be part of the discussion on GitHub. But I've been told I'm not qualified to interject so I am not going to bother.
I will use WebLLM if I want something like this (with local AI guaranteed).
So I guess the question would be, "What makes this acceptable Tech". I don't know how you get there without offering some type of "Search" like choice for open models. We all know how that turned out.
Maybe Mozilla can save itself by getting paid to serve Google's model as default rather than another providers. Would replace the revenue stream they lost.
Meaning you do not want text generation in the web API at all, or you think the prompt API needs to be different? And if so can you give one sentence on how it should change?
If you glance at that then you may see that I am for the idea of leaner alternatives to the current web platform.
But in the context of the existing web API which has just about everything and the whole kitchen sink in it (hundreds of sub-APIs), I do not think it will really help anyone at this point just just stop adding features, especially major ones.
The web is basically an overlay operating system and has been for many years.
> Meaning you do not want text generation in the web API at all, or you think the prompt API needs to be different?
Not OP but I think you are misunderstanding the interaction as a whole here. The Chromium team made a proposal, then the Chromium team asked the Firefox team for a position on the proposal. Whether or not the Firefox team or anyone on the Firefox team has any goals around AI or whatever, this response was simply "We do not like this proposal for these reasons..."
How to fix those issues really isn't the Firefox team's job and also wasn't part of the question asked by the Chromium team.
You didn't read my comment carefully enough. It was not about AI in general. It was about the text generation API. And it is perfectly reasonable to ask if he wants to reject the feature entirely or if he can give a one sentence overview of how it might be fixed.
There are a lot of people reading his position. One or two additional clarifying sentences to spell it out for people skimming is not such an unreasonable ask.
> There are a lot of people reading his position. One or two additional clarifying sentences to spell it out for people skimming is not such an unreasonable ask.
I do think it is a bit unwarranted, actually. This isn't a press release, it's a technical discussion somewhat deep into a technical process that's open for archival purposes. His audience is not people skimming through, it's the Chromium team and other members of the standards body.
You're sort of overhearing a conversation and injecting yourself into it.
And so are you injecting yourself and objecting to me even discussing on HN.
And this is not really a technical issue. It's a worldview issue no matter how much you or others try to pretend it's a technical problem or that I am violating etiquette or something.
> And this is not really a technical issue. It's a worldview issue no matter how much you or others try to pretend it's a technical problem or that I am violating etiquette or something.
I'm actually so curious what you think is going on here
A little off-topic, I honestly don't think it's as much as the browser interface that needs to be reworked as it is the idea of operating systems in general.
I don't know what the right answer is, but having used Niri/Wayland vs. GNOME vs. Windows vs. Mac... I will never go back to a non-tiling desktop and a none-kb driven workflow for desktop window management.
Funnily enough, most of the young people I know fall somewhere between those two sides of the spectrum.
I know some actual luddite-tier AI haters that believe it's ontologically evil, and another majoring in Data Science that went to the most recent career fair and told a recruiter "AI will replace you" (I uh don't think he's getting that internship)
And of course many, many, others that fall between the two extremes.
The one thing we can all agree on, is it makes homework a hell of a lot easier :) (well, except the luddite-types, they refuse to use it in any capacity)
I'm a member of a political action committee, where I was brought in as an expert in professional media applications of AI. I've got extensive experience using AI tools in the production of well known entertainment properties (think VFX for film and animation.) Anyway, within the political action committee where is a diverse mixture of people, with about 1/5th of them under age 30. The entire under age 30 set are so AI negative, to such an irrational degree, I have been asked to do nothing and offer no advice that incorporates any technology at all. They are so paranoid. In a not really emotional discussion, a bunch of them erupted in tears, they are so irrational about it.
Are you able to share whether the PAC was Democratic Party or Republican Party aligned? When I first came to America, the headlines were about how Obama’s campaign embraced tech successfully. By now, tech is considered right-wing. If the young ‘uns who burst into tears were on a Republican aligned PAC that would be interesting. It would mean cross-political tech angst.
The biggest irony with telling a recruiter they'll be replaced, is how much easier a data scientist is to replace with LLMs. With their sycophantic nature, execs will eat up whatever "data" the LLMs make up, too.
Young people love AI when it helps them cheat homework, or when used for roleplay and memes. Generating "content" with AI - is generally more hated, especially art and video.
That is a bad counter-example, because its just a poorly conceived statement. You apparently don't hate knives. You hate killing people, which isn't remotely similar.
Using AI to cheat at academics and then hating on people who use AI to cheat on media creation is absolutely hypocritical. Its qualifying hypocritical stupidity like this results in shoving a single vendor's LLM into the browser.
Do they really? Hating on AI slop is a common sentiment on social media, but remember that the opinions you see on social media are often not representative of what the general population thinks at all.
I keep hearing stories about how homework is now useless because every student just gets ChatGPT to do it for them, and from personal experience, I'm inclined to believe them.
I don't believe every student uses a calculator to solve their math homework, so what makes ChatGPT unique here? For certain subjects the ability to cheat has been trivial for a long time, yet there was no crisis.
When I was in high school a classmate did their chemistry homework by buying the teachers edition of the textbook, which had the answer key. The whole class knew this trick existed, but most of us slogged through the work manually. I knew another group who divided up the homework problems and then combined. Students have always known how to cheat on homework, but enough students actually do it anyway.
For real world use I don't think its practical if its only goal is basic browser UX in Python versus JavaScript, but I can see amazing value in this for larger applications written in Python that need to make use of a Python GUI.
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