It does not mean Firefox can no longer be installed or run on non-certified or rooted Android devices, but it might mean that users on non-certified or rooted devices can’t access all AI features in Firefox for Android.
For those curious it’s just used for ai features. Plenty of valid reasons to be frustrated with Mozilla anyway though (its valid even just to be unhappy they implemented it at all, even in a limited way. It still normalizes the usage of the integrity check)
Holy shit thats actually cute as fuck. Sad I need a qwerty keyboard 🥲
Righ, ive been corrected about that before and keep forgetting, thank you lol.
Yeah I have integrated graphics, I don’t think my laptop is gonna like that attempt at testing…
Yeah, in a perfect world artists would not have to pay bills to survive, though I don’t know that thats really an art specific problem. If a company finds a novel way to exploit steel workers, that does happen within the backdrop of those people deserving to survive even if they can’t produce monetary value for someone else, but it feels a bit like it misses the immediate actionable harm, in favor of the less easily addressed bigger picture problem
But you’re not wrong, the underlying structural issue is people’s ability to survive being predicated on ones commercial viability, and the most commercially viable path is always rent seeking behavior and hiring people you will pay less than the ammount of value they create
With respect to surveillance, even in my limited usage I’ve shared a hugely valuable ammount of information from the perspective of understanding me as a consumer. Though, I do very much see a huge implication for regular old surveillance as well.
All companies in the us right now are operating within an environment where they need to kiss the ring, and where kissing the ring passionately enough can be competitively advantageous to them as a company, and beneficial to their bottom line. If the government comes knocking and asks an ai company to give them data, whether to create a case against a specific individual, or for access to ongoing usage activity/data sharing with federal agencies, they have very good reason to consider that course. And my understanding is that they are free to just say yes as long as their TOS doesnt preclude it.
(Sorry, I’m really long winded lol 😅)
Yeah I need to try those models at some point so I understand them a bit better. Not sure how my laptop will like them though, or if I’ll be functionality limited by compute to the point that they’re less than useful.
I see it as intrinsic to the reason the technology is being invested in and pushed into everything. Ai is wildly unmonetizable outside of data collection and replacing jobs
A similar but slightly different thing happened with crypto which once upon a time was about the idea of currency that didnt pass through a centralized controlling entities (the goverment, payment processors, etc) and thats still relevant today as we descend into authoritarianism and corporations censor legal businesses because they engage with sexuality. And yet crypto as a space and a technology is mired in abuse and exploitation- why?
Because its deeply profitable for harmful things (crime, scams, wealth transfer via a hollow investment vehicle). The good it can do is not the driving force behind it as an entity. That potentially even more true about ai given it is a commercial product built by massive companies at an enormous loss. And ai has the potential to have a much more profound impact on the world than crypto, rewriting deeply important social contracts in the image of corporate profit.
The human cultural norms around creating and sharing intellectual and artistic works that have been accepted foundations of human society are kind of being dissolved so that companies can take value from those works that they didn’t compensate anyone for.
Thank you so much!! There were some details I wanted to clarify for people after reading so I edited my previous reply so folks can see a summary of some of the relevant points
I appreciate you getting me a link! This will be very helpful in explaining some of the rot in the search experience and adds a lot of additional weight to my suspicion that making search worse may also be happening to push ai adoption
That was sundar pichai? Or someone else? Do you know what terms I’d need to look up to find sources for that? Thats information I’d absolutely like to include when talking about this with people, thank you for filling me in, I had no idea about that and it adds a lot of substance to that point
Edit: from the provided link the person who killed google search was Prabhakar Raghavan, who was apparently responsible for yahoo search over the period in which it fell precipitously off a cliff. He was put in that role by sundar pichai, replacing someone who explicitly cared about search and was deeply important to search development and had been there since the beginning
Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?
He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo’s search and ads products
So not Sundar pichai, but the article does explain that he was specifically picked to become the new head of search by sundar pichai, and that Sundar used to work for McKinsey Consulting, who were responsible for the business strategy that fueled the opioid crisis, among lots of other things. Super dense, but well worth the read!
Absolutely agree, the data collection feels like even a step beyond the already horrifying amount of people’s personal information we’ve normalized scraping directly into the pockets of corporations
I feel like this is a headline that does a good job of capturing the heart of the issue.
I’ve tried to evaluate how useful ai is so I can at least get a sense for how much harm it will do, as its WAY more potentially harmful if its useful enough to actually seen any organic adoption. And my experience has been that it can be incredibly helpful, particular for finding things online that are out there somewhere but that search engines are just useful for finding or consolidating into one place (it feels like a major element of that is just how ass search engines are. Part of me feels like google is comfortable allowing their traditional search experience to languish because it makes ai more necessary)
But the heart of the problem is that those upsides for users feel largely incidental to the way companies are forcing adoption down everyone’s throats, and the massive harms it caries are all feel like fairly structural elements of why anyone cares about the technology as a product to sell, or elements of how the technology works.
The intellectual property theft and labor exploitation, environmental harms, skyrocketing utility and noise pollution for people near data centers, harm to societies ability to think critically, stochastic parrot tendency to spread disinformation or misunderstanding, and supercharged surveillance capitalism are all things that are fairly intrinsic. Some of them can be avoided with a local model (which I would guess may make the model way worse functionally, but at some point I need to try options in that space so I understand where things are at)
At the end of the day, the reason we’re burning ludicrous amounts of money (and electricity) to prop up this technologies adoption before its even remotely monetizable is NECCISARILY because it has the potential to rob people of their employment by stealing labor other people have done to create a commercial product. Thats the only aspect of it that makes it a worthwhile investment for companies. So companies will move heaven and earth to be the ones who hold the most competitive version, and force people to become dependent on this tech so that it is normalized to the point we can’t criticize it and extricate it from our society once its been successfully woven in.
So its fun to laugh when its really dumb and its lack of actual understanding under-the-hood is on full display, the reality is that sentiment drastically underrepresents the amount of harm that it might do to society. Its not that its never helpful, its that the reason its available to us is for the explicit purpose of enabling corporations to do harm to our world for profit
And given the way it impacts user’s thinking, its also harmful on the individual scale. Frankly I can tell its bad for my head, and so I do my best to limit use. But the fact that sometimes its the most effective way to find certain things makes it so easy to come back to, and so easy to just keep asking questions and getting easy polished answers. It feels slightly addicting in nature.
Thats the heart of it. Its more harmful than helpful.
Certainly, it almost undoubtedly has pros and cons, but every source I saw explicitly describes it as an example of a regressive tax, so I do feel like its fair to put “regressive” in the cons column… 😅
I dont personally have a strong stance on the subject, I dont know a ton about taxes, I was mostly just explaining why someone might want to do away with it because folks were misunderstanding the person who wished we didn’t have it. I only know its considered regressive because hank green talked about it in a video. I was just trying to add context based on something I had learned
I think its fair to ague it still serves certain purposes or has advantages, but I get the distinct impression its considered ‘on the regressive end of the spectrum’ by every authority on the subject that I have access to, I’m not sure you’re right that it’s just “maybe” regressive 😅
I’m no tax expert but my understanding is that sales tax is classified as a regressive tax
https://taxfoundation.org/taxedu/glossary/regressive-tax/
I mean they list it as their first example of a regressive tax. I learned that it was considered regressive from hank green, who’s a well known science educator. And its always possible he got something wrong, this isnt science, but thats why I looked it up just now…
Edit: the IRS website has a reference page for teachers on educational content and exercise for school kids. It describes some taxes as “truly regressive” and the wording suggests its considered a gradient of impact relative to wealth, but it also explicitly says:
Classroom Activity
Explain to students that sales taxes are considered regressive because they take a larger percentage of income from low-income taxpayers than from high-income taxpayers
I think their point may be more thay sales taxes are regressive- they disproportionately impact people with less money, as those people need to spend all or most of what they have for necessities, while folks with a large surplus of wealth or income only need to spend a small portion and much of it can go towards savings or investments
I dont think its unreasonable for someone to say they’d rather just do away with sales tax altogether. We may have more appropriate tools with which to fund the government
Edit: the IRS and also taxfoundation.org both explicitly describe sales tax as being regressive. I just checked cause I’m not an expert and someone asserted that they aren’t regressive. I dont believe thats accurate.
https://apps.irs.gov/app/understandingTaxes/teacher/whys_thm03_les02.jsp https://taxfoundation.org/taxedu/glossary/regressive-tax/
As a long time linux user it makes me so happy its serving you well! ☺️☺️
I hope it continues to!
I thought this meant sales as in they sold a game…
Like yeah, I imagine selling stuff IS great for business??
Damn what a beautiful little macine
Thats super exciting to hear, I’m glad you mentioned it ☺️
I’ll have to try it again at some point. I found it kinda brutal last time I tried it, and was gonna just try the blender plugin that adds some parametric features next time
If things have improved I guess I’ll have to give it another go at some point
Thanks for the reccomendation, I’ll take a look :)
Yeah its the customization features. A couple replies down I listed some of the features I use that I haven’t seen in other launchers. I’ll check out total launcher and see if it could work for me
Ooooh, exciting ☺️