this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Me beating the "Just use Firefox" drum for all eternity
there are a small amount of websites that don’t work properly on firefox… when my phone was being repaired i couldn’t pay my rent on anything that wasn’t chrome >_>
That does suck, and I've encountered a rare couple of websites that only work on Chrome myself as well, but that's exactly why we need to use Firefox. They shouldn't be able to get away with that. Google shouldn't hold such a monopoly on the Internet, and using rebrandings of Chromium only helps Google dominate the web.
Mozilla has also been shoehorning AI into places it doesn't belong, namely the Mozilla Developer Network documentation. Seems like no place is safe…
I'm not sure I agree. I literally can't think of a better usage of AI than aiding development, particularly parsing documentation. If one thinks AI doesn't belong there, then I have to assume you are just against it conceptually.
I, and many others, are against using AI for this purpose because the AI is a compulsive liar. It makes up features that don't exist, pretends that features don't exist when they do, incorrectly describes how to use them, etc.
Go read the thread yourself.
Mozilla representatives have been consistently evasive and obtuse about the whole affair, which tells me that they have an ulterior motive, probably money, for pushing this useless nonsense through. It's extremely alarming.
And the consequences of Mozilla failing are dire. It will be the end of the open web, exactly as Microsoft once envisioned in the Halloween documents. You will be forced to choose between using an untrustworthy browser that spies on you and blasts you with ads, or being a social pariah.
I'm aware of the flaws. I don't agree that means it shouldn't exist. There's certainly room for improvement, and I'm even open to the idea that it's too early to roll it out.
I'm not sure I understand the argument that this is somehow making them money. This is likely a huge money sink for them. I guess you could say they're trying to court more investment, but I'd need more than just conjecture for that.
This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology on your part. Large language models do not understand anything. They have no concept of truth or falsehood. They are not intelligent. The only thing they do is predict text. They're more complex and realistic versions of the classic ELIZA program, not real AI. They will never be capable of filling the role Mozilla has shoehorned them into.
The behavior of the Mozilla representatives strongly implies it. I have no idea how they intend to make money with this, and they may or may not succeed, but people don't generally act like this unless they think they can strike it rich by doing so (and don't care about the harm they'll cause in the process).
You're probably right that generative AI on its own, even if improved, can never fundamentally solve the truth problem. A probability engine is exactly just that, merely testing the probability of an output given the dataset. But for such a specific use-case as this, I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility to build some sort of reverse-lookup system that sanity checks the output before sending it. It'll probably never be suitable for extremely advanced applications, though. But I'm just not thoroughly convinced that this is entirely useless and needs be abandoned just yet.
I don't like to assume ill intent just to fill in an unexplained gap. It's entirely possible for someone to just be wrong. Just like I might be wrong, and this is in fact a technological dead end.
What kind of reverse-lookup system, exactly? As far as I know, that's impossible without AGI.
That doesn't explain the evasiveness. Something's up. Something we won't like when it's revealed.
there are firefox forks that might be safer? tor (overkill?), mullvad browser, and librewolf
if you use macos, there’s also orion
Firefox forks will fall behind web standards very quickly without Mozilla doing the heavy lifting. A browser isn't useful unless the majority of websites work in it.
unless this is a known upcoming issue, i rarely have any issues using firefox
Because Mozilla does the heavy lifting of implementing all those web platform features Google keeps pumping out. If that stops, it will not be long before you start seeing broken websites with “upgrade to Chrome” messages on them.