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Comment by sfRattan | Hacker News Reader

I've added a room to your home.

Sometimes, there's a butler in there who seems absentminded and can only remember things up to a few thousand words. He once stacked all your dishes in the refrigerator and dumped all the food into the sink.

Other times, there's a demon in there who seems hellbent on destroying the innocence of your children and ripping apart your family. He once gave your children snuff films and instructions to build a bomb.

Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.

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No, no.

> I've added a room to your home.

They’ve added a room to their home. That they let you live in, for free.

I’ll also mention that the room right next to it had all the contents you claim to take issue with.

The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).

Yes, this is why we routinely fill council homes (or public project housing) with amnesiac butlers to rearrange the residents' possessions, and also with demons for, um, reasons.

Completely reasonable things to do.

How else would we recoup our investment in the hugely expensive, unpredictable butler/demon spawning machines?

>The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).

Depends on age, and the children in question. Also, if I have power tools it's because I chose them. And neither amnesiac butlers nor stochastic demons are necessary to not starve in the way that cooking food is, so the assessments of risk and basic good sense are not comparable.

> They’ve added a room to their home. That they let you live in, for free.

They don't let you stay there for free. They let you stay there because the world's biggest advertising company pays them to.

> Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.

I mean... yeah? Do you use every feature of every piece of software you have installed?

Until the last few years, most features added to software I use haven't:

...had functionally nondeterminstic, unpredictable results in response to how I use them.

...written in long-form English text with confidence and no guarantee of factual accuracy.

...coaxed children into codependent pseudo-relationships with ML models or encouraged suicide.

AI isn't a new feature; it's a new category. And the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.

I use LLMs and diffusion style image generators... Where I understand the model I've chosen, can control it locally, and have enough tacit knowledge to double check the outputs before I go ahead with something. I don't trust Mozilla to ensure any of those things anymore. They've long since burned that credibility.

Still, just don't use them? I have no interest in AI in my browser and have had no difficulty avoiding it in Firefox.

That makes zero sense. How do you have no difficulty ? Are you going ahead and disabling like the below ? If not, then I am afraid you are hallucinating like an AI and not really "avoiding it" in Firefox. Doing the below also improves performance, memory consumption and battery life.

    about:config
    user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false); 
    user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false); 
    user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false);
    user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false); 
    user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false); 
    user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false); 
    user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
    user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false); 
    user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled", false);
    user_pref("pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload", false); 
    user_pref("pdfjs.enableGuessAltText", false);

I've done absolutely nothing to disable it other than saying "no thanks" whenever Firefox offered to turn on a feature after an update.

Maybe I’m using the wrong web browsers - mine have always had those problems (except that the pseudo-relationships were with real, horrifically bad people).

> the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.

This is such a common fallacy that I think it should be given a name. When you believe that the people who disagree with you must either be ignorant or malicious. Leaves no room for honest disagreement or discussion. Maybe the "dumb-or-evil" fallacy?

It's a specific case of the false dilemma, sure.

But, in life, when you meet enough AI evangelists, what was formally a logical fallacy becomes informally a useful, even necessary heuristic.

Perhaps; but I would argue talking to many AI evangelists is a form of selection bias. Which makes the false dichotomy conclusion reasonable given the inputs, but still inaccurate given reality.

True, it's a form of false dichotomy, but I think this specific instance is particularly interesting in that it allows the holder to dehumanise their opponent to an extent, and justify lack of discussion. It's also an incredibly common conclusion in politics after people gain a somewhat superficial understanding of both sides. I wonder if it might play a key role in social polarization.

For me the strongest arguments are the ones that can argue the opponent's side as effectively as the opponent, and then show why it's weak. And that feels entirely incompatible with a dumb-or-evil argument.

>I think this specific instance is particularly interesting in that it allows the holder to dehumanise their opponent to an extent, and justify lack of discussion.

That's a wild take and a wild leap. For my own part, I see the failure or refusal to comprehend someone else's preferences, values, or boundaries as itself a profoundly human quality, even if it's a quality I don't love, rather than one which would cause me to see someone as less human.

I will admit that, when there's enough nonsense money being thrown after a vaunted object, sensible discussion can feel pointless. Prudence goes deaf amid the din of hype.

And yes, steelmanning can be highly persuasive, but not when premises are radically different enough between two parties. It's really a more productive tool to improve your model of someone else.

It’s kinda weird, because I have the exact same feeling about people who seem to categorically reject it based on what appear to be mostly emotions.

lol

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