• Political Custard@lemmygrad.ml
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    9 months ago

    Focusing on the core business (the browser) and dropping products (that are already done better by others) seems like a very good idea. I have seen zero people on Mastodon on a mozilla.social account and I’ve never seen their VPN appear in a list of top/recommended VPNs. I just want a world class browser that pounds the competition and regains browser market share. If Firefox dies, we are f’kd.

    • NotSteve_@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      The issue is that Firefox alone doesn’t pay the bills and I’d imagine they really want to get away from being dependent on the Google deal they have.

      We don’t need AI stuff but if they can get some good funding from it, they can put more into the browser

  • FlumPHP@programming.dev
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    9 months ago

    While we resourced mozilla.social heavily to pursue this ambitious idea,

    How many people do you need to administer a Mastodon instance? I’m pretty sure infosec.exchange is like one dude.

  • PM_ME_YOUR_ZOD_RUNES@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    I didn’t realize Lemmy hated AI so much. Pretty much every post in this thread is bashing the idea. I’ve found AI to be very useful personally, I use it almost every day. It helped me code a VBA macro from scratch with 0 experience. This tool is saving me and my team hundreds of hours per year. It’s also great just as an improved search engine.

  • BoofStroke@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    Let’s skip the AI and give thunderbird some love instead. Then again, it’s pretty feature complete as is. Just keep it up to date to keep running and secure.

  • PixelProf@lemmy.ca
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    9 months ago

    Lots of immediate hate for AI, but I’m all for local AI if they keep that direction. Small models are getting really impressive, and if they have smaller, fine-tuned, specific-purpose AI over the “general purpose” LLMs, they’d be much more efficient at their jobs. I’ve been rocking local LLMs for a while and they’ve been great as a small compliment to language processing tasks in my coding.

    Good text-to-speech, page summarization, contextual content blocking, translation, bias/sentiment detection, click bait detection, article re-titling, I’m sure there’s many great use cases. And purely speculation,but many traditional non-llm techniques might be able to included here that were overlooked because nobody cared about AI features, that could be super lightweight and still helpful.

    If it goes fully remote AI, it loses a lot of privacy cred, and positions itself really similarly to where everyone else is. From a financial perspective, bandwagoning on AI in the browser but “we won’t send your data anywhere” seems like a trendy, but potentially helpful and effective way to bring in a demographic interested in it without sacrificing principles.

    But there’s a lot of speculation in this comment. Mozilla’s done a lot for FOSS, and I get they need monetization outside of Google, but hopefully it doesn’t lead things astray too hard.

    • UID_Zero@infosec.pub
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      9 months ago

      Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox, largely driven by the Fakespot acquisition and the product integration work that followed. Additionally, finding great content is still a critical use case for the internet. Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content, and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization.

      emphasis mine

      How do you interpret that?

  • feoh@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    Kinda disappointing how much of the community just takes a giant 💩 on Mozilla whatever it does these days. Funding open source is super crazy hard folks. Notice that the really successful well funded projects are fueled by megacorps?

    Offering constructive criticism is great but if you don’t have better ideas around how to fund an open browser without selling your soul to GOOG or MSFT then perhaps your energy might be better spent elsewhere.

    • Fungah@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Train ai to I filtrate Google and kill sundar prichai.

      It won’t help anyone’s bottom line but then at least sundar prichai would be dead.