There are diminishing returns, especially for more mundane tasks. Fable is nice, and I bet Sol is also nice. But there really isn't much of a difference right now when using something beyond Opus or presumably Terra for most things. They're most useful when doing greenfield, highly complex/novel tasks. When Open Source catches up, it will be more widely adopted.
Yeah, not only the name: they’re also going with various semiotic signs that are strongly associated with a subscription service, including their website design, choice of typography, and even the press release–style copy.
Looks like they have been acquired by Cloudflare, and pivoted to fully open source, but they haven’t really tweaked their messaging to make that fully land with unsuspecting visitors.
It’s kinda like the reverse situation of open source projects that switch to a source available license, but keep the aesthetics of an open source project. Kinda funny!
This is malware. It's doing something the user doesn't acknowledge or want, that has potentially destructive/negative consequences. Expecting users to have read the website (when they can might have installed this via a package manager, for example) is not reasonable.
You can introduce a social/trust element to it, something like: Join our Discord, chat to us, come to our "office hours" video calls first, then you get to contribute.
Maybe also limit the size/scope of external contributions (only small bug fixes allowed for your first few PRs)
A bit sad to see this. Of course they are free to do it the way they prefer, and there are successful projects like this (Notably SQLite) but there has to be a reasonable middle ground between "everyone can just flood us with 30,000-line 'Claude implement feature X make no mistakes' PRs" and "we're not open to outside contributions"
It's not impossible, or even that hard to review the entire rewritten codebase.
10 engineers each reviewing 5,000 LoC a day for 20 days can do it.
And that is being highly conservative with the estimate. A good chunk of the the code is probably highly trivial boilerplate one can easily skim over in minutes.
To get to the point where these artificial gates substantially matter for interop, you've already cleared 99% of the hurdles, and you can get away with just spoofing the User Agent string most of the time.
Widevine is legitimately a “gate”, but realistically it only stops 4K playback on Netflix, Disney and a few other streaming sites. And it's not super relevant considering that Zen has gathered 10M users without it.
This seems like a very reasonable system to ensure e.g. you and your classmate/friends can still interact as you grow up and switch age brackets. I wonder how families etc deal with it though? Can you play with your younger sibling/cousin? Is there some sort of parental approval/override?
I thought you were owned by Mozilla? A corporation that has over half a billion dollars in yearly revenue? If they decided to allocate zero funding to you, wouldn't it be vastly more effective to start some sort of campaign/movement (either internal or external) to get that funding back, or to entirely fork and leave Mozilla to be your own independent project, than to ask for random donations?
You don't need exclusive, 24h access, so people can pool, share or rent the hardware. Solar energy is also now cheap enough that it likely won't really be a problem.
Given how fast the Open Source models have been able to catch up their closed-source counterparts, I think at least on the model/software side this will be a non-issue. The hardware situation is a bit grimmer, especially with the recent RAM prices. Time will tell: if in 2–3 years time, we can get to a situation where a 512GB–1TB VRAM / unified memory + good fp8 rig is a few thousands and not tens of thousands of dollars, we'll probably be good.
A minor piece of feedback, though: might be just me, not sure if anyone else has this pavlovian conditioning, but seeing the black banner/bar on top with the YC logo/color below and HN background color immediately makes me think someone passed away.
There have been many, many, desktop improvements since 1995, some of which came from the Mac, some came from Windows and some came from UNIX/Linux & friends.
- Arguably the dock, though it's probably contentious
- Ubiquitous instant search (e.g. Spotlight)
- Gesture-based automatic tiling of windows to left/right side of the screen, tiling presets
- Smooth scrolling, either via scroll wheel or trackpad
- Gesture-based multi tasking, etc
- Virtual desktops/multiple workspaces
- Autosave
- Folder stacks, grouping of items in file lists
- Tabbed windows
- Full-screen mode
- Separate system-wide light and dark modes
- Enhanced IME input for non-latin languages
- App stores, automatic updating
- Automatic backup, file versioning
- Compositing Window Managers (Quartz, Compiz, DWM, modern Wayland compositors...)
- The "sources bar" UI pattern
- Centralized notification centers
- Stack view controlelr style navigation for settings (back/forward buttons)
- Multi device clipboard synchronization
- Other handoff features
- Many accessibility features
- The many iteration of Widgets
- Installable web apps
- Virtual printers ("print to PDF")
- Autocomplete/autocorrect
- PIP video playback
- Tags/Labels
- File proxies/"representations"
- Built-in clipboard management
- Wiggle the mouse to find the pointer
None of these can be said to be at their final/"perfect" form today, and there are hundreds if not thousand of papercuts and refinements that can be made.
The real issue is probably due to management misunderstanding designer's jobs, and allocating them incorrectly. The focus should be more on the interactions and behaviors than necessarily on the visuals.