• Fades@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    This is such a braindead fucking take. Companies should explore new technology not just take a look at the current popular opinion and run with it as absolute fact. The majority of this post is literally just using AI as a boogieman, oh no they’re creating jobs that relate to AI! The company is over!!!

    They saw three roles that mentioned AI and took that as absolute proof that Mozilla has “fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads”. Grow the fuck up. The internet takes money to run, ads are an inevitability so no shit a major browser company has someone managing that aspect of their browser…

    I see they have fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads

    oh, but they had 9 open listings for AI!!! THat’s a THIRD of the cOmPaNy’s listings!!!

    Are you not aware of how big Mozilla is? https://leadiq.com/c/mozilla/5a1d88fe2400002400628c85/employee-directory

    N. America: 1.5k Asia: 468 Europe: 378 Africa: 86 South Africa:44 Oceania: 25

    That alone shows how insane this take is. Mozilla dipping their toes into the water with a handful of roles doesn’t mean mozilla is focused on it alone (or even at all!). Secondly, there is a lot of value that can be taken from AI (both server and client-side), without even touching the subject of generating images/video/text/etc. Things like auto-transcriptions, summaries for the seeing impaired, etc.

    But then we get these posts essentially fear mongering any perceived interest as slight as it may be into AI. Absurd.

    • dantheclamman@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I’m ok with them chasing ethical applications of AI. I’m more tired of their half-assed efforts to chase every shiny new object over the last few years. It feels like as a non-profit, they should be comparatively immune to chasing the same transitory trends that other shareholder-owned companies are obsessed over. But it seems like for Mozilla, they have an even shorter attention span than their corporate competitors. We’ve seen them chase after crypto, metaverse, augmented reality, Firefox OS, and now AI. All of those efforts fizzled out with a whimper.

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        That crypto one isn’t even a project, just that they used some service to handle crypto donations for them. It is weird though that they think they can just walk into a successful space without offering anything new and still expect to get users.

      • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        Sure, but the only way to counter AI spam in the dead internet might be to have your own local AI model to filter junk out. And that has to be with the browser.

        There is also cookie consent spam, ads and newspaper “notify me” shit that probably can only be fixed with AI.

        Your take is that Mozilla doesn’t think before they adopt, except people here don’t think about what not to adopt either.

        • dantheclamman@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Thinking before they adopt is hard to do. I understand some experiments get cut. But I’m not sure they are thinking even after they adopt. Thus the half-assed delivery and constantly abandoning projects before they get a fair shake

    • mao@lemmy.sdf.org
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      3 months ago

      That is the first time I’ve seen South Africa listed separately from Africa

    • emmy67@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      The brain-dead take is that companies should explore new technology. Without any qualifiers on it (i assume there aren’t because you didn’t add any and you applied it to ai). That’s how we’ve ended up with such a huge amount of waste, pollution and theft from small independents.

      Even if we just narrow it to the field of AI, the waste and environmental damage from just this kind of tech is just absurd.

      Let’s add to the downsizing ai causes, the pathetic service disruptions and inevitable decline of a company’s reputation from using such a thing and its nothing but a waste.