This is probably an unpopular opinion but I think that if all this effort went in to improving Firefox, or a fork of Firefox if the goal is to totally de-Google it, then that wouldn't be such a problem and it would overall be healthier for the web. I don't really understand the purpose of this titanic software engineering effort just to avoid... a default search engine setting?
I think you misunderstood: the point was sometimes project corruption is due to a defect in our software, in which case it is definitely our fault and we race to fix it. But most reports of corruption are bad zip files, which aren't our software (unless you think the widely used and battle-tested library zip.js is writing bad zip files, which I don't think is the case). My best guess is it's faulty hardware or system-level issues.
Author here: we write zip files with the widely-used library zip.js [1], so if that's writing bad zip files, the problem is going to be widespread across many web apps. But I'd argue that zip.js is thoroughly battle-tested (current open issue count: 0) and not the cause of the problem.
Shameless plug but if you like small file size overheads, our browser based game engine Construct[1] exports an empty web project with about 300 KB overhead for a fully-featured engine. We achieve this by going all-in on the web platform so we don't have to ship a heavyweight runtime with it, and using a modular approach where only the components you use get exported.
It's not an error, it's just saying the project exceeds the free edition limits, which means you can look around and preview it but not make edits to it.
So it’s a warning, not an error, but it looks like an error to someone who hasn’t learned how the thing works.
If it were me, I’d make that first click into the demo as simple and clean as possible. The site is currently educating people about a product limitation before they see the actual product.
Is this not a good example of how generative AI does copyright laundering? Suppose the image was AI generated and it did a bad copy of the source image that was in the training data, which seems likely with such a widely disseminated image. When using generative AI to produce anything else, how do you know it's not just doing a bad quality copy-paste of someone else's work? Are you going to scour the internet for the source? Will the AI tell you? What if code generation is copy-pasting GPL-licensed code in to your proprietary codebase? The likelihood of this, the lack of a way to easily know it's happening, and the risks it causes, seems to me to be being overlooked amidst all the AI hype. And generative AI is a lot less impressive if it often works as a bad quality copy paste tool rather than the galaxy brain intelligence some like to portray it as.
There are countless examples. Often I think about the fact that the google search AI is just rewording news articles from the search results, when you look at the source articles they have exactly the same points as the AI answers.
So these services depends on journalists to continuously feed them articles, while stealing all of the viewers by automatically copying every article.
I actually often have the opposite problem. The AI overview will assert something and give me dozens of links, and then I'm forced to check them one by one to try to figure out where the assertion came from, and, in some cases, none of the articles even say what the AI overview claimed they said.
I honestly don't get it. All I want is for it to quote verbatim and link to the source. This isn't hard, and there is no way the engineers at Google don't know how to write a thesis with citations. How did things end up this way?
I have to say, I suffer from both problems, just not simultaneously.
Depending on what I am searching for, and how important it is to me to verify the accuracy and provenance of the result, I might stop at the AI, or might find, as you have, that there is no there there.
But, no matter what, the AI is essentially reducing the ability of primary sources to monetize their work. In the case where the search stops at the AI, obviously no traffic (except for incessant LLM polling) goes to the primary source.
And in the case you describe, identical traffic (your search) is routed to multiple sources, so if one of them actually was the source of something you were interested in, they effectively wind up sharing revenue with other sources, because the value of every one of your clicks is reduced by how often you click.
ChatGPT was a research prototype thrown at end users as a "product".
It is not a carefully designed product; ask yourself "What is it FOR?".
But the identification of reliable sources isn't as easy as you may think, either. A chat-based interaction really makes most sense if you can rely on every answer, otherwise the user is misled and user and conversation may go in a wrong direction. The previous search paradigm ("ten snippets + links") did not project the confidence that turns out is not grounded in truth that the chat paradigm does.
Snippets were already getting Google in legal hot water (with Yelp in the US and news agencies in Australia in particular IIRC) long before LLMs and AI scraping. It's a debatable gray area of Fair Use growing out of early rulings on DMCA related cases, and also Google's win over the Author's Guild at SCOTUS.
> What if code generation is copy-pasting GPL-licensed code in to your proprietary codebase?
This is obviously a big, unanswered, issue. It's pretty clear to me that we are collectively incentivised to pollute the well, and that it happens for long-enough for everything to become "compromised". That's essentially abandoning opensource and IP licensing at large, taking us to an unchartered era where intellectual works become the protected property of nobody.
I see chatbots having less an impact on our societies than the above, and interestingly it has little to do with technology.
> we are collectively incentivised to pollute the well
Honestly, there are two diametrically opposed incentives occurring right now. The one you describe may not even be paramount -- how hard is it to prove infringement, shepherd a case through court, and win a token amount. Is it worthwhile just to enrich a few lawyers, and get more AI-regurgitated slop to open up?
The second incentive is to not publish source code that might be vacuumed up by a completely amoral automaton. We may be seeing the second golden age of proprietary software.
It sounds like they were testing with iOS 12? In practice that has fallen out of use and doesn't need to be supported any more. Yes, a bunch of problems are to do with Safari specifically, but if you target relatively modern versions only (iOS 16+ is pretty reasonable IMO) it'll save a lot of pain.
I have to support iOS 16.
In terms of browser specific bugs that I have to deal with I'd say about 80-90% of what I encounter is Safari specific. Of that another 80% only affects iOS and of that like 2/3 are fixed in more current versions.
Yeah, supporting iOS 12 in 2025 is odd. I was investigating browser support levels just recently for a library and also settled on iOS 16 as a reasonable level.
For reference, iOS 12.x and below are used 0.33% globally https://browsersl.ist/#q=safari+%3C+13+or+ios+%3C+13. Selecting iOS 16 would still exclude less than 1% globally https://browsersl.ist/#q=safari+%3C+16+or+ios+%3C+16. In both cases the vast majority would be older iOS which is unfortunate because I assume they're on older devices with no upgrade path, but you have to decide on the transpile/polyfill cutoff at some point and browser support has an extremely long tail.
I read through this guide a while back and it is great. However it's fairly old now being from 2011 - are there any updated guides or explanations of what's changed since then?
The mesh shader pipeline isn't just an addition, it replaces several pieces of the old pipeline, like vertex shader, tesselation and geometry shaders. It's a pretty big departure. Though most engines don't use it yet I believe.
Does switching a UE5 game to lumen/nanite switch from essentially the "old pipeline" to the new mesh shader path, or do even the non-lumen/nanite modes use the mesh shaders?
Maybe optionally if the hardware supports it, but new UE5 features also work with older cards that already support compute shaders (a specialized pipeline which was introduced somewhat earlier) but no mesh shaders.