That's kinda funny when you consider where Mozilla came from... the ashes of a thing called Netscape... who tried to rule the world while a couple grad students were busy plugging away at Stanford, doing it the right way.
I started building something I like to call "Linux on the Web" (LOTW) 6+ years ago in order to start working on this problem (it's live on the web right now). Just like with node.js applications, the smallest legal file size for an app running inside of LOTW is precisely 0 bytes. I've tried to shave that down even more, but I seem to be running into physical limits :)
Can you share a link? People reading your comment have no way to know how to learn more about your project, or even whether it is relevant to the topic at hand.
The most relevant result I could find for "linux on the web" was https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com/ which doesn't seem to be relevant at all.
I think that is the one actually because the looking at the post history [1] of the person you are responding to I find that the most recent post they made in the past was one titled “Linux on the Web” [2], which leads to that very URL that you found.
He also posted a comment in the thread with some more details:
> It makes heavy use of the HTML5 Filesytem for local storage, as well as Native Client for vim, python, and plugin codecs to enable highly configurable realtime a/v streaming via WebRTC peer connections. Windowed HTML5/JS applications can be developed live within the site itself. There is a feature to stream terminal sessions to each other, in order to show how to efficiently use vim to develop applications, for example.
Hi, yes, that stuff is from quite awhile ago, seeing that NaCl/PNaCl is quite dead, and WASM is now all the rage. I previously had actual vim running via NaCl, but the current (better IMO) version is just a fairly small JS clone (about 70kb). The whole system is rapidly stabilizing right now, what with the entire gui framework being fleshed out, both conceptually and technically.
I try to stay away from the above kinds of sweeping generalizations about the whole thing nowadays. It is best to let it speak for itself and evolve in its own good time.
Did you try the "desk.os" link that is link number 3 on that page... https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com/desk.os ?
I can really only guarantee that things work on a relatively recent version of Chrome (like within the last few stable releases). The version that is live now is a couple weeks old. I'm working on some really cool features for the modular synth app right now. I'd love to start sharing this stuff with you guys!
Also, link number 5, at https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com/shell.os is for people who just want to poke around the deep system internals via a command line. For that, you need to use the "import" command in order to pull in libraries of commands. For instance, running a command like:
I also have a sandboxed interpreter in my site... I use JS to parse strings of shell/bash text. The site is a full-scale desktop environment in a browser: https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com
It is Chrome only as it relies on access to a local filesystem, and using Native Client plugins.
The first time I was aware of Larry as a person was in early 2014 when I saw a replay of him on stage at the 2013 Google I/O event. I immediately got an impression of him as being a truly saintly figure, with his gentle, soft-spoken demeanor.
Considering what I have been going through in my daily life, I could not be more in awe of what Larry has been able to accomplish. I feel that Google is easily an order of magnitude more important than the next closest institution, be it public or private, be it a business or a government.
My offering to Larry is a little thing that I've been working on for the past several years called "Linux on the Web". If you stick those four words together and put it into a relevant search engine, then the link should appear as the top hit. It only works in Chrome... a fact that truly warms my cockles at this moment.
I f*ing love that man.
Screw all the haters.
Suggestion to all potential future reporters out there: pay more attention in your math, science and engineering classes, and less in your liberal (f)arts classes.
> Suggestion to all potential future reporters out there: pay more attention in your math, science and engineering classes, and less in your liberal (f)arts classes.
No. You do not create technology that serves real humans by refusing to study the humanities.
> The first time I was aware of Larry as a person was in early 2014 when I saw a replay of him on stage at the 2013 Google I/O event. I immediately got an impression of him as being a truly saintly figure, with his gentle, soft-spoken demeanor.
I don't have any strong opinions on Page as a person, but if you decide that someone saintly based purely on their stage presence, you are in serious danger of getting taken for a ride by any charismatic jerk who crosses your path.
>Suggestion to all potential future reporters out there: pay more attention in your math, science and engineering classes, and less in your liberal (f)arts classes
You were making sense, until this last para. Have some compassion - you don't seem to care that a human (journo) is degraded into such a position (used emasculate to describe his position) by another (although no fault of the latter). Its good that humans are different, for various reasons -- its so obvious. Going by your logic, what Mr. Page does is fart compared to say a Roger Penrose writing 'The Road to Reality'.
All said, we all try our best, you know. Your project looks interesting. So is mine, or that journalist's or Larry Page's or Roger Penrose's. In the large scheme of things, who knows what really matters.
If we turn the web itself into an actual developer (and user) friendly platform, then we could probably start making better use of it as an application delivery vehicle. To enable this, I've been furiously working on this OS-in-a-browser concept for the past 3+ years: https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com
Chromium specific certainly isn't as good as open standards, but it isn't as bad as Java. Once chromium is ported to something it doesn't face legal uncertainty.
If you write a free application that runs on Java on the raspberry Pi you (probably) owe Oracle nothing. If anyone builds a console around that raspberry Pi, Oracle probably is owed money because the device is no longer a general machine. That is very different than chromium or anything else that is license compatible with your typical Linux distribution.
Whether or not someone owed damages is immaterial to the problem of trying to get everyone an appropriate license who might want to run your software in contexts you haven't imagined yet.
It makes heavy use of the HTML5 Filesytem for local storage, as well as Native Client for vim, python, and plugin codecs to enable highly configurable realtime a/v streaming via WebRTC peer connections. Windowed HTML5/JS applications can be developed live within the site itself. There is a feature to stream terminal sessions to each other, in order to show how to efficiently use vim to develop applications, for example.
> Let's suppose our AI must chose, in a flurry of combat, between sacrificing the life of a friendly soldier, or killing two other people, likely to be civilians.
This question of programmatically determining "friend" vs "foe" is highly problematic, to say the least. The only reason why humans make such distinctions is because they rely on them in order to ensure their own physical survival, so they can successfully propagate the species.
In order for a lifeless machine to make these kinds of distinctions, there must exist some kind of objectively verifiable calculation procedure that decides what exactly makes another human friendly or not. If this calculation procedure is simply meant to mimic the subjective calculations that are made by human military strategists, then this technology could not properly be considered the kind of interesting problem that AI researchers would want to work on. But if it is indeed meant to be objectively valid, then it will surely need to initiate a deep learning function that can very easily come up with a conclusion that finally determines that the so-called "friend" as determined by the human military strategist is actually a foe that needs to be eliminated.
So I think that the entire concept of developing highly sophisticated autonomous agents is inextricably wound up in the interesting, objective question of what it truly means to be human, rather than the more prosaic, subjective question of what it means to be a certain type of human that happens to judge another type of human as friend or foe.
I will do everything in my power to ensure that corporate-backed, ivory-tower, anti-philosophical, techno-enthusiast academics do not figure out some kind of formula to dominate the world of human affairs with their so-called "super intelligent machines". I'm not saying that this specific research group falls under this umbrella, but they are all credited as being associated with Facebook AI research, so take it FWIW. I do believe that a certain Elon Musk would back me up here:
"I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like yeah he's sure he can control the demon. Didn't work out."
The classes of algorithms that are meant to directly interact with people in a way that appears authentically human must obviously be highly regulated, and I certainly agree that these kinds of regulations should be on par with international nuclear oversight bodies.
It is always important to give end users the option to figure out for themselves how the algorithms that they interact with actually function. In order to encourage this kind of thing, I have been working on an online, distributed operating system concept for the past several years, and one of the apps is a simple, "Hello World" kind of an AI that goes by the name, Bertie.
I am working on making the underlying system code (which is mostly JavaScript) completely editable by end users. They will be able to test out their edits in an application window inside of the web page, and will be able to share their changes with each other over the distributed, web-based filesystem that I am actively developing.
If you are running Chrome, you can try out the OS by going to https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/. To see the AI app, just click on the Applications folder, and then click on Bertie's face. Alternatively, if you are feeling lazy, just click on the following link and the Bertie app will automatically open: https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/desk?open=Bertie.
Thank you for this, I will look into it :). I was actually going to tell these people to give me a github link or go away, haha. I don't need any kind of license page that looks like http://alchemy.cs.washington.edu/license.php?action=2, thank you very much!
By the way, you can talk to my AI guy if you have a recent Chrome/Chromium browser. It is actually an entire OS in a browser, and the AI guy is an app called Bertie. My current implementation of the OS is called "The Native Client Proving Ground", and can be found here: https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/desk. The OS should install in less than 2 seconds after clicking the link. Then you just open the Applications folder and click on Bertie's face. He will then introduce himself, and you can start talking to him.
That's kinda funny when you consider where Mozilla came from... the ashes of a thing called Netscape... who tried to rule the world while a couple grad students were busy plugging away at Stanford, doing it the right way.