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There are some things it would be nice to have a brain in a jar to do for me.

I do not, however, want that jar sitting in an Amazon-owned server room somewhere, where they can modify the jar to change how the brain works.

Take back your brain-in-a-jars from big tech! /j

Ask the lawmakers who wrote the laws with vague language, because according to them, that kind of activity could be considered a sale.

As a more specific example that is more one-sided, but still not technically a “sale,” Mozilla has sponsored links on the New Tab page. (they can be disabled of course)

These links are provided by a third-party, relatively privacy protecting ad marketplace. Your browser downloads a list of links from them if you have sponsored links turned on, and no data is actually sent to their service about you. If you click a sponsored link, a request is sent using a protocol that anonymizes your identity, that tells them the link was clicked. That’s it, no other data about your identity, browser, etc.

This generates revenue for Mozilla that isn’t reliant on Google’s subsidies, that doesn’t actually sell user data. Under these laws, that would be classified as a sale of user data, since Mozilla technically transferred data from your device (that you clicked the sponsored link) for a benefit. (financial compensation)

However, I doubt anyone would call that feature “selling user data.” But, because the law could do so, they have to clarify that in their terms, otherwise someone could sue them saying “you sold my data” when all they did was send a small packet to a server saying that some user, somewhere clicked the sponsored link.

Some jurisdictions classify “sale” as broadly as “transfer of data to any other company, for a ‘benefit’ of any kind” Benefit could even be non-monetary in terms of money being transferred for the data, it could be something as broadly as “the browser generally improving using that data and thus being more likely to generate revenue.”

To avoid frivolous lawsuits, Mozilla had to update their terms to clarify this in order to keep up with newer laws.

How the fuck do we fix this?

The primary issue is twofold:

1. Heavily biased information and restrictive media diets
2. Democrat Inaction

If you try viewing even a tiny amount of right leaning content on a fresh social media account on any platform, you’ll see the type of content that gets perpetuated. People simply become indoctrinated by content recommendations that are practically incapable of showing the other side, not to mention that most mainstream media is entirely corporately captured.

The fact that the Democrats were slow to release official policy for Harris’s campaign, indeterminate on Gaza, and had (or really, still have) a very “this is fine, you’re just overreacting, but sure we’ll fix a few things” attitude towards political messaging, only helped Republicans, because it led a lot of people to just vote for the party that promised the most, and that was the Republicans. All the wars would be over, things would be cheaper, all the “bad” people wouldn’t be here anymore, etc.

To a normal person with very little media literacy, those promises sound downright amazing.

I personally think we fix this by at least starting with messaging, since that’s what actually leads most people to make a decision on who to vote for. There were literally people deciding on election night who they wanted to vote for, so messaging is highly important.

The left needs to speak to the immediately visible, material needs of the working people directly. While it’s important to fight against the right on culture war issues to prevent the ceding of ground on things like civil rights and discrimination, I think a lot of left leaning messaging focuses too heavily on that, and as a result, it can seem to right-inclined people that the left has no economic policy. That needs to change.

See: Bernie Sanders, and how he very consistently addresses specific economic issues people face, and has broader support on the right compared to any democratic congressperson. Hell, even JD Vance said Bernie was one of the people he least disliked on the left, and Bernie’s further left than the Democrats. Populist, economic disparity focused, anti-billionaire, pro-worker sentiment is how you change ordinary people’s minds in the current media economy.

As an individual, the most you’ll likely be able to do in this respect is going to be volunteering for phone banking efforts, donating money to left leaning charities focused on reducing economic inequality, and generally bringing these kinds of talking points up in general political discussion with others.

There’s something else that’s commonly overlooked though, and that’s local policy. Think of a city’s “town hall” type meetings that accept public comment. How many people in that city are actually regularly attending a town hall meeting? Think of how few people it really is during a particularly contentious proposal. Now imagine what it’s like when it comes to something like “housing and urban development: reducing the rate of homelessness - meeting no. 57” Almost nobody. Get yourself and a few friends down to your local relevant policy meetings, make even a little noise, and the amount of change you can make as a result can be drastic compared to the actual % of the city’s population you make up.

Pushing for things like ranked-choice voting in local elections can also be very viable, since it’s proven that tends to push voters further left, on average, and it also adds some extra competition that can spur a party like the Democrats into actual meaningful action.

If nukes didn’t exist, there would potentially be more wars, and thus more death.

Nukes enable larger amounts of death. They increase the possible death, while also increasing the incentive to do a war, to prevent that death. In a world with no nukes, the threat and preventative force of less deadly weapons would simply match each other, just as they currently do with nukes, and have the same effect on disincentivizing war.

We have already automated essentially everything else, and yet people work more than ever.

Oh no we have not. See:

• Every single service job that relies on human experience/interaction (robotic replacements are still only ever used as gimmicks that attract customers for that fact, but not as a continual experience in broader society, precisely because we value human connection)
• Any work environment with arbitrary non-planned variables too far outside the scope of a robot’s capabilities
• Most creative works related jobs (AI generated works are often shunned by the masses because they feel inhuman and more sterile than human made works, at least on average)

Not to mention that when we automate something, and a job goes away because of that, that doesn’t mean there’s no new work that gets created as a result. Sure, when a machine replaces a human worker in a factory, that job goes away, but then who repairs and maintains the machine, checks that it’s doing what’s required of it, etc? Thus, more jobs shift to management style roles.

Your defensiveness speaks volumes.

You’re defensive over believing AI will actually make humans obsolete, that must mean you’re actually unable to stomach the reality that you’ll have to keep working the rest of your life. Your defensiveness speaks volumes. /s

Seriously, I welcome automation and the reduction in the amount of labor human beings have to engage in so that people are free to engage in their own interests outside of producing material goods for society. A future where work is entirely optional because we’ve simply eliminated the need to work to survive is great to me.

An ever more powerful nucleus of mechanization that has resulted in the most devastating wars and the most widespread suffering in all of human history. Genocides, chattel slavery, famine, biochemical and nuclear weapons; mass extinction and the imminent destruction of the very planet on which we live.

Ah yes, the printing press, car, and computer, the cause of all genocides. /s

Seriously man, do you not understand that people will just do bad things regardless of if a given job/task is automated?

By the way, your logic literally has no end here. The printing press, car, etc, is just an arbitrary starting point. There’s nothing about these inventions that’s inherently the starting point for any other consequences. This argument quite literally goes all the way back to the development of fire.

Fire brought the ability to burn people to death. Guess we should never have used fire for anything because it could possibly lead to something bad on a broader societal scale, maybe, in some minute way, that in no way outweighs the benefits!

Sweet summer child. Making human work obsolete makes human beings obsolete. I envy your naivety.

Were you ever a kid? Y’know, the people across nearly every society on this planet that don’t get jobs for years, and have little to no responsibilities, yet are provided for entirely outside of their own will and work ethic? Yet I have a sneaking suspicion you don’t believe that children are obsolete because they don’t do work.

The assumption that work is what gives humans their value is a complete and utter myth that only serves capitalists who want to convince you that it’s good to spend most of your time doing labor, actually.

But nuclear weapons have only been used twice in 80 years for military purposes. They have arguably prevented more deaths than they have caused.

Nukes only “prevent” deaths by saying they’ll cause drastically large numbers of deaths otherwise. If the nukes didn’t exist, there wouldn’t then be the threat of death from the nukes, which is being prevented by more people having the nukes.

If anything, your reaction is a defense mechanism because you can’t bear to stomach the potential consequences of AI.

“AI” is just more modern machine learning techniques that we’ve had for decades. Most implementations of it today are things that nobody actually wants, producing worse quality outputs than that of a human. Maybe it will automate some jobs, sure, that can happen. Just like how tons of automation historically has just pushed people from direct labor to management of machine labor.

Heck, if “AI” automated most of the work people did and put us out of a job, that would just accelerate our progress towards pushing for UBI/or an era of superabundance, which I’d welcome with open arms. It’s a lot easier to convince people that centralized ownership of wealth and resources makes no sense if goods can be produced automatically by machines for free.

But sure, seeing matrix multiplication causing statistically probable sentences to be formed really has me unable to stomach the potential consequences. /s

One could have easily reacted the same way to the invention of the printing press, or the automobile, or the analog computer. They all wasted a lot of energy for limited benefit, at first. But if the technology develops enough, it can destroy everything that we hold dear.

And what did the printing press, automobile, and analog computer bring?

A rapid advancement in the spread of information and local news, faster individualized transport that later contributed to additional developments to rail and bus transit solutions, and software solutions that can massively reduce workloads while accelerating human progress.

And all of those things either raised the standard of living without causing equivalent harm from job loss, or actively created substantially more jobs.

Human beings engineering their own obsolescence while cavalierly disregarding the potential consequences. A tale as old as time

Make human work obsolete so we can do what we care about and hang out with people we like instead of spending our days doing labor to produce goods we rely on? Sign me up.

AI is quite possibly a more catastrophic technological development than nuclear weapons.

I wouldn’t go that far. A technology that wastes a lot of energy and creates a lot of bad quality content isn’t the same as a bomb that directly kills millions.

It’s two things:

1. Sidebar you can open from the hamburger menu that is basically just a tiny chat UI
2. Right click to paste the selected text into the sidebar

If you don’t want it, they don’t seem to be pushing it any further than that. Just don’t click the option in the menus and you’ll be fine. (I believe you can also fully disable the option from appearing in settings too)

I agree to a point, but I look at this similar to how I’d view any feature in a browser. Sometimes there are features added that I don’t use, and thus, I simply won’t use them.

This would be a problem for me if it was an “assistant” that automatically popped up over pages I was on to offer “help,” but it’s not. It’s just a sidebar you can click a button in the menu to pop out, or you can never click that button and you’ll never have to look at it.

It’s not a feature that auto-enables in a way that actually starts sending data to any AI company, it’s just an optional interface, that you have to click a specific button to open, that can then interface with a given AI model if you choose to use it. If you don’t want to use it, then you ideally won’t even see it open during your use of Firefox.

The actual addition to the terms is essentially this:

1. If you choose to use the optional AI chatbot sidebar feature, you’re subject to the ToS and Privacy Policy of the provider you use, just as if you’d gone to their site and used it directly. This is obvious.
2. Mozilla will collect light data on usage, such as how frequently people use the feature overall, and how long the strings of text are that are being pasted in. That’s basically it.

The way this article describes it as “cushy caveats” is completely misleading. It’s quite literally just “If you use a feature that integrates with third party services, you’re relying on and providing data to those services, also we want to know if the feature is actually being used and how much.”