having seen the horror from a distance: VNC, a fuckton of clicking, occasionally mouse and keyboard macros, possibly a networked KVM (itself not a bad idea at all for emergency access to hardware too commodity or misdesigned to have a sensible serial console, but we’re talking day to day here), and a massive chip on their shoulder about being forced off their beloved Windows Server 2003 and onto Linux

according to Mozilla’s track record, they’re making it a core feature so it’s impossible to remove without a custom fork, and they’ll relentlessly goad the user into enabling it via ads pushed with every update. implementing it as a core feature also means they can easily infect the search bar and other core functionality with this horseshit

we’ve also only got mozilla’s word that this shit can be disabled once it’s in production Firefox at all, and we’ve seen, repeatedly, how Mozilla’s AI team does with consent — they use LLMs and marketing tactics to fabricate it

oh hell. we’re beating all my initial survivability projections by a lot

do we throw an instance birthday party thread? will there be cocktails? will the deployment get mopey if I don’t buy it more disk space? (yes, eventually)

no surprises here, Mozilla’s earlier stated goal of focusing on local, accessibility-oriented AI was just entryism to try to mask their real, fucking obvious goal of shoving integrations with every AI vendor into Firefox:

Whether it’s a local or a cloud-based model, if you want to use AI, we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs. With that in mind, this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment offering access to preferred AI services in Nightly for improved productivity as you browse. Instead of juggling between tabs or apps for assistance, those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge, all without leaving their current web page.

Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral, but we will continue adding AI services that meet our standards for quality and user experience.

I’m now taking bets on which of these vendors will pay the most to be the default in the enabled-by-default production version of this feature

this is making me seriously consider donating to Servo, the last shred of the spirit and goals of a good, modernized Firefox-style browser remaining, which apparently operates on a tiny budget (and with a whole army of reply guys waiting to point out they might receive grants which, cool? they still need fucking donations to do this shit and I’d rather give it to them than Mozilla or any other assholes making things actively worse)

thinking back to when I first switched to Mozilla during the MSIE 7-8 days and actually started having a good time on the web, daily driving Servo might not be an awful move once Firefox gets to its next level of enshittification. back then, Firefox (once it changed its name) was incredibly stable and quick compared with everything else, and generally sites that wouldn’t render right were either ad-laden horseshit I didn’t need, or were intentionally broken on non-IE and usually fixable with a plugin. now doesn’t that sound familiar?

fucking amazing. like, I shouldn’t be surprised they deployed a bunch of embedded devices without a sensible way to rotate keys OTA, but it’s always fun to watch a circus act

we have internal confirmation that the rabbit team is aware of this leaking of api keys and have chosen to ignore it. the api keys continue to be valid as of writing.

but of course. rabbit’s done pretending they give a fuck now that their shit flopped (not that they gave much of a fuck to begin with)

The silly stock prices are bets on AI going up forever. But bubbles pop — and the shine has been coming off AI. We estimated that the present AI hype would have two years of desperate venture capital funding — but AI industry peons we spoke to earlier this year gave the VC money only until about the end of 2024.

god that’s not even a particularly long bubble, though I feel like the short expected duration of this one goes hand in hand with how much non-tech people hate AI now — it took a few years of well-thought-out criticism for crypto to go from almost universally hyped to the shit you warn your grandma to not waste money on

while I am rooting for it to happen, it feels like the tech industry’s earned a particularly hard crash this time, and it’s the nature of the fucked up beast that it’ll impact tech workers like you and me more than it’ll ever affect Huang or Altman or anyone else responsible for it. hopefully we can all brace appropriately for a thoroughly miserable time.