allisoni love living in the future, in which i have to hold my web browser very gingerly so it doesn't replace the thing i'm reading with the carbon farts of a stochastic white supremacy machine https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/shake-to-summarize/
"get bent, firefox product team"—ancient proverb
John Francis 🇨🇦🦫🍁💪⬆️@aparrish found carved a yard deep into the living rock...
bigblen@johnefrancis @aparrish not carved, worn by thousands of feet walking the same path
creepin' and weepin'@aparrish Hmm but I still need to read the summary, so we've really only kicked the can down the road in terms of me needing to think or do things
@andy firefox introduces new "slam your phone on your head repeatedly until you fall unconcious" feature
Richard Hendricks
Tyler Smith@aparrish The first example being a recipe is lovely. After decades of SEO shenanigans have forced authors to bury their recipes in inane stories about their bucolic childhoods, we solve the problem by getting an AI to strip that all away and, hopefully, present the recipe that was all they wanted to post in the first place.
Ember is so tired of people. 
@plantarum @aparrish with some fun additions! like:
- steps completely made up!
- ingredients that do not belong
- amounts and ratios that make no sense!
- a dash of something a redditor shitposted about 10 years ago, just for the extra danger!
Jürgen Haslauer"you have hit the free plan limit."
shake again in 4 hours.
Inga stands with 🇺🇦 🇵🇸@Ember @plantarum @aparrish SEO + ad industry + LLMs is machine that turns recipes of pizza into recipes of pizza with glue
AndThisIsMrsPeacock 🏳🌈@IngaLovinde @Ember @plantarum @aparrish Recipes for pizza with glue that also try to explain why Black people shouldn't be allowed to vote.
Carey@plantarum @aparrish This particular example isn’t just SEO shenanigans, it’s also copyright shenanigans, since recipes don’t get copyright protection but life stories do.
Enola Knezevic
Western Infidels@plantarum @aparrish The endgame will be when the search engine AI just offers up the recipe summary you're after immediately, and we won't have to bother visiting the recipe sites at all.
The recipe sites, having jumped through all those stupid hoops to please the search engines, will then wither on the vine, betrayed again and killed for good, at long last.
All value extracted, in the name of the CEO and the shareholders, forever and ever amen.
[Click here to subscribe to Google Cooking for 9.99 per month]
Josh Sutphin@aparrish They're just going to keep forcibly injecting this crap into our lives until they've eroded all concept of a shared reality, aren't they
Morgan ⚧️@joshsutphin @aparrish that's the goal. It's our job to stop them
Que
doephin@aparrish "The feature works on webpages with fewer than 5,000 words"
...so it only summarizes things that are short, too. Double useless
Melliferous Oak
Nicolas Évrard@aparrish are we already the first of April ?
@nicoe it's the tech industry in 2025, every day is april 1st
TribeofMa@aparrish 😶🙄 oh my
katzenbergerUsually, I dip my phone into the toilet (before flushing), whenever I want this outcome.
Which is: Never.
Why Not Zoidberg? 🦑@aparrish Again: Mozilla truly has never understood why people use their browser.
@WhyNotZoidberg oh i think they understand why, they just hate the reason
Paco Hope@aparrish “We surveyed our users to find out what they wanted. Then we did this, instead.”
Sluether 
@aparrish “and you can turn the feature on or off in settings anytime”
I AM BANKSY ☕ / 🗑🔥@aparrish At the bottom, that "Let us know what you think once you give it a try." is tempting.
PunnO)))
postie 📗
D. G. MarshallLike the radio in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where you could conveniently change stations with the smallest gesture, so you had to stay totally immobile if you wanted to actually listen to the station you wanted.
ekari@davidtheeviloverlord @aparrish Came in looking for this, thanks 😊
Mike J👹🐀 🤘🏻@aparrish Can we summon some common sense by shaking or tapping a product manager?
Hisham@aparrish beyond all of the intrinsic horror of this which you already mentioned, there's the idiocy: it only works on pages that are _fewer_ than 5,000 words long. A "summarization" "feature" that doesn't work on... long text
LR@aparrish shaking every wrbsite until it just says mostly harmless
ipod squirrel 🎧🐿️@aparrish sorry this is perhaps a bit too lewd but doesn't this mean one needs to make a wanking motion to get the "ai" summary?! huh.. this is almost poetry
(for who doesn't know the shake gesture in iphone is normally for undo and not a gentle sway like in that video, it's a vigorous up and down thing)
KanaMaunaJoy. Setting aside the AI nonsense, this reminds me of the mobile-versions of news websites from 20 years ago. If you were on an early mobile phone, even Palm Pilots which had plenty of screen space, oftentimes all you get was a useless summary that skipped important details.
Kinky Kobolds@aparrish
Why do they have such a hard on for AI when the absence of AI features is a selling point to many of those willing to consider an alternative browser?
Why do they have such a hard on for AI when the absence of AI features is a selling point to many of those willing to consider an alternative browser?
Vincent Sparks 🔜 Furlingame@KinkyKobolds @aparrish because "AI is the future" and they want to be the ones to do it """ethically""" and until google miraculously got out of paying its antitrust lawsuit it looked like their biggest source of revenue was about to go up in smoke so they had to do something
@KinkyKobolds this is the best explanation i've read for why anyone who is monetarily backed by the tech industry is feeling pressured to include generative models in everything https://gauthierroussilhe.com/en/articles/how-to-use-computing-power-faster
Ozzie D, NP-hard 
@aparrish @KinkyKobolds that was a really helpful commentary, thanks. I've really struggled to understand how Mozilla benefits from pushing genAI on its user base.
MarjorieR@ozdreaming @aparrish @KinkyKobolds Having read the entire article (not an LLM's summary!) I still fail to see what the advantage to Mozilla, in particular, is from pushing AI (or at least LLM use) into its browser when its USP could be that it is free from AI, and surely growing Firefox should be an objective?
Are there financial rewards to the C suite from this, or have they just frunk the kool-aid? As far as I can see it certainly doesn't align with the interests of this user.
Are there financial rewards to the C suite from this, or have they just frunk the kool-aid? As far as I can see it certainly doesn't align with the interests of this user.
@marjolica @ozdreaming @KinkyKobolds Mozilla gets a ton of its money from Google and keeping that money flowing has to be a big (implicit and explicit) influencing factor on product development. i imagine search partners and big name donors are much more inclined to put money into organizations that are aligned with making their line go up. that's just my guess though 🤷🏻♀️
Kevin Granade@ozdreaming @aparrish @KinkyKobolds they don't, they are being pressured to include it, how that happens is external to the analysis presented here.
Xdej@aparrish
I give here an excerpt:
"• If [AI] model providers make inference much more efficient, then they will not use enough computing power to consume all that is brought to market by the semiconductor industry. If this happens, it will trigger a downward cycle in this industry, significantly slowing down the production of new hardware and possibly having significant global economic and financial repercussions.
..."
1/3
@aparrish
"...
• If model providers do not make their inference processes more efficient, they will not be able to structurally reduce their marginal costs and, failing to achieve the desired profitability, will resort to the usual means (advertising, tiered subscriptions), which will slow down adoption. ..."
2/3
@aparrish
"... If adoption slows down, model providers will struggle to achieve profitability (with the exception of those with captive markets), their demand for computing power will weaken, and the semiconductor industry will produce excess capacity and enter a downward cycle, taking part of the AI industry with it.
-> So, the central issue linking today’s semiconductor industry and genAI model providers is how to define how much efficiency gains are enough."
3/3
s0 Is Not A Sysadmin@aparrish oh my god this is the best article I’ve read on AI economics ever. Thank you
(LB) seriously everyone this is the best article on the economics of the tech industry & AI I’ve ever read. It is so worth the read.
Timothée Goguely
AndrocatI recently saw this article in Wired about a research team using some sort of LLM nonsense to generate research ideas.
And it was painfully obvious (to me, at least) that what they had gotten from the "tool" was just abject random garbage.
And that they had sort of squinted at it to "find" something they wanted to do anyway, and then they praised it, and said "Wow, such a far-fetched idea, we really couldn't have done it without [LLM nonsense]"
A sort of modern prostitution.
v@aparrish @KinkyKobolds oh this is interesting. i also see a future where the increase in performance of models stalls out, while the efficiency of the models continues to increase - this would allow local models to be used, which eliminates the marginal costs of providing inference in many cases.
@v @KinkyKobolds sshhhhh, you'll crash the economy with that kind of talk
Chronocide@aparrish @KinkyKobolds It's really tragic to read that - essentially - being wasteful creates scarecity which in turn creates demand. Infinite growth at any cost...
Jason Robinson 🐍 🍻 🚴@[email protected] Wait, this is not from the Onion?
@[email protected] it's like tech companies are trying to compete with politicians on making comedy obsolete