Walf

So early computers did have BIOS, but they loaded from wetware rather than firmware?

Oh it does that, too, with tiny little button annotations, though the sources regularly offer no support to its conclusion. It very much depends on the topic, sometimes the sources are great, other times they're or irrelevant or very poor quality. Always worth clicking through to them if you're going to even read the AI summary.

I normally use a quick search that has the `udm=web` query parameter to avoid the slop, but it seems they're putting less effort into ensuring relevant results there. Then, I'm forced to use AI mode to get to what I'm after, even if that's only a better set of keywords for a slopless search.

Volition has nothing to do with it. A breathalyser doesn't point to a person and say this is the likely drunk, so that comparison is fatuous. These identification systems do point the finger.

Only within the web page that's running it. Grammarly is often installed to the system and slurps up whatever it can, even when you haven't explicitly told it to. I think this was the article that illustrated its untrustworthiness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30470457

It's a keylogger.

Except "ye olde" was always "the olde", but for a time printing machines were produced outside of England and lacked the thorn "þ" character, so the y was used as a substitute.

Quite the non-sequitur.

It does, and I already wrote about western countries being just as guilty of invading, if not more so. None of what you wrote contradicts my point that China is actively expanding and using mainly economic tactics to do it.

You don't have to drop bombs to invade. If you think China's not invading with its economic policies and activity alone, you're not paying attention. I'm in no way saying western nations are not guilty of the same and worse behaviours (look at how many legitimate governments have been toppled and sanctioned for daring to go against the USA), but China is not friendly.

Not so wild when you realise that it's not the 1930s, and Japan isn't being led by an imperialist & expansionist regime. I'm not denying any past aggression from Japan, my grandparents fought them, but the situation is quite different now.

Any protest from China is just painting themselves as being in a defensive position, whilst they make claims over the oceans and territories that the international community disagrees with. Very much not defensive acts.

Japan is never going to voluntarily attack China. Even if there was a desire to, they know they could not win. Any military build up by the former is due to fear of the latter.

It wouldn't be a bad option to have. The calls app has only two display settings.

Multiple calls can't all have the same time and duration.

>not knowing what it even looks like

Clearly.

>There's only a handful of critical details in a call history

And they're all there: profile pic, contact name, indicators that show incoming/outgoing + missed/connected, which SIM, a redial button, how long ago (which after about a week shows the date), Tapping the middle expands the row (no obstructive pop-up) to show Block, Message, & Details buttons.

The reason it has 'human times' is because multiple calls with the same contact are grouped, so a precise time doesn't always make sense. Tapping the Details will show all calls in that group, whether it's one or seven, with their full dates, times, durations, and further options. It's never been a difficult UX.

The comment and username in isolation probably wouldn't have elicited that response from me. In combination, I took you for a delusional ultra-fan.

I think anyone who genuinely thinks AI is a wonderful thing for everyone probably enjoys the privilege of its use, reducing their own workload, without it (yet) affecting their employment, or their local environment, and possibly even lacks the empathy to comprehend negative affects on others. Obviously I was mistaken for thinking you were as such.

Putting words in others' mouths doesn't give credence to your points, the only homophobia here is coming from you. Straw men are not your friends.

Sociopathy in the context of running a powerful organisation is entirely relevant because making decisions that affect many, without really caring about the consequences for them, is generally regarded as a bad thing.

I hope so.

Freedom is slavery!

AI owned by a few companies is more likely to put the majority right back to serfdom. You're a privileged fool to believe that freedom is the likely outcome of the current stampede.

With a username that appears to cheer for a sociopath¹, I doubt reason will convince you.

¹ https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sources-sam-alt...

Unless one wants interoperability with other people who use Apple and "Samsung" (because they don't know the word Android refers to an OS). It's a de facto standard now, whether you like it or not.

Indeed. I don't use most of the stock AOSP apps on Graphene because the UI is so awful, but there are decent alternatives so it hasn't been a bother. I'm looking forward to seeing their work.

'Murrican flagged.

I'd rather see AI being used to generate new games for old platforms (console emulators) than these faux-retro things with mixels, inconsistent graphics styles (some blocky bits, some curves), and rotation of squares.

Constraining the canvas to a low-res pixel grid would be an instant improvement. The recent post https://airport.apunen.com/ does a decent job of this but it, too, has an odd mix of modern aircraft sound fx and vintage biplane graphics. It doesn't feel very retro because it's full 3D rather than limited 2D sprites of a 3D scene.

I'm on Linux, too. Perhaps because I use Mozilla's deb repo?

Above the "safe paws" screen I get a "Welcome to Firefox" dialogue (in-browser not a system window) where it asks to agree to terms, the bottom of that allows disabling telemetry before continuing. Those screens you list as individual are all part of the welcome flow in a single tab, and you can just close that without doing any of it, and start browsing.

I'm always baffled by vitriol like this. The alternatives you mention wouldn't even exist without Firefox, and what bloody swamp? What forced extensions?

I just started a two fresh profiles to test your claim (one in Firefox, one in Dev Edition), the opt-out for telemetry is present in the very first dialogue box and costs 2 clicks. There's a daily usage ping that's still on, and I'm happy to keep it on, because I believe that usage stat is valuable. It's easily disabled.

There are zero extensions by default, and one video decoding plugin. There is a skippable 'recommended add-ons' step on first run, so skip it if you want, easy.

The AI controls are all set to Available but none are automatically used, one must intentionally do so, at which point one is reminded these can be entirely disabled. Even opening the AI chat sidebar doesn't actually connect to a bot, it offers a list of bots, beneath which is a Close button, though that's not the only way to close it.

If you prefer Waterfox, great, you're not the primary target demographic for Firefox, but you can still use it without all the pain you complain of.

That's not ever how it should be done, and the average person certainly won't work around that.

However, I'm fine with telling Mozilla once per install that I'm not interested in using the generative AI, or summaries, etc. On-device translation is quite useful.

Your response sure looks AI-generated.

I already did ;)

Tried Tidal? The one gripe I have with it is no remote control, as in using phone to change what's currently playing on the device connected to my sound system, without it thinking I want to start playing on my phone.

Apple Music pays artists better, too.

Fuck Spotify. Even if you don't care about the ethics of Daniel Ek's investments, the platform itself is crap. One of the lowest paying to artists, not paying at all unless they hit a threshold, and the catalogue is filling up with AI slop, which they push on users via 'radio' and 'mix' playlists, so they can pay even less royalties. No, thanks.