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Comment Re:Yes and no (Score 2) 76

I would agree with that. It's anecdotal but I've noticed when using Copilot at my job that it usually gets me a "mostly" proper solution. But even getting you mostly to a solution can save you an hour or more of digging through documentation. "Hey Copilot, I have an Excel workbook in a memory stream. Load it up with the Open XML library, open up the Summary spreadsheet, and copy out the contents of cell D:3." AI bots are pretty good at crawling through lots of information and summarizing it; I've been finding them quite good at identifying which classes and functions you need to use in unfamiliar libraries. But, in the end, you still need a developer with enough skill to understand the provided solution and know where the solution was deficient, since, as I said, it usually just gets you part-way there.

Comment Re:it's only enabled if telemetry is also enabled (Score 1) 57

The Mozilla CEO said that was a UI issue that they will fix in a newer version of Firefox. Telemetry being disabled does prevent the feature from being used.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbugzilla.mozilla.org%2Fs...

The UI fix should be hitting beta, nightly, and 128.1esr.

Comment Re:easy fix (Score 1) 239

Firefox extensions can do things that Chromium based browsers can't do. There are also some APIs that Firefox doesn't support.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdeveloper.mozilla.org%2F...

Sure, you can't have an extension rewriting the browser UI anymore, but there is still a lot that extensions can do. And you can always re-style the UI on your own with UserChrome.css to get that Windows 95 look back.

Comment Re:Strange to do, why not use a dedicated browser? (Score 1) 208

A comment in the last slashdot story on this topic mentioned that updated rules on uBlock Origin seemed to mitigate the youtube ban blocks. Is this true?

Yes. I've seen people who work on the filters say that YouTube is updating its scripts about twice a day. The uBlock Quick Fixes filter auto-updates every 12 hours (and possibly every 6 hours once .patch filters are implemented). This page has been keeping track of uBlock's ability to bypass YouTube ads: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdrhyperion451.github.i...

Basically, once YouTube updates the script to bypass ad-blockers, uBlock will shorty follow with a fix. Unfortunately, it isn't instant, and you may have to manually update your Quick Fixes list. It's an arms race.

Comment Re: It's plugins (Score 1) 85

I can't really blame Mozilla that much. They were using OS functions normally in an intended way and there was no performance problem with the way they called those functions. They tried to get Microsoft's help and attention 6 years ago but they were literally just told to post about it on the Feedback Hub and hope Microsoft even bothered to investigate it. Looking at the ticket, it looks like it took somebody basically reverse engineering Defender to figure out what was going wrong before Microsoft acted on it. And yeah, they probably expected it to just be an issue with Defender. It wouldn't be the first time an antivirus misbehaved. And honestly, it IS mainly just an issue with Defender. The optimizations Mozilla is making now won't really improve anything with Firefox. It will just make OTHER applications on the computer behave a little better.

Comment Re:Wait... whose bug? (Score 2) 85

No, Chrome and Edge just use VirtualAlloc, which antiviruses check differently. The problem was that when Defender saw Firefox make a call to VirtualProtect, it tried to parse the ETL event. This parsing function was written poorly and ended up allocating and de-allocating a 64KB zeroed memory block for each of the 18 different event attributes. So every single time Firefox called VirtualProtect, Defender would basically malloc/free a 64KB memory block 18 times. And frequent memory allocations are not cheap.

Comment Re:Mozilla dosen't care (Score 2) 85

According to this bug report (1822650), it looks like Chrome/Edge was actually using VirtualAlloc instead of VirtualProtect. Apparently VirtualAlloc can do the same thing that VirtualProtect does, except it generates a different (and maybe even misleading) event that causes antiviruses to skip a bunch of checks.

Comment Re: It's plugins (Score 1) 85

According to the bug report, Chromium was calling the function less (batching many operations behind a single call). But it was more than that as Chrome was actually using a DIFFERENT function (VirtualAlloc). It turns out that VirtualAlloc can do the same thing that VirtualProtect does, but it is a lesser known trick so antiviruses don't trigger their protections. And even if they know about the trick, they have less information to work with so they can't scan as much.

See: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbugzilla.mozilla.org%2Fs...

Comment Re:How about selling cards people want? (Score 2) 167

Because for the past 5 years NVIDIA has chased those 40% generational gains and have brute forced it by doing the equivalent of 1% gain for $1. The performance per dollar doesn't increase. NVIDIA just raises the cap on the high end and slots their products in that new space. The old $300 mid-range slot doesn't exist anymore and what they used to call an xx70 series card is now just a label slapped onto what would have been a Titan on earlier generations.

They are finding out that while you can technically build a super-computer, you can't sell them to the masses because its too expensive. NVIDIA's hitting the limit on how expensive you can build something and will eventually have to start building cheaper products.

Comment Re:Advertising (Score 1) 163

So what, you are saying that VR isn't as immersive because monitors can have a higher pixels per degree of resolution? Seems like an odd statement to make considering the pixels per degree resolution of VR is only a single aspect of it. The people playing with monitors won't have a 360 degree coverage of their world. They won't have accurate binaural sound that works no matter where your head is positioned in the world space. They'll lack depth of vision.

The only benefits that monitors have is pixels per degree and comfort. And really, if they are using four 4k screens, they are already pushing more pixels than a VR headset so either the framerate or the resolution of the image is going to be crap. Well, unless the image is being stretched a lot, in which case they are most likely only looking forward and the other monitors are just for peripheral vision. In that case they also lack the ability to easily look around the environment, so that's reduction in immersion right there.

So yes, VR is all about immersion, and it is the best at that. You not only get visual immersion, you also get audio immersion. You are not going to beat VR in immersion unless you pay a lot of money on a really good physical simulator environment. Much more money than a cheap VR headset.

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