I used to enjoy AI a lot, and I still think the technology is really cool, but lately I’m beginning to despise it. It spreads and nestles itself into every corner of our life, and it rots whatever it touches, be it the humans that rely on it or the projects in which it’s used. I see so many open source projects that are tainted with it, it’s almost impossible to avoid it. It’s sad. The generations that will grow up with AI will be fucked.
The generations that will grow up with AI will be fucked.
Eh. That’s something every single generation before us in at least the past 150 years has been saying about other new society-changing stuff. They’ll be fine, society just changes.
Generations that will grow up with social media will be fucked.
Generations that will grow up with internet will be fucked.
Generations that will grow up with video games will be fucked.
Generations that will grow up with computers will be fucked.
Generations that will grow up with morning-after pills will be fucked.
…
…
Looks around at how fucked the world is Maybe they were right?
Probably more like, generations growing up with unchecked capitalism will be slowly fucked over time to the point where you won’t recognise life in several generations.
Generations that will grow up with morning-after pills will be fucked
I mean…
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And at least the first two were right.
Social media without limit has caused a whole slew of issues that are still being studied. And, while the early days of the internet were great, ever since at least the late 2010s, it’s been largely downhill.
What about Cambridge Analytica, the mental health impacts, the addiction, … we’re still learning the social impact of social media — especially capitalistic social media. To pretend we aren’t is just plain ignorant, no? You can’t say people are fine when you don’t even know how they’ve been affected.
I’m not saying everything is lovely and we are at the peak of civilization. I’m saying that every form of progress comes with challenges and downsides, and this saying of “Next generation will be fucked” is a cognitive bias every generation has had for a pretty long time.
They also have positive sides.
I don’t know if I expressed myself that poorly (I was pretty tired after all), but I did not mean at all that there are no downsides to any of these. I meant that despite these sayings, every generation so far has ended up as fine as the previous ones.
I’m saying that every form of progress comes with challenges and downsides, and this saying of “Next generation will be fucked” is a cognitive bias every generation has had for a pretty long time.
Change is not necessarily progress.
I’m not talking about change, I’m talking about progress. Progress is not necessarily positive.
Yeah, sorry but I have to disagree with you pretty hard there. Generations that grew up with social media, internet, video games, … they are fucked. We’ve been watching the fuckening for a long time now. Saying that they haven’t been fucked is reminiscent of my grandparents saying ADHD and Anxiety aren’t real.
Are they really more fucked than generations who didn’t have access to social media, internet, and video games? It seems to me that you are biased by the negative effects these had, and ignoring the positive ones.
Saying that they haven’t been fucked is reminiscent of my grandparents saying ADHD and Anxiety aren’t real.
How is that in any way comparable? I’m not saying the downsides of social media, internet, video games are not real, I’m saying “People growing up with X will be fucked” is a saying that every generation has been saying, ignoring the positive impacts. This is a cognitive bias in the likes of the rosy retrospection.
I don’t think so. First off, all the examples mentioned were computers, social media, video games, … these are all still pretty darn novel in the grand scheme of things. We still don’t know what happens to a society that doesn’t need to contend with boredom because they have algorithmically optimized content feeds jacking up their prefrontal cortex at all times of day and night. We still don’t understand the full extent to which walled garden social media ecosystems can influence politics and cultural bias, detriment democratic processes, or empower individuals. We still aren’t taking privacy seriously as a society, having relied for hundreds of years on the fact that complete and total surveillance systems is infeasible for a government. It’s far too early to say whether anyone is or isn’t fucked by any of this, which is why I draw comparisons to grandmama saying “back in my day, the boy was just excited. He didn’t have ‘ADHD.’ He was fine.” It’s about ignorance when new information comes to light.
We have a lot of reason to believe there is some serious consequences to technology that unfortunately isn’t obvious from the get go. More unfortunately, we have a culture of not caring. Innovation first, policy second, right? Except that only works while policy can still catch up. We’ve been slow walking into a situation where, yeah, one of these generations is definitely getting fucked. Probably, though, it’s each generation getting a little more fucked as we continue having them.
I’m not ignoring the benefits. The benefits are part of how we justify not impeding the innovation process — it’s literally part of the problem. The root of the issue is that we ignore the consequences, pretend that’s just the way things are, and think in weird metaphors like “the market will self correct” and “the market is never wrong.” If the future generations aren’t fucked, it’ll be because they solved the problems that were created here. It won’t be “they weren’t fucked because they were never fucked.” No, they were fucked. Hopefully they figure it out.
Funny you say that. In ways not everyone (obviously) sees, each generation was right about that.
No. Each generation was fucked in their own way, regardless of the two edges of the progress that they grew up with.
This is getting so sad and pathetic that it’s getting really funny 😅
Mozilla is still being paid by Google so they can continue to exist and make sure Google won’t be sued for monopoly behaviors, is it not?
If so, is it fair to assume that Google is just paying them to piss off the user base so that everyone will use chrome anyways?
If not, them why the fuck has Mozilla been doing everything to be hostile to it’s users, for years now?
OpenCode with Playwright gives you full control over what model you use, the prompts, and what it integrates with, and it promotes open weight models. The way Firefox implements this seems gimmicky, and I don’t like that it persistently collects your info while browsing. Also fuck OpenAI.
Mozilla try not to anger their user base with their new features challenge (impossible)
Yesterday I was nicely prompted to accept their ToS to continue using their service.
No mention if it was FF Relay, Mozilla acc or just Firefox.
Because I didnt want to blindly accept anything I went into the about:config page and disabled the banner.Honestly: Fuck that.
I use Duck.AI a lot, and it says its privacy oriented and doesnt save your queries. Is Firefox doing anything similar, or is it all monetized data?
The geo-exfiltration of personal information needs to be in great big banner lights; and not just because you’re outside America, or China, or wherever the bot happens to be where Firefox is exfitrating your history as queries.
Exfil is bad; geo-exfiltration is next-level bad.
bUt ThErE’s A kiLL SwItCh!
Yrah, Its called uninstalling Firefox
And instead install a chromium based browser, right?
10 delete AI
20 goto line 10
run
The speed at which firefox has been enshittified is as impressive as it is sad.
…and we’ll all suffer as climate change increases. None of this shit is worth frying for.
Dont worry the US and Israel are starting WW3 as we speak we will all be dead before then any way
Donald Trump is the most environmentalist president ever. With oil prices as they are, can you imagine how much less oil we’re burning?
Setting fire to the oil fields, cutting out the middle men. That’s American efficiency.
lol no. We still burn the same amount only now the robber baron oil execs get paid triple.
Poor people get priced out of driving. If you can’t afford gas money you may not take a trip over the weekend
Nah, it’s just imperialist billiards, big vs little.
It’s all part of “the great game” the west has been playing against Russia in the middle east for over a century… The middle east is where America does it’s proxy wars.
World wars are only a risk if a white western European country is attacked. Horrendous how those in power see the world, isn’t it?
So like Ukraine?
Awfully presumptuous of you to think Ukraine counts as white.
thier revenue entirely dependent on google, you can see why, they got lazy and dint spend time developing thier browser.
Relevant section:
Smart Window uses ‘memories’, things Mozilla says “…it learns from your activity” to inform its responses.
You can delete memories individually, and you can set any given chat session to not use/store them.
Fine so far.
The problem? My memory list isn’t populated with things Smart Window learned since I enabled it. Oh no.
It has activity going back months. We’re talking searches and website interactions from long before I enabled this. features.
Firefox just handed that history to the AI models to plough from, without telling me upfront.
I found this the creepiest aspect of Smart Window.
Mozilla says this was a flub; it will refine the onboarding around Smart Window to limit memory formation to post-opt-in activity only. That’s obviously the right fix.
Because sharing a user’s prior browsing history with third-party AI models, silently, on feature activation, without any headset? Yeah, a bit icky – but that’s the price of testing features that are finished, I guess.
I’m willing to give them a pass since this was a development build and while someone probably should’ve thought of it, it’s the kind of bug that can happen. If this was the public release it would be a lot more outrageous.
Finding out about this gives me some extra questions, though.
- Was this data summarized on enabling this window, or before?
- Did it use an existing model, or re-use one that someone may have already downloaded for a different feature?
- Is this activity going anywhere else, like Mozilla’s recent “privacy-preserving” advertising?
- When this does release, what will the default be?
There’s also an option to bring your own LLM, with fields for model name, endpoint, and API token available for entry when the manual option is enabled. However, the page itself warns local models may not work correctly.
It looks like there’s an option for people to self-host too. You won’t have to send your history to someone else’s computer.
If it’s anything like how they handled the AI sidebar, this option is going to get hidden before it hits production.
It would be really cool if they didn’t do that this time.
Hey, I’m not excited about more stuff getting added into an already overflowing Firefox (why not an extension?!), but if they must promote AI choice, I’m with you: actually allow user choice.
(Based on how Mozilla has added two unrequested search engines while ignoring a request to add StartPage, the “choice” thing seems to boil down to backroom deals.)
F*** I really dont want to change away from Firefox. Pleas be good Firefox. Please! Don’t F this up.
waterfox a better balance between firefox & LibreWolf
Librewolf is exactly the same browser with all the security features dialed to 11 and all the AI removed.
And it breaks sooo many sites.
Waterfox, is Firefox that just works.And it breaks sooo many sites.
No it doesn’t. I use Librewolf and this common refrain is FUD.
I used it for almost a year.
It took me ~2 months to find, understand, and tweak settings until I stopped running into issues with sites at least one every couple weeks.
I’ve been using Librewolf for about a month now, today I ran into the first problem, a website was blank but that fixed itself when I closed the tab and opened it again. I’ve been very happy with it so far. Sad to hear you ran into troubles.
I tried Librewolf for a while and found it to be a bit too much for me when all I really want is Firefox without AI. The privacy options are probably great but not for me.
Just installed waterfox. First impression is that I am super happy to be bock to the previous Firefox theme - it takes less space and looks nicer in my opinion. Seems promising. Thanks for the recommendation! :)
The latest Firefox release added a button that does exactly what you want. Turns off AI everywhere.
Yeah, I returned to FireFox after the latest release because of the kill switch. Still I’m uncomfortable with using software that’s full of stuff that I hate, even if it’s disabled. This is not really rational I guess, just me being weird.
It’s difficult. If people don’t support Firefox then the downstream browsers that everyone in this thread are suggesting are fucked. And we’re stuck with chrome and safari. But if people support Mozilla too much then they’ll just do whatever they want, like this AI nonsense.
Yeah, it’s tricky. I donated to Mozilla in the past, will look into making some donations to Servo moving forwards as I really think that’s the way things are headed for me. I keep trying to use GNOME Web which is WebKit based and it keeps getting better, but it’s not quite there yet for me. So for now Mozilla is my best bet in spite of everything.
It might be easier to soften Librewolf than harden Firefox, but fair point.
If you’re a relatively normal user and you still want to use LibreWolf, I would recommend:
- disable fingerprinting
- not clearing history on exit
Most of this is easy to find, especially thanks to the LibreWolf menu
Yeah it’s all just in the GUI to enable and disable what you don’t want.
I don’t get what people are complaining about with LibreWolf being “too hard”. Like it’s 1 minute clicking through menus and you’re done. 5 minutes if you need to read and search things up real quick.
But LibreWolf, ublock installed by default, and then set up containers. Just pure bliss.
For us, sure. For the average Joe who doesn’t know about the side effects of fingerprinting, not so much.
It broke youtube for me yesterday and mind you I’m a web developer and I didn’t know what broke it exactly to turn it on/off.
It fixed it self today though.
That was almost certainly YouTube breaking itself. They do a lot of public A-B testing without notifying the user of anything, even if it could break functionality.
The chances of Librewolf breaking, and updating in 24 hours is basically zero. Especially if you’re on Windows since it doesn’t update itself, you have to choose to install the separate updater application when you install Librewolf, otherwise it just doesn’t update.
https://codeberg.org/librewolf/librewolf-winupdater
https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/
How often do you update LibreWolf?
LibreWolf is always based on the latest version of Firefox. Updates usually come within three days from each upstream stable release, at times even the same day. Unless problems arise, we always try to release often and in a timely manner.
It should however be noted that LibreWolf does not have auto-update capabilities, and therefore it relies on package managers or users to apply them.
Yeah I agree it was probably a/b testing since I use ublock origin as well so I’m use to this kind of stuff.
But the point I’m trying to make that I didn’t know at that time librewolf would have settings turned on that could break some websites.
To be fair, YouTube is a giant piece of shit. On mobile, IronFox and Firefox are terrible with it, but switching to Chrome and everything loads instantly.
We all know Google is purposely slowing down non-chrome browsers.
Maybe, but if you want Librewolf but less extreme, that’s what Waterfox is for. May as well just install that and avoid the 5 minute search. And this is coming from a long time Librewolf user.
I just enable canvas on sites that need it.
Thats the only part of RFP that I find problematic.
Yeah Librewolf does go really fucking hard on security/privacy to the detriment of functionality, but the are upfront with that so you shouldn’t be going in completely blind. I think Water Fox is a nice happy medium for users that don’t want to fuck around with technical stuff.
It only breaks sites because RFP is on by default and some greedy sites dont like RFP. You can just turn it off and use a good user agent mask (if you care about fingerprinting)
Wait, it does? I’ve not had site issues with either.
It can cause issues with default settings on the occasional site.
Since I had it on hand, here's a screenshot of what I encountered when playing Jackbox with friends. All images would look like this.
unfortunately forks depend on FF, and chrome to survive.
Its too late, bro. You gotta break it off and start mingling with the forks.
I remember having ff and then switching to chrome because it was better, and then switching back to ff because it was better. I’m ok leaving ff again.
Ai in browsers is stupid
Companies at every layer are competing, from the OS, to the browser, to the website so you can experience triple the spam.
Soon your OS will get into a never ending loop with the browser and the website.
Do yourself a favour and use LibreWolf or WaterFox instead.
Floorp is also good since it has PWAs
But it has a DuMb NaMe so I don’t like it 😡
Or just keep using Firefox and don’t use the entirely optional and opt-in features you don’t need. The same as always.
I’m completely flabbergasted why people get their panties in a twist over
- completely local features that happen to be backed by machine learning models (the translation feature is a huge privacy win over sending your text to Google translate)
- opt-in LLM integration that nobody forces you to use
Or further favourable: Konform Browser.
Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser also worthy mentions.
