Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • zogwarg@awful.systems
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    5 months ago

    Itā€™s also insane to believe it should be a first class feature, when those who god forbid want to ā€œopt-inā€ could simply install a plugin.

    • self@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      according to Mozillaā€™s track record, theyā€™re making it a core feature so itā€™s impossible to remove without a custom fork, and theyā€™ll relentlessly goad the user into enabling it via ads pushed with every update. implementing it as a core feature also means they can easily infect the search bar and other core functionality with this horseshit

      weā€™ve also only got mozillaā€™s word that this shit can be disabled once itā€™s in production Firefox at all, and weā€™ve seen, repeatedly, how Mozillaā€™s AI team does with consent ā€” they use LLMs and marketing tactics to fabricate it

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        In the end they had 18481 words of notes to go through. Which is not nothing but also not that much. [ā€¦] Mozilla also seems to know. And they had an innovative solution: THEY HAD AN LLM SUMMARIZE THE NOTES TO REDUCE BIAS.

        It feels like the AI contingent lost the attention span to actually read stuff somewhere along the line. This isnā€™t the first time Iā€™ve seen this garbage approach. Of course here at awful.systems weā€™ve been innoculated against declining attention spans due to regularly having to read lesswrong dissertations.

        • blakestacey@awful.systems
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          5 months ago

          To avoid confirmation bias and subjective interpretation, we decided to leverage language models for a more objective analysis of the data. By providing the models with the complete set of notes, we aimed to uncover patterns and trends without our pre-existing notions and biases.

          ā€¦ the Hell?

          • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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            5 months ago

            Yeah itā€™s wild. Even most AI grifters donā€™t outright try to claim that LLMs reduce bias (they know weā€™d laugh at them even harder than usual) so mozilla.ai is in deep.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsOP
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        5 months ago

        ah yes, flashbacks to when they bought pocket and instantly forced it on everyone

        where you had to remove the ui icon, untick shit in settings, and then STILL go into about:config to kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share, but then found that apparently at some point my old settings got nuked? or decommissioned or something? and others reinstated/introduced? because none of my changes for that are there anymore

        sigh

        also, their push to telemetry, to labs, to getting people to cohort into running things, them pushing selective bans on plugins because of legal pressure in countries, their absolutely fucking awful track record in spending their cashflow on utter and complete bullshit instead of actually improving the browser, ā€¦

        • earthquake@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          go into about:config to kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share

          Well, looks like my custom pocket settings are preserved, if theyā€™re useful to anyone:

          browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket				false	
          extensions.pocket.api										0.0.0.0	
          extensions.pocket.enabled									false	
          extensions.pocket.onSaveRecs									false	
          extensions.pocket.settings.test.panelSignUp							v1	
          extensions.pocket.showHome									false	
          extensions.pocket.site										0.0.0.0	
          services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket	false