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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
no surprises here, Mozillaās 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:
Iām 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 Iād 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 wouldnāt render right were either ad-laden horseshit I didnāt need, or were intentionally broken on non-IE and usually fixable with a plugin. now doesnāt that sound familiar?
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 whatās best for the user instead of the user knowing that themself-- thereās 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 āto summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledgeā is so fucking galling.
Itās also insane to believe it should be a first class feature, when those who god forbid want to āopt-inā could simply install a plugin.
according to Mozillaās track record, theyāre making it a core feature so itās impossible to remove without a custom fork, and theyāll 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
weāve also only got mozillaās word that this shit can be disabled once itās in production Firefox at all, and weāve seen, repeatedly, how Mozillaās AI team does with consent ā they use LLMs and marketing tactics to fabricate it
It feels like the AI contingent lost the attention span to actually read stuff somewhere along the line. This isnāt the first time Iāve seen this garbage approach.
Of course here at awful.systems weāve been innoculated against declining attention spans due to regularly having to read lesswrong dissertations.ā¦ the Hell?
Yeah itās wild. Even most AI grifters donāt outright try to claim that LLMs reduce bias (they know weād 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, ā¦
Well, looks like my custom pocket settings are preserved, if theyāre 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
insert appropriate reaction GIF here
Pour one out for opera presto, which I will always mourn.
Mozilla: Hey, weāre going to take you out to a restaurant and get you a burger, as a treat!
The restaurant:
@self @froztbyte āWe think you should have the freedom toā¦ā š¤®