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No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

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Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all fine and good until you accidentally kill someone with your blinkers off and then you have to wonder 'what if' the rest of your life. Seriously: signal your turns and stop defending the indefensible, this is just silly.

You're making a huge leap here. I'm raising only had signaling intentionally rather than automatically has made me pay more attention to others on the road. You're claiming that that action which has proven to make me pay closer attention will kill someone.

By not signaling you are robbing others on the road the opportunity to avoid a potential accident should you not have seen them. It's maximum selfish fuck everyone else asshole behavior.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessarily close minded to choose to abstain from interacting with generative text, and choose not to use software that integrates it. I could say it's equally close minded not to sympathize with this position, or various reasoning behind it. For me, I feel that my spoken language is effected by those I interact with, and the more exposed someone is to a bot, the more they will speak like that bot, and I do…

I’m not too worried about starting to write like a bot. But, I do notice that I’m sometimes blunt and demanding when I talk to a bot, and I’m worried that could leak through to my normal talking. I try to be polite just to not gain bad habits. But, for example, chatGPT is extremely confident, often wrong, and very weasely about it, so it can be hard to be “nice” to it (especially knowing that under the hood it has no…

I think it makes much more sense to treat the bot like a bot and avoid humanizing it. I try to abstain from any kind of linguistic embellishments when prompting AI chat bots. So, instead of "what is the area of the circle" or "can you please tell me the area of the circle", I typically prefer "area of the circle" as the prompt. Granted, this is suboptimal given the irresponsible way it has been trained to pretend it's doing human-like communication, but I still try this style first and only go to more conversational language if required.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#163
post #5

This whole backlash to firefox wanting to introduce AI feels a little knee-jerky. We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into.. and if so, if would cut down on the majority of the knee jerk complaints. I think people want AI in the browser, they just don't want it to be the big-corp hosted AI... [Update]: as I posted below, sample use cases would include…

> I think people want AI in the browser

Sorry but no. I dont want another humans work summarized by some tool that's incapable of reasoning. It could get the whole meaning of the text wrong. Same with real time translation. Languages are things even humans get wrong regularly and I dont want some biased tool to do it for me.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#164
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside: Does anyone actually use summarization features? I've never once been tempted to "summarize" because when I read something I either want to read the entire thing, or look for something specific. Things I want summarized, like academic papers, already have an abstract or a synopsis.

Yes. I use it sometimes in Firefox with my local LLM server. Sometimes i come across an article I'm curious about but don't have the time or energy to read. Then I get a TL;DR from it. I know it's not perfect but the alternative is not reading it at all. If it does interest me then I can explore it. I guess I do this once a week or so, not a lot.

I highly doubt that no information would be worse than wrong information. Both wars in Ukraine and Gaza show this very clearly.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#166

if kagi can make a search engine that charges users, why dont we have a 1$/month open source browser whose code can be verified but people pay to use monthly?

I guess that wouldn't really "open source" in the traditional sense, but that's clearly a tangent.

Personally, I'd love a paid for high quality browser that serves me rather than sneakily trying to get me to look at ads.

I think the challenge is that a browser is an incredibly difficult and large thing to build and maintain. So there aren't many wholly new browsers in existence, and therefore not very many business models being tried out.

Full agreement that I'd pay for such a thing- I have a browser and a terminal open non-stop during my workday. It's an important tool and I'd easily pay for a better offering if that was an option.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#167
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when there are other cars around that would need the indication This has a failure state of "when there's a nearby car [or, more realistically, cyclist / pedestrian] of which I am not aware". Knowing myself to be fallible, I always use my turn signals. I do take your point about turn signals being a reminder to be aware. That's good, but could also work while, you know, still using them, just in case.

You're not the only one raising that concern here - I get it and am not recommending what anyone else should do. I've been driving for decades now and have plenty of examples of when I was and wasn't paying close enough attention behind the wheel. I was raising this only as an interesting different take or lesson in my own experience, not to look for approval or disagreement.

You said something fairly egregious on a public forum and are getting pretty polite responses. You definitely do not get it because you’re still trying to justify the behavior.

Just consider that you will make mistakes. If you make a mistake and signal people will have significantly more time to react to it.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#168

I still can’t give them money, so what’s the point? Just like with Mozilla, they rely on sponsors and you are the product.

You can give Waterfox your money. Just not for the browser itself. They sell ad free search[0].

[0] https://search.waterfox.net/

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#169
post #165

Waterfox is dependant on Firefox still being developed. Mozilla are adding these features to try to stay relevant and keep or gain market share. If this fails, and Firefox goes away, Waterfox is unlikely to survive.

That's true, but as a Waterfox user, I'm not worried!

If firefox really completely fails, and nobody is able to continue the open source project, I'll just find a new browser. That's not a huge hassle- Waterfox does what I need in the here and now, that's my only criterion.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#170
post #95

> Large language models are something else entirely*. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn't sit well. Am I being overly critical here or is this kind of a silly position to have right after talking about how neural machine translation is okay? Ma…

Aside: Does anyone actually use summarization features? I've never once been tempted to "summarize" because when I read something I either want to read the entire thing, or look for something specific. Things I want summarized, like academic papers, already have an abstract or a synopsis.

Nah, because anything not worth reading is also not worth summarizing.
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