AshleysBrain

That's true of WebP and AVIF as well. I think all modern image codecs have both lossy and lossless modes - the separation between JPEG for lossy and PNG for lossless seems to be a historical oddity.

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.

[1] https://gildas-lormeau.github.io/zip.js/

If the exact words we choose when writing matter so much, then why use a non-deterministic LLM that produces slightly different output on every run?

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.

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.

[1] https://www.construct.net

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.

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.