Counterpoint

ew

these are literally least intrusive ads possible and Firefox gets a few pennies from me leaving it active so that I can enjoy the product for free

mozilla has alienated a large number of its supporters by going all-in on LLM horseshit in their browser and anywhere else (MDN) they can shove it, exploitative crap (especially directed inwards towards its own developers, go find some ex-Mozilla postmorts if you want to see some of the nicest people you know get curbstomped by awful management and then fired), and doing a ton of other semi-to-fully fraudulent nonprofit boondoggle shit. they’ve made it clear they don’t want our donations (and plenty of people were donating more than just a few pennies from ads) and they really don’t deserve your advocacy. all Mozilla as a company cares about is the funding they get from Google. everything else is just layered affinity grifts.

Q&A!

what browser do you recommend then

none. we fucked it. once Mozilla dies, and they will die, none of the Gecko forks are realistically in shape to take on browser development on their own. chromium will be the only game in town, and google will use their dominant position to push through crap like browser attestation to secure their deathgrip on the web. ladybird is unserious fascist shit. chromium forks solve nothing. everything else is targeting an early 2000s version of the web’s features, which is good for them.

the only way I can see out of the above is Servo, the ex-Mozilla browser engine that Mozilla did their best to bury after Firefox Quantum, and they’re starved for cash and developers. I’d love if Servo was a workable browser today, but it just isn’t. it’ll take a lot more than a couple of pennies in some grifter’s pocket and the laziest possible advocacy to get it there.

I suspect people that downvoted me above assume I am shilling some commercial browser and just don’t know what LW is

lol no

this thread has broken containment, and the median quality of the discussion has dropped to the point where some rando decided to start a subthread about how it’s not ok to celebrate hitler’s death and also two regulars had an extremely heated fight about who was the most not-mad about the word chat as a noun/pronoun/whatever in English of all fucking things so uhhhh that’s all folks

yeah, it’s weird how many of our visitors came here thinking TechTakes is a news sub

you’re right, I even had Ellis’ Wikipedia page open to re-confirm the allegations but my fingers wanted it to be Gaiman for whatever reason

haha nah time for you to fucking leave

no fucking thanks

oh absolutely, fuck graber and fuck, fuuuuuuck gaiman to hell. i don’t have an inch of trust for either of them.

tho I will say that even here on lemmy, even if it didn’t reach the awfulness of what i quoted, i’ve seen a bunch of clanker memes that were seriously iffy… I wouldn’t qualify those of “serious discussions”

I agree with all of this

but they still matter in the broader ai discourse

and disagree strongly with this. part of the mission of TechTakes and SneerClub is that they must remain a space where marginalized people are welcome, and we know from prior experience that the only way to guarantee that is to ensure that bigots and boosters (and sometimes they’re absolutely the same person — LLMs are fashtech after all) can’t ever control the discourse. I know through association that a lot of moderated AI-critical spaces, writers, and researchers follow a similar mission.

now, unmoderated and ineffectively moderated spaces are absolutely vulnerable to being tuned into fascist pipelines, and inventing slurs is one way they do it (see also “waffles” quickly being picked up as an anti-trans slur on bluesky, which has moderation that’s hostile to its marginalized userbase). if that’s something that’s happening in a popular community and there’s enough examples to show a pattern, then I’d love to have it as a post in TechTakes or as a blog link we can share around the AI-critical community as a warning.

you’ve never posted on our instance before as far as I can tell and I’m pretty sure I didn’t ask you to fucking gatekeep one of our threads and start a shitty little fight that I have to clean up

in every serious (ie not TikTok or any other right-wing or unmoderated hellhole) anti-AI community I know, bigotry gets you banned even if you’re trying to hide it behind nonsense words like a 12 year old

meanwhile the people who seem to have dreamt up the idea that AI critical spaces are full of masked bigotry appear to be mostly Neil Gaiman Warren Ellis (see replies), who has several credible sexual assault allegations leveled against him, and Jay Graber, bluesky’s CEO who deserves no introduction (search mastodon or take a look at bluesky right now if the name’s unfamiliar). I don’t trust either of those people’s judgement as to what harms marginalized people.

that’s a very good post — framing fascism as a supply chain issue helps push back against the rhetoric that software is somehow apolitical by nature, and it’s a good response to the excuses given for the RubyGems takeover

the first post is the ladybird guy personally welcoming one of the main hyprland transphobes to browser development because he landed a PR in ladybird

Brendan Eich is the Brave guy but he was also Mozilla’s CEO (and he’s the guy who invented JavaScript and made it fucking suck) when he got caught making a donation to an anti-LGBT organization and got asked to step down. since then he’s used Brave as a vehicle for cryptocurrencies and LLMs.

Proton’s CEO expressed support for the Republican Party in the US in a public post, and then most likely paid for some shithead to write a medium article unconvincingly arguing that he did nothing of the sort; both the original post and the shitty medium article have been discussed before in the Stubsack.

lunduke is a far-right crank with a long history who’s currently ranting on Twitter about how open source projects need to eliminate all the wokes; FUTO has done free marketing for ladybird in the past and is now doing the same for lunduke

god I hope not, I take sanity damage every time I deep dive these fuckers

yep, see this recent post for receipts (in the answer key) — they’re not even close to not being fash, though they’re still denying it in ways that don’t hold any water at all

I accidentally omitted the receipt for suckless so check that out in the answer key if you didn’t see it in there before

here’s a good summary of the situation including an analysis of the brand new dogwhistle a bunch of bluesky posters are throwing around in support of Jay and Singal and layers of other nasty shit

here’s Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, getting called out by lowtax’s ex-wife:

here’s Jay posting about mangosteen (mangosteen juice was a weird MLM lowtax tried to market on the Something Awful forums as he started to spiral)

Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?

since Jay posted AI generated art about dec/acc and put the term in her profile, her little “ironic” nod to e/acc and to AI, my guess is this is coming very soon

thank you! I adapted the post I mentioned and the surrounding thread into a TechTakes post

jeff’s follow-up after the backlash clarifies: you wouldn’t know her because he donated right under the limit to incur a taxable event and didn’t establish a trust like a normal millionaire and also the LLM printout only came pointlessly after months of research and financially supporting the unhoused friend and also you’re no longer allowed to ask publicly about the person he brought up in public, take it to email

so I got angry

I really hope atwood’s unhoused friend got the actual infrastructural support you mentioned (a temporary mailing address and an introduction letter emailed to an employer is only slightly more effort than generating slop, jeff, please) but from direct experience with philanthropists like him, I’m fairly sure Jeff now considers the matter solved forever

@mawhrin@awful.systems summarized it nicely but if you want some fresh abyss to stare into, here's some links to fedi posts with details:

• https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01K6AHA0BNBBX616JGDJHYET36
• https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01K6E3G2Z19M82BWRB3SPADHP9
• https://mstdn.games/@KFears/115286316219357517