I don’t want either. And it’s a slippery slope to the next stage, and the next. Eventually we will have no control over what we own and zero privacy.

/thread

Going to kick this off tonight and seed for a good long while. I got you fam.

You got downvoted for mentioning you’d get downvoted! OK, I’ll bite. Based on OP’s comments, As long as it isn’t in AI, surveillance or Microslop WIndows, maybe you have found something for us all?

I don’t think I’m being paranoid by saying it:

• opt-out rollout of every AI feature

• only slogging through registry to manual opt out until now

• CEO and board hell bent on monetizing and delivering features users actively do not want. I.e., enshitification

• I have seen my own AI registry changes revert already once after a patch

I’d say you’re being generous calling it poor design. It’s actually reverting to “default” on settings when you uncheck instead of storing individual bits and honoring those. Why not revert to opted out - OK, that may be lazy to use a single template, but that’s not the way some of their other “master” options work. And I’ve been a FF user since it’s first releases, so this isn’t some Mozilla hate. And I won’t be going to anything Chromium and because of inertia I may just stick to FF.

It’s also crazy that I have been manually configuring away from AI since it wasn’t even opt out… it was forced in. Most aren’t going to do that and Mozilla knew it going in. And I’ve already seen those registry settings revert once. Since this control option literally should have been the first feature for AI delivered and their entire AI push has an untrustworthy stink, I’ll say it again: I await a future release bumping the setting back “on”. “Oopsie! you can just turn it back off or wait for the next patch” after Mozilla and their partners collect their information across millions of users that aren’t paying attention.

So, there’s a “bug”, though I expect to FF it’s a feature: If you individually block all of the AI features, then click on the master switch to block all AI, everything’s great. But if you revert that master switch suddenly it “forgets” all of your settings and shit is activated again.

It seems by design. And since it’s opt in, if FF “accidentally” disables the master switch (I’m betting it will eventually) you lose that extra layer of protection. OH, and I had disabled EVERYTHING in registry (about:config) before this and translations were still available. I guess it’s time for me to explore other FF-core options…

Shout out to Brightworks and Drongo on Youtube for their BAR coverage. It’s a great game. I just wish RTS wasn’t so toxic.

We call that Linux here and you can start winning today!

Microsoft steeply lowered expectations on the AI Sales team, though they have denied this since they got pummelled in their quarterly and there’s been a lot of news about how investors are not happy with all the circular AI investments pumping those stocks. When the bubble pops (and all signs point to that), investors will flee. You’ll see consolidation, buy-outs, hell maybe even some bullshit bailouts, but ultimately it has to be a sustainable model and that means it will cost developers or they will be pummeled with ads (probably both).

A Majority of CEOs are saying their AI spend has not paid off. Those are the primary customers, not your average joe. MIT reports 95% generative AI failure rate at companies. Altman still hasn’t turned a profit. There are Serious power build-out problems for new AI centers (let alone the chips needed). It’s an overheated reactionary market. It’s the Dot Com bubble all over again.

There will be some more spending to make sure a good chunk of CEOs “add value” (FOMO) and then a critical juncture where AI spending contracts sharply when they continue to see no returns, accelerated if the US economy goes tits up. Then the domino’s fall.

’m no expert computerologist, but I think that any system that requires anybody but you to have your key is insecure.

Computerologist here. You are 100% correct. If anyone says otherwise, they are selling you something.

I’m not exactly standing behind it - just saying what I’ve read. I’m confident nuclear plants are after 9/11. Anything else is probably hit or miss, including petro/gas pipelines, coal, and generating plants specifically. Plus if a bad actor (likely state sanctioned) decides to, they can get through air gaps with spies/traitors/unwitting idiots with a simple USB drive. After air gapped uranium processing centrifuges were wrecked with an errant USB drive, I would expect all systems to disable or remove USB drive connectivity, but I’m sure that’s inconsistent… at best.

I can only speak for the US, but our electric grids and production are supposed to be air gapped for critical infrastructure. Healthcare? I doubt it based on the continuous leaks there - and medical supply chains are tightly integrated with internet/cloud… Shopping still has a fairly sizeable local accessibility for staple items, certainly food distro where the internet wouldn’t matter for at least a short while, but it’s also tightly integrated for Supply Chain Management, much like Health care - so there could be a run on it.

I’m not sure on public transport, but most are goverment led, so probably air gapped.

There’s also a shitton of dark fiber laying about. Internet infrastructure COULD be brought back up depending on the damage that triggered outages in the first place.

Don’t forget Xitter, Facebook/Insta/Whatsapp/Meta, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Minnesota Star Tribune, LA Times, Time Magazine, Bloomberg, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Tiktok, Reddit, Sinclaire (Radio) and now CBS / Paramount, etc… It’s a trillion dollar propaganda machine run at the pleasure of billionaires. If we go orthagonal, we should include all major AI players too, most definitely Grok.

Right wing media IS mainstream media now.

Let’s not limit it to the US

The word is that Julia Roberts took the title in the 90s

OK, I’m going to challenge the statement that AfD would be considered left in the US. I’m from the US and I’ve seen their politics and they would defnitely be considered far right in the US sense (or our current “right” which is MAGA in power). I appreciate your point about media labels, though, so everyone should apply critical thinking to those labels for sure.

I agree with you. I’m not saying the EU isn’t doing better on substantially every level like education, social services, policing, well being, worker rights, etc. I’m saying the EU is at risk and it’s it goes beyond just the US and global tech corpratism to authoritarian & oligaritarian influence of (soft and hard) compaigns to shift the EU far right. I am saying I hope the EU can hold on to what they have and push back further!

On a side note, the Nazi’s borrowed a lot of their eugenics from the US and our deeply ingrained racism, so I’m not 100% sure this is new

I’ll continue to equate the right wing with far right extremism until they give me evidence to conclude otherwise. You can call that a code for “out of power” if that’s your way of thinking, but it’s not mine and I certainly didn’t use it that way. I believe it’s the reality of the ratcheting overton window for 50 years.

I dunno, and this sanity check is coming from someone who’s visited over a dozen times and loves it there… EU is not all fun and games, they are going to enforce chat control, apparently bowing to pressure on GDPR, has enforced facial recognition to enter, and right wing parties are growing in multiple countries including the big economic houses: Germany, France, UK. We’re all over here looking at you folks to show us the way and if you blink in your resolve, you’re going to end up where we are.

On a positive note, Drumpf’s policies are hitting a wall of awareness, resistance and resolve. Our recent elections are giving some hope. His pedophile protecting tight grip is loosening it’s hold as his desperately unpopular and catastrophic policies are forcing “masks off” upping of their rhetoric and abusive policies. This shows their real racist nazi agenda to everyone and it’s only dropping their approval. We’re worried they will cook the books next November, but the hope is we can reign in the insanity and undo the damage in the coming decade. It’s going to take that long and we will need to start with our dear friends in Canada).