@malwaretech Firefox has a blocklist that stops a number of buggy versions of those DLLs from being injected into the browser, and we spent even more time working with the vendors to get them to fix their bugs 🤷
I'd like to clarify the origin of the accusations against #ImaneKhelif because I don't think most people realize where they came from. The vitriolic mix of of misogynist, transphobic and racist insults against the Algerian athlete started days before the match, largely on Italian papers belonging to far-right politicians and businessmen. Here's a few examples from late July (English translation of the titles is in the alt text). 1/8
The reasons why it's bad are rather obvious: most ad networks know more about you than yourself. Google in particular has an incredible view of your life, they probably know more about you than yourself, because they meticulously tracked and stored every interaction you had with them for as long as you've been online. 4/11
Firefox is currently made of 30 million lines of codes. Just running the test suites on a server costs a ton of money. You have to pay everybody's salaries, including the security people who are on-call 24/7 to respond to 0-days and similar security incidents. You have to pay for Sync storage and processing, you have to pay for download bandwidth, heck we need several people to deal with accessibility alone. 8/11
I'm very happy about how the fediverse works, this is one of the few spaces that's ad-free, but I've been contributing to my instance, and I hope that my contributions make it possible for other users who can't afford it to join the fediverse too. Is this sustainable? Honestly I don't know. What I know is that browser development is not sustainable with contributions alone. Not by a long shot. 7/11
But what if you don't want to see ads at all? You can totally do that! There are very good and effective ways to block ads, and it'll make for a better online experience. But don't be under the illusion that will somehow change the current dynamics. Most services you'll see will still be ad-funded, and they won't be able to survive if they can't serve ads. Alternatively you'll have to pay to access them. Which brings us to another topic: donations. 6/11
And it's not just Google. Every ad network is going to extreme measures to track you, because it is *profitable* to do it. And as long as there's an economic incentive, they'll do it. The only way to stop this is by removing the economic incentive to tracking. You'll still be served ads, but at least they'll be generic then. I don't know if PPA will achieve that, but the status quo won't. I'm 100% sure about that. 5/11
So let's get that out of the way, Mozilla hasn't become an ad company, it already was. pretty much always has been. The company didn't really want to talk about it in these terms though. Which brings us to the second topic: ads are now heavily reliant on user profiling and tracking. That's bad. 3/11
First of all let's make something clear. I've seen people claim that Mozilla has become an ad company because Mozilla bought and ad company, but that's ridiculous: Mozilla's work has already been funded by ads for two decades. The first agreement signed with Google dates back to 2005. That paid for most of Firefox development, an ad-funded browser. Most of the internet is ad-funded at this point. You might not like it, I don't like it, but that's the way it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances 2/11
Chances are that you might have heard about #Firefox "Privacy Preserving Attribution for Advertising". I've been working for Mozilla for 12 years and I've learned about it here on the fediverse, not only because I haven't been paying much attention, but because internal comms have been occupied with other stuff. So let's talk about something I feel Mozilla desperately needs: transparency. 🧵 1/11
> On May 14, Tianle Cai, a PhD student at Princeton University studying inference efficiency in large language models like those that power such chatbots, accessed GPT-4o’s public token library and pulled a list of the 100 longest Chinese tokens the model uses to parse and compress Chinese prompts. [...] The longest token, lasting 10.5 Chinese characters, literally means “_free Japanese porn video to watch.” Oops.
I can't believe how the western press will happily write about how “Putin is open to negotiations” on the same day when the Russian armed forces launch a deliberate terror attack on a civilian target.
The only thing Putin is interested in is the complete erasure of the Ukrainian nation, its people and its culture. Nothing more nothing less.
Memory errors in consumer devices such as PCs and phones are not something you hear much about, yet they are probably one of the most common ways these machines fail.
I'll use this thread to explain how this happens, how it affects you and what you can do about it. But I'll also talk about how the industry failed to address it and how we must force them to, for the sake of sustainability. 🧵 1/17
This is gonna be fun: OpenAI runs afoul of the GDPR because it generates false information about individuals and they don't have full access to the data that pertains to them.
From the article:
> Maartje de Graaf, data protection lawyer at noyb: “The obligation to comply with access requests applies to all companies. [...] It seems that with each ‘innovation’, another group of companies thinks that its products don’t have to comply with the law.”
So I just learned what "The Stack" is today: an aggregation of GitHub repos for machine learning from which I can opt out.
But I won't.
I won't because they scraped some hot garbage I wrote in bash and Python that would make you faint. Bottom-of-the-barrel throw-away scripts full of coding crimes. Stuff like
find | grep | awk | xargs | ugh
...invoked via subprocess.run() then fed into more garbage.
I want "artificial intelligence" to learn this. It's going to be fantastic.