AmbitiousProcess

Not a real quote, but funny nonetheless.

This article was posted January of this year.

In case anyone thinks this will bring any sort of immediate scrutiny, that should show you otherwise, given it's been nearly a year now with almost no coverage remaining in mainstream media or discourse.

They don't use local models yet, at least not for their existing AI chatbot sidebar feature. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot

When you use a chatbot, you are agreeing to that provider’s privacy policies and terms of use. Each chatbot provider has their own terms of use and privacy policies. View the privacy policies and terms for providers in Firefox.

Some chatbots are more privacy-respecting than others.

True. I've found DuckDuckGo to still be pretty good though, especially for forum searches, at least in my experience.

I use Kagi now, which is even better, for me at least, but that's paid and I know most people aren't gonna shell out money every month for a search engine.

In my experience at least, there has not once been an instance where an LLM was able to find answers on Reddit more reliably than I could, and I've been using LLMs since before ChatGPT was even a thing. (though granted, most web-search compatible LLMs came later on)

I think it will probably be better than the average user, since a lot of people simply aren't that great at using search engines very effectively in the first place, but I wouldn't call the answers "practically impossible to find."

The problem is, it's not unobtrusive.

When I right click and I instantly get an option silently added to the list that sends data to an AI model hosted somewhere, which I've accidentally clicked due to muscle memory, it's not good just because there's also the option there to disable it. When I start up my browser after an update and I am instantly given an open sidebar asking me to pick an AI model to use, that's obtrusive and annoying to have to close and disable.

Mozilla has indicated they do not want to make these features opt-in, but opt-out. The majority of Mozilla users do not want these features by default, so the logical option is to make them solely opt-in. But Mozilla isn't doing that. Mozilla is enabling features by default, without consent, then only taking them away when you tell them to stop.

The approach Mozilla is taking is like if you told a guy you weren't interested in dating him, but instead of taking that as a "no." he took it as a "try again with a different pickup line in 2 weeks" and never, ever stopped no matter what you tried. It doesn't matter that you can tell him to go away now if he'll just keep coming back.

Mozilla does not understand consent, and they are violating the consent of their users every time they push an update including AI features that are opted-in by default.

Because google only pays Mozilla because of:

• Maintaining search dominance
• Preventing anti-monopoly scrutiny

They don't want Mozilla to compete in any AI space, because there's already a ton of competition in the AI space given how much money gets thrown around, so they don't benefit from anti-monopoly efforts, and there's so many models that they don't benefit from search dominance in the AI space. They'd much rather have Mozilla stay a non-AI browser while they get to implement AI features and show shareholders that they're "the most advanced" of them all, or that "nobody else is doing it like we do".

WE. DON'T. WANT. THIS.

Mozilla, for the love of god, stop cramming AI into the browser when the vast majority of your users just want a privacy-respecting browser that works.

I've said it before, and I've said it again: I will not donate any more money to the Mozilla foundation until they stop cramming AI into everything, and you should too.

SO fucking true. I feel like it's actually impossible to even find foods with enough fiber in them in the first place. I might only get 5% of my daily fiber from a full meal, but at least my Snickers bar has 20g of protein in it for some reason.

We always somehow manage to focus on the wrong things.

I'm sorry for being a bit too much but you don't know what I'm going and you just have not to do it because I didn't have the money money money money money money money money money money money

Now you get it! Someone take away your spine so you can get into office too! /s

Hey, remember all the people saying they wouldn't vote for either party because they were both "equally as bad?" Yeah, good times, right? Glad we're past that now.

Now in all seriousness, what in the actual fuck are we doing here. Shit like this makes me more sick to my stomach than a lot of the other things this administration does, because "kill anyone I disagree with" is so deeply integrated with historical fascist-related events that it feels even more like the calling card of fascism than any other policy or rhetoric that led to it that this administration has also implemented.