Eventually we can reduce the human brain down to this. Is it ethical to use that blueprint for experiments? We’ve got to be better than this, I hope. And it has to start before we get there.

I find this deeply unethical.

So deeply unethical it’s unreal.

Yes it is. I’ve worked in senior leadership teams for years - it’s just not viable to think something like that would stay contained.

In sane countries the government has a neutral service, backed by laws securing anonymity of verification, for this kind of shit. Only in commercial, dystopian, kleptocracies does it seem reasonable to have a company doing this.

Even better: Your advancement is critical to ensure the American intelligence industry doesn’t fall behind.

I mean it’s OK - you’re not copying it, you’re using it to train an intelligence.

But if you’re going through the trouble of re-encoding you might as well re-encode to AVIF, no?

Looking at the article it seems AVIF is better ok almost every way except progressive rendering.

If you can’t see the difference between a compiler and a large language model, may I propose you read more about both and then return to this debate.

And if the entirety of your argument is a mystic “and all that stuff”, I am finding it hard to generate a convincing counter-argument.

Again, we are stuck in a semantics debate. What I call reasoning you don’t, it seems.

But all I know, as someone that has worked in software engineering for 25+ years, is that the output of whatever it does, and whatever you call it, is incredibly useful.

Saying “it just generates text” is a reflexive reaction that attempts to flatten the nuance.

All Columbus did was sail west.

All America did was throw some fuel into a tube and put Neil Armstrong on the top.

All Picasso did was to throw some paint onto a cloth.

All this PhD student did was generate text.

Surely we’ve got to have some more nuance in there. If there’s a difference between 10000 monkeys hacking on a typewriter and a human writing their doctoral thesis, the quality of their act isn’t in whether text was generated but WHAT text was generated.

Yes AI is definitely a topic that seems to have a fairly united front. I’ve worked in software engineering for 25+ years and I can see the impact AI has on our discipline. So it’s not like I’m hailing it to be an all-positive force - I just think “all it does is generate text” is a weird, flat form of criticism.

But it isn’t really. The forks rely on the majority effort of Mozilla and they would never be able to maintain Firefox on their own.

I’m just a movement generator.

Saying “it’s a text generator” cannot be the full force of your criticism, if the text it generates is incredibly useful. What could AI be on a screen if not a text generator?

Your views have got to be formed by WHAT text is generated given that AI cannot express itself through any other channel than text.

If you can give AI a deeply complex code base and ask it to find the likely cause of an obscure bug, and the solution is right, then you’ll have to acknowledge that some form of reasoning is going on, no?

And given that no other system has previously enabled this form of reasoning, it seems a shame to judge AI on semantics, rather than usefulness.

Just a crying shame Mozilla has turned into a commercial nightmare making them relatively poor custodians of the only free choice we have left.

Mozilla needs to die so Firefox can live.

The income stream from Firefox is plenty for a highly technical, deeply competent, widely dispersed team could work full time on the product using something like OpenCollective.

Instead what we get is prime SF real estate offices, “competitive” SF salaries and a commercial organisation that seeks weird and increasingly desperate income streams to justify looking like “real company”.

I want an actual non-profit governing Firefox.

For root drives (where recovery may be required) and database drives it still serves a purpose, IMHO.

We’ve been doing it for a long time. Linus is from Finland.

I’m going to get downvoted to oblivion, I’m fully aware.

There are many things I don’t know anything about. But I do know a fair bit about this area.

And with great respect to the worriers, this just will not happen.

The investment team that’s bought EA have many other “western” investments they’ve never interfered with, even though they do a great deal of things that the orthodoxy in Saudi Arabia would disagree with. The layers between “what I [claim] to believe” and “make me the most amount of money” are many and includes people from all over the world. If anyone thinks Saudi royalty will sit and make determinations about what games EA will ship they can stop worrying right now. The Saudi monarchy is worrying about two things only: As much money as possible and staying in power.

This is an investments like so many others. It will be ordered to profit-maximise - and if that requires one-upping Doom in gore, and shipping a new edition of Gay Paradise 2000 every 6 months - they will do exactly that.

This is a complete storm in a tea cup.

Lifelong fan detected!

I feel fortunate to have my defining years of youth in the 90s. Debut and Post and Homegenic by Bjorn. Violator and SoFaD, by Depeche Mode. Downward Spiral and The Fragile, by NiN. Dummy and Portishead, by Portishead. Blue Lines and Mezzanine by Massive Attack. OK Computer. Music has the right to children. Music for the Jilted Generation. And they just keep coming and coming and coming…

It really was a golden era of music.