The odd thing is that this disguises as some bare metal, hackable device.
Their TUI[1] is planned to use react(!), to share logic with their BrowserUI[2]. In the repos you can see how they struggle to get anything gpu backed done (which is required by the browser). Then falling back to wayland to do it for them. (This all seems a mess that LLMs can't figure out.)
Anyway, it does seem to end up in a custom linux desktop environment, with lots of sharp edges that makes it less hackable.
> The 256×144 px screen requires pixel-level rendering, which standard TUI libraries (ncurses, etc.) cannot provide. The proposed solution is an HTML/CSS rendering engine running as a background daemon — a lightweight browser-based renderer that draws menus, popups, and UI components.
But the text says "or," not "and." So by my interpretation if you process user data but are available via "free, public" repo, you're not covered. I presume "free" is defined elsewhere in the text, and that it approximates "open-source."
(e) AN OPERATING SYSTEM PROVIDER OR DEVELOPER THAT DISTRIBUTES AN OPERATING SYSTEM OR APPLICATION UNDER LICENSE TERMS THAT PERMIT A RECIPIENT TO COPY, REDISTRIBUTE, AND MODIFY THE SOFTWARE WITHOUT ANY PLATFORM-IMPOSED TECHNICAL OR CONTRACTUAL RESTRICTIONS IMPOSED BY THE PROVIDER OR DEVELOPER ON INSTALLING ALL MODIFIED VERSIONS.
Aha, thanks! So I think that raises the question of whether e.g. RHEL is affected. Technically it could be argued that they don't add any additional restrictions, but I wonder if Colorado will see it that way.
Well my concern instantly spiked. Recently Gemini started to show a search spinner for every turn. So every response paired with a search could be subject to prompt injection. Probably every response.
This will also become viral like link spam. Every user content site will become a prompt injection host. The problem is that these are way harder to detect then a link.
Even before the AI era I slowly became less and less successful with google searches. Everything - non trivial / specific - that I looked for turned into a chore and I quickly gave up.
LLMs, that can supply valid links, give me a completely different variety of results. Either I am too dumb to search manually, too impatient or google search is just broken, but Gemini usually gives me something I can work with. I just wished I could blacklist some sources like medium.
Checkout Kagi. You can blacklist sites. You can also weight certain sites higher than others. I've been using it for almost a year at this point. When I'm forced to use Google at work, I am legitimately less effective at finding the information I need.
I've been paying for Kagi for like four years. I like it but also resent that it's something I pay for now when I remember how good Google was 20 years ago.
So you can code in search now and create apps. No clue how that in depth works out. For them, the dream could be that everybody has their custom apps hosted by google.
It doesn't seem to be secure. If every google link is one step away from a prompt injection and leaking all your data, then they are worse then npm.
I wonder how many days it takes until they roll it back or put that stuff behind some extra clicks.
There are prompt guard classifiers that can detect prompt injections, but they are not perfect (false positives, obfuscation) and should be only a part of the defense.
The concern is real and unsolved. I think security researchers have an advantage here because they still can fall back to manual audits if their automated analysis (or scores thereof) is off.
I am currently experimenting with linux based GUIs. It was always something that felt clunky to me, but now with more insights, it's clunky for a reason. If you need more then a framebuffer, then rendering something sophisticated to the screen is insanely complex. Somehow it's easy to expect that rendering text on a screen should be easy, but when you go down the layers you find yourself with a club and a flint stone trying to build a castle with it.
Wayland is another product of this hardships, going wayland native seems only feasible when all stars align around it. But then you are stuck in that place.
That being said, without deeper knowledge about SwiftUI, I find it a bit odd to expect so much from a novel concept. Native desktop dev is already kind of niche, considering the dominance of web dev. Chrome (and it's artifacts) is probably the best funded software in the world and google's incentive to improve it is above all. It's not a miracle that it just works. It's effort and tons of cash.
> Somehow it's easy to expect that rendering text on a screen should be easy
This is a common misconception among programmers, and is actually the opposite of the truth. Drawing arbitrary geometric shapes is easy, rendering text correctly is insanely difficult because ... humans.
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