When you go to enable "Unsafe WebGPU Support" it says the following:
"Convenience flag for WebGPU development. Enables best-effort WebGPU support on unsupported configurations and more! Note that this flag could expose security issues to websites so only use it for your own development."
Can someone who knows about this stuff please guide us in terms of what sort of security risk we would would be exposing ourselves to?
Being new, largely untested code paths in the browser, it's very possible for it to have buffer overflow defects that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on your system. So, basically, literally anything could happen.
Linux support for WebGPU is incomplete. Other platforms have received more priority and have it enabled by default. Even on platforms where Chrome does support it, the tech isn't available on other browsers necessarily.
I was gonna respond with the generic large swath of unverified code running on your machine, but I realized your question is more specific and more interesting. If anyone knows, I would love to hear an answer on this as well.
Go to archive.is (or one of the other archive sites), paste in the URL you want to get an archive copy of, then copy the resulting URL and paste it here.
The tutorials and hands on coding examples made me understand how to program with GPUs. I loved them because at the time, khronos was still in its infancy and just started out with GLES extensions and the whole WebGL ecosystem.
Meanwhile I kind of believe that learning where it came from (fixed function pipeline, buffer/texture and uniform problems etc) makes a lot of sense to learn first so you start thinking in shader computation pipelines much easier, as you understand the whys and whens much better.
I probably owe my career to him; it was learning the old fixed pipeline OpenGL API from his tutorials that led to me making games, and those games that led to a family member encouraging me to interview for an internship at his company. All that led to a 20 year career (so far) in software engineering.
I'm sure there are others here that are experts on this topic, but my 2 cents on this is that Broadcom specialise in custom / specialised AI chips, and their collaboration with Google to manufacture the TPUs is a pretty solid revenue moat over the next several years.
> In the last eight weeks, I have counted 361 queens. The meagre three traps might sound irrelevant in the face of the growing continental scale of the problem, and perhaps they are. However, a mature hornet nest in autumn can have 6,000 individuals, so potentially over two million fewer hornets will be patrolling our local landscape come autumn.
> What does “take full responsibility” mean in the present context?
Aside from Pete's reply (see adjacent comment), I'd add that him taking full responsibility is also his way of saying his post was nobody else's fault but his.
In other words it's less about forfeiting assets and descendant peonage, and more about saying "the buck stops with me".
At least that's my read of his sentiment. Pete can expand if need be.
“Nobody else’s fault but mine” is a perfectly good way of asserting “nobody else’s fault but mine”; “I take full responsibility” is something else entirely and the two are not synonymous. Hyperbole needs to be radically discounted.
No. He is not solely responsible. A sequence of bugs introduced by developers created a hole. Information about how to deal with this calamity was not privy to him. He is not “solely responsible”. He merely reacted (publicly) to information that he was not beholden to maintain secret about things others had done inadvertently in the past. He’s not alone. He does not bear that “sole responsibility”. He acted within the UK’s freedom of speech doctrine (IANAL). He need not place this burden upon himself.
I know nothing of who Pete is or his associations, so any accuracy on the following speculation is purely coincidental.
"Take full responsibility" is also something someone set up as a scapegoat might say. By claiming nobody else influenced, coerced, or otherwise convinced them to make that statement, every/any one else involved can then wash their hands of the situation.
I'm merely playing devil's advocate here, and it's just a sign of the times that a person making an honest admission can be interpreted in such a manner.
To be honest, your accounting of the situation reminds me of a scene from the West Wing where the press secretary lets slip info about a grand jury but then spins herself up realizing grand juries are meant to be secret and leaking that info could have consequences. After an entire episode of a tv show where she's not been able to sleep, she finds out that because someone else told her about the information, she's not liable for leaking it. Hopefully, you'll similarly be able to get some sleep now that you know the world isn't going to come crashing down on you.
Whilst I appreciate the impact of AI and its long-term implications for humanity as we know it, I am getting kinda tired of seeing so many AI-related headlines here on HN. Perhaps it's just me, but I feel like every day the front page is filled with mostly LLM-related announcements.
The big difference is that when the web blew up, there were new players in every direction. Now, we get to hear from the same 3-4 companies over and over and over and over again.
It's not the same 3-4 companies. The 3-4 companies are Anthropic, OpenAI, X/Grok, and Meta/Muse.
But there's also DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Jev, and countless services built on top of frontier or open source models. Those 3-4 companies might have the most numerous announcements that hit the front page, but there's way more than that going on in all directions.
Pre-internet there was no way to hear about things "all the time". If someone released a product and a competitor came about it would be months, if not years, before the product existed and the marketing cycle made it to trade magazines.
Now every day there are 200 links to 200 new AI tools. The internet already made the signal:noise ratio tough, with AI it's getting cranked to wondering if there even is a signal among the infinite noise.
Hearing people talk about the “information superhighway” was exceptionally tedious.
The biggest difference to me is the tone. The dot-com era was brimming with optimism and enthusiasm. People were getting rich (on paper). The demand for someone who could write html/perl/java (or fake it) was high, and lots of smart or savvy people got pulled into tech.
The thing I hate about all of the HN posts on AI is the underlying doomerism. There’s always someone gleefully proclaiming that white color workers are super screwed and that we’re destined to be sad serfs to our AI overlords.
What am I supposed to comment "this is cool and I'm excited to try it!"? Snark is a contagion but they're on the front page because a lot of us are having a lot of fun using these new tools and playing with the new ideas
Given that anti-AI posts are flagged faster than I thought possible despite a lot of positive comments, there are probably a lot of silent viewers that are pro-AI…
I am pro-AI and am not really participating in the more combative discussions. Why would I fight battles in a war that I am winning anyway and can just sit it out.
I happen to believe AI will be the biggest change in my career in tech. I therefore think it's pretty natural that there is lots of news about it.
But I would welcome other tech news on the site. A quick count says that less than half the submission are AI related and that is split between four types of ai news (how to handle security, a new model, a non-model release from a major lab and politics). Would you complain about there being too many news about programming languages if the frontpage had C++, Ruby, Lisp and a great guide to ARM assembly?
Well, a couple of years before that it was all NFTs all the time. Then before that it was web3. Then before that it was the blockchain in general. And then before that it was Haskell and monads.
I don't think it lasted long. I remember finding it annoying as the whole concept of NFTs was eye rollingly stupid. At least some of the other topics have had merit.
I joined HN around the time category theory was starting to take off so not sure what the topic du jour was before that.
I hadn't since CmdrTaco left. But I've been going to it more and more in the last few months. I don't read the comments - but I do like the headline curation.
I think that as these tools coalesce and we start to see the real super-in intelligence leaders come out on top, there'll probably be less volume and fewer but deeper things to discuss.
Can you name some of these opportunities? I see people in this thread talking about using agents to manage their budgets, buy fancy cars and houses, contract work on their home. I think a lot of people feel like AI will permanently forclose any avenue they would have had to achieving that level of wealth, so there's a bitter irony
A good software developer / engineer knows how systems interlink.
AI supercharges that. If you trust the agent's results, you can focus on far higher-level aspects. You can deliver software that was in theory in reach for you, but not in practice, else you hired 30-50 developers doing the actual work for you.
This is different from a PO / PM perspective. They manage people that know their business. You manage agents that just implement code. That'll stay true for at least a few years, I'd say.
In fact, I'm quite sure that engineering-minded people will survive AI the longest. I was of the opposite opinion a few months ago.
Theres plenty of people in construction who literally get paid to stand and watch. And theyre very well paid.
The same will happen to software - it'll get boring but you'll be paid to do.. not all that much.
Yeah for many that 'problem solving' thing w.r.t code will go. But there's other things they'll spend their time thinking about.
Also these personal assistants will crash and burn. Something else will come in the future. These chat bots are not it. Technology keeps evolving - if you get stuck on the chat paradigm... its over for you.
I mean I'm not going to make a chrome extension and install it and update it every time hn changes or something breaks and update it and shit. For a site I often go years without looking at. I'll just be vaguely annoyed that a super popular website can't be bothered to add really basic usability features.
"Convenience flag for WebGPU development. Enables best-effort WebGPU support on unsupported configurations and more! Note that this flag could expose security issues to websites so only use it for your own development."
Can someone who knows about this stuff please guide us in terms of what sort of security risk we would would be exposing ourselves to?
Thanks.
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