No One Wants Your "AI" Bullshit, Mozilla
About a week or two ago, I saw a link to a post on Mozilla's Connect forum in a Mastodon post encouraging people to leave their thoughts about Mozilla's inclusion of "AI" "features" in Firefox. In essence, the post states Mozilla's intention to implement access to "AI" services such as Gemini and ChatGPT from the Firefox sidebar in their Nightly branch, and that "[they'd] love to hear your feedback... and [they're] open to all [our] ideas and thoughts."
The comments to this post have been vehemently opposed to this move, citing the countless issues with these dogshit word blenders.
Now imagine the insanity of begging for donations where "with the rise of AI and continued threats to online privacy, the stakes of [their] movement have never been higher." 1
Mozilla wants to play both sides, claiming to represent digital privacy and freedom, while simultaneously shoving the latest symbol of technological bullshit into our asses while insisting to us that we will like it. Their justification for their ventures into "AI" is that they argue that they will do it more "ethically", by which I mean they just throw in the terms "open source" and "private" whenever they talk about it so they can pretend they're actually doing something.
What's incredibly disappointing to see is that this marketing actually manages to trick a lot of the the gullible "privacy-conscious" people who don't actually have any sensible understanding of technology or how it intersects with society, who see "open source" as basically a guarantee that a piece of software is trustworthy and reputable, or seriously believe that bitcoin is decentralized.
It's important to emphasize what the true purpose of the community post is: a piece of performance by Mozilla to pretend that they care at all what their users have to say. They do not. They've made up their mind, and are going to roll this out as a permanent "feature". There's no negotiation, no discussion to be had, no "listening to the community." Mozilla went "fuck you, we're adding this" and there is nothing to stop them. This is far from the only case of Mozilla being a dogshit organization/company, making dogshit decisions that waste time and resources while pissing everyone off, it is merely the latest. This is where I remind you that their CEO's salary nearly doubled between 2021 and 2022, reaching almost $7 million. Mozilla also let go 250 employees in 2021, blaming the coronavirus pandemic. 2 As they drive Firefox into the ground and fire people to avoid paying them, Mozilla funnels more and more money to its executives.
Is There Anything To Be Done?
I had tried switching to Vivaldi a little while ago for desktop use. While I enjoy using it on mobile (and will continue to do so), and its customization and feature-set make it great to use on desktop, being based on Chromium has its limitations related to privacy as well as not having cookie clearing exceptions for certain websites (instead requiring an additional browser extension that is confusing to configure). So for now, it appears that the best compromise (for me, at least) is to use Librewolf which disables Mozilla's bullshit telemetry and needless "features" by default, and refuse to support Mozilla financially or vocally. They aren't open to constructive feedback, so it's a waste of effort to give it to them in the hopes they'll listen. They're deep in enshittification, and their demise is only a matter of time, as it's become clear that they are incapable of getting their shit together. Mozilla is walking dead.
I'm Not Going To Talk About "AI" For Now
I won't go into much detail about why "AI" is total nonsense here. For one, I suck at writing, and Ed Zitron is just one of the countless awesome folks out there explaining why these "AIs" and the sociopathic techbros who own from them are complete fucking shit.
If you insist on hearing my thoughts right this instant, I'll leave it at this: "AI" only serves to perpetuate all the problems with solutionism, late-stage capitalism, and all of the inequality and harm they entail, especially to marginalized and vulnerable groups; it is morally reprehensible and unacceptable to express any support or positivity about a disgusting technological nightmare that does nothing it promises while hurting everyone and everything around it. It is not a coincidence that so many of the people and companies who jizzed hard for "cryptocurrency" were also among the first to jump on the "AI" hypetrain.