Linux Foundation, Canonical, and Mozilla

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 06, 2024

• Ubuntu ☛ Canonical joins ELISA

• Ubuntu ☛ Canonical: Meet our Federal team at NLIT 2024

• Mozilla

  • Rohan Kumar ☛ MDN’s Hey Hi (AI) Help and lucid lies

    Following the release of MDN’s Hey Hi (AI) chatbot “feature”, many developers turned to Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub Issues to voice concerns. Most concerns revolved around the chatbot spouting misinformation on a technical reference expected to contain accurate information, and ethical concerns related to Proprietary Chaffbot Company and the use of a large language model (LLM).

    I don’t find the mere existence of LLM dishonesty to be worth blogging about; it’s already well-established. Let’s instead explore one of the inescapable roots of this dishonesty: LLMs exacerbate biases already present in their training data and fail to distinguish between unrelated concepts, creating lucid lies.¹

    A lucid lie is a lie that, unlike a hallucination, can be traced directly to content in training data uncritically absorbed by a large language model. MDN’s Hey Hi (AI) Help is the perfect example.

  • KDAB ☛ Embedding the Servo Web Engine in Qt

    With the Qt WebEngine module, Qt makes it possible to embed a webview component inside an otherwise native application. Under the hood, Qt WebEngine uses the Chromium browser engine, currently the de facto standard engine for such use cases.

    While the task of writing a brand new standard-compliant browser engine is infamous as being almost unachievable nowadays (and certainly so with Chromium coming in at 31 million lines of code), the Rust ecosystem has been brewing up a new web rendering engine called Servo. Initially created by Mozilla in 2012, Servo is still being developed today, now under the stewardship of the 'Linux' Foundation.