• 5 Posts
  • 139 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle






  • Yeah - I’ve actually softened my own stance since I wrote that paragraph near the end, too, I just didn’t feel like editing a message that I claimed to have copy/pasted. While I still have no intention of enabling the feature in my install, that’s out of pure spite for anything that could conceivably help an advertiser somewhere, even if it isn’t at my expense. I do see value in the feature itself existing. While I think the industry is unlikely to abandon tracking cookies and swap to this system voluntarily, I could see certain governments eventually mandating such a change, if the feature proves robust enough.

    I might even go as far as to agree that on-by-default is the better option for the feature’s chances of success - but for new installs. When new features are added to existing installs in updates, particularly if those features are in the “Privacy & Security” section of the settings page, it would probably be better practice to ask the user to pick an option on the first boot after updating.


  • Copy/pasting my comment from the earlier thread on this that got deleted for misinformation

    After reading about the actual feature (more), this seems like an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.

    The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it’s a way for advertisers to figure out things like “How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?”, but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.

    The only thing I looked for but could not find an answer on one way or the other is if Mozilla is making any sort of profit from this system. I would guess no but actually have no idea.

    There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like “Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default” (my personal take), or “It’s a pointless feature that’s doomed to failure because it’ll never provide ad companies with information as valuable as tracking cookies, so it’ll never succeed in its goal to replace tracking cookies” (also my take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody.

    I’m absolutely convinced there’s a coordinated anti-Firefox astroturfing campaign going on lately.


  • That feature (more) they’ve been getting all that negative press over for the past two days is an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.

    The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it’s a way for advertisers to figure out things like “How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?”, but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.

    There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like “Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default” (my personal take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody, and Mozilla is at least trying to build a system that would legitimately improve the privacy situation on the internet created by companies like Google.



  • After reading about the actual feature (more), this seems like an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.

    The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it’s a way for advertisers to figure out things like “How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?”, but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.

    The only thing I looked for but could not find an answer on one way or the other is if Mozilla is making any sort of profit from this system. I would guess no but actually have no idea.

    There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like “Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default” (my personal take), or “It’s a pointless feature that’s doomed to failure because it’ll never provide ad companies with information as valuable as tracking cookies, so it’ll never succeed in its goal to replace tracking cookies” (also my take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody.

    I’m absolutely convinced there’s a coordinated anti-Firefox astroturfing campaign going on lately.





  • Florida is already a swing state and has been for ages. 2 of the last 4 elections it went blue.

    It wasn’t a freak accident either. There’s no sane way to look at the last 70 years of presidential elections in Florida and determine it’s been a safe long-term bet for either party in that timeframe. It usually votes for the winner, but when it hasn’t, that loser has always (in modern times) been a Republican - so the state is at least much more electorally important to them than it is to Democrats. It’s very much always been a leans-Republican swing state.




  • Is every other message there something you typed? Or is it arguing with itself? Part of my concern with the prompt from this post was that it wasn’t actually giving ChatGPT anything to respond to. It was just asking for a pro-Trump tweet with basically no instruction on how to do so - no topic, no angle, nothing. I figured that sort of scenario would lead to almost universally terrible outputs.

    I did just try it out myself though. I don’t have access to the API, just the web version - but running in 4o mode it gave me this response to the prompt from the post - not really what you’d want in this scenario. I then immediately gave it this prompt (rest of the response here). Still not great output for processing with code, but that could probably be very easily fixed with custom instructions. Those tweets are actually much better quality than I expected.