I tried it out for a while and yes, it really is as bad as the article implies. I gave it a fair chance for a few weeks and then went back to the old assistant (a task which which gemini was also completely unable to help me with, at one point even gaslighting me and saying I wasn’t using Gemini).

It’s kind of crazy to think about but it seems like Google is just somehow really terrible at AI

Personal preference I guess. I’ve tried Firefox many times over the years and always ended up going back to other browsers. I find Firefox doesn’t render some pages quite right, the user agent stylesheet is odd, and the UI is less streamlined. Performance also used to be a problem although I hear it’s caught up now.

I used to be a Chrome user but now I prefer chromium based alternatives like brave and edge (which incidentally, uBO will keep working on). Chrome is still required for work, but uBO change won’t be an issue I think, there are plenty of other ad blockers that will work with MV3

Sensationalist and inaccurate title

If you read the whole thing, it’s not wrong. It just highlighted a part that is wrong when taken out of context

So is human speech

Can I get a ChatGPT summary of this article please 😆

Would honestly be better than the current options

All first world governments have some degree of corruption from money in politics, but don’t kid yourselves: USA is much worse than most

Hmm I don’t think that’s necessarily what OP is proposing. There are cryptos where transactions are anonymous.

Banks are already paying for servers to process and store information.

Yes

A few validators or collators (quite cheap for a private network) provided by several banks would cost a fraction of what they pay now

How? They’d be doing extra compute work for no reason (validating already valid transactions), and storing extra data (lots of hashes) for no reason, so it can only make infra costs more expensive. Plus the added complexity meaning you have to hire an extra team just to understand it.

Don’t mix blockchain with the speculative world built on top of it. That’s only an unfortunate use of the technology.

That speculative world as shitty as it is, is the only proven use case of the technology, if you take that away then blockchains are even less useful

All my points? That’s a bit rich

You make a good point that PoS would solve one of the issues I raised which is electricity usage.

In theory it could also increase throughput and reduce costs, but: a) in practice that hasn’t happened yet despite years of development, b) it’s never going to be as efficient as a centralised system because of the extra overheads necessary to decentralise it, so that point still stands

All my other points still stand as well, plus the additional problems PoS creates to do with centralisation of power

Ok so firstly you’re not the OP I was replying to, so neither of us know for certain whether they were talking about replacing the banking system with a decentralised currency vs keeping the existing centralised private banks and just having them use a blockchain as their database. I assumed the former because of their wording (“replace the banking system”), and because the latter offers no advantages that I know of.

Secondly if you think a blockchain would offer some advantages over other more efficient write only databases, I’d be interested to know what those are, because to me if you’re not running a decentralised system then you’re only getting the downsides of blockchain (such as it being single threaded, slow, and space inefficient) without any of the upsides.

For some background, I’m well aware of how both blockchains and crypto work, having been obsessed with them for a little while in 5 or 6 years ago like many of us were before becoming disillusioned. I’ve also got professional experience as a developer on both immutable databases and banking ledgers.

WebP was barely competitive with JPEG

Citation needed

So what, we’re not supposed to use any library that’s ever had a vulnerability? You better go uninstall literally everything on your computer then

It’s just the typical Lemmy hivemind hating anything made by a large tech company, purely because it’s made by a large tech company, even when it’s actually really good

JPEG-XL is better

Citation needed

A banking system running on Blockchain

Is an astronomically terrible idea. It:

• would use as much electricity as an entire country
• payments/transfers would be both much slower AND much more expensive than via a bank
• would have no protection against fraud. You got scammed? Your money’s gone. You paid for something online and it never arrived? Too bad
• would have no way to stop money laundering
• would have no way to help people who forgot their password, they’d just lose their life savings permanently
• would tie up a bunch of capital, preventing reinvestment and growth. There would be no way to get a bank loan to buy a house for example
• the list goes on

Appreciate you taking the time to reply in such detail! Some good insights thank you

If were just a personal project that they’re building entirely on their own then sure, go nuts and do whatever you want. But they’re trying to gain adoption, asking for contribution, and wanting to replace other browsers. At that point it’s no longer just a personal choice if you’re asking the community to invest their time and money into it with you

Reading all of that it sounds mostly like a dev who has spent 20 years doing things the C++ way wasn’t comfortable learning something new. Like basically they’ve been using horrible design patterns that Rust bans because they’re horrible, and instead of learning better approaches they just say Rust is bad