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.
Ladybird Browser adopts Rust, with help from AI
Submitted 16 hours ago by Beep@lemmus.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/
Comments
arcine@jlai.lu 9 hours ago
0x0@infosec.pub 5 hours ago
If any creator can separate work from personal and the product is good I really couldn’t care less with what they use their own time for.
I’m pretty sure you could find people with other unsavoury opinions in the devteams for both chrome and firefox, what then?
statelesz@slrpnk.net 6 hours ago
Came here to say this.
db2@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Sloppybird
Reygle@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Oh. Welp, if it’s going to be vibe coded I’m out.
tinsuke@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Andreas King’s ladybird? Don’t wanna touch that with a 10ft pole.
Fizz@lemmy.nz 9 hours ago
Hyperborea.org is that owned by a racist or is the domain ment to be making fun of it?
XLE@piefed.social 9 hours ago
Based on the content of that article alone (especially near the bottom (, I don’t think it’s run by a racist at all
0x0@infosec.pub 5 hours ago
If any creator can separate work from personal and the product is good I really couldn’t care less with what they use their own time for.
I’m pretty sure you could find people with other unsavoury opinions in the devteams for both chrome and firefox, what then? Lynx?
Telorand@reddthat.com 11 hours ago
Thanks for the reference!
Sharkticon@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
Gross
cabbage@piefed.social 14 hours ago
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 15 hours ago
Guess I got excited about this browser for nothing.
Matty_r@programming.dev 8 hours ago
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.
unpossum@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
Good grief, the irrational ai kneejerk hate in this community is insane. This seems like a perfect use case - a code base with good test coverage and well defined output expectations, where a human has guided the translation and checked the results. The human in question has saved a lot of time. And still all the comments are “hurr durr slop amirite”. SMH fucking head.
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
yeah, this part of the community is as insufferable as the overly enthusiastic vibe coders
XLE@piefed.social 9 hours ago
And the people complaining about “insufferable” critics of AI, and assuming all criticism is “knee-jerk”, are themselves contributing to the cycle of negativity.
Fizz@lemmy.nz 9 hours ago
Hes not even using the rust part either. Its still using c++
Trilogy3452@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I think it’s important to note that human review = quality always, it’s case by case and a lot of times the nuance and potential problems don’t appear until the code has been fiddled with manually in my experience.
Basically saying that it depends on how it was used, but my hunch is using AI for new languages for production use without an expert to help is a bad use case since the new comer has no idea what nuances exist. Unless that’s not the case here
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
Birdpoop browser you say? Never heard of of it.
tocano@piefed.social 15 hours ago
I was enthusiastic about this project. But I am afraid these recent tangents will only reduce momentum.
dsilverz@calckey.world 15 hours ago
@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.paraphrand@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Why leave WebKit out?
XLE@piefed.social 15 hours ago
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”?
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
out of context?
Please coordinate with us before starting any porting work so nobody wastes their time on something we can’t merge.
If you look at the code, you’ll notice it has a strong “translated from C++” vibe. That’s because it is translated from C++. The top priority for this first pass is compatibility with our C++ pipeline. The Rust code intentionally mimics things like the C++ register allocation patterns so that the two compilers produce identical bytecode.
that seems reasonable to me
XLE@piefed.social 12 hours ago
But is it a good idea to just translate something from C++ like that? It seems technically feasible but there’s something “off” about the whole thing.
Like the developer originally talked about switching to Swift, then decided not to switch to Swift.
And previously, “Ladybird devs have been very vocal about being ‘anti-rust’ (I guess more anti-hype, where Rust was the hype).”
Apparently you can translate C++ directly to Rust, but anecdotal statements claim that while Rust supports C++ conventions, you wouldn’t typically build a Rust app using them.
It all just suggests rudderlessness from the developers right now.
favoredponcho@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
I’m still gonna try it. Downvote away. 🖕fuck the Lemmy hivemind
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Hive mind would imply that people are simply following along and not making decisions on their own. I read the article and was thinking that the way they went about it was a fairly good use of AI to actually implement code.
Then I read the article posted by someone in this comment section about how the author and creator of ladybird is not only a homophobic asshole but an out and out racist. If you support him and use this then you are, by association, a homophobe and a racist.
So fuck you 🖕 as well.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Your deep insecurity is too on the nose
favoredponcho@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
You’re the one bringing up insecurity. Sounds like projection.
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
Every minute that passes, Gemini (not the Google one!) looks more viable, which is already a shame because as I described in lemm.ee before it went down, that itself feels like “Gopher but in the format of a brutalist buttplug”.
What we need is some sort of return to HTML + CSS 1.0, or a web engine that simply ditches JS, so that development can be tackled by Individuals again.
CameronDev@programming.dev 5 hours ago
github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz - This kinda covers the “engine without JS” part, it’s a bit more limited, but also in alpha. It’s part of the dioxus project, they use it for rendering UI on desktop.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 10 hours ago
Separation of server styles, server markup and client styles is definitely something Gemini lacks, not having server styles at all.
But it’s not as much a problem of browsers as it is of the environment in which information is shared and propagated. While we still connect to websites using a browser, those websites will behave however their owners wish, inflating web standards and requiring complex browsers.
I was dreaming of something like “hypertext Usenet”, and making descriptions of another system I was interested in trying to make, I am still not even close to that, and I’m not sure I’m still interested, because it appears NOSTR now has much of what I wanted in its standards.
Basically if you imagine a system for propagating posts addressable by ids and with markup inside, referring to styles and containing hyperlinks by ids to other posts, you can throw away the idea of a website, and still have the hypertext web. That markup can be anything, while the URLs in the links leading to images and such (and other pages) are using those ids or are at least Blossom-compliant.
I think NOSTR of new protocols is the one most likely to eventually attain such functionality. People here wouldn’t like it, I suppose, because of huge intersection with Bitcoin community and because most clients and client libraries are for the web. But there’s now a C client library, functional enough, and architecturally NOSTR is worlds above the thinking of designers of Lemmy, for example.
Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
Someone could theoretically fork ladybird and strip out the AI, but it would be a lot of work.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 14 hours ago
it’s not that they are adding AI to the browser. it’s that they are letting an AI develop the browser
woelkchen@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
they are letting an AI develop the browser
The port from C++ to Rust was assisted by an LLM. That’s different from “ChatGPT, write me a web browser”.
I cannot speak for the quality of that code, not advocating for it, I merely want to make that distinction.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 hours ago
Not that much, there’s a git log, just found when they started doing AI and fork from then on
TheOneCurly@feddit.online 16 hours ago
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.”
XLE@piefed.social 14 hours ago
“I coded this with hundreds of handcrafted AI prompts.”
“That sounds hazardous, but did you test it?”
“I had multiple AIs test it it!”
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 14 hours ago
Let us all hope Servo does not go down the same path.
zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
It is one thing to use coding agents to produce code. It is another to trust it on reviewing it.
This reminds me of the C compiler written by Claude Code, which was compiling everything, except
printf(“Hello from CCC!\n”);thenose@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
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?
brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
hyperborea.org/reviews/…/ladybird-inclusivity/
mastodon.social/@alatiera/115272605624599561