In this digital age, notifications are a double-edged sword. On one hand, they can keep us informed of important updates or news about topics we care about - but on the other hand, it’s all too easy for websites to start spamming users with intrusive notifications. Apple’s new update to their iOS operating system helps manage these issues by restricting permission requests for website notifications only to apps that have been added to the Home Screen.

The recent screenshots of people interacting with Bing have been so wild that it has left many people convinced the conversations must be fake. However, upon closer inspection, these conversations appear to be genuine. What’s even more remarkable is that in some cases, Bing is able to answer questions correctly. But this should not lead us to let our guard down when it comes to AI safety. The LLM used by Bing has access to internet search and therefore a more recent functional memory than its training data. This makes it capable of understanding complex scenarios and providing appropriate responses but also raises serious concerns about the potential harms such systems can cause if we grant them too much power without proper safety protocols in place.

The research on GPT-style language models is fascinating and the possibilities are seemingly endless. We’ve seen that these models can be used to play games like Othello and can even understand different languages in a single phrase. But how exactly do such complex functions work? The answer to this is: “we don’t really know as its a very complex function automatically discovered by means of slow gradient descent, and we’re still finding out”. In other words, this technology is still relatively new and there’s a lot of research being done to better understand it.

Open source projects have become increasingly popular in recent years, but with their success comes a dark side. Denis Pushkarev is a prime example of the struggles that open source maintainers face when dealing with entitled users and the lack of compensation for their hard work. Despite his admirable restraint and dedication to his project, Denis has been pushed to the brink by users who expect him to provide free services for them without any appreciation or understanding of what he does.

Mozilla Firefox has been on the market for some time now and while there have been updates, the UI/UX of Firefox’s Containers feature hasn’t seen any significant improvements. Containers are still synced separately, leading to a default 4 containers with a tutorial UX even after syncing. This presents an issue when it comes to address bar completion, as it is monolithic and can lead to accidentally opening a site in an undesired container.