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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024 (awful.systems)
submitted 4 months ago by froztbyte@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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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.

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[-] self@awful.systems 12 points 4 months ago

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?

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 4 months ago

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.

[-] zogwarg@awful.systems 12 points 4 months ago

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.

[-] self@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago

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

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 12 points 4 months ago

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.~~

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago

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?

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 4 months ago

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:config to 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 anymore

sigh

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, ...

[-] earthquake@lemm.ee 6 points 4 months ago

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	false
[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 4 months ago

ah, handy

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 4 months ago

iirc I nuked a few more things, api keys and such

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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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