Stephen King and HP Lovecraft both have this amazing ability to absorb you into a story and then abruptly remind you they’re the one writing it and they have opinions that suck.
Me: Man, this is so good.
HP Lovecraft: Glad you’re enjoying it. Just wanted to remind you that I am massively racist and antisemitic.
Me: Man, this is so good.
Stephen King: Glad you’re enjoying it. Just wanted to remind you I am really weird and freaky about women and sex in general. I am also racist.
Hi, a lot of people I know are uninstalling Firefox because of the new AI inclusions. Im not the most tech savvy person alive, but Im virulently anti-Google and have similar feelings to you about the browser wars. Do you have any tips on how to talk to folks about their concerns and decisions? I honestly dont know much about AI, it's a blind spot for me, so I dont know how bad the new changes are and what factors would go into alternative options to talk to folks about. But I also am frustrated and concerned with a glut of people I know personally and their extended circles all switching to Chromium based browsers of all sorts. I worked hard to sow the seeds of degoogling where I can, dammit.
Lol, chrome itself has way more AI stuff built in and it’s harder to turn off. That’s the argument that I would (and do) use. Firefox has always introduced new features with various updates, new features have always upset some segment of the userbase, and in almost all cases Firefox has made it possible for interested users to disable the unwanted features. (They do also tell people what they’re adding, but most people don’t actually read release notes so it comes as a surprise to most users)
Firefox isn’t good because Mozilla always does what the most vocal part of its userbase wants, Firefox is good because it allows you to configure the browsing experience that you want. They’re always going to cater to the largest segment of users (and in spite of what terminally online tumblr users and comments in mozilla support threads say, most people don’t care about ML/AI stuff enough to get mad about it) but they also give you the control to say “no thanks” by editing your configuration.
Chrome, on the other hand, does not care and exists only to sell ads and collect data.
Moving from Firefox to Chrome because Firefox started including AI features is like saying “the library started providing a biometric option for checking out books so I’m going to the police station to look up information instead”.
A) You don’t have to use the AI and
B) Chrome is actively spying on you, and you DO have to tolerate the AI built into Chrome because you can’t turn it off.
This Reddit thread includes an answer from 001Guy001 that lists what settings to change to disable the AI tools:
Also, Brave, Opera, etc. Include the same AI features, brave just does it while also mining crypto and opera does it while making it difficult to disable. Where chrome goes, so goes chromium.
Oh good I’m not the only one who noticed I thought I was going insane. 90% of the stuff that people seem to want to automate with LLMs to ‘revolutionise [X] industry’ was already being automated much better with bots, which is depressing because before this wave of LLMs we were all complaining about how shitty all the bots make everything when they’re used to do things that shouldn’t be automated, but now even a misimplemented non-AI bot is a comparative relief.
Personal property is stuff like knickknacks or family photos.
Private property is stuff like factories and machinery. The means of production.
Nobody is gonna try to take your stuff in the revolution. They’re just gonna- Wait. Hold on a second. I just found this post of yours that says “my body is a machine that turns dicks into sucked dicks.” That’s interesting. That’s really interesting…
