This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Yeah seems about right for this project. I really wanted this to be a serious browser, but nothing about this dude is serious.
Also I know he backed this statement up with much better testing but these AI brainrot things people say kill me: "I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns."
"I coded this with hundreds of handcrafted AI prompts."
"That sounds hazardous, but did you test it?"
"I had multiple AIs test it!"
Let us all hope Servo does not go down the same path.
artisan AI prompts. we are supposed to be paying extra!
You’re not the first I hear saying his bad news/not serious. Afaik I didn’t hear a thing about him until ladybird. What did I missed?
Those were some disappointing reads
God that screenshot is giving me severe second hand embarrassment
I was enthusiastic about LadyBird until I learnt that the guy leading the project i s a white supremacist, via pivot-to-ai.
Now I hope either someone else takes it over, or that it crashes and burns.
I don't think you should be able to make claims like this without hard proof.
Do you have any information about this?
Edit: So I found out where you read that, and that article is wayyy over thinking that comment.
I think the Twitter comment could be taken multiple ways and it would be fair to give them the benefit of the doubt.
How many times do I have to give him the benefit of the doubt though?
First it was the "using they in documentation is political ideology" Github issue, then he publicly defended DHH when people called him out for being a white supremacist, he implied tech companies are discriminating against white people with diversity policies, and he tweeted that he hopes young people will carry on Charlie Kirk's legacy.
If one or two of these things happened in isolation, I could maybe understand giving him the benefit of the doubt as a non-American (for that last one) non-native English speaker. But all of these things taken together? I personally don't think I can look past that.
To be fair I hadn't heard of some of these, so I think you're right. I wouldn't go so far as as to say he's a white supremacist but it definitely seems like he has an "ideology"
Edit: The more I read about it the more it's pissing me off. Especially defending DHH who wrote that trash article about London (I'm not a Londoner but I'm a Brit who's there enough with work to know he's talking absolute shit).
That's fair, I assume most people probably aren't following ladybird that closely so it's easy to miss. It just bothers me because shrugging off small individual problems and ignoring a bigger trend is arguably what let people like DHH get a platform in the first place.
Sloppybird
Andreas Kling's ladybird? Don't wanna touch that with a 10ft pole.
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
Rest in peace to this browser.
I've suddenly lost all interest in this browser's development. From what I've heard, LLMs are pretty bad at generating Rust code for some reason. If they used LLM to bulk convert C++ code to Rust, the quality of the code is questionable at best.
Surely you read the article?
"The requirement from the start was byte-for-byte identical output from both pipelines. "
The bytecode from C++ is identical to the Rust output.
~~I don't think it's possible to write rust code that compiles to the exact same binary as c++. compilers make different optimizations, and make overall a different structure, especially across languages.~~
~~I think they meant the rust library produces the same output from the same input as the c++ library.~~
if llms indeed generate worse rust code than for other languages, that's not that big of a problem because the compiler will catch a lot of mistakes. if it compiles, it will run, and no memory safety bugs unless unsafe is also used. the llm could pick the wrong functions for some uses, but that should be caught relatively easily with testing, which can be automated partly
edit: I was wrong, they indeed say that. this is weird.
I would of course love to see ladybird succeed, but it has seemed problematic from the start in my opinion. Servo seems much more serious.
I also like that Servo is developing an engine, not a browser as such. Seems like a good idea to keep the two separated.
Oh. Welp, if it's going to be vibe coded I'm out.
The things people criticize are so fucking brainless these days. AI this, slop that.
Not a single one of you made fun of "let's rewrite it in Rust." You can't even elevate to the level of mildly funny parroting.
“Let’s stop halfway through our multi-year project to rewrite it in another language” is peak nerd shiny distraction. I say this as one who resists the urge every day. Way to delay your project by several more years, clown.
All things considered the way they're approaching the migration is fine enough - they're only moving specific portions at a time, they're not stopping C++ development, and they're making sure it doesn't introduce regressions. Adopting a memory-safe language for something like a browser makes sense because it completely eliminates that class of vulnerabilities.
The problem is the way they're approaching the code itself. From their wording, it sounds like they're relying on AI heavily for both writing and reviewing the code. Rust has a steeper learning curve than most languages and is very different from C++. They even mention in the blog that their current Rust code looks like C++ code ported over. If they don't take the time to actually learn Rust before adopting it, it'll just lead to security logic issues that their AI couldn't catch because C++ and Rust don't always behave the same way. And that's completely ignoring all of the other ethical/technical issues with AI
Be that as it may, the time to choose Rust was at the beginning. It existed then, but they made their technology choice. Continuing to develop in C++ while doing the migration just means more throwaway code and duplicated effort. This decision is truly the worst of both worlds.
Guess I got excited about this browser for nothing.
The worst part is they are doing themselves a disservice by not rewriting it by hand - have they really learnt enough Rust to know how to effectively rewrite the other parts of the engine as they say? Doubtful - they'll probably just do everything through AI stuff going forward.
I was enthusiastic about this project. But I am afraid these recent tangents will only reduce momentum.
Birdpoop browser you say? Never heard of of it.
Gross
@Beep@lemmus.org @technology@lemmy.world
Ah, the smell of irony by the morning! Adopting a programming language often praised by its "safety", while the entire pretension of "safety" is alchemically transmuted into a sewage and deliberately flushed up (not down) by a clanker who drinks from the cesspool with the same determination and thirst that of a Chevy Opala gurgling down entire Olympic pools worth of gasoline.
Being serious now, the foreseeable future for Web browsing is definitely depressing: Chromium needs no introduction (used to be an interesting browser until Google's mask "don't be evil" fell and straightforwardly revealed their corporate face and farce), Firefox have been "welcoming the new AI overlords" for a while, text browsers (such as Lynx) are far from feasible for a CAPTCHA(and Anubis)-driven web... now, one of the latest and fewest glimmers of hope, an alternative Web browser engine, is becoming the very monster the fight against which was promised to be the launchpad purpose ("They who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster"). I wouldn't be surprised if Servo were to enshittify, too. Being able to choose among the sameness is such a wonderful thing, isn't it?
I mean, I'm not the average Lemmy user who got this (understandably) deep hatred against AI, I am able to hold a nuanced view and finding quite interesting uses (especially when it comes to linguistics) for the clankers (especially the "open-weighted" ones). However, this, to shoving AI everywhere and using AI to "code for you", it's a whole different story. A software should be programmed in the way programming (as posited by Ada Lovelace) was intended to, not "vibe coded" by a fancy auto-completer who can't (yet) deal with Turing completeness, especially when it comes to a whole miniature operational system that browsers became nowadays. When coding a whole OS, AI shouldn't even be touched by a two million light-years pole, let alone by a two-feet pole.
Is it a good sign for Rust code when it's described as having "a strong 'translated from C++' vibe"? Or when the developer says too much Rust might be something they "can't merge"?
