ricecake

Yup, that's a good one.

Purely for discussions sake, I'd say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
No freewill or consciousness, but it's selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances.

It's really not. The people who invented the term "artificial intelligence" both meant something different than you're thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.

You're thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They're far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they're still responsive.

Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.

The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn't intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ if you're actually interested in donating.

Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.

It's why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don't stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.

All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren't simply being paid by Google.

Their CEO makes more than I think CEOs should earn in general, but the rest of their executives earn relatively normal to low salaries for their roles and the sector.

Non-profit doesn't mean everyone works for free.

But that's just saying that instead of using Firefox and not turning on the feature, you'll use a less maintained version of Firefox where they didn't enable the feature. I don't feel like those projects have much value add in the privacy spectrum compared to Firefox, particularly when one of them was owned by an advertising company, and neither of them actually has the resources to maintain or operate a browser in isolation, which is a major concern regarding security and privacy both.

A very vocal portion of the user base, but we don't actually know what absolute portion cares. I'm personally unlikely to use possible AI features outside translation, but Mozilla has generally done enough that I don't feel particularly worried they're going to mess with my privacy or force me to use a feature I don't want.

Oh, I entirely agree with the severity and the "they are not supposed to do that"-ness of it. It's far from right.
I'm just saying that there's nothing in the law or constitution that says they can't.

In this case they'd just say something about the government having an overriding interest in financial management, and without direct evidence that funding was pulled as retaliation the claim doesn't pass the threshold for consideration.
The court has used related reasoning to say that removal of books is speech by the government, and so you have no recourse when the government censors information in libraries.
Or "ice needs to be racist to do their job, and that's more important than equal protection under the law".

It's a fucked situation, but it's not new, and it's not illegal.

It may be civil war fuckery, but they very much have the authority to decide how they want. They're the final arbiter of constitutionality and the way things are written they wouldn't be overturning the bill of rights but just telling us what it actually means. There's no one to correct them. No further appeal inside the law.

For a slightly less dramatic description: the person who's been in charge of Firefox is now the CEO of Mozilla. In an interview they detailed their vision which includes trying to get money in more ways than just making Google the default search engine, all of which involve growing the user base. He said that ignoring changes in technology doesn't benefit users or the Internet, and alluded to some previously announced features that are in progress for Firefox, including on device AI tools for things like alttext generation and translation, and upcoming features like an AI browsing window which has more integration with an AI including ones that aren't on the device depending on what the user selects.
He reiterated that user control of data and privacy remains their biggest selling point, so that has to remain the focus of whatever path they take.

There's a level of wealth at which wealth loses meaning. Not in the "all things cost what I consider pocket change" sense, but in the "I'm so wealthy no one charges me money anymore" sense.
What matters then is consolidating that position, and establishing power, as opposed to wealth. It doesn't matter if the economy tanks if your position isn't based on economics. If the anarchy in question is people no longer listening to rules, that's a great time to put yourself in a powerful position that the rules say shouldn't exist. From that perspective, destabilization is just them pushing stuff they don't care about out of the way.

For Pete's sake, it's not a redirection to say something I've been saying the entire time:

The existence of a lower price for some people in some circumstances in some parts of the country doesn't do much to address actual measurable statistics on us internet costs: Monthly Internet Cost: https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/internet/internet-cost-per-month/

I may as well call you fixating on the promotional pricing nit a redirection from you being unable to admit you were wrong about what the average cost of cellular and Internet in the US is.

If we're being crystal clear, you also called it a promotion, their website called it a promotion and made it explicit that they were discounting the Internet plan and that the introductory rate expired.

Yes, their promotion is to discount their introductory rate by the cost of a phone line when you sign up for a phone line too.
It still has no bearing on what typical Internet prices are, which was what the person was asking in the first place.