AI will not find a magic solution. Besides, we already have quite a few directions that would help, but we’re not acting on them. Pilling more “solutions” over them won’t change that.

This really sounds like the parody of rich people that think they can eat and breath safely as long as they have money, the rest of the world be damned.

Move, yeah. To Firefox… meh. The writing’s not on the wall yet, but we’re not going to ignore the very heavy signaling Mozilla has been doing for years now.

The ethos of Mozilla

That’s the thing that changed.

This is only a threat to people that took random picture at face value. Which should not have been a thing for a long while, generative AI or not.

The source of an information/picture, as well as how it was checked has been the most important part of handling online content for decades. The fact that it is now easier for some people to make edits does not change that.

reCAPTCHA v2 visual challenge images are all pre-labeled and user input plays no role in image labeling

That’s funny, because when I’m faced with this, I keep adding/removing one of the image randomly and it keeps accepting them as ok.

From the outside it really seems that a large amount of the USA administration is actively working against the USA’s interests. Which sounds weird.

Well I heard about a guy that told the collective advertisres of the platform to “go fuck themselves”, maybe this guy should be investigated.

as Electron has no integration with the rest of the system,

You pretty much can use Electron to build an application and use native OS-specific features. It only requires thinking about it and a bit of work, but technically isn’t much harder to do than with anything else. And there are some things useful in windows for that, based on user login credentials.

But ultimately, if the developers didn’t care about doing that, it won’t happen, regardless of them using Electron or writing fully native apps.

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

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.

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

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

Oh, yeah, thanks for these researchers to have provided insightful feedback such as “don’t record private activity”, “don’t store data in a plaintext user-accessible sqlite database”, and “don’t do that automatically to everyone elligible, what are you thinking no stop”. No way anyone could ever figure these out beforehand. Microsoft was totally stumped when these showed up and most certainly is very honest when they say they’re reworking it now, and not at all abusing the PR outrage to slip us something as bad in the meantime.

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.

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.

What a coincidence. I had to install a W11 machine for a relative. The amount of backward decision in the first 20 minutes of checking the settings is mind boggling. Really? Can’t open the start menu on “all apps”? Not even an option?

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

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m sure these “engineers” were confused everytime they saw an elevator door not mercilessly crush people.

And nothing of value was produced.

Exactly what people want: more ads.

It’s not a matter of excusing it. Distribution of someone’s picture without their explicit consent, and anything like that, is inexcusable. But we’re talking about the generation of said content, which technically can’t be stopped without seriously restraining everything.

Any of these large business coming out to explicitly say “this will not happen” is concerning.

Well, it would not be fun if people suddenly voted against themselves just to do the right thing for everyone.

If there was a fiable framework for that in use by most applications, it’s fairly safe to say it would still have exceptions for the OS’s provided apps, “to improve the user experience”.

Because of the “more or less” part of your post. Oversimplifying things is nice for a quick explanation, but physics don’t care about your simplified model once you get up there, gravity isn’t completely uniform, random space stuff sends you slightly off your path, and your target move in a mostly (but not 100%) predictable way, around your planet.

they could already do so in user mode

So, you read “we already have these surveillance capability” and you’re fine with it? Interesting.

The whole point of “user mode” is that it is possible to separate things. Even on Windows, assuming proper handling of your storage and settings, one account can be barred from accessing another account data it should not have access to. Granted, most people won’t care, but you can do it, and run separate windows accounts for games and personal stuff for example. You can even do it without constantly switching between them.

Not only kernel mode “anticheat” will allow snooping on the current account, but on others too, that’s the key difference here. As a user/customer, it removes the possibility of having private stuff on your computer at all.

That’s kind of a big deal.

I’m curious how they will tank their worth by then, as is tradition.

People are looking for alternative to lithium batteries. Unfortunately the world does not stop while we’re looking.

'It’s a win for everyone" except if Google (and Apple) were to start playing “fair”: no more restriction on apps, but they charge full price for the service of hosting and providing a searchable store to something million users. That way, only big business that can pay for that kind of service will be able to use each platform’s “main” store, and every (big business owner) will be happy.

There’s no free meal in there. Not for the majority of users, at least.

“It seems you wanted to start an application, let me guess which one you want instead of just letting you proceed with that”

But if we show a full-sized scrollbar all the time, we lose all that space that we could have left completely empty otherwise!

Yeah, losing function over form is annoying.

Yeah, after burning down something popular, he get off without any repercussions (aside maybe a big bag of cash) and is likely to go find the next successful thing to burn it down, to get another big bag of cash.

Can we purge these people out once they failed everywhere?

I really hope it’s a surprise to no one. Having full control over the access to any media is the core principle behind any online-only, DRM-based service.

You are correct, there are too much crackheads and not enough infrastructure investments.