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"
How would you decide what is the middle ground though? If a project allows some AI-generated PR if its good quality, then it is a burden on the reviewer on what is considered good or not.
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)
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.
And five engineers reviewing 20 thousand LoCs would get the job done in ten days, but both numbers are just as BS when it comes to actually understanding the codebase. No one is comprehensively reading 5k lines per day for a month straight.
Seriously, “just review 5k lines a day for a month” is the most out of touch manager suggestion I’ve seen in a hot minute. As though you only need to read each line one single time in a review before magically committing its exact purpose, content, and overall implications to memory. The absurdity of which is multiplied for AI generated code which, based on what I see from my coworkers, is clunkier and weirder and less focused even than regular human code, on average.
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?
Thunderbird lives in an entity called MZLA, created by Mozilla and the Thunderbird Council (the elected open source community leadership) to be the legal and financial home to Thunderbird.
MZLA, which I lead, receives only money via donations from donors. We are a for-profit because the IRS is very skeptical of nonprofits who develop FOSS software (someone down below linked to a bunch of great links on this topic). We, do, however publish tons of information on what we are doing on our blog, and we are open source and a community run project, so if you really want to go deep on this - come join us in making Thunderbird.
Is "half a billion dollars in yearly revenue" still synonymous with "half a billion dollars in funding from Google" or did they pivot? Are mozilla still trying to reimagine themselves as an ad tech company?
Yes, I would actually be surprised to learn that mode is available on any system. I’ve never seen that anywhere, though I only have a M1 Pro and an M4 Pro (and various Intel Macs).
You’re rendering to a framebuffer exactly 2x the size of your display and then scaling it down by exactly half to the physical display? Why not just use a 1x mode then!? The 1.75x limit of framebuffer to physical screen size makes perfect sense. Any more than that and you should just use the 1x mode, it will look better and perform way better!
Then complain about that. That would make a much more sensible blog post and discussion. Asking for a crazy workaround to a sane problem isn't a great way to get good results, especially with Apple. Beyond the obvious performance pitfall, this scale up to scale down approach will also destroy the appearance of some controls. There is some UI that aims for 1px lines on hidpi modes that will get lost if you do this. It's hardly a perfect mode.
Scaling up before scaling down is a sensible approach, especially when you want to run at a slightly lower scaled resolution. It worked fine up to M3 Pro. So whatever you think of it, it's something that worked fine for many years and suddenly doesn't anymore on the newer MacBooks.
The crazy workaround only needs to be done because of what Apple did probably around a decade ago and probably already heard a bunch of crying about and didn't care. No one removed subpixel antialiasing on their own, we do this bullshit because Apple forced us to to make text look halfway decent.
I can tell you that inside Apple, they have something called the standard question, and it goes something like this: “What are you really trying to do?”
If you haven’t personally filed a bug report at feedbackassistant.apple.com, I recommend that you do so. Title it something like “Poor text quality on LoDPI display”, file it in the Displays component, and in the description explain what you’re seeing. Here’s the critical part: you want to attach images showing what looks bad and what looks better, and why the current behavior is a regression and since when (earlier macOS versions for subpixel AA, earlier GPUs for 2x 1x mode). If possible, use the same display, but get an image of historical macOS when it had subpixel AA, macOS with this 2x 1x mode, Windows 11, and then current macOS at the standard 1x mode. I’m not sure screenshots will capture it, you’ll probably need to use a camera.
I know how they think at Apple. If you come at them with a bug written like OP’s blog, they are going to say it behaves as designed. To get them to fix something, you have to be descriptive about what the real problem actually is: the text rendering looks bad. Then you have to explain what used to work and what you’ve tried and bring receipts (the images). Don’t write a novel; write the shortest bug that fully describes the real problem, includes all of the relevant information including macOS versions, hardware info, and display model, and the evidence of the problem, but don’t include a bunch of emotional text or extraneous information (like SkyLight framework reverse engineering stuff).
Now you might say, “I’m not Apple’s free QA”, and you’ll be right. But, consider that you’re spending this time complaining about a problem online and you’ve spent good money on a display you’d like to use and it’s not working the way you want. Fair or not, you care about the outcome, and at this point you might as well take my advice and file a strong bug to make your case. Dupes help, OP should file one too, but be descriptive about the real problem, not proscriptive about bringing back the crazy workaround that they likely intentionally disabled because on the face of it, it makes no sense.
I do know that they read user bugs in the Displays component, because I have filed a few in there recently and they got fixed and they followed up with me about where they were fixed.
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 few thousands of dollars plus the energy to run the system is unaffordable to most of the world's developers. Not that it is going to be the first way in which the Global South is kept from closing the gap.
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.
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