Boycott the Jim Pattison Group I guess?

Ask Claude for the studies.

I mean really, for fuck’s sake, am I your unpaid intern research assistant or something? I’d say “Google it” only the clanks you so much enjoy fucking have utterly fucked up web searches now, haven’t they?

I’ll give you a freebie. The most recent one I know about is METR’s survey. Now toddle off, child, and learn to do the research on your own two feet. You can do it! Your Mommy and Daddy have faith in you and are oh so proud of you!

The Bored of Peace, I think you mean.

Huh. That’s new. When I first tried DeepL it was not LLM. That’s an intriguing development.

I will update my mental database accordingly.

DeepL isn’t what is being touted as “AI” this week, though. DeepL is based on older translation technology (by which I mean “far more reliable”).

This is a shell game. Every time there’s a wave of “AI” it’s some new tech that shills sell as the answer to “real” computer intelligence. (It can never possibly be this, of course, because we can’t even define intelligence properly, not to mention making an artificial version of it.) There’s certain levels of hype. There’s a bubble (usually far smaller than this one, of course). Then the bubble pops and we enter the next AI Winter.

The small use cases for which the new technology is actually useful, however, loses the AI monicker and is just called “software”. Like what used to be AI for doing dynamic adjustment on pictures for night shots, HDR, etc. is no longer shilled as AI. It’s just … software that my phone has built in.

So currently “AI” means “LLM” outside of some very specific academic environments. DeepL is just software that (mostly kinda/sorta) works.

And nothing of value was lost.

No. Dwyer tried to laze his way into being an artist.

Grainger turned it into art.

I just get popcorn from the street vendors. It’s a tenth the price, comes in a bewildering varieties of flavours, is always fresher than in the theatre, and the theatres aren’t allowed to ban it.

Actual formal studies of the products of AI in code disagree with basically everything you say here. I’ll take actual scientists and data analysts over J. Random Techie seven out of seven days of the week.

I don’t care, personally, if they eat at Mozilla’s (minuscule) share. I use software for my purposes. If it doesn’t suit my purposes I switch to software that does.

Mozilla lost my trust with the Pocket fiasco. They’ve repeatedly since shown that they either do not care about or do not understand what I use a browser for. (Hint: it’s in the name “web browser”.) When I came across an alternative that worked, and that just as Mozilla started pushing AI crud into their product, I made the switch.

I owe nothing to Mozilla. They owe nothing to me. But I get to decide which browser I run, and if they want it to be theirs they have to make it something I want to run.

Ah. I can’t keep up with their little title shenanigans. My bad.

In my case Zen, but there are a lot of forks of Firefox with different focuses.

But why give him an easy way out. Make him live through the whole experience until he dies painfully.

Isn’t Palantir Thiel’s baby?

I use a spin-off. Zen. There are several others with different focuses. Still the Firefox ecosystem, but Firefox with the stupid stuff gone.

I remain unconvinced that LLMs have any practical application given their massive costs.

Pocket was used and loved by a lot of people, sure, but it was forced upon everybody, even those who did not love it and did not want to use it, and, get this, couldn’t be rid of it until the noise got loud enough Mozilla finally added the ability to remove it. THIS is why I no longer trust Mozilla people. They’ve very clearly veered away from their original user-focused world.

So, Pocket alone made me mistrust Mozilla. Now let’s talk Looking Glass. Let’s talk all the AI crap they’re now shoving in without an opt-in and without an easy way to opt-out. Mozilla is no different, ethically, than any other Silly Con Valley company. Just without the profits.

What is wrong in the techbrodude head that makes them only think of ruining things? Like it seems to me that they literally spend their days looking at things that are good and saying “what can I do to fuck this up for a profit?”

Should being a techie go into the DSM-V as a subheading under narcissistic personality disorder?

The translate feature in Firefox cannot possibly be an LLM. It is instead some kind of “NMT” (Neural Machine Translation) thing called “Marian”. That’s the problem with using imprecise terms like “AI” since, with enough squinting an adding machine from the 18th century is “AI”.

Nobody’s browser should have a link to an LLM in their browser without full informed consent, period. And given Mozilla’s track record in injecting unwanted technologies (remember Pocket?) into their browser, I no longer have any confidence that they won’t inject LLM slop into their flagship.

Except that is very much the thin end of the wedge.

It starts “optional and opt-in”.

Then there’s an update and it has activated some AI feature “for you”. But you can opt out easily. They’ll even make it easy.

Then there’s another update and they’ve activated another AI feature “for you” … but this time it’s a pain to disable.

Then they sneak it in. Probably something that spies on you to feed some model or another. And this one might require deep technical skills to disable. This will be hidden behind another public AI release that they trumpet as the second coming of web browsing.

All the while their share declines because nobody wants this shit!

No AI.

That’s it.

No. AI.

It’s why I stopped using Firefox.