Comment by sfRattan

Comment by sfRattan 2 days ago

15 replies

I've added a room to your home.

Sometimes, there's a butler in there who seems absentminded and can only remember things up to a few thousand words. He once stacked all your dishes in the refrigerator and dumped all the food into the sink.

Other times, there's a demon in there who seems hellbent on destroying the innocence of your children and ripping apart your family. He once gave your children snuff films and instructions to build a bomb.

Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.

Aeolun 2 days ago

No, no.

> I've added a room to your home.

They’ve added a room to their home. That they let you live in, for free.

I’ll also mention that the room right next to it had all the contents you claim to take issue with.

The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).

  • sfRattan 2 days ago

    Yes, this is why we routinely fill council homes (or public project housing) with amnesiac butlers to rearrange the residents' possessions, and also with demons for, um, reasons.

    Completely reasonable things to do.

    How else would we recoup our investment in the hugely expensive, unpredictable butler/demon spawning machines?

    >The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).

    Depends on age, and the children in question. Also, if I have power tools it's because I chose them. And neither amnesiac butlers nor stochastic demons are necessary to not starve in the way that cooking food is, so the assessments of risk and basic good sense are not comparable.

  • mvdtnz 2 days ago

    > They’ve added a room to their home. That they let you live in, for free.

    They don't let you stay there for free. They let you stay there because the world's biggest advertising company pays them to.

    • [removed] a day ago
      [deleted]
NicuCalcea 2 days ago

> Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.

I mean... yeah? Do you use every feature of every piece of software you have installed?

  • sfRattan 2 days ago

    Until the last few years, most features added to software I use haven't:

    ...had functionally nondeterminstic, unpredictable results in response to how I use them.

    ...written in long-form English text with confidence and no guarantee of factual accuracy.

    ...coaxed children into codependent pseudo-relationships with ML models or encouraged suicide.

    AI isn't a new feature; it's a new category. And the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.

    I use LLMs and diffusion style image generators... Where I understand the model I've chosen, can control it locally, and have enough tacit knowledge to double check the outputs before I go ahead with something. I don't trust Mozilla to ensure any of those things anymore. They've long since burned that credibility.

    • NicuCalcea 2 days ago

      Still, just don't use them? I have no interest in AI in my browser and have had no difficulty avoiding it in Firefox.

      • lenkite a day ago

        That makes zero sense. How do you have no difficulty ? Are you going ahead and disabling like the below ? If not, then I am afraid you are hallucinating like an AI and not really "avoiding it" in Firefox. Doing the below also improves performance, memory consumption and battery life.

            about:config
            user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false); 
            user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false); 
            user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false);
            user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false); 
            user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false); 
            user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false); 
            user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
            user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false); 
            user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled", false);
            user_pref("pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload", false); 
            user_pref("pdfjs.enableGuessAltText", false);
    • cdrini 2 days ago

      > the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.

      This is such a common fallacy that I think it should be given a name. When you believe that the people who disagree with you must either be ignorant or malicious. Leaves no room for honest disagreement or discussion. Maybe the "dumb-or-evil" fallacy?

      • sfRattan a day ago

        It's a specific case of the false dilemma, sure.

        But, in life, when you meet enough AI evangelists, what was formally a logical fallacy becomes informally a useful, even necessary heuristic.

    • johncolanduoni 2 days ago

      Maybe I’m using the wrong web browsers - mine have always had those problems (except that the pseudo-relationships were with real, horrifically bad people).