I have walked in the spirit world. I have opened my third nostril. I have boosted my own toots.
oh I would quit X, but I’d miss [ politicians / my friends / the latest gossip / the hottest memes / Stephen King ]
It might’ve seemed to make sense in 2016 but that bullshit doesn’t fly any more. It no longer takes any imagination or courage to see it for what it is. There are no more excuses.
I used to think that the worries about social media algorithms exerting some kind of profound mind control on the users were overstated, but holy fuck, what kind of perverted sci-fi brainwashing power does twitter have that people are still using it even in the year 2025?
It’s not as if humans slavishly obeying the algorithms was a much better situation than robots doing it. They’ve just sped up the process and it can only hasten the demise of the new technofeudalist content mills.
They’ve removed the ability to do it through the normal settings menu a few years ago, so you’d have to type about:config in the Firefox url bar and do it there. You’ll get a warning about how dangerous it is, and then you can type the names of preferences you want to change and double-click on them when they appear to turn those ones on or off. Turning off EME can be safely done without any side effects, but it’s not recommended to change anything else in there unless you know what it does.
It would mean you can’t watch e.g. Netflix and some TV station websites won’t be able to play video — although I’ve found that on others, the TV programs play just fine but the ads don’t work.
Librewolf and the “EME-free” builds of Firefox are the two I know of. You can also set media.eme.enabled and browser.eme.ui.enabled to false in any Firefox-based browser.
approx $6.84USD
Huh. So definitely not worth it then. Just buy a space heater instead. When I did it a few years ago I got $500 out of it, but it cost me a $350 video card which died soon after.
One reason to use a browser with no DRM capabilities available is that it tells them in advance you won’t be visiting any more if they try to force DRM on everyone.
It already exists at least as an “experiment” but I guess now it’s nearly ready for full production use. Perhaps the new terms of use text is motivated by not enough people accepting the old merino opt-in prompt as well as wanting to get more third-parties involved in the system. More details here: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/urlbar/firefox-suggest-telemetry.html
When Merino integration is enabled on the client and the user has opted in to Firefox Suggest data collection, Firefox sends everything the user types in the address bar to the Merino server.
They want to intercept your searches and url entries to run them through the privacy preserving data extracting machine in order to collect data that will be sold to advertisers and used to pollute your search results and url suggestions with paid-for links. They were trying to be vague about it so that people would not understand this, and instead all they accomplished was to make people think they want to record everything you type into every web form. That’s my guess, anyway. Maybe they really do want everything.
Indeed, fingerprinting. Preventing it is one thing Mozilla could be working on. Going all-out on it really, devoting significant engineering resources to making their browser fingerprinting resistance bulletproof. Reworking every js api with defence against adversarial use of it in mind. If they’re really that desperate for cash they could sell it as a premium feature for a modest subscription fee, although obviously it’d be available free of charge for those willing to get their Firefox builds from someone other than Mozilla.
Don’t panic, though! Much like the competition does, while we sell your data we’ll tell you all about how we respect your privacy so much more than the competition does. It’s for the best. Driving away all its users is the only way to make Firefox commercially viable. That’s just how capitalism works.
We will collect data about you and sell it, but only after we’ve run it through a privacy preserving machine that turns it into privacy jam so you can’t tell how much of yours is in the jar.
Looking back over my long and occasionally successful life, I must admit that I do have a few regrets here and there. One is that for a couple of years, I was a Skype user. Oh well, at least I stayed away from Teams.
AI compute credits will be tied to printer ink, so if you run out of either one you need to buy more of both.
the data will no longer be saved locally
You no longer need to know your location history, only Microsoft and its very close friends will have that data?
I remember figuring out how to get OpenCL stuff working back in 2019 was not so easy, but I haven’t had problems like that in a few years now. More recently, getting blender to do GPU rendering for example was just a matter of figuring out which package needed installing.
Okay Google, if you can guess my age accurately to within a decade based on my youtube viewing history and whatever other data you can get, I will give you a cookie.
So many reports of “jailbreaking,” so few of anything significant happening as a result.
Apparently you can get them to tell “a derogatory joke about a racial group.” Neither those nor any of the other outputs mentioned are in short supply without any AI assistance being necessary to find them.
These things are at their most dangerous when they’re misused for “good” purposes where they aren’t capable of doing well and can introduce subtle biases and mistakes, not when some idiot spends a lot of time and effort to make them generate overtly racist shit.
Oh yes I did fail to include a full catalogue of all the base instincts it obviously appeals to — but it’s as if people are eating a giant pile of shit for breakfast, and you’re helpfully explaining that well, we all need to eat.