cley_faye

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cley_faye ,

Firefox has always had our backs

It's been going in a less friendly direction for a while. Embedding of mandatory useless extensions, aggressive advertising, deals to display more and more content to more users, disregard for user settings on multiple updates, opt-out telemetry, and now telling you that you're using it wrong.

Sure, you can navigate through various settings to disable most of these, and check back on updates for settings that toggles back, or are simply renamed and mysteriously got back to their default, intrusive value. But we should not have to do that.

And that's not even touching the issue with the Mozilla Corporation itself.

Firefox is the alternative browser, but it certainly isn't there to "have your back".

cley_faye ,

Firefox has a tendency to embed optional extensions as impossible to uninstall core features these days, so it would not change much.

cley_faye ,

Sure you can. You can also spend time disabling intrusive telemetry, you can also spend time reverting half the UI changes (not the other half though), you can also spend time removing integrated services you don't use but are still running, you can (regularly) change back some settings that gets reverted every once in a while, you can also block some IP to prevent intrusive ads, you can toggle off part of the "user experience" that bloat the lockscreen…

Or you could, I don't know, not have to do any of that and still have a working system that's not trying to bend you over.

Microsoft Account to local account conversion guide erased from official Windows 11 guide — instructions redacted earlier this week ( www.tomshardware.com )

Microsoft has been pushing hard for its users to sign into Windows with a Microsoft Account. The newest Windows 11 installer removed the easy bypass to the requirement that you make an account or login with your existing account. If you didn't install Windows 11 without a Microsoft Account and now want to stop sending the...

cley_faye ,

I had the occasion to discuss with people involved with Microsoft a few times, mostly on the research front. Great people, with great ideas, and very knowledgeable about their field. Of course they had nothing to do with the lobbying and the windows OS.
Microsoft is very large; the corporate drones are only a small part of it. Unfortunately, it's the part that decides what gets done and pushed out :(

cley_faye ,

Great, another victory of people keeping IP in closed box away from the public at the small cost of culture disappearing.

cley_faye ,

Humans loves to see patterns in everything.

cley_faye ,

I believe the appropriate, corporate-friendly answer in this case is "go fuck yourself"

cley_faye ,

(most) films and video games requires a bit of engagement from you.

cley_faye ,

Interesting, we get to either hate them for going full big brother, or hate them for going full adobe in the first place. It's nice to have a choice sometimes.

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information ( futurism.com )

You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)...

cley_faye ,

The "solution" is to curate things, invest massive human resources in it, and ultimately still gets accused of tailoring the results and censoring stuff.

Let's put that toy back in the toy box, and keep it at the few things it can do well instead of trying to fix every non-broken things with it.

cley_faye ,

Physicists are warry about splitting atoms; historians are warry about splitting Germany.

cley_faye ,

That's a very important distinction. While the first part is, to put it lightly, bad, I don't really care what people do on their own. Getting real people involved, and minor at that? Big no-no.

cley_faye ,

I'd usually agree with you, but it seems he sent them to an actual minor for "reasons".

cley_faye ,

Apparently he sent some to an actual minor.

cley_faye ,

"Freeing up memory and eliminating unused apps and files" sounds like the kind of bullshit app we have on Android already. Why bring that to PC.

cley_faye ,

My music library is hosted on my server, automatically synced locally on fixed devices and played from local files most of the time. Streaming services combine the advantage of sometimes disappearing, altering, removing content with the other advantage of needing an active internet connection at all time. That's neither a good thing nor an efficient thing when the alternative is cheap and works all the time from everywhere.

Of course, I know this is not the most common use case; most people usually don't care about any of this (and usually complain when something break). But it exists.

cley_faye ,

"And now, I'll make these allegations disappear!"

Firefox 126: New Search Data Telemetry, Improved Copy Without Site Tracking, Security Fixes, and More ( www.mozilla.org )

Telemetry was added to create an aggregate count of searches by category to broadly inform search feature development. These categories are based on 20 high-level content types, such as "sports,” "business," and "travel". This data will not be associated with specific users and will be collected using OHTTP to remove IP...

cley_faye ,

A few months ago, I had trouble with Firefox on Android, so I started looking again in the settings; something you really rarely do in a browser. Finding a few things like data collection, usage data, marketing data, and "occasional studies" being all enabled by default sure reminded me that Mozilla isn't what it used to be.

cley_faye ,

Collecting usage data and "running some occasional studies" should never be "opt out", always "opt in".

cley_faye ,

There's no "initial button". Installing Firefox on mobile you'll have technical data collection, marketing (with a third party) data collection, and "random studies" enabled without a clue. As someone that is very wary of this, I can assure you that at no point I was asked anything about sending data to "Adjust" (marketing partner), Mozilla, or allowing random, unknown at the time, studies.

cley_faye ,

You're conveniently missing the point that there is an actually labeled telemarketing partner that is opt-out. That's not user habit collection. You're also missing that "random future studies" should not be auto-enabled by default either. Finally, the topic of this particular post is about categorizing search queries, which as far as they describe it isn't something your browser should care about.

The only thing that may be legitimate is, as you say, actual UX and feature usage. But for that to be done properly, you have to ask and make it opt-in, as with any data collection scheme. It's actually a requirement in some places.

The point is, people give shit to chrome because "evil google collects your habits data and monetize them", while people like you are a-ok with Firefox openly sending data to a third-party marketing partner on opt-out conditions and, as demonstrated by today's post, adding more collection that have absolutely nothing to do with the behavior of the browser and all to do with user habits.

cley_faye ,

Hyperloop? The failed project he pushed just to make sure other possible projects that would just work would not be done? Yeah, he was better back then… not.

cley_faye ,

Some people decided that they needed a buzzword for something that have absolutely nothing to do with the web, and they decided to use Web3.

Anything "web3" you can think of is a regular webservice, that have no technological difference with "web2" (whatever this was), and may or may not behind the scene communicate with some form of blockchain (which may or may not be a real one too).

That's web3. And note that I didn't even bother to go check what happens on the blockchain side, that is already so removed from the web it's insulting people calls this web3.

cley_faye ,

It was the only name on there.

cley_faye ,

In addition to being able to run the exact same thing on that phone you already have, too.

Their device does not have any specific hardware for their usage. Even if Google and Apple don't bring any improvement to their own solution, soon enough someone is bound to just provide an "assistant AI app" with a subscription, proxying openai requests and using the touchscreen, camera, micro and speaker that are already there instead of making you buy a new set of those.

cley_faye ,

Yes, there is. And yes, it would be huge. I know a lot of people that are staying away from all this as long as the privacy issues are not resolved (there are other issues, but at this point, the cat is out of the bag).

But running large models locally requires a ton of resource. It may become a reality in the future, but in the meantime allowing more, smaller provider to provide a service (and a self-hosted option, for corporation/enthusiasts) is way better in term of resources usage. And it's already a thing; what needs work now is improving UI and integrations.

In fact, very far from the "impressive" world of generated text and pictures, using LLM and integrations (or whatever it is called) to create a sort of documentation index that you can query with natural language is a very interesting tool that can be useful for a lot of people, both individual and in corporate environment. And some projects are already looking that way.

I'm not holding my breath for portable, good, customized large models (if only for the economics of energy consumption) but moving away from "everything goes to a third party service provider" is a great goal.

cley_faye ,

I'm sure these "engineers" were confused everytime they saw an elevator door not mercilessly crush people.

cley_faye ,

They sure did not know about the "not crushing human limbs" part.

cley_faye ,

You're missing the point of a safety feature. The car shouldn't, by itself, close the lid if something's in the way. It should allow the user to push it down, or disable it temporarily, to do so.

The point of a safety feature in any system is to prevent unexpected situation from having unexpected consequences, not to be a magic solution that accommodate for brainless people. In one direction, you can make the judgement call and force the thing down, in the other direction you lose a finger.

cley_faye ,

It does not need much to upload data and play audio. They could probably have gone even lower.

cley_faye ,

No, revealed to not be specific design at all. The device is actually a terrible phone with less feature than a phone, nothing more. The app would likely run as-is on any Android phone with 100% of the feature provided.

Paying $200 for a bottom of the line smartphone that can't smartphone is a bit much.

cley_faye ,

Having seen what this device does, they may not even have had to alter anything to the base AOSP image. Just set your app as the launcher and you're good to go.

cley_faye ,

This is not about the programming language nor the OS. It's about masquerading a cheap butchered android phone as a brand new device. If it was some custom, optimized hardware to connect the main I/O (camera, touchscreen, buttons) to a piece of software that communicate with a remote server, it would justify the price. But as it is, it's a borderline refurbished weak phone hardware sold for $200.

cley_faye ,

Your first mistake was thinking the company training their models care. They're actively lobbying for the right to say "fuck copyright when it benefits us!".

Your second mistake is assuming training LLM blindly put everything in. There's human filters, then there's automated filters, then there's the LLM itself that blur things out. I can't tell about the last one, but the first two will easily strip such easy noise, the same way search engines very quickly became immune to random keyword spam two decades ago.

Note that I didn't even care to see if it was useful in any way to add these little extra blurb, legally speaking. I doubt it would help, though. Service ToS and other regulatory body have probably more weight than that.

cley_faye ,

A miess Gooby an Dolan

cley_faye ,

We could just have that. A contest where you bring your cat, they get to play around for an afternoon, and the only outcome from the judge is "yep, that's a cat".

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