Just want to raise up the design of this “AI kill switch” in Firefox, and say how much I like it: it’s a top-level preference, and the design and content are both *very* clear in communicating the different levels at which you’re making decisions.
I would *love* to see more product companies roll out something like this for their en-LLM’d features.
@beep #GitHub really took the biscuit—this is just wild and deceptive beyond any morale:
– They intentionally rolled out #Copilot for general "availability" on Christmas Eve(!) 2024, to be able to maliciously reply to all complaints with "sorry, our devs have gone home for the holidays. There's nothing, we can do. You gotta understand this. Leave them and their families their celebrations and recreational time"
1/
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/147437#discussioncomment-11870995
– Furthermore, they had put a disabled(!) "Disable" button into the #AI settings, so that they could claim "what are you looking for? It's right there!". After complaints filled their inboxes, the deviously cooked up a "hide" button, which, semantically is not the same as "disable" and refused to comment on that gaslighting attempt. Because, if they did, they would have had to admit that they had no intention of giving their users any choice whatsoever
2/
– On top of that, they censored criticism by marking all of it as spam so people wouldn't stumble upon opposition
But this is unfortunately not surprising at all as GitHub was demoted to a sub company of Copilot at #Microsoft and the then CEO said that people should "embrace AI or leave"
3/3
Ethan Marcotte
Zuri (he/him) ❌️👑 🕐 CET