Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
thinking about how I was inoculated against part of ai hype bc a big part of my social circle in undergrad consisted of natural language processing people. they wanted to work at places with names like “OpenAI” and “google deepmind,” their program was more or less a cognitive science program, but I never once heard any of them express even the slightest suspicion that LLMs of all things were progressing toward intelligence. it would have been a nonsequiter.
also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was “the meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs.”
finding out that some prestigious ai researchers are all about being pilled on immanetizating agi was such a swerve for me. it’s like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics
it’s like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics
hell of a stinger
Microsoft’s AI leader claimed that copyright on the internet can be ignored: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ever-put-content-on-the-web-microsoft-says-that-its-okay-for-them-to-steal-it-because-its-freeware
With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That’s been the understanding, there’s a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, ‘do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.’ That’s a gray area and I think that’s going to work its way through the courts.
Watch the entire interview if you’re bored because he is in deep. Microsoft probably just hired the most AI-enthused person they could find.
I think even wilder is that he thinks content which has explicitly been labeled “do not scrape except for search engine indexing” is a “gray area” with regards to scraping for AI. Like, that’s exactly what it says not to do!
Never thought I’d see Microsoft suggest downloading a car, but I should have seen it coming.
He isn’t totally wrong re the unspoken rule, but he forgets the second unspoken rule, that the first rule only applies to human being doing entertainment not corporations trying to make money.
Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it
Ew… stay away from my content, you creep!
see it was wrong when those dirty pirate hippies tried to do it but it’s totally fine when microsoft does it because microsoft can’t be wrong, see? easy
Here’s the whole thing from that great quote. Sorkin is not a hard-hitting interviewer, but he just asks the incredibly obvious questions and Suleyman swerves and dodges like a MF while pronouncing at him in an English listen-to-me-you-pleb voice.
No, all you lawyers explaining to me how the practice of law works in the U.S., you would totally benefit from GPT. Complete with bonus:
- Everyone explaining to me that lawyers actually read all the documents in discovery is really trying to explain to me, a computer scientist with 20 years of experience[1], how GPT works!
- [1] Does OP have actual tech expertise? The answer may (not) surprise you!
- You lawyers admit that sometimes you use google translate and database search engines, and those use machine learning components, and all ML is basically LLMs, so I’m right, Q.E.D.!
- Lawyers couldn’t possibly read everything in discovery, right?
- Lawyers couldn’t possibly pay for professional translation for everything, right?
- Even when it’s mandated by the court?
- Really?
- and many, many more
This is also a very qucik hypthetical that I wrote up just to show a point not to argue a fucking legal case.
“Guys I totally didn’t expect the lawyers to respond like lawyers when reading my Chat-GPT generated garbage”
Except… I admitted I was not a lawyer and not an expert, and rather than working to communicate they kept latching onto errors related to law, while they confidently made statements about the nature and functionality of ML technologies like LLMs and NMTs.
“Why are all the lawyers being so mean to me?? I’m just saying they could all be replaced by chatbots”
I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. You’re also mansplaining to an expert. While I admit that I am not an expert on law and am listening when corrections related to LAW and the practice of LAW are concerned, you do not want to admit your lack of understanding of this technology.
My god DANIEL, no, people are not mansplaining to you, unless that’s a mask for a Danielle.
EDIT: Down the thread he responds to Kathryn Tewson, an actual expert, with
Yeah I’m not obligated to answer every question by a horde of people. You should change your name to Karen, because you sure act like a fucking entitled white bitch.
This guy has such a punchable face, even though I’ve never seen him. I can just tell.
Kathryn Tewson
Iirc, She is not just an expert, but she is so good at law that while she didn’t practice law, but just commented about her interpretations of the law (as ANAL) people hired her and paid for her law degree. She has both talent and expertise.
Daniel’s a very nice and likable guy, but he’s also a bitcoiner
Ah shit, ML spelled backwards and wrong is LLM, they got me good.
I just want to latch onto one more thing there:
GPTs are great at transforming information. Transformations include compression, decompression, and inter-language translation, among others.
Okay mister computer scientist, sure, what is “transforming information”? From what you’re saying it appears like you’re describing basically any map from information to other information. But AMONG OTHERS that includes a map going from NO INFO to CONFIDENT BULLSHIT. And I do agree LLMs are amazing at it.
Here, I’ll sketch it out for you in fucking LaTeX:
$\emptyset \mapsto \mathit{Nonsense}$
This thread is an unending source of amusement.
Someone there found his ORCID and… It’s not great: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2835-3521
He has basically nothing published, but has like 40 different “preprints”, read PDFs he uploaded to arxiv with no peer review.
I use these tools daily. I have also built software which utilizes genAI. I have also worked on fine-tuning GPTs. I have written extensive [sic!] on the topic. I also have formal training in mathematics, computer science, engineering, and anthropology1. [emph. mine]
🤡
1 No he doesn’t? His Education lists A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science, and B.S. in Mathematics, that anthropology claim seems completely made up.
Those “papers” are gold, they’re mostly a few pages long, and they span such a wild range of topics as:
- How to calculate a mean of numbers?
- What is a number?
- Atheism is actually a religion.
- Ethereum is a store of energy.
I’ve never seen someone in such a dire need of a wedgie, come on man, you spend the hours of your life writing your farts into LaTeX and generating DOIs for them, this isn’t healthy.
Ethereum is a store of energy.
fucking WHAT
I am unfairly misrepresenting that for sneer purposes but if you want to see what happens when someone with typical cryptobro brainworms gets access to a paper-looking PDF template:
jaysus, mary, joseph and the wee donkey. (ESPECIALLY the wee donkey.)
he also has a personal site, it’s linked on researchgate. i took psychic damage reading this, somebody force him to touch grass
oh goddess, he’s already a bleeding muppet, and going to be a major crank. from the researchgate profile:
I am an aspiring polymath and a rōnin scholar. I also tend to look at questions, rather than fields of study, as a research question often does incorporate many disparate topics. Research interests include the psychological and anthropological nature of religion, vaccine efficacy and impact on asymptomatic carriage, and the application of paraconsistent logic to scientific research.
rōnin! fucking! scholar!
eh i’ve seen that before at least once and i’m inclined to believe there’s much more of it that nobody cares to notice. on r/chemistry and r/organicchemistry there was a dude, 19, dramatic bitch, who read surface level philosophy and tried getting into ochem for some obscure reason. turns out he wanted to make some anticancer drugs and needs guidance. cool fine maybe get degree in ochem first so you don’t do any stupid avoidable mistakes. he won’t listen
he tried to get into uni but if i have to guess he got rejected? in any case he didn’t learn anything but over time got into contact with some research group, at least that’s what he claimed and started homelab. (you’d guess that some medchem research group at uni would have a wet lab, but it must be in other country and you’ve never seen them).
so anyway our misunderstood hero starts cooking “anticancer” “meds” in his living room. how does he know it works, did he made this, sent samples to biologists who would test it for him, or maybe compchem group would simulate it out? nope, he’d just got an idea that it will work and that’s just as good, you know, his supreme rationality unrecognized by academic cabal guided him there. so he starts cooking, but does not know how. this included shit like distilling some flammable solvent on wicker table without clamps or anything that would actually make glassware stable. so every other step he asks for advice on really basic shit like he’d learn in second year university course (BSc), or in first year of work in organic chemistry lab, his synthesis is avoidably dirty, his purifications are trash, three steps in he has painted himself into corner, yields drop to zero and he has no idea why or what now. this usually means that entire synthesis was shite from the beginning and it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
(did i mention that he was a dramatic bitch? so he picked it up because he wanted to do something Good for Humanity, and if he fails then well he could just as well commit sewer slide. his first idea involved radioisotopes btw, all in his living room mind you. then objective shifted to “anti-rabies antiviral” where he missed the point of about everything he wanted to do. then went back to “anticancer”)
anyway this was his breaking point, after something like three or four people tried to explain politely that he really should get a degree first and set some objective that is not obviously pulled from his supremely rational ass, he started insulting everyone and what eventually earned him sitewide ban was a tirade about how he’d genocide everyone who doesn’t recognize his genius, given opportunity (he compared himself to milosevic (he was serb))
anyway he also had medium blog and posted dick picks with face included from the same account. he made another one, but it’s since abandoned. allegedly he also had 2 or 3 accounts before that
if his claim of “20 years studying math” is anywhere close to accurate he’s already off the deep end, unless he’s counting in everything from kindergarten up. considering he’s a cryptobro it already happened pre-pandemic
Hey, he didn’t update the website to include his research interest in AI, huh, wonder how long he’s been a samurai of that
nothing wrong with papers a few pages long, as long as they are concisely written and have supplementary information 10x that size. my last paper is 5 pages long, of which the last one are references only, and has 60+ pages of SI
Dunno, the funniest thing about them to me is that they’re still divided into 7-8 sections, each one-paragraph long. Just a guy who was never told he was wrong in his life and his idea of what research looks like.
They’re all blog posts that refer to no actual work, my favorite is the one where he advocates for his blog posts to be accepted to journals: Call to Research: A need for a new paper format
This is mostly whining about how he’s totally an academic and people should take him seriously.
Jesus cinnamon crunch Christ. At least the blog posts are mercifully short. He somehow manages to have antivaxx nonsense there as well??
This is doubly funny because that already exists, at least in Computer Science, and is called a vision paper. You still need to put in a lot of work, perhaps more, into the bibliography and, you know, actually having compelling stuff to say.
he’s the very model of a modern crypto-douchebag.
A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science
wait, wait. that’s basically the bootcamp level of education, no?
(nothing wrong with that per se, i don’t have any c. s. degree anyways and yet i work in the field for years. but the gall of a dude who has finished a few two-year courses to tell fucking law professionals that they don’t know enough… this is indeed the threadnought-level of recklessness.)
the sheer hubris of that individual putting out preprints, as if making this available before peer review would hasten chatgpt rapture (none of that shite will be ever published)
I know essentally nothing about the US education system but…
If you’re gonna pull credentalist bullshit, maybe at least have the credentials? You took us there mate, I wouldn’t be pulling your degrees up if you didn’t first talk about how formally educated you are…
he does seem to have carefully cultivated case of engineer disease
also it’s not “almost all” preprints, it’s all preprints, just one repository calls these papers
he didn’t discover yet predatory journals, it all could have been published for a small fee like with this one (contains mind numbing level of conspiracy-theoretic rambling and related brainworms) hxxps://uraniumisagenocidegiant[.]com/ (you have been warned)
There’s one classified as “SSRN Electronic Journal 2023 | Journal article”, I thought this was something like a predatory journal, hence the “almost”, but now that I clicked on it I think this is just an arxiv-like website that calls itself an “electronic journal”? No fucking idea.
yeah that one is sneaky but it’s a repository, not a journal with peer review
Amazing.
I could “publish” my homeworks from the 5yrs of college onto arxiv and that’d be a more scientifically valuable endeavour. Better formatted, too.
that
\hbox overfullon the subsection title was painful, wasn’t it?
studied maths and CS for 20 years, all he has to show for it on his orcid is BSc and bunch of lousy preprints (with blockchain!). jfc. in that amount of time, people can finish entire PhD degrees, starting from high school, twice over
on top of that pile of shite sits a preprint titled “A Scholar’s Year in Review: Navigating the Convergence of AI, Economics, and Physics in 2023”. might be a bit grandiose and bordering on word salad. why the fuck does he think he needs to release preprints. if he had anything worthwhile to say, it would pass peer review
he also has researchgate
Looking to network with other researchers in a diverse array of fields for collaboration and discussion.
bet you would want to, you time-waster
aand his crowning achievement seems to be dead startup where he tries to put covid on blockchain, it has coin and everything. it’s even associated with worldcoin and so with sam altman. curious that
I wish I was surprised at what the main account was posting about when I looked into it 😵💫
Not a cult.
from r/EnoughMuskSpam
Amazing claim considering there are I think about 10k cybertrucks in the world right now, and all of them are broken. Ok I admit, that is due to the wiper recall, but even if you ignore the wiper recall the amount of broken cybertrucks is massive.
And ~0.5% of them have ‘Fuck Elon Musk’ written on them.
E: Amazing. (The Cybertruck was released on Nov. 30. Today, Tesla announced it was recalling the vehicle for the fourth time, an impressive rough average of one recall every seven weeks. )[https://bsky.app/profile/charlescmann.bsky.social/post/3kvr3ahwc452h]
Haha this reminds me of humanoid robots belong in the trash
heck yeah I love
Physics Jenny NicholsonAngela Collierindeed! I rarely get to watch them because of the length, but they’re always so good, thoughtful and thorough. one of best talking heads on yt I know of
format/delivery is technically more than just talking head, I guess, but ykwim
Thank you —she and this video are new to me - very good!
I like the wet your finger and stick it up in the air forecasting model. OK - there’s 1.5 billion pocket-sized iPhones - so let’s say 2 billion person-sized robots, you know,
I’m wondering about the supply chain issues just making the extra half billion robots, might be kind of a big deal. Are there enough rare minerals in the whole world to do this? Lithium batteries? Computer chips?
Also, yeah, valuation based on revenue and not EBITA / profit margins, but whatever.
Lol. What, are we going to be installing Candy Crush on our robots? Expecting to be able to project recurring revenue from a humanoid robot based on smartphone numbers is a new kind of ignorance.
I’m sure Candy Crush will come pre-installed.
“Hello helpdesk? My fleet of humanoid workers I paid 500k for apiece aren’t at their workstations churning out fabric piecework, they’re all playing Candy Crush on their iPhones…”
rabbit data breach: all r1 responses ever given can be downloaded
AI continues to be going great…
we have internal confirmation that the rabbit team is aware of this leaking of api keys and have chosen to ignore it
european regulatory clarity approaching at mach 5 (that is if they ever sold this thing in EU)
lol holy shit
thought it was bad enough when the hackers got into my rabbithole, now this
we have internal confirmation that the rabbit team is aware of this leaking of api keys and have chosen to ignore it. the api keys continue to be valid as of writing.
but of course. rabbit’s done pretending they give a fuck now that their shit flopped (not that they gave much of a fuck to begin with)
https://x.com/xyz3va/status/1805689140639408277
rabbit has revoked the keys!
breaking every R1 still in service
breaking every R1 still in service
Total losses estimated at $7.13
fucking amazing. like, I shouldn’t be surprised they deployed a bunch of embedded devices without a sensible way to rotate keys OTA, but it’s always fun to watch a circus act
and here I am building up a fucking pile of infra in advance of deployment of boards for exactly this reason
it’s almost like, irunno, maybe you could say I’ve thought this through! only maybe tho. I’m not backed by decamillions+ vc dollaridoos, so who can tell whether I know what I’m doing, amirite
remember that Rabbit pivoted to this from NFTs
that’s what makes it even better - from the “self-custody of keys!!! your own credentials! v v v v v importants!” world, these dipshits still had no clue
just truly awe-inspiringly terrible
https://religionandpolitics.org/2021/05/12/the-eugenics-roots-of-evangelical-family-values/
Ran across this a few weeks back and boy howdy it explained some things…
“look surely not everything in America is explained by racism” “… OH COME ON NOW”
some of the rest is explained by greed
I doubt you had to do square dancing lessons in school over there but apparently that was a RW thing too.
The Death of the Junior Developer
Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, there’s no need for any junior people anymore, all you need is a senior prompt engineer. No word on what happens when the seniors retire or die off, guess we’ll have AGI by then and it’ll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineer’s time is spend rewriting increasingly meaningless LLM responses as the training corpus inevitably degenerates from slurm contamination.
If I had a nickle for every time on June 27th 2024 I’ve read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete I’d have two nickles. Which isn’t a lot of money but it’s weird that it happened twice.
As a “senior” programmer; my coworkers, even the newer ones are people. They can think. They are professional. I can describe problems to them and eventually get solutions, or at least sensible follow-up questions. I don’t have to baby them or “prompt engineer” stuff I tell them. I can just sit back and drink my hot cocoa and occasionally try to sound distinguished while my juniors do all the hard work.
Chatbros have discovered that you can get a chatbot to string together tutorials from the net into simple programs that almost work with some finangling. Somehow they never realized that you could always do this by web searching for “socket example I hate unix please make it gentle”. Of course none of this generalizes to anything complex or not in the training set (read: anything that anyone will actually pay you to do), but the Chatbros don’t care because they were never doing real work in the first place.
this is such a sad slop. i wouldn’t guess it’s yegge, it’s so far from his style when he used to write himself.
Funny, as I also assume LLMs will cause the death of the Junior Developer, but not because the job dissapears, but because due to relying on LLMs devs never really build the skills to understand software and will suck so hard people will not hire them for the junion -> senior positions. And it gets even worse for the junior dev when the LLMs enshittify (either by the output degrading or the deal altering more and more pray they don’t alter the deal further).
Guess the difference of opinion here is calling people who use LLMs junior devs vs calling them senior devs.
I’m oddly reminded of the person who used copilot to write a script to do something (which they offered to others), and didn’t know what http errors meant. (they just asked the LLM how to fix it).
“DevOps” is a word meaning “sysadmin who can still use the command line”
@dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was “Sysadmins are useless shit now because they aren’t software engineers and hell, they don’t even call themselves engineers”.
a euphemism treadmill of “keeping shit working”
@dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor who’s worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with “Venereal Disease” and passing through “Special Clinic” on the way to “Sexual Health Clinic”. Same thankless job, just different labels.
Same basic lessons, too… “consider the risks of giving root privileges to people you just met”, etc.
I don’t feel like any great shakes as a sysadmin, then I encounter someone with the same job title who has clearly never used a command line before
Wait there are people who cannot use the command line. No wait again, don’t answer that please.
There are “sysadmins” who have to be dragged kicking and screaming to using the command line.
…what… What would they use instead?
having seen the horror from a distance: VNC, a fuckton of clicking, occasionally mouse and keyboard macros, possibly a networked KVM (itself not a bad idea at all for emergency access to hardware too commodity or misdesigned to have a sensible serial console, but we’re talking day to day here), and a massive chip on their shoulder about being forced off their beloved Windows Server 2003 and onto Linux
How do they sysadmin a server that doesn’t have any display devices aside from the terminal then? Which in my experience is almost all of them?
I have had the actually quite heartwarming experience of us hiring on a serious NT BOFH (someone who knows precisely how to wave a hammer at NT to intimidate it) and he sees how Linux does stuff and is trepidatious but eventually delighted
then there are others
i’m at like the pointy-clicky stage with NT admin and sometimes it’s just not enough, cos it’s Babby’s First OS but with several layers of tentacles underneath
Before: searching in Internet Explorer “how to install Chrome”
Now:
nsfw: nice to see thejuicemedia jumping in with a quality sneer
oh that’s very good
bring back rap news :<
lol, Bruce Sterling posted this to bsky: (image)
@dgerard @froztbyte given that anecdote from William Gibson about how realising that his first computer actually *used a spinning disk full of rust to store its data* crushed his romantic ideas about technology, this rings true
I don’t understand the hate for transition lenses. You don’t have to get them in frames last fashionable in 1982.
I guess the point is the dude won’t have lasik.
Lasik? Rip those eyes out and put cybereyes in! For one hole glorious year I could see in infrared. (Sadly the company went bankrupt and they repo’ed my eye, so that is why there is a hole now, at least I didn’t splurge for both eyes).
Lasik doesn’t work for every vision problem.
That’s because it doesn’t use AI…
transition lenses = photochromic lenses
(i thought for a moment it was another term for varifocals, but no, Transitions is a company that makes photochromic lenses)
Duh, my bad. I thought it was something like varifocals too.
Photochromic lenses were a nerd staple when I was a teenager. Dunno if/how popular they are now.
i am the guy of that age, and i would never get anything else, and yes fuck they are
Another one
https://mastodon.social/@bruces/112690475011154532
edit seems to be a whole bunch of similar ones.
yeah it’s a new meme format with an AI wojak generator
You know what would be awesome is if there was a way to easily see new posts to a thread, like if the “New” button actually put New posts on top. Maybe lemmy truly is too janky for that but it’s a shame because I just start to ignore threads after a while.
I recently learned there is a page showing just the comments of the communities you are subscribed to; that works for me because this space is so incredibly low-traffic, but I guess falls apart if you use that account to follow higher-traffic chatter.
I use it, but at least on my browser the
nextbutton is disabled so I can only see the most recent page of updates. I treat that as a the jank is a feature moment, though; if there’s more than one page of new comments, I’m forced to stop reading.
yeah, it’s a Lemmy breakage
I also use the new comments page, and when lemmy default frontend broke the next page, I looked around and found https://alexandrite.app, which fixes this page. EG https://alexandrite.app/awful.systems/c/techtakes?type=Comments&sort=New
The downside is that, in implementing an infinite scroll, it unloads comments that you’re not looking at, so ctrl-f will be unreliable.
I might have been wrong on the capabilities of ML, this is very impressive. (twitter link), was I wrong and Yud right?
Don’t worry a heavily edited 3 minute video filled with inconsistencies promised me that AI movies were right around the corner. No matter that the unearthly writhing of the backgrounds makes me simultaneously motion sick and stressed out, I’m sure they’ll work that out.
And be careful that you don’t lose yourself in the eyes of a pig.
okay at this point I should probably make a whole-ass perplexity post because this is the third time I’m featuring them in stubsack but 404media found yet more dirt
… which included creating a series of fake accounts and AI-generated research proposals to scrape Twitter, as CEO Aravind Srinivas recently explained on the Lex Fridman podcast
According to Srinivas, all he and his cofounders Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho wanted to do was build cool products with large language models, back when it was unclear how that technology would create value
tell me again how lies and misrepresentation aren’t foundational parts of the business model, I think I missed it
A couple of examples Srinivas gave on the podcast is “Who is Lex Fridman following that Elon Musk is also following,” or “what are the most recent tweets that were liked by both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.”
Questions asked by the terminally deranged.
Or somebody looking for ‘the worst posts online’ cringe compilation. Musks CEOs must be able to build their companies products not be able to read spreadsheets was a good example.
How can someone implement that and not just be constantly thinking “I really really really do not want to be prosecuted under the CFAA, I should not be doing this”.
Ethics clearly don’t really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.
Ethics clearly don’t really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.
I’ve thought about this a bunch in the past, and tbh the only answer I’ve come to over many forms of it is “fuck the fucking USA”
it’s a place that is structurally built to allow for that kind of evasion and abuse to happen
As long as line goes up nobody knows how rich the perps will be.
And if you don’t know how rich the perps will be, how will you know if and how hard they should be punished?
no surprises here, Mozilla’s earlier stated goal of focusing on local, accessibility-oriented AI was just entryism to try to mask their real, fucking obvious goal of shoving integrations with every AI vendor into Firefox:
Whether it’s a local or a cloud-based model, if you want to use AI, we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs. With that in mind, this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment offering access to preferred AI services in Nightly for improved productivity as you browse. Instead of juggling between tabs or apps for assistance, those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge, all without leaving their current web page.
Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral, but we will continue adding AI services that meet our standards for quality and user experience.
I’m now taking bets on which of these vendors will pay the most to be the default in the enabled-by-default production version of this feature
this is making me seriously consider donating to Servo, the last shred of the spirit and goals of a good, modernized Firefox-style browser remaining, which apparently operates on a tiny budget (and with a whole army of reply guys waiting to point out they might receive grants which, cool? they still need fucking donations to do this shit and I’d rather give it to them than Mozilla or any other assholes making things actively worse)
thinking back to when I first switched to Mozilla during the MSIE 7-8 days and actually started having a good time on the web, daily driving Servo might not be an awful move once Firefox gets to its next level of enshittification. back then, Firefox (once it changed its name) was incredibly stable and quick compared with everything else, and generally sites that wouldn’t render right were either ad-laden horseshit I didn’t need, or were intentionally broken on non-IE and usually fixable with a plugin. now doesn’t that sound familiar?
we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs
Thanks for giving me the freedom to not use the tools that best suit my needs, Mozilla!
But seriously I hate how at some point techies decided they know what’s best for the user instead of the user knowing that themself-- there’s been a long trend of technology getting less customizable and less user friendly over time; and Firefox is not at all innocent.
The smug presumption that any brand of spicy autocomplete is a viable tool “to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge” is so fucking galling.
It’s also insane to believe it should be a first class feature, when those who god forbid want to “opt-in” could simply install a plugin.
according to Mozilla’s track record, they’re making it a core feature so it’s impossible to remove without a custom fork, and they’ll relentlessly goad the user into enabling it via ads pushed with every update. implementing it as a core feature also means they can easily infect the search bar and other core functionality with this horseshit
we’ve also only got mozilla’s word that this shit can be disabled once it’s in production Firefox at all, and we’ve seen, repeatedly, how Mozilla’s AI team does with consent — they use LLMs and marketing tactics to fabricate it
In the end they had 18481 words of notes to go through. Which is not nothing but also not that much. […] Mozilla also seems to know. And they had an innovative solution: THEY HAD AN LLM SUMMARIZE THE NOTES TO REDUCE BIAS.
It feels like the AI contingent lost the attention span to actually read stuff somewhere along the line. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this garbage approach.
Of course here at awful.systems we’ve been innoculated against declining attention spans due to regularly having to read lesswrong dissertations.To avoid confirmation bias and subjective interpretation, we decided to leverage language models for a more objective analysis of the data. By providing the models with the complete set of notes, we aimed to uncover patterns and trends without our pre-existing notions and biases.
… the Hell?
Yeah it’s wild. Even most AI grifters don’t outright try to claim that LLMs reduce bias (they know we’d laugh at them even harder than usual) so mozilla.ai is in deep.
ah yes, flashbacks to when they bought pocket and instantly forced it on everyone
where you had to remove the ui icon, untick shit in settings, and then STILL go into
about:configto kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share, but then found that apparently at some point my old settings got nuked? or decommissioned or something? and others reinstated/introduced? because none of my changes for that are there anymoresigh
also, their push to telemetry, to labs, to getting people to cohort into running things, them pushing selective bans on plugins because of legal pressure in countries, their absolutely fucking awful track record in spending their cashflow on utter and complete bullshit instead of actually improving the browser, …
go into about:config to kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share
Well, looks like my custom pocket settings are preserved, if they’re useful to anyone:
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket false extensions.pocket.api 0.0.0.0 extensions.pocket.enabled false extensions.pocket.onSaveRecs false extensions.pocket.settings.test.panelSignUp v1 extensions.pocket.showHome false extensions.pocket.site 0.0.0.0 services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket falseah, handy
iirc I nuked a few more things, api keys and such
Pour one out for opera presto, which I will always mourn.
Mozilla: Hey, we’re going to take you out to a restaurant and get you a burger, as a treat!
The restaurant:
@self @froztbyte “We think you should have the freedom to…” 🤮
