Every time there's news from Mozilla we see a lot of takes around here along the lines of: they're clueless, their heads are in the sand, they don't know their userbase.

Alternative interpretation: We're looking at another case very much like Bluesky - a corporation with somewhat-openwashed branding which knows exactly who their userbase is, hates it, and wants a different one.

The rationale is clear enough; the browser is just a massive opportunity for datamining. The "AI" startups can only dream of controlling a browser with even the marketshare of Firefox. In that light, it's no use having a userbase of technically competent, privacy-aware dissidents who can work around the extractive dark patterns. Let's face it people, we're not profitable to surveillance capitalism

“I felt like Jason and the mods cared more about Claude than the welcoming community they built. Considering Jason is the owner of the server, I wouldn't trust him to be able to put the community first before putting AI first,” ML told 404 Media.

(Need free account to read full article or else here: https://archive.is/Ypur6)

There is a tedious point that advocates of AI art will periodically articulate to the effect of AI rendering art accessible to more people—ones lacking in time or ability to otherwise produce it. The response to this is generally that the time and labor involved is fundamental to art. But even more fundamental is the thought involved. At the end of the day what defines art is the existence of intention behind it—the fact that some consciousness experienced thoughts that it subsequently tried to communicate. Without that there’s simply lines on paper, splotches of color, and noise. At the risk of tautology, meaning exists because people mean things. Nobody else is going to do that work for us. If we don’t do it, really, what’s the fucking point?

The issues and harms surrounding emerging technologies are especially concerning given the lack of regulation in the tech industry generally, and the tendency of productivity-increasing technology to further concentrate power in the hands of the few. This reading group will explore these risks and engage with how they work in the hopes of better organizing to protect the rights of workers and individuals. The goal is to have a better understanding of the costs (data, carbon, human labor) and risks (misinformation, unpredictability, bias) of making these machines, as well as limitations in what they can learn about the world primarily through data scraped from the internet.

Excellent book list if you're interested in the topic(s).

Tracking the use of generative AI by fascists and adjacent forces - CONTENT WARNING: distressing imagery in many flavours: violent, offensive, racist, supremacist, etc

Appends udm=14 to the Google search URL to instruct Google to only return the Web results. There is even an extension and website built specifically for this use case. This is suitable for user who would like to have a clean search results without the clutter from Knowledge Graph, Local Results, Related Questions and etc. Now, there are others udm=x than just 14. I have been doing some searching and compile all of them here.

Save this to a custom search string in Firefox/whatever browser and you can automatically use it to search for things in Google without the AI nonsense coming up.