I'm going to resist wasm as much as practical. At least that is my current intention based on what I have learned from being a web user for the last 33.5 years.
First of all, wasm won't run in my browser (I determined that by evaluating `typeof WebAssembly` in the console tab of Developer Tools), a choice made not by me, but by the maintainer of my browser (Trivalent) -- probably for security reasons. I trust the maintainer of my browser about security-related decisions.
Besides security, another reason I am going to resist wasm is that it gives the site owner more power at my expense. The way it is now, I can modify web sites using extensions. For example, for years, I ran an extension that deletes "fixed elements" from web page (which didn't work on 100% of sites with fixed elements, but was still a welcome assistance to me because it worked on about 70% of sites). Wasm would make it more difficult for an extension to modify a site in ways that users with various preferences and various disabilities might want -- because code is more difficult to modify than data is, and the way web pages are now, there is a lot of data in a web page stored in 'locations' that an extension can programmatically find and modify.
In summary, site owners already have too much control over my experience (relative to me and authors of software such as a browser extension acting on my behalf), and wasm would give them even more control.
It would be one thing if I used the web mainly to run sophisticated applications. I do not: I use it mainly to find simple data resources, mostly text and URLs, written by ordinary people such as yourself. When anyone anywhere wants to get some information out to the world and consider how best to do that, 99% percent of the time, the first thought that comes to mind is to put some text or maybe a video or some other kind of data on the web. I see sentiments like the one you expressed just now as interfering with the flow of this text or other kind of data to me -- by making the process more complicated, less customizable by the user and giving "middlemen" like advertiser more ways to profit from this flow.
Again: I never wanted or asked for a platform for the delivery of sophisticated applications over the internet (using web protocols) to get all mixed up and combined with the world's most important and most convenient platform that ordinary users (i.e., not site owners or professional technologists for the most part) use to publish and consume simple data objects like text and URLs and such.
1) Wasm wouldn't prevent you from running those client scripts (e.g. remove fixed elements). That would still just be a script that modifies the DOM from an extension after the page is rendered/dom mutations occur.
2) wasm makes serving static content practical as server side rendering is economical. My previous employer, for instance, spends tens of millions of dollars every year running SSR servers - almost all of that would be eliminated if the backend could just run the client as wasm.
3) Scrapers (think puppeteer) would be faster and more resource efficient because they wouldn't need to start a JavaScript runtime to load a page.
4) You don't use Electron apps?
5) You may not, but everyone else uses rich interactive web applications. Think of the energy usage and cost savings there would be to the world.
I've tentatively concluded the I should stay away from them for security reasons. That is what the Secureblue project recommends. I like vscode, but have no current need for it, so I did not install it the last time I installed an OS. If I ever start coding full time, I'd need something vscode-like and would try to make do with Github Codespaces. I've already made sure Codespaces runs in my browser (Trivalent with wasm, webgl and webgpu disabled) and have found a way to use it without a browser's tab bar and location bar taking up valuable screen real estate.
> The way it is now, I can modify web sites using extensions
This isn't related too directly to WASM, what you want is DOM rendering only, you would theoretically reject canvas and WebGL rendering I imagine. But you could create DOM nodes with WASM. The only difference is that WASM is not as easy to decompile, but I can't imagine you're really unminifiying and patching Javascript are you?
Yes, I disabled WebGL many years ago (and Flash many years before that) when I was running Google Chrome. These months, I run Trivalent, which has it and WebGPU disabled by default.
I'm not a web dev, so maybe directing my hatred and resentment at wasm like I did in my first comment is a mistake. I don't like the idea of a site that draws its whole UI to a canvas (for reasons you can probably understand) and I have been assuming that that is impractical in just Javascript and that in practice, wasm is needed for that.
According to one of those services that gives fast answers to questions, Vanadium (the browser of the GrapheneOS project, which I also trust to give security recommendations) has wasm enabled, but that is a new development. Before late 2025, wasm worked only when JavaScript JIT was enabled, and the default was to have it disabled, which is how most users left it. It was possible for the user to enable it only on a few sites chosen by the user (per-site configurability).
I did not mean to broadcast misinformation, and will be more careful in the future. I do know that when the web gets new capabilites to make it a better application-delivery platform, my experience of the web strongly tends to get worse. The introduction of HTML5 and other technologies circa 2006 for example was a very salient example of that.
(I have no opinion on web3.) That is a poor argument because the internet had been in operation continuously for 24 years (1969 to 1993) before the public started to take an interest.
The early Internet wasn’t founded on the idea of extracting as much money from people as possible, and turning everything into a commodity to be traded. Web3 seems like it’s being driven by people who want to have the entire population addicted to gambling.
That feels much different, and worse, than the early Internet days.
>Instead what happened is that, by creating the reservations and encouraging them to maintain their traditional lifestyles
Aside from simply not forcing them to integrate into mainsteam society,
how did mainstream American society over the last 102 years encourage them to maintain traditional lifestyles?
Since the "Indian" Citizenship Act of 1924, every native American born in the US (on a reservation or not) has held US citizenship, free to move anywhere they want in the US just like any US citizen or lawful resident (who is not on probation after having been convicted of a crime). I am tempted to conclude that the main effect of the existence of reservations after 1924 has been to give native Americans the choice between integrating into American society with all the advantages any other immigrant would have (by moving off the reservation) and continuing to live in a jurisdiction administered by members of his or her own tribe (by chosing to stay on the reservation).
Actually the situation is a little more nuanced than that because Washington has disbursed money to the tribes every year, and some of that money goes to benefits (e.g., housing assistance, healthcare (via Indian Health Service), or per capita payments) that tribe members get only if they continue to live on or near the tribe's reservation.
But still, do you stand by your assertion that "you’re condemning the kids born in these places to quasi third world conditions"? Because being able to just move whenever you want to the US legally without even a requirement to inform any authority of the move doesn't strike me as "third world conditions", the essence of which IMHO is the difficulty of becoming a lawful resident of a more competently-run jurisdiction.
Do you save your snark for batteries only, or are you equally liberally minded with your non-binary thinking about the number of bombs allowed on board?
It's not fallacious, it focuses the issue, and in this particular case shows that it's not about "binary thinking" it's about risk.
And my original puzzlement continues. At what level of risk, does limiting the number of devices on board to 500 or even more, actually accomplish anything?
If they're not all that dangerous, then why limit them at all? And if they're dangerous enough to limit at all, why in God's blue sky, would you allow that many of them on a plane?
We don't limit people to 1 knife per person, even though knives have utility to a lot of people who carry one with them every day.
Because it's a numbers game... the original order itself even acknowledges that the problem is not unique to power banks, but that what makes power banks unique is the amount of increased risk they pose compared to other devices, due to a higher ubiquity of them in general, and of low-quality unsafe ones.
If laptops were catching fire with the same frequency, they'd ban those too, but they're not. They technically can be made just as unsafe as power banks, but they usually aren't, and this directive is based on the frequency of occurrence of a particular type of device, not a general "what if" strategy.
Banning all electronic devices would be extremely unpopular and possibly tank their sales. They're trying to balance safety with convenience at a level that is acceptable to most people.
If there are 20 battery banks on board a plane, each possessed by a different person:
* Less likely to be of the same low quality
* Less likely to all go off
* Less likely that someone is doing something malicious/suspicious with it
vs. someone who has 20 power banks themselves in a bag, in which case if one of them catches fire unexpectedly, they will probably all go up at once and create a cumulative effect much more dangerous than 20 individuals.
The problem with having 32gb of RAM is that there is no mechanism to power off part of it when it is unneeded (plus RAM constitutes a significant fraction of a device's total power consumption) so if the device is running off a battery and is designed to keep device weight to a minimum (e.g., battery as small as practical), then battery life is not as good as it would be if the device had only 16gb.
This is why the top model of the previous generation of the iPhone (the iPhone 16 Pro Max) has only 8 GB of RAM, bumped to 12 GB for the current top model (the iPhone 17 Pro Max at the higher tiers of additional storage). If Apple had decided to put more RAM than that into any iPhone, even the models where the price is irrelevant to most buyers, they would not have been serving their customers well.
So, now you have to pay a penalty in either battery life or device weight for the duration of your ownership of any device designed for maximum mobility if you ever want to having a good experience when running Electron apps on the device.
The people I trust to give good security recommendations (e.g., the leader of the Secureblue project) tell me I should completely avoid Electron (at least on Linux) because of how insecure it is. E.g., the typical Electron app pulls in many NPM packages, for which Electron does zero sandboxing.
I can understand why banks got bailed out by the US gov in 2008, but why would a government feel the need to bail out AI labs?
I hope you are not going to say, "to avoid a global recession or depression caused by the popping of the AI bubble". That would be unnecessary and harmful (in its second-order effects), and governments do have advisors who are competent enough in economics to advise against such a move.
Can you understand why banks were bailed out to the extent of protecting shareholders?
In the UK the first bank to go, Northern Rock, was simply taken over by the government. The shareholders got nothing. The bailout of Lloyds bank required the government taking a 40% stake. This is the way to go - if you need a bailout there should be a cost to the shareholders. otherwise you are just privatising profit and nationalising risk.
Not that UK regulation was great all round or the bailout perfect. It certainly failed to prevent the crisis which could have been done (no doubt the same applies in many countries). I looked at Northern Rock's accounts some time (an year, maybe?) before the crisis and was horrified by their reliance on interbank lending. it was obvious they could not cope with a rise in rates.
So far, the country I know best, the US, has been competent enough to avoid massive corporate bailouts except the aforementioned banks in 2008 and GM. The bailout of GM was not motivated by a desire to avoid a recession when a bubble pops.
If the AI labs become very influential and powerful, Washington might nationalize them, but that would be very different from bailing them out because they have become unprofitable and cannot attract additional investment from the private sector.
You forgot about the $9b bailout to Intel in August of 2025.
With the recent OpenAi deal with the government I am certain they would throw tons of money at OpenAi if it got real bad. But with upcoming IPO where they are expected to be valued at $840b, we would be a LONG way from them needing a bailout. Well past this current admin.
Despite politics, TARP was arguably an economic success story for the US treasury despite public sentiment. Whether it created moral hazard or not I suppoae is up for debate.
GM on the other hand should have been left to die.
However, I was obliquely referring to the open transactionality and patronage encouraged by the current administration, and how the AI / big tech players have, with few exceptions, gleefully joined in.
Unless they run out of money for bribes, I think it's inevitable that current government will bend over backwards to prop them up.
The U.S. has an admin right now that has made it clear the only important metric for country health is the stock market, which is single-handedly propped up by AI right now.
That's why huge concessions nobody asked for were made to the AI industry in the Big Beautiful Bill.
"but why would a government feel the need to bail out AI labs"
Oh easy, with all the drones and sensors, AI means military power. Those who dare opposing the bailout of the local AI gigants want the other side to win.
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