RE: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115737483111161917
I'll elaborate. I believe we're in an AI bubble. AI companies are pushing the overton window on AI discourse. They want the most extreme anti-AI sentiment to be "Sure, it's an overhyped technology right now but there will be reasonable applications down the road". I want to see pushback on this. It doesn't matter if I can disable some AI feature in the settings. The fact that Mozilla is jumping on this bandwagon is deeply disappointing to me.
I've finally switched to the @Vivaldi@social.vivaldi.net browser. I've been using Firefox for as long as I've been on the internet, but the focus on AI means it's no longer the browser for me. Thankfully unlike Chrome, Vivaldi supports the uBlock Origin extension which is the most important extension for being able to browse the web nowadays.
@Gargron@mastodon.social IBM is enforcing on customers but only in creating reports and excel reports. Also in Power systems tuning and backups. Users don't like it, they are going out for coffee and talking about work issues, no AI
@Gargron@mastodon.social I'm also not too pleased with DeepL.com's push on AI, translating on Mastodon.
@Gargron@mastodon.social seems useful for machine translation.
@Gargron@mastodon.social I enjoy Trivalent and Vanadium, does what I want with no extensions.
@Gargron@mastodon.social you did not mention how the 'AI' bubble is just a circle jerk of money going round and round.
@Gargron@mastodon.social i guess i don't see how contributing to google's browser monopoly is an improvement
@Gargron@mastodon.social I'm basically 'anti-AI', but the term "AI" is about as meaningful as the term "smart" was. It can be arbitrarily broad, to support any "AI is good" argument.
Take OCR, audio transcription models, simple classifiers, etc. These are genuinely useful! And SOTA is genuinely better in 2025 than it was in even 2021.
They aren't LLMs, but they're neural networks. Anyone can call them "AI" if they want.
@Gargron@mastodon.social but the vivaldi translation service is entirely dependent on Google translate. Brave may be a better option.
@Gargron@mastodon.social I don't think they necessarily want to be deep into AI. Their goal is to shape the web to be human and privacy friendly and if there are users who want AI, and there are, then Mozilla wants to make the industry move in a good direction.
Its why they worked on ad attribution with Facebook. They saw that Googles "privacy sandbox" sucks, so they created something arguably better. And at least partly because of mozilla, google ended the privacy sandbox.
@Gargron@mastodon.social my position remains that it is evil for myriad reasons.
And evil is a word I did not use about much of anything until all this, because it has been so abused by creepy megachurch right wingers who point it at the people they’re trying to hurt.
Eugen Rochko
