I find this whole "I gotta be able to turn off AI!" thing to be silly, personally. Do you also want to be able to turn off anything that uses binary search? Perhaps anything written in C++? Ooh, maybe it's nested for loops! Those kinda suck, give me an option to turn those off!
My indelicately expressed point is that the algorithm or processing model is not something anyone should care about. What matters? Things like: is my data sent off my device? Is there any way someone else can see what I'm doing or the data I'm generating? Am I burning large amounts of electricity? But none of those are "is it AI or not?"
Firefox already has a good story about what is processed locally vs being sent to a server, and gives you visibility and control over that. Why aren't the complaints about "cloud AI", at least? Why is it always "don't force-feed me AI in any form!"?
(To be clear, I'm no cheerleader for AI in the browser, and it bothers me when AI is injected as a solution without bothering to find a problem worth solving. But I'm not going to argue against on-device AI that does serve a useful purpose; I think that's great and we should find as many such opportunities as possible.)
It's a shame they didn't ship an EV that fit the uses the F-150 serves. The Lightening is a luxury item. The F-150 is a tool, regardless of whether it's ICE or EV.
I hope this puts more people in the market for the Slate truck. It won't serve everyone with an ICE F-150 but I suspect a bunch of farm and ranch vehicles that don't do many highway miles could be Slates.
I'm a happy Kagi subscriber and look forward to Orion on Linux. Every well supported browser other than Chrome is a win.
I'd love Kagi to fund people working full time on web standards in the W3C and WHATNG, too.
Reading mainstream coverage of tech is certainly what made me lose confidence in much of their other reporting.
Back when tech was this niche thing 20+ years ago, media's illiteracy on the matter was forgivable. Now that it's omnipresent and represents a huge portion of the economy, not so much. Yet the accuracy of the reporting on events that I have familiarity with has barely improved.*
* Acknowledging that this is subjective and I don't have any way to quantify it.
Inaccuracy is a common complaint about science reporting.
If you look at how a country is reported in another country, it is often highly inaccurate. In my case its mostly been how Sri Lanka is reported in the UK, but I have also seen lots of inaccurate reporting of the UK in American media (and not restricted to any type of media or political side.)
I have seen quite a bit of inaccurate reporting of business and finance.
Lots of bad reports of survey data, especially related to things like religious and political attitudes. Often the result of badly (or dishonestly) crafted questions.
About 20 years ago, haha, but yes. Am familiar with that term from Crichton.
> [..] UK in American media
If it's any consolation, much of the reporting I see on America in American media is also inaccurate.
> survey data
To me this is perhaps the most egregious bad faith reporting I see. The survey questions themselves are often designed in a way that will likely produce a given result, whether through malice or incompetence. Then the reporting on those results buries the actual questions asked.
I saw one recently, from the early 2000s, that said "majority of Americans cannot locate the Middle East on a map".
But the actual survey's findings were "the majority of Americans can not identify the Middle East on a map".
And what did it mean by that? It was a multiple choice question and if you failed to include the correct extent of North Africa that is regarded as the Middle East, you were considered unable to identify the Middle East.
Something like 85% correctly included Saudi Arabia.
That's a sweet idea and I'm glad to see your comment about maintaining it as a patch on top of Firefox sources so you can roll in their security fixes.
This reminds me of gas station pumps that play ads on sub-par displays and tiny crackly speakers. I'm already paying for gas and now you think you can force crap ads on me?
If an ad starts I immediately stop pumping and go to a different gas station.
The fridges in people's homes. Expensive fridges! That's a hard pass.
I'm ready to print off some stickers that say "FUCK YOUR ADS" and stick them all over the gas pumps that do this. Probably get me arrested for vandalism though. I want to just smash those fucking displays every time.
Cross my fingers, but I think my Nissan Leafs aren't "connected" enough to ever have to worry about ads. Certainly not during charging, when you just walk inside the house.
I would really love for new projects to find their own name instead of calling themselves the next version of something they don't like. "Web3" has never been a new version of the web, just a way to inject undeserved clout into a (IMHO fundamentally flawed) experiment.
There are so many great unused names! Please pick one.
I don't know why people gave you that advice but it's pretty easy to tell when a designer hasn't spent enough (or any!) time defining their target market and then spending time with those people to listen instead of force fitting a technology.
Without that up front work we're all just rolling the dice.
That said, building stuff is fun by itself so it doesn't always need to be about money and growth. Just know it's a hobby.
I would love for everyone designing a new social app to start by deciding how to handle the issues every social app will have. Abuse, hate speech, brigading, etc. We've known about these for decades. They can't be ignored.
I'm not dictating how they should be handled (variety is great!) but decisions should be made and declared up front before the first spec or line of code.
Otherwise the app is DOA IMHO.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that the two main negative metrics for social media are spam and spite. But people only tend to focus on the spam and only act on spite when it tips into abuse. If we put the same amount of effort into spite as we did spam, the difference would be immense and social media would be far healthier.
A good start would be to distrust anything made by a VC funded start-up or a once-great tech co.
If you do want to use something they made, create a hard fork and pretend they already ditched the project as they inevitably will.
This is how to burn what little trust remains: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off."
It has to be opt-in or you're not worthy of trust.
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