spaduf

There's an interesting aspect of this that I have not seen mentioned yet. While this is true you are usually better off using your residential heater rather than an electric space heater because residential heaters are frequently over 100% efficient. That is, they deliver more heat for the energy expenditure than if you had converted the energy directly by redirecting ambient heat. Heat pumps are this same principle taken to the extreme.

As somebody who works in this field, I think we have already lost the fight in reserving artificial intelligence for what I would now call theoretical AI or maybe agent theory. The meaning has changed, and we are not putting that toothpaste back in the tube. Big social's algorithms are certainly AI under the new generally understood meaning.

Yes but if you want to do just want anything more advanced than putting users in a list you're out of luck.

You're absolutely right and I definitely shouldn't be making broad statements like that. Another thing I've found is that if you can stomach the effort (or do this from the get go), it's a good idea to put all your academic or professional accounts into a single list. It's nice to check into a slightly smarter feed from time to time.

In this context or generally?

I don't think this is a money making move. The previous CEO was absolutely overly focused on monetization and this move is a step away from that. I should've addressed this more explicitly in the above comment but even for the players who actively monetize, AI is a money incinerator.

Mastodon really does seem to rally around braindead takes and misinformation. The culture over there can be hard to stomach sometimes.

Tell me this is a good thing.

Mozilla has long been the most ethical player in this space (while still producing SOTA ML). All of their datasets/models are open source and usually crowdsourced. Not to mention, their existing work is primarily in improving accessibility.

ALSO, the other half of this story is that Firefox is becoming the primary focus again. Everybody's freaking out about the AI stuff but that's because they're only reading the headlines. The programs they've shut down are things like Hubs (Mozilla's metaverse platform), the VPN, and the sensitive data scrubber (which was using a third party service anyway).

Though, it's tough to pull from the headline/discussion this pivot is explicitly meant to refocus on the browser.

As far as the AI stuff goes, Mozilla has long been the most ethical player in this space. All of their datasets/models are open source and usually crowdsourced. Not to mention, their existing work is primarily in improving accessibility. It's really hard to see how this is a bad thing.

So frustrated to see how this conversation is playing out. This is exactly what people have been asking for but all anybody can seem to see is "AI" in the headline.
This pivot is about refocusing on:

• The Browser
• Privacy
• Ethical AI

This seems like a much better position for Mozilla to operate from, particularly because they've excelled at producing ethical SOTA ML for YEARS before ChatGPT. In all, this seems far more forward looking than the previous strategy of "make weird little web tools to make money maybe" and it's an absolutely massive untapped niche, that they already have the talent to tap into. If we punish the players best positioned to shift the industry standard away from extreme and exploitative data collection, we will end up in exactly the Orwellian AI hellscape that we're all so afraid of.

This is a particularly silly opinion because Lemmy is an algorithmic social media platform. It's just an algorithm that you happen to have access to documentation for. Almost certainly, any fediverse algorithm would have to work on the same principles as Lemmy (open and based on public interactions). Likes and upvotes are king. User similarity ranking is wildly inefficient on the fediverse due to its distributed nature and keyword systems are easily gamed (although some hybrid is possible).

This has always been the killer feature of the fediverse. Open non-exploitative content algorithms. So weird to see people against it for no reason.