Exactly my case as well. There are several Firefox-based browsers better than Firefox itself without the bullshit: Zen, Mercury, LibreWolf, Floorp… All are good options. But the dev behind Waterfox made a public commitment to keep this AI crap out of the browser. That sealed the deal for me.
Now if only I knew the best Android replacement for Firefox…
And what say you of the preliminary evidence suggesting that using AI is making people less capable of thinking for themselves, or people becoming emotionally attached to AI girlfriends/boyfriends, or people who killed themselves either intentionally or accidentally by following LLM advice, or the fact that an overwhelmibg majority of companies who made AI a crucial part of their functioning are losing money or going bankrupt? These are part of the social cost and they all point quite strongly towards it being a very bad idea to rely on AI for anything.
The social and environmental impact of AI training and use is what I’m referring to.
Plugins exist. There is no excuse for bloat8ng the browser with these seldom used niche features by default, espexially when they represent 5% if what the AI component is doing and the other 95% are harmful to literally every living thing on the planet.
That’s cute.
This is such a shortsighted take. After the initial hurdle of migration, you’re free of licenses forever. It won’t take long for the savings to match the initial costs, and after that it’s more money in the bank until the Sun explodes.
Not to mention the tiny insignificant issue of a foreign private company having backdoors into your government’s IT infrastructure. A foreign private company headquartered in Trumpistan of all places.
I just hope the alternative doesn’t take too long to materialize
I actually like this idea. It provides more girth for when I make pro-Google threads on Lemmy, set notifications to vibrate and shove the phone in my asshole.
Woody didn’t swallow Bill Clinton’s hot white jizz.
Shitass touch
I think your question comes from thinking that anybody involved in this grift cares about anything other than short-term results. They would sell both their own kidneys as long as they only had to deliver after the next quarterly earnings report.
Conservative lawmakers don’t know anything about porn, because if they ever recorded themselves fucking and the recording got out, they’d go to jail for statutory rape.
They’re generally very comfortable around Grindr though.
By creating a plaintext dotfile in $HOME, I’d reckon. Minimum effort, gets the job done. Users can lie when setting up the account so protecting the file against tampering is pointless.
But more likely, not a single distro will implement anything by default because it doesn’t make sense to change your internationally-distributed OS because one state in one country passed a stupid law.
I apologize in advance for how pedantic this comment will be but “half the US now requires” obviously refers to half the administrative units (states in this case, could be counties or municipalites etc) while “half the US is required” would refer to the population, so technically the post title is not wrong because of the population distribution.
I’m going to wash my hands now so that my fingers forget they typed this.
Corn me up, snake
This aligns with what I read in an article several months ago as well.
Aligubba on Trump sucked off Bubba.
Chupa Bozo
“Cool while it lasts” is still better than “terrible now and forever”. Hopefully Waterfox survives long enough for Ladybird to get off the ground.