Eh, that’s not quite original research. There are plenty of other examples of images and sound files created for Wikipedia. A representative example isn’t research, it’s just indicating what something is.
The Wikipedia article on AI slop and generative AI has a few instances of content that’s representative to illustrate a sourced statement, as opposed to being evidence or something.
It’s similar to the various charts and animations.
Yes, but…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ADatabase_download
That’s because viewing the page uses server resources, as done API access. If you want the data you can download the database directly.
There’s hardware required to shunt the display out the USB port and since it’s not a super in demand feature they usually don’t implement it. As such the software for looking nice while doing it isn’t as developed.
But yes, it’s been in developer settings for years, and was usable if your hardware supported it.
Yes. And now it’s native in all android! Samsung helped make it!
It’s good when things get better.
Yeah, the conventional ones still draw a good chunk of power, and they’re not clean but they’re not dirty. Same as how a grocery store isn’t good for the environment but you’re not looking at them first for places to clean.
They tend to be boring, and are usually not a public thing but just something owned by a company to house their computers. The only reason I know about the ones near me is I used to work at one and people would move jobs to or from other ones. (As an aside, a datacenter is a great place to nap if you like white noise).
For a sense of scale:
This is the site of an open AI data center. The yellow square is about 1 square mile and mostly encompasses the area they plan to/have filled.
That angle shows more build out.
This photo has two normal data centers in it. The yellow square is also about 1 square mile. I’ve highlighted the data centers in red. One is to the left of the square near the middle, and the other is down from the right side near the big piles of what looks like rocks. (Spoilers: it’s rocks. They make asphalt). The sprawling complex in the upper right is a refrigerated grocery store distribution complex. The middle on the other side of the block from the asphalt is a coal power plant.
Of the things in this picture, I’m most upset about the giant freeway interchange. Coal is shit, but it’s a modern plant so it’s not belching soot, just co2, and the utility is phasing it out anyway. The grocery traffic is mostly dead except between the hours of midnight and 7am when they do restocks.
I can hear the freeway if I go outside.
I think the part you’re missing is that 1) it’s my community too 2) they’re not talking about AI data centers, or new data centers or anything like that, they’re petitioning to ban all data centers, and 3) we have multiple data centers in the city already that no one complained about until AI data centers became a thing people felt concerned about.
There’s a major difference between the 2 square mile hyper scale AI data center that requires a nuclear reactor and a full water treatment plant to cool and the 2 acre data center that’s air cooled and has no more ground pollution than any other parking lot and essentially a warehouse.
The state government has two in the city, at least, for processing electronic tax records, applications and hosting service sites. We have a few national insurance companies that need to process all the things they process. A research university, and a web hosting company round out the list of ones I know about.
This is my entire point about why sometimes it’s really necessary to point out that what someone is referring to is only a small part of what the words they’re using describe. The language being imprecise doesn’t matter until someone proposes a law outlawing chemicals, shuttering all data centers, or banning AI.
LLMs are problematic. My fancy rice maker isn’t.
I take your point. :)
It’s worth mentioning in my opinion though, because if someone were to say “we should ban chemicals” it’d be worthwhile to point out what that actually means.
I don’t actually think the broadness of the category is intentionally abused, it’s just that it’s an incredibly common thing to remove anything from the AI category that’s explicable.
I feel slightly more hanlons razor about it since there’s people in my city talking about and petitioning on the popular notion of banning all data centers from the state, and how it would be awful if s data center came here. I know what they mean, but it’s not what they’re trying to get the law to do, and our city already has six data centers I know of off the top of my head. The language drift is fine, but when it starts to conflate with policy it’s another issue.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next-chapter-anthony-enzor-demeo-new-ceo/
The root of the current discussion.
A conservative guess would be around 60 people.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi
You can click around and see the bug reports they’re working on. There are a few, to say the least.
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/releases/
This is a way to see what’s in each release. The ones on the left are major releases and tend to have bigger features, and the others tend to be bug fixes.
Web browsers start with core functionality that’s very complex. Then you tack on that they’re being used for things like banking, and managing the critical details of people’s lives. That means security galore, which is hard and constant. Then you have ad people, who are also something that’s hard to defend against.
Then there’s the constant flood of new features you have to implement to keep up with Google.
Chrome has 1,000 to 4,000 people working on it. Mozzila employs about 700 to work on firefox, with maybe 1,000 additional open source developers.
My initial guess was very wrong.
It’s less a vague umbrella and more an academic category. It just feels odd to call it vague in the same way you wouldn’t call “chemistry” vague, despite it having applications ranging from hand soap to toxic waste.
Yeah, ocr is a type of AI. The big advantage of modern techniques is that it can factor in context a bit better. It’s the same principle but a different mechanism for how you know a red hexagon with S__P on it says stop, even if the sign is dented, a letter fully fell off, it’s raining and dark.
It also means it’s sometimes wildly inaccurate, like in cases where it’s just so much more likely that it said something else. Like how on a bright sunny day, with perfect clarity, and a crisp new sign with extra good visuals, you’ll hit the breaks for a sign that’s a red hexagon that says §¥¢¶. It’s just very unlikely that that would coincidentally be on a red hexagon near the road, so it’s more likely you saw wrong and it was actually the normal thing.
You’re taking what they said a fair bit further than they actually said. They said a class a day for technology literacy, and you reacted like they advocated for nothing except advanced computing.
Teaching tech literacy is part of the basics.
You can say it should be learned on their own time, but why not say that of drawing and color theory? Math, history, civics?
Some parts of primary and secondary education are about teaching you how to live in the society you’ll be living in. Technology is part of that.
Yup. The risk of someone breaking into your house and stealing your post-it note is vastly different from someone guessing your password, and the risk changes again when it’s a post-it note on your work computer monitor.
One of the best things you can do with your critical passwords is put them on a piece of paper with no other identifying information and then put that piece of paper in your wallet. Adults in modern society are usually quite good at keeping track of and securing little sheets of paper.
I’m paranoid, so I put mine on an encrypted NFC card that I printed to look like an expired gift card to a store that went out of business. It’s got what I need to bootstrap the recovery process if I loose all my MFA tokens (I keep another copy in a small waterproof box with things like my car title. It’s labeled “important documents: do not lose” and kept unlocked so any would be thief feels inclined to open it and see it’s worthless to them rather than taking the box to figure that out somewhere else. The home copy is important because there’s vaguely plausible scenarios where I lose both my phone and wallet at the same time. )
Stealing my laptop and getting my stuff is a significantly larger risk than me leaving my computer on and unattended without locking the screen.
Passkeys are a good trend because they’re just about the only security enhancement in recent memory that increases security and usability at the same time.
Yup, that’s a good one.
Purely for discussions sake, I’d say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
No freewill or consciousness, but it’s selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances.
It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.
You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.
Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.
The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ if you’re actually interested in donating.
Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.
It’s why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don’t stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.
All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren’t simply being paid by Google.
Their CEO makes more than I think CEOs should earn in general, but the rest of their executives earn relatively normal to low salaries for their roles and the sector.
Non-profit doesn’t mean everyone works for free.
But that’s just saying that instead of using Firefox and not turning on the feature, you’ll use a less maintained version of Firefox where they didn’t enable the feature. I don’t feel like those projects have much value add in the privacy spectrum compared to Firefox, particularly when one of them was owned by an advertising company, and neither of them actually has the resources to maintain or operate a browser in isolation, which is a major concern regarding security and privacy both.
Just for more clarity: they workshoped for ideas on how to improve clarity and accessibility from some editors at an event. They did some small experiments, and they then developed a plan to trial some of them and presented the plan to a wider audience for feedback. After they got feedback they decided not to.
It’s not quite the editors pushing back on Wikipedia. Or rather, it’s not the “rebellion” people want to make it out to be.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Readers/2024_Reader_and_Donor_Experiences/Content_Discovery/Wikimania_2024,_"Written_by_AI"_How_do_editors_and_machines_collaborate_to_create_content
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Content_Discovery_Experiments/Simple_Article_Summaries
It rubs me the wrong way when the process going how it should go gets cast as controversial and dramatic. Asking the community if you should do something and listening to them is how it’s supposed to go. It’s not resistance, it’s all of them being on the same team and talking.