AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

What’s wrong with wanting a UI you’re used to?

Everyone wants other people to switch to Linux until they do literally anything a purist wouldn’t do with their own personal setup 😅

Very unique, I’ve genuinely never seen something like this before in Minecraft, somehow. Good work!

iOS also has Brave, which apparently created the adblock engine Mozilla borrowed (and weakened)

Afaik that’s a currently non-used library in Firefox desktop. For iOS, The Verge claims it’s just Apple’s WebKit Content Blocker + EasyList.

https://www.theverge.com/news/987247/mozilla-firefox-ad-blocker-ios-launch

Sorry, but do you have a source for this at all?

As far as I can tell, they have added some Play Integrity checks (with root detection being part of that), but the reason was cited as spam prevention, and I can’t find anything claiming they had any sort of agreement with Apple to do so.

They kept pushing for Apple to implement it, but I don’t know of any cases of them making any promises about what they’d do on their own platform in order to convince Apple or anything like that.

In what way does this have anything to do with RCS or Apple lmao

The petition is only one part of the puzzle.

Keep Android Open also says to contact your regulators and fill out Google’s developer verification survey, both of which either directly affect Google by influencing internal processes, or put regulatory pressure on them to back off.

The Change.org petition is moreso just a way to count overall total supporters, and add one more lever of pressure that can be leveled against them. (e.g. instead of “we’ve had a lot of people contact regulators” it’s “218,000 people are actively taking the time to tell you they don’t like this”, can be cited by lawmakers, advocacy groups, etc)

That said though, I do agree that a change.org petition on its own is… generally ineffective most of the time.

Isn’t that no different than the millions of open source projects that have few authors, little interest and are abandoned for the next shiny thing?

The end result isn’t inherently different, but the basis is.

Someone who programs a FOSS project with their own programming skill is, by definition, more invested, and more willing to spend time making that project exist. Someone who is mostly just willing to tell the LLM to do it for them is, by definition, less invested in the project.

It is more likely that someone less invested in a project will abandon it.

At least in my mind with the current state of LLMs, if there is an open source project that you want to update for yourself, you should be able to do that pretty easily.

Sure, that’s possible, but the main concern is that most people either don’t have access to more capable models (which will otherwise require them spending money for their software to keep getting things like security patches, vs projects that have maintainers that are more invested in them that aren’t abandoned in the first place which are effectively free unless you choose to donate), and you get forks in development path. It might fit one user’s goals, but now you have, say, 100 people who all tried reviving abandonware with their own LLMs, all with different features, security, import/export mechanisms, etc.

That’s not to say it’s bad that people can use LLMs to “revive” abandonware, but I don’t think we should be encouraging people to create and publish software that’s highly likely to be abandoned in the first place.

This is the main reason why vibe coding, even if it produces good code, is still a major problem. It encourages people with the goal of making software, but without the actual will and motivation to keep supporting that software to pump out software and publish it.

It’s like all the faceless AI-automated YouTube channels we have now. It’s not that these people had no way of doing it before, it’s just that it’s easy and might make them some money, or make them feel like they accomplished something until they get bored and move on.

There’s something to be said for convenient and easy to use things, but they’re a double edged sword, because they also directly target people with the least emotional investment to use them, as a side effect of that convenience.

Most of these AI crawlers are from major corporations operating out of datacenters with known IP ranges, which is why they do IP range blocks. That’s why in Codeberg’s response, they mention that after they fixed the configuration issue that only blocked those IP ranges on non-Anubis routes, the crawling stopped.

For example, OpenAI publishes a list of IP ranges that their crawlers can come from, and also displays user agents for each bot.

Perplexity also publishes IP ranges, but Cloudflare later found them bypassing no-crawl directives with undeclared crawlers. They did use different IPs, but not from “shady apps.” Instead, they would simply rotate ASNs, and request a new IP.

The reason they do this is because it is still legal for them to do so. Rotating ASNs and IPs within that ASN is not a crime. However, maliciously utilizing apps installed on people’s devices to route network traffic they’re unaware of is. It also carries much higher latency, and could even allow for man-in-the-middle attacks, which they clearly don’t want.

While true to a degree, I think the fact is that AI is just much more complex than a knife, and clearly has perverse incentives, which cause people to use it “wrong” more often than not.

Sure, you can use a knife to cook just as you can use a knife to kill, but just as society encourages cooking and legally & morally discourages murder, then in the inverse, society encourages any shortcut that can get you to an end goal for the sake of profit, while not caring about personal growth, or the overall state of the world if everyone takes that same shortcut, and the AI technology is designed with the intent to be a shortcut rather than just a tool.

The reason people use AI in so many damaging ways is not just because it is possible for the tool to be used that way, and some people don’t care about others, it’s that the tool is made with the intention of offloading your cognitive burden, doing things for you, and creating what can be used as a final product.

It’s like if generative AI models for image generation could only fill in colors on line art, nothing more. The scope of the harm they could cause is very limited, because you’d always require line art of the final product, which would require human labor, and thus prevent a lot of slop content from people not even willing to do that, and it would be tailored as an assistance tool for artists, rather than an entire creation tool for anyone.

Contrast that with GenAI models that can generate entire images, or even videos, and they come with the explicit premise and design of creating the final content, with all line art, colors, shading, etc, with just a prompt. This directly encourages slop content, because to have it only do something like coloring in lines will require a much more complex setup to prevent it from simply creating the end product all at once on its own.

We can even see how the cultural shifts around AI happened in line with how UX changed for AI tools. The original design for OpenAI’s models was on “OpenAI Playground,” where you’d have this large box with a bunch of sliders you could tweak, and the model would just continue the previous sentence you typed if you didn’t word it like a conversation. It was designed to look like a tool, a research demo, and a mindless machine.

Then, they released ChatGPT, and made it look more like a chat, and almost immediately, people began to humanize it, treating it as its own entity, a sort of semi-conscious figure, because it was “chatting” with them in an interface similar to how they might text with a friend.

And now, ChatGPT’s homepage is presented as just a simple search box, and lo and behold, suddenly the marketing has shifted to using ChatGPT not as a companion, but as a research tool (e.g. “deep research”) and people have begun treating it more like a source of truth rather than just a thing talking to them.

And even in models where there is extreme complexity to how you could manipulate them, and the many use cases they could be used for, interfaces are made as sleek and minimalistic as possible, to hide away any ability you might have to influence the result with real, human creativity.

The tools might not be “evil” on their own, but when interfaces are designed the way they are, marketing speak is used how it is, and the profit motive incentivizes using them in the laziest way possible, bad outcomes are not just a side effect, they are a result by design.