Oh hey, this is good. Wouldn’t want to have obsolete strings. About time they did away with the obsolete concept of “not selling your personal data”. Looking forward to April when that’s finally deprecated.

+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
  does-firefox-sell = Does { -brand-name-firefox } sell your personal data?
  # Variables:
  # $url (url) - link to https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/privacy/
  
+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
  nope-never-have = Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. { -brand-name-firefox } products are designed to protect your privacy. <a href="{ $url }">That’s a promise.</a>

Good food for thought, but a lot of that rubs me the wrong way. Slaves are people, machines are not. Slaves are capable of suffering, machines are not. Slaves are robbed of agency they would have if not enslaved, machines would not have agency either way. In a science fiction world with humanlike artificial intelligence the distinction would be more muddled, but back in this reality equivocating between robotics and slavery while ignoring these very important distinctions is just sophistry. Call it chauvinism and exceptionalism all you want, but I think the rights of a farmhand are more important than the rights of a tractor.

It’s not that robotics is morally uncomplicated. Luddites had a point. Many people choose to work even in dangerous, painful, degrading or otherwise harmful jobs, because the alternative is poverty. To mechanize such work would reduce immediate harm from the nature of the work itself, but cause indirect harm if the workers are left without income. Overconsumption goes hand in hand with overproduction and automation can increase the production of things that are ultimately harmful. Mechanization has frequently lead to centralization of wealth by giving one party an insurmountable competitive advantage over its competition.

One could take the position that the desire to have work performed for the lowest cost possible is in itself immoral, but that would need some elaboration as well. It’s true that automation benefits capital by removing workers’ needs from the equation, but it’s bad reductionism to call that its only purpose. Is the goal of PPE just to make workers complain less about injuries? I bought a dishwasher recently. Did I do it in order to not pay myself wages or have solidarity for myself when washing dishes by hand?

The etymology part is not convincing either. Would it really make a material difference if more people called them “automata” or something? Čapek chose to name the artificial humanoid workers in his play after an archaic Czech word for serfdom and it caught on. It’s interesting trivia, but it’s not particularly telling specifically because most people don’t know the etymology of the term. The point would be a lot stronger if we called it “slavetronics” or “indenture engineering” instead of robotics. You say cybernetics is inseparable from robotics but I don’t see how steering a ship is related to feudalist mode of agricultural production.

Hello, I am the the technology understander and I’m here to tell you there is no difference whatsoever between giving your information to Mozilla Firefox (a program running on your computer) and Mozilla Corporation (a for-profit company best known for its contributions to Firefox and other Mozilla projects, possibly including a number good and desirable contributions).

When you use Staples QuickStrip EasyClose Self Seal Security Tinted #10 Business Envelopes or really any envelope, you’re giving it information like recipient addresses, letter contents, or included documents. The envelope uses this information to make it easier for the postal service to deliver the mail to its recipient. That’s all it is saying (and by it, I mean the envelope’s terms of service, which include giving Staples Inc. a carte blanche to do whatever they want with the contents of the envelopes bought from them).

Whether the terms are abusable by design or by accident doesn’t really matter, you get is abuse either way.

How I wish we could have some nice things sometimes.

The update on their news post supports the “don’t sue us for sending the data you asked us to send” intention.

UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.

Whether or not to believe them is up to you.

Maybe. The latter part of the sentence matters, too

…you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

Good luck getting a lawyer to give a definitive answer to what exactly counts as helping you do those things.

The whole sentence is a little ambiguous itself. Does the “as you indicate with your use of Firefox” refer to

• A) the whole sentence (i.e. “[You using Firefox indicates that] when you upload […] you hereby grant […] to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content.”) or
• B) only to the last part of it (i.e. “When you upload […] you hereby grant […] to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content [in the ways that you] indicate with your use of Firefox.”)

B seems fairly innocuous and the intended effect is probably “if you send data to a website using our browser, don’t sue us for sending the data you asked us to send”. The mere act of uploading or inputting information through Firefox does not — in my (technical, not legal) expert opinion — indicate that Mozilla could help me navigate, experience, or interact with online content by MITMing the uploaded or input data.

A is a lot scarier, since the interpretation of what it means to “help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content” does not depend on how you use Firefox. Anything that Mozilla can successfully argue to help you do those things is fair game, whether you ask for it or not, which seems a lot more abusable.

Opera Mini was (is?) an embedded/mobile browser for Symbian dumbphones and other similar devices that passed all traffic through a proxy to handle rendering on server side and reduce processing effort on the (typically slow and limited) mobile devices. This could be construed as helping the user navigate, experience, and interact with online content, so there is precedent of a browser MITMing its users’ data for arguably helpful purposes.

I would never accept hijacking my web upload and input data for training an LLM or whatever mass data harvesting fad du jour happens to be in fashion at a given time and I do not consider it helpful for any purpose for a web browser to do such things. Alas, the 800-pound gorilla might have some expensive reality-bending lawyers on its side.

I thought about the “anthro pic” too, but it feels like a low hanging fruit since the etymological relation of anthropic and anthropomorphic (from ancient Greek ἄνθρωπος) is so obvious.

Last time I wore a suit I kept track of the way everyone around looked at me and five of them looked hatefully. The first one was reading Lenin and nodding approvingly. The second one was trying to covertly plant a comically oversized microphone with Russian markings and a hammer and sickle on it. The third one was handing out militant union agitprop and advocating for a good work strike among transit workers. The fourth one was wearing a Zhōngshān suit (which is technically also a type of suit, so that was quite hypocritical of him) and proudly proclaiming to be Maoist Third Worldist. The fifth one I made up just to feel a little more persecuted so you can imagine the proof of their radical socialism by yourself.

Aww thanks, kind of you to say that.

I paid for the whole motherboard, I’m using the whole motherboard thank you very much. ASCII was good enough for the Bible, so it’s good enough for me. God included character number 7 for a reason, even if that reason was for me to hear obnoxious buzzing from my audiophile grade piezo beeper.

My favorite bit:

When software that came pre-installed with the base OS reaches end-of-life (EOL) and no longer receives security fixes, Pacman can’t help

What base OS? The base metapackage that pulls in a small core of system software packages that are then treated and updated like any other package? What the hell is an EOL? You mean the thing that happens to non-rolling release distros such as Not Fucking Arch?

When GNU Scrotum 5.x series becomes unsupported after release 5.56, people running Arch Linux will be happy to know they already have gnu-scrotum-7.62.69-rc1 installed from their repositories. It’s the people on LTS Enterprise distros who have to start whining at their maintainers to backport a major version of GNU Scrotum released since the Obama administration.

Humans have bouba intelligence, computers have kiki intelligence. This is makes so much more sense than considering how a chatbot actually works.

Ah, I recalled it having recovered quite a bit some years ago, but apparently that was temporary and due to a weather event. Even so, the direly depleted form of Ozone layer present in the Antarctic is still better than anything Mars could support.

Not that solar UV is going to be your biggest problem when the atmosphere is so thin you might as well try to breathe in a vacuum and >90% of the little that is there is CO₂. If you can figure out how to breathe, you can probably come up with sunblock, too.

They’re really fond of copypasta:

The issue with Arch isn’t the installation, but rather system maintenance. Users are expected to handle system upgrades, manage the underlying software stack, configure MAC (Mandatory Access Control), write profiles for it, set up kernel module blacklists, and more. Failing to do this results in a less secure operating system.
The Arch installation process does not automatically set up security features, and tools like Pacman lack the comprehensive system maintenance capabilities found in package managers like DNF or APT, which means you’ll still need to intervene manually. Updates go beyond just stability and package version upgrades. When software that came pre-installed with the base OS reaches end-of-life (EOL) and no longer receives security fixes, Pacman can’t help—you’ll need to intervene manually. In contrast, DNF and APT can automatically update or replace underlying software components as needed. For example, DNF in Fedora handles transitions like moving from PulseAudio to PipeWire, which can enhance security and usability. In contrast, pacman requires users to manually implement such changes. This means you need to stay updated with the latest software developments and adjust your system as needed.

Can you blame someone for hoping that maybe Musk might plan to yeet himself to Mars. I’d be in favor, though I’d settle for cheaper ways to achieve similar results.

Yeah, Antarctica is a cakewalk compared to Mars. The temperature is maybe in a comparable ballpark if you squint. Everything else is way easier. You can breathe the air as is instead of living in a pressure vessel with an artificial atmosphere 24/7. You have water everywhere you can simply melt or desalinate and you don’t have to even go to the even colder polar ice cap region for it because you’re already there. You have a magnetic field allowing for an ozone layer which is nice because the sun is a deadly lazer. There are organisms around you can eat for nutrition, and whatever resources you lack can be brought over with a boat or aeroplane instead of a spaceship. You can get to Antarctica from any human settlement (with the possible exception of space stations) or vice versa in a matter of hours. You can have near-instantaneous communication with other humans on earth at any time, whereas one-way trip between Earth and Mars will take a radio wave anywhere between 3 and 14 minutes, assuming there’s not some opaque body (such as a moon or a star) in the way. I’m probably missing a lot of other stuff but that’s the ones off the top of my head.

Did Daniel B. Miller forget to type a whole paragraph or was completing that thought with even the tiniest bit of insight or slightly useful implications just too much thinking? Indeed, maybe people don’t usually take over governments just for the sake of taking over governments. Maybe renowned shithead Elon Musk wants to use his power as an unelected head of shadow government to accomplish a goal. Nice job coming up with that one, dear Daniel B. Miller.

What could be the true ambition behind his attempt to control the entire state apparatus of the wealthiest nation state in the world? Probably to go to a place really far away where the air is unbreathable, it’s deathly cold, water is hard to get and no life is known to exist. Certainly that is his main reason to perform weird purges to rid the government of everyone who knows what a database is or leans politically to the left of Vidkun Quisling.

On one hand I wish someone were there to “yes-and?” citizen Miller to add just one more sentence to give a semblance of a conclusion to this coathook abortion of an attempted syllogism, but on the other I would not expect a conclusion from the honored gentleperson Danny Bee of the house of Miller to be any more palatable than the inanity preceding.

Alas, I cannot be quite as kind to comrade anomie, whose curt yet vapid reply serves only to flaunt the esteemed responder’s vocabulary of rat jargon and refute the saying “brevity is the soul of wit”. Leave it to old friend of Sneer Club Niklas Boström to coin a heptasyllabic latinate compound for the concept that sometimes a thing can help you do multiple different other things. A supposed example of this phenomenon is that a machine programmed to consider making paperclips important and not programmed to consider humans existing important could consider making paperclips important and not consider humans existing important. I question whether this and other thought experiments on the linked Wikipedia page — fascinating as they are in a particular sense — are necessary or even helpful to elucidate the idea that political power could potentially be useful for furthering certain goals, possibly including interplanetary travel. Right.

I showed a one-year-old how to stack blocks into a tower and then how to knock it over. I then stacked them again and said “No! No breaking! No breaking! No breaking! Noooo!” as they knocked the tower over and giggled happily. Down the line this led to the Helvetica scenario somehow.

Lisp curmudgeons getting incorrected about AI history:

Overly power hungry statistics