kevingadd (u/kevingadd)

kg commented on "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec" github.com/whatwg/html/pu... · Posted by u/troupo

93po · 5 days ago

When I see "reps from every browser agree" my bullshit alarm immediately goes off. Does it include unanimous support from browser projects that are either:

1. not trillion dollar tech companies

or

2. not 99% funded from a trillion dollar tech company.

I have long suspected that Google gives so much money to Mozilla both for the default search option, but also for massive indirect control to deliberately cripple Mozilla in insidious ways to massively reduce Firefox's marketshare. And I have long predicted that Google is going to make the rate of change needed in web standards so high that orgs like Mozilla can't keep up and then implode/become unusable.

kg · 5 days ago

It's not a huge conspiracy, but it is worthwhile to consider what the incentives are for people from each browser vendor. In practice all the vendors probably have big backlogs of work they are struggling to keep up with. The backlogs are accumulating in part because of the breakneck pace at which new APIs and features are added to the web platform, and in part because of the unending torrent of new security vulnerabilities being discovered in existing parts of the platform. Anything that reduces the backlog is thus really appealing, and money doesn't have to change hands.

Arguably, we could lighten the load on all three teams (especially the under-resourced Firefox and Safari teams) by slowing the pace of new APIs and platform features. This would also ease development of browsers by new teams, like Servo or Ladybird. But this seems to be an unpopular stance because people really (for good reason) want the web platform to have every pet feature they're an advocate for. Most people don't have the perspective necessary to see why a slower pace may be necessary.

kg commented on "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec" github.com/whatwg/html/pu... · Posted by u/troupo

segmondy · 5 days ago

By your argument, once anything makes it in, then it can't be removed. Billions of people are going to use the web every day and it won't stop. Even the most obscure feature will end up being used by 0.1% of users. Can you name a feature that's supported by all browsers that's not being used by anyone?

kg · 5 days ago

Yes. That is exactly how web standards work historically. If something will break 0.1% of the web it isn't done unless there are really really strong reasons to do it anyway. I personally watched lots of things get bounced due to their impact on a very small % of all websites.

This is part of why web standards processes need to be very conservative about what's added to the web, and part of why a small vocal contingent of web people are angry that Google keeps adding all sorts of weird stuff to the platform. Useful weird stuff, but regardless.

kg commented on "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec" github.com/whatwg/html/pu... · Posted by u/troupo

spankalee · 5 days ago

A few things to note:

- This isn't Chrome doing this unilaterally. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 shows that representatives from every browser are supportive and there have been discussions about this in standards meetings: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11146#issuecomment-275...

- You can see from the WHATNOT meeting agenda that it was a Mozilla engineer who brought it up last time.

- Opening a PR doesn't necessarily mean that it'll be merged. Notice the unchecked tasks - there's a lot to still do on this one. Even so, give the cross-vendor support for this is seems likely to proceed at some point.

kg · 5 days ago

Former Mozilla and Google (Chrome team specifically) dev here. The way I see what you're saying is: Representatives from Chrome/Blink, Safari/Webkit, and Firefox/Gecko are all supportive of removing XSLT from the web platform, regardless of whether it's still being used. It's okay because someone from Mozilla brought it up.

Out of those three projects, two are notoriously under-resourced, and one is notorious for constantly ramming through new features at a pace the other two projects can't or won't keep up with.

Why wouldn't the overworked/underresourced Safari and Firefox people want an excuse to have less work to do?

This appeal to authority doesn't hold water for me because the important question is not 'do people with specific priorities think this is a good idea' but instead 'will this idea negatively impact the web platform and its billions of users'. Out of those billions of users it's quite possible a sizable number of them rely on XSLT, and in my reading around this issue I haven't seen concrete data supporting that nobody uses XSLT. If nobody really used it there wouldn't be a need for that polyfill.

Fundamentally the question that should be asked here is: Billions of people use the web every day, which means they're relying on technologies like HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, etc. Are we okay with breaking something that 0.1% of users rely on? If we are, okay, but who's going to tell that 0.1% of a billion people that they don't matter?

The argument I've seen made is that Google doesn't have the resources (somehow) to maintain XSLT support. One of the googlers argued that new emerging web APIs are more popular, and thus more deserving of resources. So what we've created is a zero-sum game where any new feature added to the platform requires the removal of an existing feature. Where does that game end? Will we eventually remove ARIA and/or screen reader support because it's not used by enough people?

I think all three browser vendors have a duty to their users to support them to the best of their ability, and Google has the financial and human resources to support users of XSLT and is choosing not to.

kg commented on "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec" github.com/whatwg/html/pu... · Posted by u/troupo

nikeee · 5 days ago

If security and memory-safety is a concern and there is already a polyfill, why remove the API form the standard instead of just using the WASM-based polyfill internally?

kg · 5 days ago

They want to punt a half-baked polyfill over the wall and remove support from the browser so they don't have to do any maintenance work, making it someone else's problem.

kg commented on "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec" github.com/whatwg/html/pu... · Posted by u/troupo

4ndrewl · 5 days ago

XSLT was the blockchain, nft, metaverse of the mid?-2000s. Was totally going to solve all of our problems.

kg · 5 days ago

At the time I ran across lots of real websites using it. I successfully used it myself at least once too. Off the top of my head, Blizzard was using it to format WoW player profiles for display in the browser.

kg commented on Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims apnews.com/article/domini... · Posted by u/throw0101a

FridayoLeary · 5 days ago

The counterargument is that mail in ballots help increase voter turnouts and that requiring id will turn people away. It's a weak argument because you shouldn't try to increase turnout by making voting less secure. Any other solution should be found instead.

kg · 5 days ago

If we really want to increase turnout, we can just make voting mandatory like other countries have.

Requiring ID is a problem given that a lot of people don't have easy access (or access at all) to legal ID, for various reasons, some as simple as cost. Having a license costs money on an ongoing basis and you need to have access to documents to prove your identity like a birth certificate, and some citizens don't have those through no fault of their own, like losing everything in a fire or even the relevant records agency itself burning down. Thankfully there are often fee waivers for hardship but there are certainly corner cases where saying 'if you want to vote you need ID' is basically a poll tax, something we rightfully banned in the US a long time ago.

kg commented on Class-action suit claims Otter AI records private work conversations npr.org/2025/08/15/g-s1-8... · Posted by u/nsedlet

bilekas · 6 days ago

> Last year, an AI researcher and engineer said Otter had recorded a Zoom meeting with investors, then shared with him a transcription of the chat including "intimate, confidential details" about a business discussed after he had left the meeting. Those portions of the conversation ended up killing a deal,

I'm sorry but this is another example of not checking AI's work. Whatever about the excessive recording, that's one thing, but blindly trusting the AI's output and then using it blindly as a company document for a client is on you.

kg · 6 days ago

I checked the original tweet to try and understand this better and what appears to have happened is that Otter kept recording after he left and the VCs stayed on the call chatting (for hours, according to the tweet). This violates the assumption baked into the recording agent (all participants of the call have a right to a transcript of the whole call) by repurposing a scheduled meeting into a party line/just chatting sort of situation.

You could fix this by training people not to use booked meetings this way but I'm not sure how realistic that is to do. I think it might be that services like Otter need to be adjusted to take into account that not every part of a meeting is of equal sensitivity.

i.e. my HOA's monthly meetings have a private period for the board only and a public period for all residents. If Otter were used in this configuration, it would broadcast the exact details of those private discussions to the whole building, which might include board members discussing details that shouldn't be shared with everyone.

kevingadd commented on Teaching GPT-5 to Use a Computer prava.co/archon/... · Posted by u/Areibman

daxfohl · 7 days ago

Very cool. I've been thinking for a while that this is where things will end up. While custom AI integrations per service/product/whatever can be better and more efficient, there's always going to be stuff that doesn't have AI integrations but your workflow will need to use.

Without this, AI is going to be limited and kloodgy. Like if I wanted to have AI run a FEA simulation on some CAD model, I have to wait until the FEA software, the CAD software, the corporate models repo, etc., etc. all have AI integrations and then create some custom agent that glues them all together. Once AI can just control the computer effectively, then it can look up the instruction manuals for each of these pieces of software online, and then just have at it e2e like a human would. It can even ping you over slack if it gets stuck on something.

I think once stuff like this becomes possible, custom AI integrations will become less necessary. I'm sure they'll continue to exist for special cases, but the other nice thing about a generic computer-use agent is that you can record the stream and see exactly what it's doing, so a huge increase in observability. It can even demo to human workers how to do things because it works via the same interfaces.

kevingadd · 6 days ago

One potential virtuous cycle here is that accessibility trees used by tools like screen readers are also a nice potential way for a model to consume information about what's on screen and how it can be interacted with. So it creates an additional incentive for improving the accessibility of new and existing software, because doing that lights up integration with future models.

kevingadd commented on Good multipliers for congruential pseudorandom number generators arxiv.org/abs/2001.05304... · Posted by u/luu

ryao · 7 days ago

I am under the impression that George Marsaglia‘s work showed that there are no good values for this class of PRNGs. That is why he devised so many other classes of PRNGs.

kevingadd · 7 days ago

Quoting the start of the paper:

> While MCGs and LCGs have some known defects, they can be used in combination with other pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) or passed through some output function that might lessen such defects. Due to their speed and simplicity, as well as a substantial accrued body of mathematical analysis, they have been for a long time the PRNGs of choice in programming languages.

EDIT: And going further, they call out Marsaglia's work in particular, it seems.

kevingadd commented on What kids told us about how to get them off their phones theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/jc_811

kevingadd · 9 days ago

> Since the 1980s, parents have grown more and more afraid that unsupervised time will expose their kids to physical or emotional harm. In another recent Harris Poll, we asked parents what they thought would happen if two 10-year-olds played in a local park without adults around. Sixty percent thought the children would likely get injured. Half thought they would likely get abducted.

> These intuitions don’t even begin to resemble reality. According to Warwick Cairns, the author of How to Live Dangerously, kidnapping in the United States is so rare that a child would have to be outside unsupervised for, on average, 750,000 years before being snatched by a stranger.

I wonder how we ended up in a situation where people think Stranger Danger is this bad. Is it just from TV and the internet inflating the danger to drive views/clicks?

In many areas crime has been trending down but people seem to think things are more dangerous than ever, in general. It baffles me.