Mastodawn

Google Mail / "GMail" has no fewer than nine settings for "Smart Features and Personalization", e.g., Gemini. I have these all turned off in order to prevent Gemini ingesting my emails. To do this, you now have to opt out of benign machine-learning or even pattern-matching-based features, like sorting promotional emails from regular ones or spellcheck.

Despite this, as of today, Google is offering a Gemini smart compose feature on all my emails, despite me having turned off smart compose.

Related, consider the Android "Messages" app. This has checkbox settings for "Smart Reply"; two additional checkboxes for "suggestions" of stickers and "actions"; and a fourth checkbox, "Gemini in Messages", for explicitly turning off Gemini. I have turned off all of these. Despite this, this week I discovered that if I long-press or open ANY image in Messages, there are two buttons, "Remix" and "Create", which Google's documentation explicitly says network-sends the image to, quote, "Gemini".

Now one *assumes* these buttons don't activate unless pressed, but there's a problem. First, the checkbox to disable "Gemini" in Messages itself only turned off an activate-on-select button. Second, on a phone— where "scroll" and "tap" are both taps— accidental activation of buttons is a part of life.

This happens to me again and again, with Google, with Copilot in VS Code, with everything. A company adds an "AI"-branded feature with an off switch, you turn it off, they later enable it anyway.

The repeated lesson here is that a company, organization, computer program, or person who uses the privacy, environmental, and trust disaster sold as "generative AI" for one thing, can no longer be trusted for any thing. If it is tolerated for one thing, it will eventually be used for all things. If a program adds an optional "AI"-branded feature you *have* to stop using that program completely, because if (when) the company feels the use metrics are too low they will stop making it optional.

@mcc the sparkle emoji now means "I do not care about the concept of consent"

@aparrish @mcc like em-dashes, I refuse to give up sparkles just yet. fortunately Their sparkles are nearly always multicolored or flat white.

Third spruce tree on the left 6d ago

Do they.. "get"? the concept that the only reason a lot of us keep our emails there is having to change email addresses used by everything else is a real pain in the butt? That is becoming less and less of an impediment every day.

I only use gmail/outlook when I have no other choice, other than that, its a glorified IMAP source for Thunderbird. Tho Im this close to just enabling autoforward to a single self-hosted (ok, my VPS host managed, I $pay for) mailbox

@tezoatlipoca well if you look closely at the screenshot you'll see they're now expecting me to pay them money to continue receiving email there which is a strong counterbalance to the impulse to stay put

The Great Llama

@mcc @tezoatlipoca
"Nice message history... I'd be a shame if something HAPPENED to it..." Classic extortion as a businesses model.

I've been s l o w l y migrating off gmail, one or two things at a time. I switched to proton, which is not without its issues, but they let you set up semi disposable alias emails. I'll set up an alias for all my banking/financial stuff, and spend a day moving all those. Then a week later, maybe I'll do one for shipping (FedEx, UPS, etc...). Eventually, I'll get to the point where there's nothing useful going to gmail and I can just dump it.

✨buff dog himbo✨6d ago

@TheGreatLlama @mcc @tezoatlipoca an unfortunate problem i have encountered is being automatically classed as a bot or potentially abusive account when attempting to sign up on some websites with my protonmail address. For Flickr i had to simply use my gmail bc ey kept automatically flagging my account, asking me to do all this extra stuff to "prove" this or that. Plug in a gmail address g account creation is a breeze. 🙄 It's happened multiple times for me.

@itsmeholland @TheGreatLlama @mcc @tezoatlipoca I was impressed with one site (I don't remember where now) that did not believe proton.me was a real domain and wouldn't let me sign in at all. Fortunately protonmail.com is an alias and it was not-stupid enough to accept that.

Frank Davies 5d ago

@derek @itsmeholland @TheGreatLlama @mcc @tezoatlipoca the .me TLD has existed since 2007 so there's some very old code in their codebase

that or they think Montenegro is not a real country

The Great Llama

@itsmeholland @mcc @tezoatlipoca
I did get hit with that the other day. In annoyance, I decided they didn't want my business. Thinking you might be a bot has nothing to do with it. They don't want it because it's less useful for data mining purposes.

"You might be a bot," is the same as, "We want you to turn off your ad blocker because WE CARE about your experience." It's a lie.

Mycotropic 6d ago

@mcc @tezoatlipoca

Those goddamn constant storage alert messages........
I've tried to turn off every background backup, deleted a ton of images and videos and there is no way to get that percent below 90 that I can find. I know it's entirely marketing crap but it's also annoying.

Manic Emo Dream Ghoul 6d ago

@mcc you know me well enough to know my reasoning on why i think the organ harvesting by shadow governments are largely conspiracy theories (except cornea). My other reason is I seriously believe if it's technically easy, Google would've successfully made it legal, demanded large amount of investor fund, and has a hidden clause in their T&C that if you ever used google search they can legally take your kidneys

Manic Emo Dream Ghoul 6d ago

@mcc also fuck i gotta remove Firefox off my old tablet

Pink Rhododendron 6d ago

@BigShellEvent @mcc what did Firefox do 🤔 ?

✨buff dog himbo✨6d ago

@pinkRhododendron @BigShellEvent @mcc Firefox switched their entire business model into adtech instead of browser development & they keep enshittifying Firefox in myroad ways, primarily by shoehorning in AI features with every update & quietly undoingnusers preferences that switch off all the AI stuff so they have to keep redoing it. Supposedly they enabled more control for this in a recent update but after the last 5 years the damage to their reputation is done for mang of us by this point.

✨buff dog himbo✨6d ago

@pinkRhododendron @BigShellEvent @mcc i just use firefox forks like waterfox or Librewolf.

Pink Rhododendron 6d ago

@itsmeholland @BigShellEvent @mcc cool. I use Fennec which is also a firefox fork on my android 😁

@mcc @cstross : every autocompletion is a sort of manipulation.

As a writer, I quickly realize how even the simplest autocompletion keyboard on a smartphone was changing what I wrote and, consequently, what I thought.

This makes it obvious why company are pushing it so much and why it is dangerous even if you don’t care about privacy, ecology and accountability.

https://ploum.net/2025-12-10-autocompletion-intention.html (in French, sorry, I should translate it)

L’autocomplétion de nos intentions

L’autocomplétion de nos intentions par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.

Charlie Stross 6d ago

@ploum @mcc I have autocomplete turned off on all my devices, except for a very short manually curated list of specific abbreviations for phrases that are too tedious to type. (Usually specific to whichever novel I'm writing at the time.)

Dopes The Frogman 6d ago

@mcc sounds like a great idea to feed the ai a dyslexic written copy of Animal Farm that was translated into Turkish

Phil Haigh 6d ago

@mcc looks pointedly at Slack. Several AI features present, none can be disabled as far as I can tell. Meh. And my clients use it, so I can’t boycott.

Lauri Kotilainen 5d ago

Helpful stuff like “popup that hides a thread I’m reading, offering to summarize it for me” or “massive interstitial with same injected into the middle of my DMs where I’m ranting about how these things refuse to leave me the hell alone.”

Pink Rhododendron 6d ago

@mcc Unfortunately, phone companies are making sure that you don't get to have a choice when it comes to removing the bloat that the phone comes with.

Domestic Supply

@mcc The fundamental problem is that those using what should be a tool are placing unwarranted trust in it. It exudes confidence, whether or not it's right. In a sense we have succeeded in replicating the product of human intelligence, but at the level of a teenager writing an essay on a subject they've researched by looking for keywords in whatever sources were available the night before it was due. It's like an experiment to combine the Turing Test with the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

@mcc I am struggling to cope with the intersection of this true thing that you have said, and the other true fact that this phenomenon is engulfing all software at breathtaking speed https://floss.social/@soller/116217334800540296

Jeremy Soller 🦀 (@[email protected])

LLM slop is just one part of the broader systemd/Linux sloperating system. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/AGENTS.md

FLOSS.social

@mcc I realize that there’s a small difference between “developed by LLMs” and “LLMs embedded in it” but I believe your observation largely extends across this barrier as well

@mcc I feel like “stop using software entirely” isn’t really an option for me, particularly as the most concerning software is going to be used *upon* me regardless of my own choices.

@mcc gosh this sucks ass

@glyph It is possible I am willing to stop being a part of the world to a greater extent than you are.

@glyph You do what you can. I made my line "directly embedded is what gets me off of the stuff", because otherwise I'd go insane trying to find solutions to the problem.

@glyph No, I do not believe there is

@glyph It is at the moment my sincere opinion that it is no longer possible to coexist with Linux, except by forking both the kernel and systemd from last December and maintaining them independently. I do not know how to organize a community effort of that scale. I guess I am looking into FreeBSD as soon as I'm no longer in surgery recovery.

I am using Linux because, only because, of LLMs in Windows. If LKML is using LLMs, then there is literally no point.

@mcc @glyph Did FreeBSD ever settle on an LLM/AI code policy? Last I looked they were intending to write/release one, but, I haven't been able to... actually find it written anywhere? (I know netBSD has an explicit no-LLM-code policy)

@miss_rodent @glyph then most likely I am confusing netbsd and freebsd.

@mcc @glyph Ah okay, freeBSD seemed to be erring against LLM code, but considering allowing it for documentation, but, looking again, I can't find a specific policy about it, so, maybe it's still an ongoing argument.

@miss_rodent @glyph I don't know. I am entirely uninformed about BSD. I am scrambling because until two days ago I didn't think this was something I needed to worry about. I looked into it last fall and found the Linux kernel had considered it and concluded LLMs were for documentation only. It did not occur to me that double checking my OS kernel to see if they'd started randomly generating security critical code was something I needed to do monthly.

@mcc @glyph Fair, I'm hoping there's another fork of the kernel similar to the 'linux-libre' fork, but, I def don't have the capacity (or familiarity with the obscenely large kernel codebase) to maintain it myself.

@mcc @glyph Yeah, looking again, found https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2025-04-2025-06/#FreeBSD-Team-Reports

but don't see it mentioned in docs/contributor guide, so, I am unclear on if this is still pending?

FreeBSD Status Report Second Quarter 2025

FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms.

The FreeBSD Project

Victor Mignot 5d ago

@miss_rodent @mcc @glyph

Even FreeBSD is concerned by slop, as you can find Claude code (or at least code where Claude was used as an assistant) in LLVM

@vmignot @miss_rodent @glyph nightmare scenario where I have to get gcc working on freebsd so I can use the unslopped rustc

@mcc @vmignot @miss_rodent @glyph Is Rust still slop-free? The available language options are dwindling fast.

@sabrina @vmignot @miss_rodent @glyph i have no evidence and no time right now to investigate but multiple people I understand to be high level influential in the rust community have shown themselves to become actively angry and defensive at the mere suggestion users might object to slop code, so I'm worried, if I look, what I'll find

Which is why I spoke of potentially having to use the Rust frontend for GCC

Evan Prodromou 5d ago

@mcc So, for example, if someone you know uses ChatGPT to look up the name of the drummer from Hüsker Dü, you won't be friends with them anymore?

Negative12DollarBill 5d ago

@evan @mcc Butting in to say, I wouldn't be upset with them, but I would also not assume that they KNEW the drummer's name after the interaction. "Looking things up" is not actually what ChatGPT does.

Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

@mcc I feel like this is largely true, but it’s because many large tech companies and startups already work this way, rather than a consequence of AI. If you trust a company/collective/solo developer to respect your consent, I’m not sure AI features should immediately change your perspective. (Of course, there may be other reasons to abandon software that adds AI features, even if they‘re so far 100% opt-in, and I don’t blame people for not wanting to risk it.)

@alys I think you're talking about trusting someone you should not trust and I'm talking about believing a thing that is not true and, actually I am not sure I can convincingly argue they are different things

Miss Aemilia🎀5d ago

@mcc holy shit finally someone else that *properly* gets it. I've been saying this for ages and no one else seems to make the leap.

Once a tool that *can* be used to replace exists, it *will* be pushed to. It cannot remains as "just a tool" because that "tool" will inevitably be used to destroy your work and livelihood. It's a question of when, not if.

@mcc Hello, Firefox… 😒

eltheanine 4d ago

That is the conclusion I came to. Turning it off just does not work - or if it does, it will not for long.

Stupeflo 6d ago

@mcc
Like your toxic ex coming back pretrnding they changed.

@mcc the most juiced KPIs in history, perhaps

@jplebreton what kills me is that the Gmail Gemini button is *literally directly underneath* where the smart compose button would be if it were enabled. So there's a "I'll write it for you" button and in case you missed it a second, smaller "I'll write it for you" button underneath.

@mcc playing the odds like "if we make this feature like 80% of our UI, our engagement % starts looking *really* good"

GreenSkyOverMe (Monika)6d ago

@mcc argh