It’s cute that you think anyone who would co-opt a beloved brand like Firefox to make an “AI browser” would be at all stopped by past habits.
Screen shots are not developed by massive art theft, nor does the creation of such a feature burn so many megawatts of data center energy that it makes Bitcoin farming look efficient.
“Opt-out” means on by default. Installed alongside the parts that you use, and quite possibly embedded into the thing so thoroughly that the next automatic update or feature iteration will either switch it back on or remove the option entirely.
LLMs are controversial to say the least, and accomodation to those who are repulsed by their inclusion should not take the form of an option they need to jump through hoops to turn off.
Leaving them in but saying they can be turned off is like shipping pornography in your video game with a filter someone in the options you can enable. It’s a pain in the ass at the least, and means that anyone making a moral or ethical stand against its inclusion has no choice but to go elsewhere.
“fake” diversity with an obviously proprietary option is substantially better than a fake “open” environment where the only web browser options are either made by a single for-profit company, a reskinned derivative of that for-profit company’s work, or a semi-not-for-profit whose main funding source is that same for-profit company.
In a very real way, web standards beyond “whatever chrome does” died when Microsoft tossed edge’s HTML engine for chromium.
If you’re covering for David Brooks, and we assume that Brooks is not himself a pedophile to be charitable, then you’re covering for whatever unknown pedophile Brooks is covering for.
This isn’t a court of law, it’s an international private forum with no binding consequence on anybody’s liberty. We don’t have to presume people doing shady fuck are innocent, since we’re not even accusing anyone of crimes.
Congress passed a law demanding disclosure of all files the government had about an infamous pedophile and child trafficer, with an explicit ban on redactions for embarrassed adults. Today they released a whole bunch of files, with essentially every adult in the pictures reacted.
Anyone who thinks this is a non-story is either a pedophile themselves or intentjonallh covering for child trafficing pediphiles. Especially if they are an old white guy who was definitely associated with the inhuman scum at the center.
We don’t know if David Brooks is a pedophile himself, but he sure as fuck isnt a journalist.
That sounds like a great idea actually.
Zelda’s on like it’s 7th reboot or something.
As the guy who buys his own wine and isn’t that picky, I’d much rather open a $5 bottle than one ten times that price. Especially if it’s a sweet red; then I can get an order of magnitude more drink than the snob who likes sour grapes.
(And, honestly, $50 is way too much for a common bottle of wine. Even $30 is nearly in the realm of conspicuous consumption.)
It’s not racism. It’s just that sysadmins are goths who prefer dark mode, and were esthetically aggravated by the discordant terminology.
A mere casual endorsement is not an appeal to authority. If you don’t like the guy that’s fine, but it’s not a logical fallacy to, for example, describe a late night comedian as “a kinda funny guy.”. (A logical fallacy would require that someone assume Krugman is RIGHT because of his record, not that he’s merely worth reading )
How is dismissing someone because of where they worked NOT an ad hominem attack?
How is splitting hairs over which awards given by the swedish government are and aren’t “nobel prizes” NOT a distinction without a difference?
You didnt attack any of his actual credentials, though. You just said that he should be dismissed because he wrote for a particular newspaper and the award he was given by the Swiss government was not one of the awards given by the Swiss government funded by the gift of a 19th century arms merchant.
If you want to rebut my statement that Krugman “has a pretty good track record”, please do so! But you didn’t, and haven’t, and instead asserted your own biases as fact.
Which is obviously your right to do but, again, is a really weird response to a “who is this guy” post.
But we’re always trying to increase revenue and decrease cost. That’s biological. It’s a constant.
You may have this habit, but it’s hardly universal to our species. My biology tells me to value the stability of home life and the predictability of patterns; any increase in revenue or reduction in costs is from learned habits or intentional action.
I completely agree about personal discipline being a good bulwark against accidental change for the worse, though.
I don’t think it’s often useful to react to contrary evidence as special case exceptions.
The “tragedy of the commons” is a real thing, but it’s also literally what “the cathedral and the bazar” is about. I would argue that the awareness and intentional action made based on either side of this mode is why technology seems to behave differently from other areas of human society.
Generalizing from the specific, I think it’s more helpful to say “things tend to change randomly over time, and people can be resistant to sudden change which is not obviously better.”
Since random change is more likely to be a change for the worse than a change for the better, societies will have a tendency to slowly become worse as time goes on. But the worse something gets the easier it is for people to discard it, and since intentional changes for the better are so often deliberate they also are often improvements to the best of what came before.
Enshittification occurs more as a deliberate act to increase revenue or decrease cost, which is a whole different ball game.
An ad hominum attack and a distinction without a difference is a hell of a response to “who is this guy”.
Do you want to show the class where on your wallet the Keynesian model of economics touched you? (Or do you perhaps have a “Krugman sucks and you shouldn’t listen to him” link you’d like to share?)
People making things worse isn’t a natural state.
To give an example off the top of my head, the US House of Representatives used to be even worse. An interpretation of the Constitution’s quorum clause became traditional in that if a rep would not answer “present” when called to a vote they were counted as not in attendance. Essentially, a minority faction gave themselves a veto on the whole body. This persisted for decades until one speaker just said “I can see you there”, and the body got slightly better.
(That it was latter became bad all over again in new and clever ways is a slightly different issue.)
No, this one wasn’t funny even then.
Paul Krugman is a nobel-prize winning economist who used to have a column in the NY Times. He has a relatively impressive record of predicting terrible things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman
And while I certainly don’t want to push back on the difference between heroin and other opium derivatives, it’s worth noting that legally speaking they’re both exactly as illegal when not used as prescribed for the treatment of pain or disease.
It’s not a blog post about heroin or opiates, though, so quibbling over the imperfections of his analogy is kinda missing the point. Please give it another read if you have a few minutes; the analogy is fairly apt, though very depressing as an American.
Science is not a search for truth. It’s a search for provable falsehoods and useful theories.
The beauty about actual science, as opposed to the fanfic and bragging that scientists need to publish to get paid, is that we can resolve contradictory theorems through experimentation
Massachusetts and NY raised taxes on the rich, and yet their revenues did not plummet.
Is there any contrary instance we can find where taxes were raised on the rich specifically and revenues dropped?
(And if so, get the academics back to refine their theories, make more predictions, and let’s see who’s more accurate!)
Eww. It’s a LLM travel agent.
I wish more pop science reporters would report on “dark energy” and “dark matter” as the questions they are.
Dark energy is “our best models of physics say redshift is due to movement away, and when we apply that model to our best observations the furthest galaxies appear to be accelerating, what the fuck is making them accelerate”?
(Dark matter is, simpler, “why are all these galaxies rotating as if they have way more matter than we can see – and why the fuck can’t we see that matter?”)