Translation is something the LLMs are pretty good at. It makes sense to use them for it, though obviously it should be a separate product and not part of Firefox.

The rest looks completely useless to me.

Paid and freeware but either way non-free, unfortunately.

I mean it’s better than nothing I guess but that is not what I’d call “freely available.” In addition to requiring that you use their shitty online viewer, it appears to require users to sign in to an account even to do that. It’s directly admitted on the website that they make it unusable in this way specifically because they rely on the revenue from selling real access to people who need it.

🍉

I wouldn’t be willing to disable my vpn for the nyt so thanks for confirming that it wouldn’t have made a difference. It appears that they now block everyone who doesn’t let javascript freely do whatever it wants to fingerprint you or whatever. I’ll not miss them too much.

It was just bothering me this morning (not the time of day but I want ISO date format.) It’s probably this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1935895

“Judge not convinced by flimsy excuse” doesn’t really strike me as worthy of the Onion.

I’m shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren’t superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they’re not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they’ll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they’ll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn’t phrased exactly the right way they’ll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They’ll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it’s quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don’t really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren’t funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they’re almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you’ve got writer’s block or something.

The time when it would’ve seemed to everyone an unacceptable intrusion to make routine demands that travellers show their ID anywhere other than at international borders is still within living memory.

I’m mean sure they’ll still kill a few people along the way, but they’re not going to contribute as much to the downfall of all civilization as they might if they weren’t constantly revealing their utter mindlessness. Even as it is smart people can be fooled, at least temporarily, into thinking that LLMs understand things and are reliable partners in life.

This slightly diminishes my fears about the dangers of AI. If they’re obviously wrong a lot of the time, in the long run they’ll do less damage than they could by being subtly wrong and slightly biased most of the time.

Addicted to coffee? Try just a pinch of meth instead, you’ll feel better than ever in no time.

About 97% less salacious than you’d guess from the headline.

Makes sense to me. AI bullshit generators may be worse than useless for most of the things people try to do with them, but they might just be the perfect tool for rationalizing the systematic looting of formerly productive companies by private equity.

doggedly backed the invasion of Ukraine, calling it a Holy War

Yeah I don’t really give a shit about their concept of the male gender. Apparently it involves fathering many children, so that Russia doesn’t run out of soldiers for the hundred years of glorious holy war it will take to defeat NATO and save the world. If you really want to reach the ultimate heights of manliness, try wearing eye shadow, practicing embroidery, and watching Hello Kitty while remaining confidently masculine.

Nice. Unfortunately I have no use for it unless I can also move extension buttons from the toolbar to the overflow menu.

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Canada, but I too see the bsky link on ‘www’ — it’s the ‘blog’ hostname that links to twitter instead.