The application of age indication is just going to be another metric that these companies use for fingerprinting and person identification, one that some analyst on their inside possibly considered a useful data point.
And while this particular API might be an easy one to target, for removal as a patch, it might end up being part of a JS framework that many websites use and will break in case the return value is not available.
So if people require sites to work, this will become just another feature, requiring similar mitigations to other JS features I mentioned, that will need to be handled in a way that it increases the anonymity of the user, lest the user be subjected to harassment.
By "harassment", I mean the actual inescapable kind, not just random internet trolls.
Hi, I am here to tell you that it is not particularly trivial to make the kind of changes required to make the websites keep working while also preventing stuff similar to JS fingerprinting.Some extensions do a decent job in certain cases, but the only ones that completely fix the problem are the ones that simply turn off JS.
I checked out what Librewolf's changes do, using amiunique.org and in some tests it even ends up increasing the uniqueness.
You will essentially require identifying different parts of the JS engine that expose said vulnerabilities and then creating mitigations for each of them, with either the "blend in" or "randomise" strategy and will also require to make sure they are not detected over any domain (due to partial overlap of either change).
This kind of change for a single person will require properly understanding the JS engine codebase and then making and maintaining all required patches over the course of the fork as the main project goes forward. This is pretty much a full time job.Even if multiple people are working on it, one would still require a good understanding of the codebase.
I suggest recruiting one of the retired/laid-off Firefox engineers, if you have the funds.
I am starting to learn Rust and the only reason I don't intend on using it for GUI stuff for the time being is because I just like QtWidgets a lot and GUI toolkits in Rust are a pretty new thing.
Apart from that, pretty much all logic can benefit from a language that forces people to be more explicit.
Although I won't consider it for larger projects until the borrow checker gets the overhaul it needs, because I'd rather not start hating another language.
But software engineering has this unique "I can conjure a machine to do my bidding" quality to it.
If this kind of jealousy exists, it's pretty nonsensical.Machines are made in factories, using materials and machines that no one of us Software Engineers could afford.
The only Digital IC I would be able to make by hand are the little handheld-sized AND gate, OR gate, Flip-Flop etc, things (which will still end up requiring more than 1 person and a significant amount of investment) which are far from being able to run software from even generations ago.And I don't need to write software to make those things to do my bidding. I can break down the task, create the logic and build it from the ground-up using those gates. Because the logic itself (and not really the language) is the value I create.And that will always take time.
Also, automating that, doesn't require an LLM. Once I can make a machine to do a thing, I can make a machine that can make the previous machine, simply because I have a way to make a device that is logically sound and consistent.
People put all different kinds of logic into the same umbrella of "AI" and act as if they have the same value, but they don't.When you go with stuff like ML and Computer Vision, you might be shifting from an anvil to a hydraulic press, but when you start using LLMs for stuff other than language, expecting it to do logic and hoping that it won't make a mistake somewhere you are not looking, is far from that.With a hydraulic press, you know what piece you can work on and upto what level after which you switch to precision tools. But when you use a hammer to do a screwdriver's job it may look just fine and may work where you are looking, but will then end up failing in ways you don't know of, because you didn't realise it was a hammer and didn't take a good look at the screw.
The magic is turning messy human intent into something a computer can execute—reliably—in the real world.
This part is correctly said. What is lacking over here is that we are using the wrong tool for the wrong job and the price we pay for it, is going towards reducing our ability to use the created software for ourselves.
The expectations increase. The baseline competence rises.
The expectations for quantity increase.The baseline quantity output rises.
The maximum possible quality falls.The expectations for quality decrease (as if they weren't already low enough).
The ability to understand your product, vanishes.And everyone ends up calling it "magic" and you a "chanter".
Tools of automation reduce unnecessary variations.Deploying automation with deterministic devices en-masse, can help reduce variation and bring up the bottom line, with the trade-off of maximum quality.
When you start creating the automation from a non-deterministic point and use it to feed input into a deterministic GIGO, then in turn for the trade-off of maximum quality, you get 'GO'.
Any engineer worth their salt can do proper logic. And most humans can learn a programming language, just as any language *sometimes more easily).But if an engineer not understanding a language now gives their logic to an LLM that writes the wrong logic in said language, what is telling the Software Engineer, that it was not the logic the engineer intended. And if the original engineer can tell that to the Software Engineer while checking the code, they can do so for writing the code.
I don't plan for all of them.Just when I realise some specific one is getting too repetitive, I make a script for it.
Never needed to do so at home (yet), because my IDEs usually provide good enough boilerplate and I am mostly doing learning projects (i.e. hardly any repetition), but I did make a few in one of my previous work places, which someone else might be using rn (hopefully not, because it was meant for me and not for users).
Fix it by simply turning off "Low Disk Space" warnings in System Settings.Mix that with keeping your / and your home cache, local, share etc directories in a non-data drive and you get no warnings. Only errors when a write fails.
Yeah, it would be nice to have an animator and a programmer work together for stuff like this.
On the other hand, Blender has Python scripting, meaning a lot of Blender users would be capable of that.So all that is required for a programmer is to create Python endpoints and then provide a similar interface that would work on pre-rendered graphics.
Hehe! I have.And what took the longest was for me to get used to the dual versioning of QML modules and fixing the UI code that was partially using stuff from both versions.
Business logic was pretty small for me but that was because other engineers had already written most of it in Maths.
Yeah, e.g. writing UI code takes a lot of time, while it tends to be pretty simple overall and that's why we have so many UI toolkits, to reduce the amount of writing required for UI.
Might as well just give me their money and call it a day. No real product required.I can then "pay" that money to 10 other companies for nothing and then the govt. can pay my client for contracts of nothing.And everyone can be a billionaire.
I once tried a bit, to make an extra partition for an installer and failed.It's neat being able to easily do so, but not worth using AI generated stuff for it.
The application of age indication is just going to be another metric that these companies use for fingerprinting and person identification, one that some analyst on their inside possibly considered a useful data point.
And while this particular API might be an easy one to target, for removal as a patch, it might end up being part of a JS framework that many websites use and will break in case the return value is not available.
So if people require sites to work, this will become just another feature, requiring similar mitigations to other JS features I mentioned, that will need to be handled in a way that it increases the anonymity of the user, lest the user be subjected to harassment.
By "harassment", I mean the actual inescapable kind, not just random internet trolls.