this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 5 months ago by froztbyte@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful you'll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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[–] self@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (5 children)

no surprises here, Mozilla’s earlier stated goal of focusing on local, accessibility-oriented AI was just entryism to try to mask their real, fucking obvious goal of shoving integrations with every AI vendor into Firefox:

Whether it’s a local or a cloud-based model, if you want to use AI, we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs. With that in mind, this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment offering access to preferred AI services in Nightly for improved productivity as you browse. Instead of juggling between tabs or apps for assistance, those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge, all without leaving their current web page.

Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral, but we will continue adding AI services that meet our standards for quality and user experience.

I’m now taking bets on which of these vendors will pay the most to be the default in the enabled-by-default production version of this feature

this is making me seriously consider donating to Servo, the last shred of the spirit and goals of a good, modernized Firefox-style browser remaining, which apparently operates on a tiny budget (and with a whole army of reply guys waiting to point out they might receive grants which, cool? they still need fucking donations to do this shit and I’d rather give it to them than Mozilla or any other assholes making things actively worse)

thinking back to when I first switched to Mozilla during the MSIE 7-8 days and actually started having a good time on the web, daily driving Servo might not be an awful move once Firefox gets to its next level of enshittification. back then, Firefox (once it changed its name) was incredibly stable and quick compared with everything else, and generally sites that wouldn’t render right were either ad-laden horseshit I didn’t need, or were intentionally broken on non-IE and usually fixable with a plugin. now doesn’t that sound familiar?

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The smug presumption that any brand of spicy autocomplete is a viable tool "to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge" is so fucking galling.

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's also insane to believe it should be a first class feature, when those who god forbid want to "opt-in" could simply install a plugin.

[–] self@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (3 children)

according to Mozilla’s track record, they’re making it a core feature so it’s impossible to remove without a custom fork, and they’ll relentlessly goad the user into enabling it via ads pushed with every update. implementing it as a core feature also means they can easily infect the search bar and other core functionality with this horseshit

we’ve also only got mozilla’s word that this shit can be disabled once it’s in production Firefox at all, and we’ve seen, repeatedly, how Mozilla’s AI team does with consent — they use LLMs and marketing tactics to fabricate it

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

In the end they had 18481 words of notes to go through. Which is not nothing but also not that much. [...] Mozilla also seems to know. And they had an innovative solution: THEY HAD AN LLM SUMMARIZE THE NOTES TO REDUCE BIAS.

It feels like the AI contingent lost the attention span to actually read stuff somewhere along the line. This isn't the first time I've seen this garbage approach. ~~Of course here at awful.systems we've been innoculated against declining attention spans due to regularly having to read lesswrong dissertations.~~

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

To avoid confirmation bias and subjective interpretation, we decided to leverage language models for a more objective analysis of the data. By providing the models with the complete set of notes, we aimed to uncover patterns and trends without our pre-existing notions and biases.

... the Hell?

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Yeah it's wild. Even most AI grifters don't outright try to claim that LLMs reduce bias (they know we'd laugh at them even harder than usual) so mozilla.ai is in deep.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago

insert appropriate reaction GIF here

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

ah yes, flashbacks to when they bought pocket and instantly forced it on everyone

where you had to remove the ui icon, untick shit in settings, and then STILL go into about:config to kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share, but then found that apparently at some point my old settings got nuked? or decommissioned or something? and others reinstated/introduced? because none of my changes for that are there anymore

sigh

also, their push to telemetry, to labs, to getting people to cohort into running things, them pushing selective bans on plugins because of legal pressure in countries, their absolutely fucking awful track record in spending their cashflow on utter and complete bullshit instead of actually improving the browser, ...

[–] earthquake@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

go into about:config to kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share

Well, looks like my custom pocket settings are preserved, if they're useful to anyone:

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket				false	
extensions.pocket.api										0.0.0.0	
extensions.pocket.enabled									false	
extensions.pocket.onSaveRecs									false	
extensions.pocket.settings.test.panelSignUp							v1	
extensions.pocket.showHome									false	
extensions.pocket.site										0.0.0.0	
services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket	false

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

ah, handy

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago

iirc I nuked a few more things, api keys and such

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Mozilla: Hey, we're going to take you out to a restaurant and get you a burger, as a treat!

The restaurant:

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs

Thanks for giving me the freedom to not use the tools that best suit my needs, Mozilla!

But seriously I hate how at some point techies decided they know what's best for the user instead of the user knowing that themself-- there's been a long trend of technology getting less customizable and less user friendly over time; and Firefox is not at all innocent.

[–] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago

Pour one out for opera presto, which I will always mourn.

[–] trisweb@m.trisweb.com 1 points 4 months ago

@self @froztbyte "We think you should have the freedom to..." 🤮

[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 1 points 5 months ago (4 children)

This display of a man hoping AI reclaims the awe in technology he once felt as a 17 year-old:

Sam Altman is the snake oil salesman who might restore Silicon Valley to its former glory https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/06/25/opinion-ai-altman-silicon-valley-revival/

[–] 200fifty@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

unironically saying "the sharing economy" in the year of our lord 2024 is... certainly a choice

also

God knows we old-timers tried to be cynical about ChatGPT, pedantically insisting that AI was actually just machine learning and that Altman’s new toy was nothing but cheap mimicry. But the rest of the world knew better

idk dude I've talked to the rest of the world about this and most of them actually seem to dislike this technology, it seems like maybe you didn't actually try very hard to be cynical

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I've had this open in a background tab, reading it in pieces as time allows, and I only just noticed one of it exhibits one of the things I like noticing about various publishers' system fucking up: a lurking page title before a post-publish edit

the page title as it is in my browser right now: Opinion | AI boom led by antihero Altman is reviving Valley dreams. the page title as it displays in the content area: Opinion \n Sam Altman is the snake oil salesman who might restore Silicon Valley to its former glory.

the url slug also seems to be mostly the former - most of these renames on various publishing platforms seem to do that (keep the original slug instead of a rewrite+redirect)

can't make direct guesses as to the exact reason why this one was updated whenever it was, but I expect public perception/reception might've been part of that?

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago

it is also something that's been of passive interest to me over some years: things as published often shift underfoot, and the time at which someone reads something then shares on and then someone else reads ... there might be quite a substantive difference in the contents of such things at the times. this ranges from the benign (inserting late-received comments, errata, etc), to a complete contextual/content rework. I've often thought that there's a possibly for a really interesting part project there...

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

surprise lemmy feature discovered:

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[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You know what would be awesome is if there was a way to easily see new posts to a thread, like if the "New" button actually put New posts on top. Maybe lemmy truly is too janky for that but it's a shame because I just start to ignore threads after a while.

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I recently learned there is a page showing just the comments of the communities you are subscribed to; that works for me because this space is so incredibly low-traffic, but I guess falls apart if you use that account to follow higher-traffic chatter.

[–] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I use it, but at least on my browser the next button is disabled so I can only see the most recent page of updates. I treat that as a the jank is a feature moment, though; if there's more than one page of new comments, I'm forced to stop reading.

a greyed out Next button, and a snippet of developer tools showing it's disabled

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago

yeah, it's a Lemmy breakage

[–] earthquake@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I also use the new comments page, and when lemmy default frontend broke the next page, I looked around and found https://alexandrite.app, which fixes this page. EG https://alexandrite.app/awful.systems/c/techtakes?type=Comments&sort=New

The downside is that, in implementing an infinite scroll, it unloads comments that you're not looking at, so ctrl-f will be unreliable.

[–] sinedpick@awful.systems 0 points 4 months ago (14 children)

I tried using Claude 3.5 sonnet and .... it's actually not bad. Can someone please come up with a simple logic puzzle that it abysmally fails on so I can feel better? It passed the "nonsense river challenge" and the "how many sisters does the brother have" tests, both of which fooled gpt4.

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