XLE
"When it comes to privacy, defaults matter."
- Mozilla
Why not remove the AI and offer them as a separate extension? That way you're happy, and everybody else doesn't have crap shoved down their throats.
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
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.)
If it's anything like how they handled the AI sidebar, this option is going to get hidden before it hits production.
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.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is ~~democracy~~ democratization manifest.
the first 10+ years of PCs and clones on the market, many were sitting idle on workers' desks...
No. Literally from Wikipedia: "Third-party software support grew extremely quickly, and within a year the PC platform was supplied with a vast array of titles for any conceivable purpose."
Not a million chatbots with flaky guardrails and dubious value, getting pushed on random people. The value of a PC program was explicit and understandable.
IBM marketed thier PCs very effectively and launched with a Billion dollar boom, but then lost market share and ultimately lost their ability to sell PCs...
... Because the PC Compatible emerged? Yeah I know. That's evidence of success.
Moving goalposts to a different metaphor (the dot-com bubble) makes me think you realized your first attempt at a metaphor sucked
Like I said, it is built to be human_like_. Of course it's not human or sentient, but Sam Altman sells ChatGPT with humanizing language, describes human attributes, and personally subsidized the grooming of people to commit suicide and homicide.
Come on, don't be so dishonest. Compare similar things. This "tool" is designed to create humanlike realtime communication, and it's run by a billionaire rapist who just as easily have groomed the killer himself (thanks to it being a black box "live service", we don't know where the grooming came from, do we).
I remember your previous comment from another thread:
Vulnerable people don't get to outsource responsibility.
But apparently billionaires do.
As soon as I saw the word "existential", red flags went up for me, too. I looked, and of course, this is a piece of propaganda molded by a think tank.
Generously supported by
the Future of Life Institute
I'm kind of impressed how paranoid this piece is. I saw some MSM articles about "AIs making a religion" when these "religion"s were described and then discarded, but apparently whoever wrote this just assumed you'd been fed your media slop already, and he could focus on the doomsday scenario.
The Wikipedia article is yours to peruse and fix if you think it's wrong. It has examples. I just quoted something that was particularly funny given your insistence that AI is literally the PC and clones.