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uspol, 9/11, oblivious disrespect 

The Socorro County Republican Party headquarters is proudly flying three flags today, but none of them are the Red White and Blue of the USA's national ensign.

Instead, one of them is an impostor standing in for the Stars and Stripes, one whose colors ran or surrendered, bisected by the thin blue line of police state authoritarianism, and saying "blue lives matter" as if the Black lives ended by cops didn't.

@mcc @leo You’re welcome.
Sponsored and nonsponsored suggestions can be disabled in about:config.

browser.urlbar.quicksuggest.sponsored
browser.urlbar.quicksuggest.nonsponsored

If those are set to true, then double-click to change to false.

Also, I changed this to false:

browser.preferences.experimental

I didn’t check the code so I’m not sure if it was removed or disabled, but Firefox Labs, including the AI chatbot junk, is gone now.

Two additional, minor notes:

- Firefox appears to have some problems with preferences occasionally resetting to defaults. I've spoken to two people who encountered this (and I believe one is maus I linked above). I am going to assume this is a regular bug and not an anti-privacy policy decision.

- If you are outside the USA, and want to preemptively disable address bar "sponsored suggestions" in case they're ever turned on in your area, instructions are here mas.to/@FizzyDaisies/113099538

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Wendy Carlos on transphobia 

Goddamn she was absolutely fucking right when she wrote this, and people keep demonstrating JUST how right she was :blobfoxannoyed:

Really impressed with how good Infinite Mac is these days. Being able to just drag an ISO onto my browser desktop and have it be mounted in a way that just works is really, really impressive. infinitemac.org

Featureful Web browsers do have their uses. I'm getting lost now in infinitemac.org/ (specifically, their NeXT toys).

Seriously though: I want (okay, demand) a version of Firefox with the "AI chatbot" functionality removed. Not disabled. Removed. I want all code which is specifically designed to connect to OpenAI removed from my computer completely. I do not care if the vampires have promised not to suck my blood. I do not want the vampires in my house in the first place. mk.nyaa.place/notes/9xvolkux40

As an experimental feature, the AI chatbot sidebar is disabled by default, but it's still there, integrated in every edition of Firefox that has Firefox Labs.

Fortunately, they include an obvious clickable "Share feedback" link right next to the checkbox in the "about:preferences#experimental" page.

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It's real, and I saw it first on, appropriately enough, Firefox 130.0 (64-bit) from mozilla-flatpak 1.0 installed in the Linux (Beta) environment of ChromeOS 128.0, Google's laptop ecosystem more closed off from the world than Android.

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Rumor is circulating that Firefox now has an AI chatbot feature integrated as a Firefox Labs experimental feature. Even if this is untrue, Mozilla has been following the enshittification bandwagon for so long now (more than a decade) that it's perfectly believable they will do it.

This is why I haven't called Firefox the best Web browser since 2012. It's merely the least bad major browser, and like every other major browser maker, Mozilla is hell-bent on making Firefox worse for users.

I say this not to say that Google Chrome is better than Firefox but to say that something is *deeply sick* at Mozilla and that Mozilla is failing us at a deeply critical moment¹.

¹ That is, Google this year simultaneously trying to one, add ad-blocker-blockers to YouTube; and two, demanding the right via Manifest v3 to pre-approve every single adblock rule uBlock Origin wants to add. It's not very subtle that they're intending to use the second thing to enable the first.

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I really need to stress that at this point, Firefox is much more aggressively and maliciously adware than Google Chrome, and this is *even given* that Google Chrome is trying to prevent you from being able to run an effective adblocker. Google Chrome and Firefox will both send information about your browsing to advertisers via a backchannel, but Chrome will warn you first. Chrome has features that drive you toward sites with ads but does not have ads *in the address bar*
mastodon.social/@onelson/11309

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“We created a self-opening fridge with an AI camera that tracks what you put in and take out.”

Please for the love of any and all deities I am PROSTRATE on the floor begging you for fair energy prices and accessible public transport I do not need a fridge incorrectly guessing what is in my 17 Tupperware containers and refusing to open because I haven’t paid my monthly £24.99 subscription of “Fridge Door Lock Plus” :neofox_melt_sob: :neofox_melt_sob: :neofox_melt_sob:

If you have to change your behavior to conform to any computer software program, then the program is not artificial intelligence, only artificial like the rest of any software library. This is another reason why today's "AI" is nothing more than the currently popular digital snake oil cure-all tonic expiring in the 19th Century.

I'd say ask the "AI," but you'd have to do more fact-checking on its answers than an ill-informed essay on lunar eclipses, defeating the whole purpose of asking it.

Friends, please remind your less computer-literate friends:

Despite what the email promises, your friends haven't won a Microsoft Apple UN lottery for commemorative Trump coins to spend watching lolita use breakthrough superfoods to add three inches to their tactical flashlights.

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Computer Fairies

Computer Fairies is a Mastodon instance that aims to be as queer, friendly and furry as possible. We welcome all kinds of computer fairies!