I read the piece again and became even more disappointed.

2026: "Docter said Pixar found some parents didn’t want entertainment to force them to have a conversation they weren’t ready for with their children. “We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy,” he said."

2009:

Release 2026.02.09 is out!

Beyond fresh #OpenstreetMap data, you can now search for æøå, disable the display of speed limits on Android, and when navigating in Apple Car Play or Android Auto, 3D buildings are disabled to improve legibility of the map.

For more changes read the full release notes here: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/releases/tag/v2026.02.09-4

A female OpenAI executive who raised concerns about the upcoming ‘Adult Mode’ - which lets you sex ChatGPT girlfriends - has been fired for ‘sexual discrimination against men’

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-executive-who-opposed-adult-mode-fired-for-sexual-discrimination-3159c61b

I've had the growing impression, in recent years, that it has become thoroughly uncool to do your best. Exceeding expectations is embarrassing, merely meeting them, even worthy of ridicule. I see it all the time. You're caught rehearsing, or journaling in public? how performative. It kept you up at night, did it? you poured sweat into it? such a try-hard.

But I don’t think this is new. It’s that ol' familiar cynicism, one we’ve cycled through before. It usually precedes a moment when people grow tired of poorly made things, and what is done carefully and thoughtfully can once again be appreciated without shame. I'm hopeful that we're about to emerge into a renaissance, and convinced that my friends who are doing their honest best are just avant-garde.

If despite it all, you keep going and try your best.
I'm here for it and thank you.

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/now

"So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world."

https://poets.org/poem/choir-invisible

I'm watching people in my feed screaming at each other over Firefox's "AI kill switch" this morning with some trepidation.

As far as I'm concerned, Firefox already has an AI kill switch. It's called browser.ml.chat.enabled, I set it to false more or less the day it appeared, it hasn't mysteriously popped back on since, despite angry posts to the contrary, and that's been that for me. It's disabled every "AI" feature I find objectionable. I'd prefer if Mozilla leadership would sync up with reality on occasion and stop deciding to put this paid placement trash into Firefox in the first place, but at least there's a reliable way to get rid of it.

Everything else people have been screaming at Mozilla about? I'm not sure I see the problem. The little model you can download to summarise web pages for you? I wouldn't trust it, and so I don't think it's necessarily a productive use of Firefox devs' time, but at least it's opt-in. The other little model you can download to help organise your tab groups? I don't use it much, but this one seems more practical, and it's also opt-in, despite the occasional angry report of it slowing down people's browsers even without having been downloaded. Liek, bro, maybe try closing a Slack tab or two.

I don't want ChatGPT in my browser, or Claude, or any kind of world burning data centre LLM pretending to be our new AI god. browser.ml.chat.enabled = false does that for me. It would be even better if it wasn't there in the first place. But tiny, focused ML models doing nominally useful things? I not only do not see the problem there, I'd like some of them to be part of the Web platform rather than just the browser. I've been wishing since they launched them that Mozilla would make an API available to web sites out of those translation models of theirs, for instance.

I'm monitoring the situation, as European heads of state like to say, but so far, despite the posturings of their C-suite types, it doesn't seem like any critical Mozilla resources are being diverted away from maintaining the Web platform into AI boosterism. Every new Firefox changelog is delivering on what it should be delivering on, and it's only occasionally that I see a new "AI" feature advertised. Compare that to a product like VSCode, which has been completely consumed by the cancer of slop production with only one in a hundred changelog entries being about building an actual damned code editor, and I'm not feeling all that alarmed about Firefox just yet.

I know this is Mastodon, but sometimes I just wish people would entertain having opinions that can have some nuance in between "burn the world down so the AGI can live" and "Butlerian Jihad now," you know?

Reasonably sure Mastodon peeps like libraries and might like a peek at this wowzer I stepped into today.

#DasCDMX