The fact that some #Firefox users are running it on surprisingly dated hardware is a testament to its versatility and ability to scale down all the way to really old machines.
Internet of things! me: I don't care about the inter— INTERNET OF THINGS! [later...] Virtual reality! me: I don't care about virtua— VIRTUAL REALITY! [later...] Metaverse! me: I don't care about the metav— METAVERSE! [later...] Blockchain! me: I don't care about the blockch— BLOCKCHAIN! [later...] Artificial intelligence! me: I don't care about so-called artif— ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE! [etc...]
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.
From the article: “since the first fake pornographic videos and photos were created in 2017 using these techniques, this has been the main domain of application. Today, most studies estimate that around 90% of the fake content published online is pornographic”
ARtificiAl IntElLigEncE WILl trAnsforM OuR LiVeS fOR THe bETTEr
It's hard to describe how good #Ultima7 was when it came out. It had complex mechanics that you could experiment with and even abuse, so the path towards the end could get really fun and really weird. In the end that's what an #rpg should be about.
If you don't believe me just go and read the "Fear and Loathing in Forge-of-Virtue" walkthrough. An unparalleled masterpiece of glitch exploits and in-game absurdity: http://www.it-he.org/fear.php
@mhoye one great aspect of this is that it's zero-cost for Mozilla, vs the running costs of server-based approaches. I'd still like to see some UI improvements but overall it's fantastic
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
Before we dive into the bugs themselves it's important to understand just how complex our platform support is: Firefox runs on 4 different operating systems, and for each of them it uses dozens of platform-specific APIs to implement a huge amount of features: input handling, media decoding, various forms of hardware acceleration, accessibility, window management, the list goes on and on... 2/13
These must run over an astounding amount of different hardware, some of which with very peculiar behaviors, hardware- or configuration-specific bugs and very different support levels. So in some cases a certain feature will have two, three or sometimes even four fallback paths to support specific setups. This is a lot of complexity in the code and it makes doing changes and testing them extremely hard. Old platforms pose extra challenges on top of this, so let me give you a few examples. 3/13
The first one is a #Windows input bug: the virtual keyboard did not show up when editing some texts on Windows tablet-convertible laptops on Windows 11.
Sounds like an obscure area of input code? You bet it is! Windows has several different APIs to figure out if a machine has a touch screen or not, if it's a tablet or not, if it has a keyboard or not and whether it was detached... and thus needs to display an on-screen one. 4/13
And you know what's worse? Some of these APIs conflate different concepts together: it's a tablet so it doesn't have a keyboard... no wait, it's detachable, the user can plug it in. Oh no, we were joking, it's a foldable laptop so when it turns into a tablet it still has a keyboard attached, but it's disabled! You need a different API to query that! Also you should check the registry, there's firmware hooks updating it. But the firmware is buggy and lies to you. 5/13
This was fixed in kernel 4.20 so users of more recent distros are unaffected, and we'll see if we can deploy a workaround to help users of older systems.