Notices by tante (tante@tldr.nettime.org)

Any social internet worth thinking about needs to be built on the idea of care.
- care for the wellbeing of the people on the network (moderation)
- care for those doing extra work (like moderation)
- care for each other (add alt-texts to images, thinking about inclusivity etc)
- care to make running infrastructure sustainable (in all respects)

The social Internet needs to be a web of human care.

We keep seeing startups who want to replace something valuable (therapy, counseling, tutoring, artistic expression) with some tech bullshit under the banner of democratization. But why do we need to invest so much in bad tech that doesn't work instead of just giving people access to what they need?

This is a sign for how fucking atrophied our mental muscles are. How limited our space for thinking about how things should be.

You want to democratize "going to therapy"? Make it "free" as in paid by socialized healthcare. You want to democratize "making art"? Give people money and free time to express themselves.

None of these things are meaningfully addressed through tech. It's always about the political struggle to give people what they need and deserve.

GitHub is not your friend. They're also not on your side.

Basically: Sure people do a thing and like it but maybe it's not Mozilla's job to make that kind of thing even easier.

(Like with Facebook etc they built containers to isolate those browsing experiences: This was a move of "we have to protect users but we also show them that what they are doing is not without significant dangers and harms". The move when it comes to "AI" looks structurally massively different.)

So, @anildash wrote an interesting reflection on "AI" and Firefox a few days ago: https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/

He argues that the number of people who want Mozilla to just stop with the AI development and focus on a more traditional browser is small (probably true) and that people are so used to using AI in their everyday lives that it's Firefox's/Mozilla's job to make that as secure and "less big tech dependy" as possible.

I think that's not an unreasonable argument. I do think that the actual question is more about _what Mozilla is for_ and not "AI" (or other tech hypes).

From my reading the people who don't want AI in Firefox are often AI critical, sure. But it's also about resources and narrative. The idea of Mozilla was to have something that would work for the good of the open web, that would fight for users through participating in standards development but that would also argue based on what is right. Mozilla's sales pitch was a moral one - at least that is how many in the community on Mastodon for example interpreted it.

So when Mozilla cuts down on policy work, cuts work on technologies like Servo or Rust that were supposed to materially improve the security of browsers and people online while setting a lot of developer hours on fire in order to integrate fundamentally insecure (and some would say fundamentally anti-"open web") systems "just because people use them", it feels like an organization having lost their mission or the drive to push their values.

I think "AI" is just the latest (and probably biggest) event that illustrates a sentiment that has been brewing for a while: That Mozilla's mission or goals have shifted in a way that their original supporters no longer feel aligned with.

RE: https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EC_DIGIT/115564144071125950

Yeah you can save a lot of time by accepting that "it cannot" is the answer. You mustn't draft legislation with an LLM because in that context words do massively matter. And the words are a result of the intent and the analyses of problems that you have.

It's a ridiculous approach that shows just how little people know what they are doing.

(Kinda reminded me of the EU funding services running a survey if providing LLMs for application generation would be good: Why would you as EU provide spam generation engines whose output you then have to validate? You're making your life harder while reducing quality.)

What has Mozilla done now?

Please do not use "AI-slop" to illustrate your articles or presentations.
If you need images and have none just use one of the free stock image sites. It's not harder and doesn't make you look like a dumbass.

The consequences of the recent GEMA vs. OpenAI decision will be very interesting for "coding agents" and the sources they vomit out. Cause a lot of the code their developers accumulated is GPL-licensed.

The court basically decided that you can't just ignore copyright for the training of your stochastic parrot if it can still reproduce the original. So yeah.

Cleaned out a cupboard but I can probably never use it again.

Also ich finde, jeder sollte einfach ne BahnCard100 bekommen.

Und weil ja alle Effizienz wollen, sparen wir uns den Unfug gleich und die Bahn fährt fahrscheinlos.

"This is not some grand heel turn, or some brainwashing that DHH suffered. This is straight up a midlife crisis turned fash speedrun."

(Original title: Jordan Petridis: DHH and Omarchy: Midlife crisis)

https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/11/06/dhh-and-omarchy-midlife-crisis/

The translation of "just use our docker image" into human language is "we don't have good docs and we don't give a shit".

"An LLM helped me with some task" is not a good argument for these things increasing productivity. Did you also factor in all the cases where it made you slower? Where the output created extra work? And how much of your work/activity is that task?

All bigger studies we know (even those done by Google for example) show a total lack of meaningful productivity gains, especially when looking at a whole organization.

(There are few exceptions: Spam generation might see productivity gains for example. Translation services where quality doesn't matter much. But how much of our economy is that?)

"Chimpanzees revise their beliefs if they encounter new information, a hallmark of rationality that was once assumed to be unique to humans"

(Original title: Chimps Are Capable of Human-Like Rational Thought, Breakthrough Study Finds)

https://www.404media.co/chimps-are-capable-of-human-like-rational-thought-breakthrough-study-finds/

This is sometimes read as "look 'AI' isn't working". But the opposite is true.

_This_ is what "AI" is _for_. Push down labor power, push down wages, make employment more insecure.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/forrester_ai_rehiring/

Menschen, insbesondere junge Menschen, zu zwingen "KI" einzusetzen, ist intellektuelle Körperverletzung.

When "AI" search engines look for sources, they go for fringe and not established quality sites. What could possibly go wrong?

(Original title: AI-powered search engines rely on “less popular” sources, researchers find)

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/ai-powered-search-engines-rely-on-less-popular-sources-researchers-find/

"A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value. [...] In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers."

"Unlike this mental outsourcing to a machine, however, workslop uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being. When coworkers receive workslop, they are often required to take on the burden of decoding the content, inferring missed or false context. A cascade of effortful and complex decision-making processes may follow, including rework and uncomfortable exchanges with colleagues."

https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity

Never cared much for Omarchy: It's being made by a right-wing dipshit with no experience with Linux and distributions who's whole "Opinion" seems to be that "90ies Hacker movie look" is what makes a good operating system.

But when I read this actual review https://マリウス.com/a-word-on-omarchy/ I was shocked by how bad it actually is: Technologically but also as an "opinionated Linux distribution". Sad to see that @frameworkcomputer tanked their reputation within their target audience in support of this underbaked Linux-Hacker-Cosplay thing.