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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

#291

Post by Izkata »

_heimdall wrote: post #134
jacquesm wrote: post #132

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.

There is no such thing as not signaling. By not using the turn signal, you are lying to anyone around that you might not see, signaling that you are going straight forward when you aren't.

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

#292

Post by immibis »

hannasanarion wrote: post #116
move-on-by wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the complaint isn’t the AI itself, but the updated privacy policy that was rolled out prior to the AI features. Regardless of me using the AI features or not, I must agree to their updated privacy policy. According to the privacy policy changes, they are selling data (per the legal definition of selling data) to data partners. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-...

This is an absurd take. The meaning of "selling" is extremely broad, courts have found such language to apply to transactions as simple as providing an http request in exchange for an http response. Their lawyers must have been begging them to remove that language for the liability it represents. For all purposes actually relevant to privacy, the updated language is more specific and just as strong.

> courts have found [that "selling" means] providing an http request in exchange for an http response

No they fucking haven't. Provide evidence for this.

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

#293

Post by yunohn »

nazgul17 wrote: post #232
yunohn wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you are conflating multiple concepts to prove a flaky point. Again, unless your agent has access to a function that exfiltrates data, it is impossible for it to do so. Literally! You do not need to provide any tools to an LLM that summarizes or translates websites, manages your open tabs, etc. This can be done fully locally in a sandbox. Linking to simonw does not make your argument valid. He makes some gre…

Thinking aloud, but couldn't someone create a website with some malicious text that, when quoted in a prompt, convinces the LLM to expose certain private data to the web page, and couldn't the webpage send that data to a third party, without the need for the LLM to do so? This is probably possible to mitigate, but I fear what people more creative, motivated and technically adept could come up with.

Why does the LLM get to send data to the website?? That’s my whole point, if you don’t expose a way for it to send data anywhere, it can’t.

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

#294

Post by charcircuit »

XorNot wrote: post #229
charcircuit wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a different edge case. It's easier to round trip successfully if your translation uses loan words. It can guarantee that it translates back to the same word. This metric would prefer using loan words even if they are not common in practice and would be awkward to use.

The point of translation is to translate. If both parties wind up comprehending what was said then you've succeeded.

A translation can succeed without being the ideal one.

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

#295

Post by Izkata »

XorNot wrote: post #148
charcircuit wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not an ideal translation as it prioritizes round tripability over natural word choice or ordering.

Getting byte exact text isn't the point though: even if it's different, I as the original writer can still look at roundtripped text and evaluate that it has the same meaning. It's not a lossy process, and N round-trips should not lose any net meaning either. This isn't a possible test with many other applications.

English to Japanese loses plurals, Japanese to English loses most honoriffics and might need to invent a subject (adding information that shouldn't be there and might be wrong). Different languages also just plain have more words than others with their own nuances, and a round trip translation wouldn't be able to tell which word to choose for the original without a additional context.

Translation is lossy. Good translation minimizes it without sounding awkward, but that doesn't mean some detail wasn't lost.

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

#296

Post by warkdarrior »

zavec wrote: post #261
beepbooptheory wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days its pretty much the "sweet" lesson for everyone but Sutton and his peers it seems.

It's bitter for me because I like looking at how things work under the hood and that's much less satisfying when it's "a bunch of stats and linear algebra that just happens to work"

So you prefer "a bunch of electrons, field effects, and clocks than just happen to work"?

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

#297

Post by Etherlord87 »

rythie wrote: 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.

If most people move from Firefox to Waterfox, then Waterfox can acquire Firefox devs, no? Obviously it comes to money, but the first step to gain funding is to gain popularity...

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

#298

Post by skylurk »

immibis wrote: post #288
skylurk wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, some domains have no hard rules at all. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

It's completely possible to write a parser that outputs every possible parse of "time flies like an arrow", and then try interpreting each one and discard ones that don't make sense according to some downstream rules (unknown noun phrase: "time fly"). I did this for a text adventure parser, but it didn't work well because there are exponentially ways to group the words in a sentence like "put the ball on the bucket o…

I would argue that particular sentence only exists to convey the bamboozled feeling you get when you reach the end of it, so only sentient parsers can parse it properly.

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

#299

Post by schoen »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #245
schoen wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an older tradition of rule-based machine translation. In these methods, someone really does understand exactly what the program does, in a detailed way; it's designed like other programs, according to someone's explicit understanding. There's still active research in this field; I have a friend who's very deep into it. The trouble is that statistical MT (the things that became neural net MT) started achieving…

> There's an older tradition of rule-based machine translation. In these methods, someone really does understand exactly what the program does, in a detailed way I would softly disagree with this. Technically, we also understand exactly what a LLM does, we can analyze every instruction that is executed. Nothing is hidden from us. We don't always know what the outcome will be; but, we also don't always know what the o…

The grammars in rule-based MT are normally fully conceptually understood by the people who wrote them. That's a good start for human understanding.

You could say they don't understand why a human language evolved some feature but they fully understand the details of that feature in human conceptual terms.

I agree in principle the statistical parts of statistical MT are not secret and that computer code in high-level languages isn't guaranteed to be comprehensible to a human reader. Or in general, binary code isn't guaranteed to be incomprehensible and source code isn't guaranteed to be comprehensible.

But for MT, the hand-written grammars and rules are at least comprehended by their authors at the time they're initially constructed.

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

#300

Post by schoen »

warkdarrior wrote: post #296
zavec wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bitter for me because I like looking at how things work under the hood and that's much less satisfying when it's "a bunch of stats and linear algebra that just happens to work"

So you prefer "a bunch of electrons, field effects, and clocks than just happen to work"?

If you're building on a computer language, you can say you understand the computer's abstract machine, even though you don't know how we ever managed to make a physical device to instantiate it!
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