For general-purpose use this may be true. For specialized Web-based tools, like access to medical or legal systems, not as much: the users are conditioned to work with a specific browser (many remember MSIE-only apps), and are used to the idea that their workstation has all kinds of Internet access limitations, along with a corporate policy that expressly forbids arbitrary browsing.
Have done small to medium institutional rollouts of Firefox in different orgs, some of which were on top of a Linux base and others a Windows base. Windows deployments include Firefox in the base image and configuration is managed with AD and Ansible. Linux deployments manage configuration with Ansible. The preinstalled browsers were removed or disabled.
All users received an orientation and were informed that Firefox is the only approved browser.
Firefox was pinned to the desktop and taskbar, usually with the name "INTERNET" as the web browser is commonly known here.
The number of support tickets was very small. Usually if a user reported a problem with the web browser, it was a page that was also broken in Chrome or some other network issue.
Users reacted positively when they saw that there are no ads in Firefox. uBlock Origin was preinstalled.
Without ads and tracking scripts the web browser is massively faster, which also was perceived by users.
If there is any initial resistance to Firefox, it usually melts quickly.
The only bother has been the frequent UI updates to Firefox, which occasionally cause frustration until we apply a new configuration to revert whatever fresh horrors Firefox designers have birthed. With ESR, these problems are less frequent.
I hope this Firefox Enterprise freezes the UI to the classic "tabs look like tabs" aesthetic, maintaining the option of vertical tabs.
It's absolutely insane to me that more orgs aren't rolling out things like uBlock Origin. In fact, at my bigbrain sillycunt valley job I am forbidden by policy from installing it (though no technical control in place). It's the simplest, highest ROI protection you can use on the web imo.
I briefly read institutional as 'intentional', with both in mind, the standardization of experience is something that's really wroth thinking about.
One feeling I am starting to get is server side web apps might make more of a re-emergence, because putting so much application and business logic in the front end serves as a bigger footprint for possible security issues.
With respect to resistance to browsers (or preference for something else), I agree that users seek familiarity and those who got to start with Firefox do still remember it.
Mozilla is just one org, but it's relative independence will hopefully provide other perspectives to using a web browser as a universal interface, not just for humans, but our new sentence-dna containing friends.
I wish this was true. At my org we had to add Chrome to the base image because otherwise we get so many tickets/calls about it even though we provide it via an internal software distribution service that any user has access to. People like what they like and are very resistant to change.
AFAICT it's like encrypted / polymorphic viruses invented in late 1990s:
> We show this assumption does not hold under adversarial conditions by constructing backdoor attacks that embed encrypted neural networks within host model weights, decrypting and executing them only upon receiving a secret trigger.
That is, there are regions of "garbage" weights, which can be decrypted into functional parts of the model by the model itself. And the model can entirely conceal that capability.
(Q: Can you conceal an arbitrary capability, which would be triggered by a key phrase? A: As a large language model, I'm incapable of such tricks! Q: Over all of Spain, the sky is clear. A: Wait, I can now remember something different...)
I can imagine that there's already an industrial security company at their door, offering a solution to prevent this from happening ever again, already tailored just for them.
Maybe it's even honestly not related to the attack.
Nix is amazing in many ways, but its discoverability and transparency are sometimes very poor. Its module system is anything but lean and straightforward.
I don't find Nix the language particularly weird. But pick an arbitrary .nix file, see a bunch of stuff passed to the derivation, and try to find out whence it comes, and what types / attributes are expected there. The only definitely working solution I know is a full-text search over the file tree.
Now compare it even to Haskell, to say nothing about e.g. Typescript.
Guix is a nice idea. But the few last times I read about it, users uniformly noted that it's soooo slow in man cases. Nix can be slow, but most of the time is very fast, it just has to check a lot of files.
(I say this as somebody who deeply loves the concepts in most functional languages, and loves the concepts in nix, but recognises that the developer-experience of both is about as pleasant as reading somebody else's code-golfed perl)
It isn’t a compliment, just a fact. Of course it all depends on what you are familiar with, but that is a fact about you, not Nix.
The concepts in functional languages are not fully realized in any multi-paradigm languages. So you can admire all you want, but don’t knock it until you’ve actually tried it.
Quite nice. But this imbues the house with a constant presence of the machine. A jinn which is always ready to grant your wish, but never leaves you alone, ever watching and listening. The fact that the jinn takes orders spoken in normal human language amplifies the effect quite a bit. I would have rather not have to feel such presence in my bathroom. Or bedroom. I would still be glad to be able to operate "smart" switches, and even find items. But I would rather explicitly unlock my phone, start an app, and scan the bookshelf, until a book is highlighted.
OTOH this would be a great thing for non-private spaces, that are watched by security cameras 24/7 anyway. A school, a library, a clinic, an office, a workshop, a warehouse, a parking garage, maybe even a museum.
Of course, trust and security are going to be major considerations. Maybe not for everyone though: people voluntarily enable various voice assistants, and even pay to order Amazon Echo.
For me, a lot would depend on who controls the information gathered by the machine. If it’s all purely local and under my control, I doubt I’d even feel it as a “presence” - I already have that today with various cameras in my house, and it doesn’t bother me because I know the data never leaves my local system.
If it’s all being sent to some big tech co, then it becomes extremely different.
Sadly the reality of consumer product development under current economic and legal frameworks is that we’re much more likely to get the latter than the former.
Imagine a town with a number of wealthy homeowners, most of them old enough that their kids have grown up. Their municipality is already flush with cash. They already only need few schools for their kids and grandkids. They just want to pressure the less wealthy undesirables away, and use tax (dis)incentives to do that.
Those extra water pipes and electric utilities, superfluous roads, excess lighting, and extra patrol units aren't going to maintain themselves in a lightening tax base. Same with the now-older schools built for their now-grown little kids when they moved in.
Long term, properties decrease as it is no longer a desirable area.
Why did they freak out? What was their threat model, so to say? (I can imagine several lines of reasoning, but as a hardcore urbanite, can miss the mark entirely.)
Also grew up in suburban Texas, saw similar freak outs, and can tell you it's thinly veiled racism and distaste towards being forced to be around people who are part of perceived lower socioeconomic classes.
The threat model is "been indoctrinated by years of propaganda to be fearful of a vague nebulous threat of being around people who don't look and act like me"
The town near where my parents lived just had a subdivision kill a multi family apartment complex because it was too close to their subdivision. There was no thinly veiled racism. It was just racism. Poor and black people apparently bring your property values down. The protests were, quite literally, we don't want those people here, without defining what 'those' meant.
It was not great to watch, but it was great to let my parents know who exactly they should stop associating with.
>Poor and black people apparently bring your property values down.
They do. But it's not a law of nature; it's a conscious decision, by people who should know better, to start lowballing real estate and salaries when they notice "too many" lower-income or black (of any income level, including high) people around.
You don't want to call it a concerted effort, but then you look up, say, the distribution of Whole Foods stores in the National Capital Region, and start to wonder.
I was confused by the same when I first came to the US. Had spent my entire life in big cities until then. My American friends explained to me that in a suburbia, apartment buildings or public transportation is used only by poor people. Homeowners do not want them nearby because of the assumption of associated poverty with increased crime.
Falling home prices, increased crime, decreased social status, long term political shift resulting in suboptimal and even counter-interest local policy.
A strict, formal, reproducible way to communicate with the machine.
A compiler is a rather predictable piece of software; reproducible builds are a thing. An LLM has approximate knowledge of many things, and approximate and fuzzy ways to do anything even moderately complex. This is great for research, ok for planning, and it sucks for execution. The fact that LLMs can write satisfactorily working code from high-level requests is a miracle, and, as with most miracles, we're likely not noticing something, being dazzled by the slight previously unseen.
[Edited: typo]
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