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> This argument requires us to believe that AI will just asymptote and not get materially better.

That's not what asymptote means. Presumably what you mean is the curve levelling off, which it already is.


This seems overly pedantic. The intended meaning is clear.

Hardly, asymptotic behavior can be anything, in fact that's the whole question: what happens to AI performance as we tend to infinity? Asymptoting to `y = x` is very different to levelling off.

Because modern cookie directives and browser configs neuter a lot of the worst XSS outcomes/easiest exploit paths. I would expect all the big sites to be setting them, though I guess you never know.

I would not be that confident as you can see: on their first example, they show Discord and the XSS code is directly executed on Discord.com under the logged-in account (some people actually use web version of Discord to chat, or sign-in on the website for whatever reason).

If you have a high-value target, it is a great opportunity to use such exploits, even for single shots (it would likely not be detected anyway since it's a drop in the ocean of requests).

Spreading it on the whole internet is not a good strategy, but for 4000 USD, being able to target few users is a great value.

Besides XSS, phishing has its own opportunity.

Example: Coinbase is affected too though on the docs subdomain and there are 2-step, so you cannot do transactions directly but if you just replace the content with a "Sign-in to Coinbase / Follow this documentation procedure / Download update", this can get very very profitable.

Someone would pay 4000 USD to receive 500'000 USD back in stolen bitcoins).

Still, purely with executing things under the user sessions there are interesting things to do.


> some people actually use web version of Discord to chat, or sign-in on the website for whatever reason

Beside this security blunder on Discord’s part, I can see only upsides to using a browser version rather than an Electron desktop app. Especially given how prone Discord are to data mining their users, it seems foolish to let them out of the web sandbox and into your system


Again, here you have not so much sold a vulnerability as you have planned a heist. I agree, preemptively: you can get a lot of money from a well-executed heist!

Do you want to execute actions as logged-in user on high-value website XXX ?

If yes -> very useful


Nobody is disputing that a wide variety of vulnerabilities are "useful", only that there's no market for most of them. I'd still urgently fix an XSS.

There is a market outside Zerodium, it's Telegram. Finding a buyer takes time and trust, but it has definitively higher value than 4k USD because of its real-world impact, no matter if it is technically lower on the CVSS scores.

Really? Tell me a story about someone selling an XSS vulnerability on Telegram.

("The CVSS chart"?)

Moments later

Why do people keep bringing up "Zerodium" as if it's a thing?


I understand your perspective about the technical value of an exploit, but I disagree with the concept that technical value = market value.

There are unorganized buyers who may be interested if they see potential to weaponize it.

In reality, if you want to maximize revenue, yes, you need to organize your own heist (if that's what you meant)


> understand your perspective about the technical value of an exploit

Going out on the world’s sturdiest limb and saying u/tptacek knows the technical and trading sides of exploits. (Read his bio.)


Do you know this or do you just think it should be true?

AIU this feature is SSS, not XSS, so XSS protections don't apply.

How would you make money from this? Most likely via phishing. Not exactly a zero-click RCE.

What happens in all these discussions is that we stealthily transition from "selling a vulnerability" to "planning a heist", and you can tell yourself any kind of story about planning a heist.


The thing is React is usually fine, and even if you don't have to build _this_ thing in React due to simplicity, why bother learning two paradigms when you can just use the heavier one for everything and most likely never encounter any real practical showstopping issue?

The reality of React is that you have to keep re-learning and un-learning stuff if you want to keep up with React's ecosystem, because the surface area of the libraries is so large. (see "JavaScript fatigue")

Whereas with HTMX you learn a very, very basic concept in 15mins, and you're good to go for the next decade(s), and it will be more than enough for 80% of your projects.

Same as with vim and Emacs vs. proprietary IDEs and text editors.


I agree that people often do this but I don't think you _have_ to. You could have freely ignored SSR, RSC, etc. and kept on making boring old React SPAs. The churn is largely opt-in.

> The churn is largely opt-in.

It is not. React 18 changed damn near everything. You can't create a new React 17 project without jumping through serious hoops. React 19.5 introduced the compiler, so you can stop using useCallback and useMemo. Except for "common scenarios" where you still need it. Which are about as clear as mud.

I can only imagine what React 20 is going to introduce.


My current app is a boring SPA. SSR, RSC wouldn’t make sense for it. My previous app was a video player with UI drawn in React: couldn’t SSR that.

> why bother learning two paradigms

Objection. Your React is ultimately turning into HTML so you DO have to learn HTML + CSS. You just have an abstraction over it.


That's like saying my C# is getting turned into CLR bytecode, so I do have to learn CLR bytecode because I have an abstraction over it.

Yet I know roughly what it is, but I couldn't begin to actually write the stuff myself.

Good abstractions mean you don't have to worry about the layer below.

Now of course it's not really the case that React holds up to being a good abstraction, especially when it comes to CSS and styling, but I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that abstractions force you to learn the level below.

Otherwise we'd all spend half our time learning assembly.

I do have sympathy though for a developer who just wants to focus on the higher level paradigm and let the library maintainers worry about the innards.


React is an abstraction over UI state, not the platform (ie HTML/CSS). This is by design and non-parallel to C#/CLR case. If you want something akin to this, then Flutter is what you should be looking at.

> That's like saying my C# is getting turned into CLR bytecode, so I do have to learn CLR bytecode because I have an abstraction over it.

For a good part of your career this is true, but eventually you will need to justify your senior salary by being able to debug react via looking at library code itself, or understanding the event bubbling under the hood, or figure out why the output css isn't working.

Saw a video, wish I could remember who, someone developing a game in c-something. There was some bug they couldn't figure out so they jumped into I guess the assembly for that block of higher abstracted code, and was able to find some kind of memory issue. Vague, sorry, but point is I remember being really impressed, thinking oh shit yeah if I really want to be an expert in my field I better be able to really understand my stack all the way to the bones.


> That's like saying my C# is getting turned into CLR bytecode, so I do have to learn CLR bytecode because I have an abstraction over it.

That's not a valid analogy, 99.99% of C# developers never see or touch CLR bytecode, where every React developer is still working with HTML+CSS.


That's possibly true, but I wonder why react as an abstraction fails to deliver that kind of independence.

In theory, react developers ought to be able to code against the react API in typescript, without seeing the "raw" HTML+JS that gets delivered to the browser.

So what's failing those developers? Is it the tooling, the abstraction itself, or something else?


> So what's failing

You're failing to understand the difference between react and react-dom.

> be able to code against the react API in typescript

https://github.com/chentsulin/awesome-react-renderer


Off the top of my head, C# is both the language & the runtime. React only throws things over the fence to browsers.

Probably helps a lot to keep abstractions from leaking.


That seems like an odd take. I don’t know that anyone ever intended React to completely insulate you from the actual UI framework (HTML/CSS in this case). You’d have to reinvent a whole new set of layout and styling features. Why would you bother? React is for orchestrating your use of the UI framework, not for replacing it.

That just makes HTML/CSS part of the React paradigm though. You can still use all those features in a React app, after all. The 'new paradigm' to learn with HTMX is how it does reactivity/interactivity.

This featured article is about HTMX not HTML. Ofc everyone working in the FE should know HTML/CSS

honestly both the react haters & the htmx haters are wrong on this

if you care about have a solid UI, you should learn everything

you should learn css, react, svelte, vue, rails, tailwind, html

if you don't and you say you actually care about your UI, your opinion is actually irrelevant


React (and Angular) is an MVC framework pushed on top of a MVC framework in the backend. Why make things so complex?

> you can just use the heavier one for everything

Because people don't like using heavyweight solutions needlessly. That's the logic that begat C++ and Ada and Multics and ASN.1 and CORBA. All of which were good solutions useful for "everything" in their domain. But people hate them, mostly.

Historically big "everything" solutuions end up losing in the market to lighter weight paradigms with more agility and flexibility. Almost every time. React[1] was such a solution once!

[1] Which really is a shorthand for "modern node-based web development with tens of thousands of npm dependencies and thirteen separately-documented API and deployment environemnts to learn".


The thing is most of us have jobs where we can't unilaterally switch to the 'cooler' solution, and I value my own context-switching overhead much more than I value a slightly smaller bundle or dep tree. I'll much sooner optimize the former than the latter and so the general purpose solution that will solve both my own projects and the work ones typically wins.

> most of us have jobs where we can't unilaterally switch to the 'cooler' solution

Which is exactly why the uncool solutions persist in the market. They're useful and practical! If they weren't they never would have been successful at all. I'm just saying that that this is fundamentally the logic of the frumpy old curmudgeon, and the kids will always have something better to offer along with their confusing new ideas.

And to be clear, I'm also just saying that as someone looking in from the outside (I do firmware!) the front end webdev developer onboarding story has long since jumped the complexity shark and things are quite frankly an impenetrable disaster ripe for disruption.


Performance

At best this would be 1.7x more _discovered_ bugs. The average PR (IMO) is hardly checked. AI could have 10x as many real issues on PRs, but we're just bad at reviewing PRs.

It's been suggested that code reviews shouldnt be about finding bugs, because they do not really work well for that goal.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...


Couldn't this be true in the other direction as well? Anecdotally I see developers putting a lot more scrutiny into vibe coded PRs, while AI code tends to be highly commented (by the AI) and potentially easier to read.

I've seen way more human comments of "I don't know what this does but if I remove it everything breaks" in systems.


Yes, I would literally pay a nominal fee for Firefox if I were confident in the org's direction. As things stand though, the trust is gone as you said.

Yeah, but there's a selection bias present in most feedback like this, isn't there? People are more motivated to submit feedback when something annoys them. This is speaking as someone who is also annoyed by AI features.

That's a slightly different question, but an important one: the presence of a group criticizing a feature doesn't mean the absence of a different group requesting it!

When Mozilla initially made the Connect forums, it was to solicit requests for new features. I can't stress enough how few people joined the forum to request more AI in their browser.


Does it not still suck at blocking YouTube video ads? As in, you get a delay before videos start playing.

That's not sucking at blocking thats YouTube intentionally adding a delay to make it seem like their experience is degraded when it isn't. If you turn the slider up to full it only happens very rarely.

I'm sure this will all change eventually though and YouTube has a loophole planned so ad blocking on manifest 2.0 is impossible.


I'm not really sure of the actual mechanism, but on Firefox with a fully updated block list the delay doesn't seem to happen for me. Whereas I could never quite get rid of it on Chrome. This was a while ago, though, when they first introduced it.

I use uBlock Origin with Firefox on Linux, and it seems like that delay happens maybe on 30% of the YouTube videos for me, with no rhyme or reason to which ones. And reloading the same video multiple times show consistent behavior if it loads fast/slow, not sure what's going on.

I don't even have this issue with uBlock Origin Lite on mobile Safari. I'm fully browser-based on mobile for YouTube these days. No ads, no delay.

> The “AI is in a bubble crowd” still has no answer to “why didn’t the tech bubble pop in 2022?”

Are these things related? Why is the tech bubble popping in 2022 a necessary condition for current AI hype being a bubble?


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