That’s nearly every company making image generation AI right now. Stealing from creators is all the rage, and I’ve yet to see a reasonable defense of this by AI users.

Apparently the dump doesn’t include media, though there’s ongoing discussion within wikimedia about changing that. It also seems likely to me that AI scrapers don’t care about externalizing costs onto others if it might mean a competitive advantage (e.g. most recent data, not having to spend time and resources developing dedicated ingestion systems for specific sites).

I want to stress this: it’s not that “tech bros” are just stupid—even though a lot of them are revoltingly unappreciative of the giants whose sholders they stand on—it’s that they don’t care.

No one who uses Mozilla software wants more cloud shit or online services from Mozilla.

I don’t think that’s unanimous. I’d like to use Firefox Relay, myself, and I’m willing to give thundermail a chance.

Used to think I’d go full Proton eventually, but leaning more towards a diverse set of service providers, nowadays. It’s also my hope that these services allow Mozilla to depend less on companies like Google, and more on the users they ought to serve, which would be healthier for the org and better for users.

Yes, sort of. Thundermail addresses, apparently, or bring your own. From the linked article you’re commenting on:

Users can send and receive email using new Thundermail accounts they sign up for. The service will also allow using your own custom domain (e.g. your.name@yourdomain.com).

I should donate again. As someone who still depends on gmail, I keep forgetting how annoying it was to get ads every time I refreshed my inbox, before I switched to their app. Glad things seem to be working out.

If they’re user funded, their incentives are fundamentally different from Google’s. Even thinking as a business, it makes no sense to enshittify the way Google does. It’s a different choice, even if it’s not the choice you wanted.

They said it will be opt-in and are trying to make it local-first. Their provider(?) apparently allows fallback to nvidia cloud compute when the hardware can’t handle it.

I’m not using AI to write my fucking emails, regardless. Just wanted to let people know.

p.s. Sorry, I’m dumb, skipped over quote in parent comment. Point is, there’s more to the service than optional AI bullshit, and you shouldn’t have to disable it.

I’ve seen news that tumblr has changed/is changing, and they’re even implementing some form of activitypub (Fediverse) integration. I don’t have stakes here, just curious: does that change your position any, as an ex-user now on fedi?

Might be nicer if they just didn’t care.

Check the comment section for the video version of this article by Niccolò, or the comment section of the post on r/browsers, or the replies whenever these issues are mentioned on Twitter, and so on, and you’ll find a bunch of brave people saying stuff like:

you unintentionally just made me like brave over firefox. now i can switch to a chromium based browser and not even feel bad about it

Yes i am installing Brave after this advertisment!

Thanks to this video I deleted Brave then redownloaded it

These were taken directly from the video. They’re on the mild side. Throw in also some “stop inserting politics (other than mine) into tech” comments, and a few homophobes not even trying to hide it. Rather than not caring, many of them like it a lot, especially the right-wing politics.

I don’t think every Brave user is a cunt, but fucking hell, are loud cunts seemingly attracted to Brave.

To folks bothered by this: know that the lead developer of Ladybird is a big fan of Brendan Eich.

I think there was a similar idea in the USA with the COPIED Act, but I haven’t heard about it since.

:( sorry to hear that. Out of curiosity, what app/UI are you using?

Not sure what I expected. For the equally curious with no foresight:

that means everyone who disagrees on that point is arguing in bad faith

It doesn’t, that’s not my point. Bad faith implies they’re lying despite knowing better, which isn’t what I described. I never claimed bad faith, I said they’re factually wrong in this instance, and that their discourse is harmful regardless of their beliefs.

Just as not all anti-vaxers argue in bad faith, but are wrong nonetheless. Like many other groups who honestly and earnestly defend(ed) everything from racial segregation to genocide. I’m not saying these groups and the harm they cause are equivalent—this should be obvious, but I’m saying it anyway.

Everyone was wrong about something at one point.

When one being wrong hurts innocent people, something has to be done. I expect folks in aforementioned groups to stop being wrong about those things at some point. Otherwise, it’s up to the rest of us to act to protect the victims, not the moral standing of the aggressors because they’re sincere.

This attitude of “only one side follows facts and it just happens to be mine” is so amnesic, you never were always on the right side.

That’s a gross misrepresentation of my position, which I hope is born of misunderstanding or lack of knowledge on the topic. I tried to clear up any misunderstandings. If you don’t think they’re wrong or causing harm, I’m willing to have a conversation about this to explain it, if you want.

The problem isn’t opposition. It’s spreading misinformation, framing critics as luddites, refusing to acknowledge their misunderstandings about the relevant technologies and how they impact others. There’s no “two sides” to it when one of the sides thinks 2 + 2 is 5.

If your goal is avoiding GenAI because you’re allergic to it, sure, but when the goal is to demonstrate support for creators over rich companies exploiting them, it’s a start. Being imperfect doesn’t make it useless.

Recently, a thread cropped up about indie devs putting “No GenAI used” stamps in their pages, and the amount of people questioning the value of the initiative or outright criticizing it is absurd.

People saying disingenuous things like “It’s just another tool, I didn’t hear anyone complaining about the brush on photoshop”, and “games already used AI, are you also against procedural generation?” or the ridiculous “I need AI to make things. Why are you all against me learning and growing as a person?”

There is a vocal, often severely technically-uninformed crowd that strongly likes GenAI, doesn’t care about and refuses to understand the harm it causes, and needs everyone to be like them so they can stop receiving backlash for contributing to creator exploitation.

And why does it fall on the consumers and workers to figure out how to not exploit people, instead of the companies currently doing it?

I remain skeptical of using solely LLMs for this, but it might be relevant: DARPA is looking into their usage for C to Rust translation. See the TRACTOR program.

That can be AI depending on how broad your definition is, but it’s not GenAI, which is the main concern here.

These same discussion happened with photoshop and “brush tools” why are those acceptable to make it less labor intensive, but this isn’t?

You’re missing the point. “This makes things easier” isn’t the problem, it’s more along the lines of “this is only possible by stealing the works of countless people, it will attempt to obviate their jobs, and make billionaires even richer.” People aren’t mad you want to work less, they’re mad you’ll make things worse, and won’t even bother to grasp how.

It’s more hypocrisy over purism, as you’ve so nicely pointed out.

Comparing GenAI to brush tools is extremely disingenuous, talk about hypocrisy.