Yeah, the conventional ones still draw a good chunk of power, and they’re not clean but they’re not dirty. Same as how a grocery store isn’t good for the environment but you’re not looking at them first for places to clean.

They tend to be boring, and are usually not a public thing but just something owned by a company to house their computers. The only reason I know about the ones near me is I used to work at one and people would move jobs to or from other ones. (As an aside, a datacenter is a great place to nap if you like white noise).

For a sense of scale:

This is the site of an open AI data center. The yellow square is about 1 square mile and mostly encompasses the area they plan to/have filled.

That angle shows more build out.

This photo has two normal data centers in it. The yellow square is also about 1 square mile. I’ve highlighted the data centers in red. One is to the left of the square near the middle, and the other is down from the right side near the big piles of what looks like rocks. (Spoilers: it’s rocks. They make asphalt). The sprawling complex in the upper right is a refrigerated grocery store distribution complex. The middle on the other side of the block from the asphalt is a coal power plant.

Of the things in this picture, I’m most upset about the giant freeway interchange. Coal is shit, but it’s a modern plant so it’s not belching soot, just co2, and the utility is phasing it out anyway. The grocery traffic is mostly dead except between the hours of midnight and 7am when they do restocks.
I can hear the freeway if I go outside.

I think the part you’re missing is that 1) it’s my community too 2) they’re not talking about AI data centers, or new data centers or anything like that, they’re petitioning to ban all data centers, and 3) we have multiple data centers in the city already that no one complained about until AI data centers became a thing people felt concerned about.

There’s a major difference between the 2 square mile hyper scale AI data center that requires a nuclear reactor and a full water treatment plant to cool and the 2 acre data center that’s air cooled and has no more ground pollution than any other parking lot and essentially a warehouse.
The state government has two in the city, at least, for processing electronic tax records, applications and hosting service sites. We have a few national insurance companies that need to process all the things they process. A research university, and a web hosting company round out the list of ones I know about.

This is my entire point about why sometimes it’s really necessary to point out that what someone is referring to is only a small part of what the words they’re using describe. The language being imprecise doesn’t matter until someone proposes a law outlawing chemicals, shuttering all data centers, or banning AI.

LLMs are problematic. My fancy rice maker isn’t.

I take your point. :)

It’s worth mentioning in my opinion though, because if someone were to say “we should ban chemicals” it’d be worthwhile to point out what that actually means.

I don’t actually think the broadness of the category is intentionally abused, it’s just that it’s an incredibly common thing to remove anything from the AI category that’s explicable.

I feel slightly more hanlons razor about it since there’s people in my city talking about and petitioning on the popular notion of banning all data centers from the state, and how it would be awful if s data center came here. I know what they mean, but it’s not what they’re trying to get the law to do, and our city already has six data centers I know of off the top of my head. The language drift is fine, but when it starts to conflate with policy it’s another issue.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next-chapter-anthony-enzor-demeo-new-ceo/

The root of the current discussion.

A conservative guess would be around 60 people.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi

You can click around and see the bug reports they’re working on. There are a few, to say the least.

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/releases/

This is a way to see what’s in each release. The ones on the left are major releases and tend to have bigger features, and the others tend to be bug fixes.

Web browsers start with core functionality that’s very complex. Then you tack on that they’re being used for things like banking, and managing the critical details of people’s lives. That means security galore, which is hard and constant. Then you have ad people, who are also something that’s hard to defend against.
Then there’s the constant flood of new features you have to implement to keep up with Google.

Chrome has 1,000 to 4,000 people working on it. Mozzila employs about 700 to work on firefox, with maybe 1,000 additional open source developers.

My initial guess was very wrong.

It’s less a vague umbrella and more an academic category. It just feels odd to call it vague in the same way you wouldn’t call “chemistry” vague, despite it having applications ranging from hand soap to toxic waste.

Yeah, ocr is a type of AI. The big advantage of modern techniques is that it can factor in context a bit better. It’s the same principle but a different mechanism for how you know a red hexagon with S__P on it says stop, even if the sign is dented, a letter fully fell off, it’s raining and dark.

It also means it’s sometimes wildly inaccurate, like in cases where it’s just so much more likely that it said something else. Like how on a bright sunny day, with perfect clarity, and a crisp new sign with extra good visuals, you’ll hit the breaks for a sign that’s a red hexagon that says §¥¢¶. It’s just very unlikely that that would coincidentally be on a red hexagon near the road, so it’s more likely you saw wrong and it was actually the normal thing.

You’re taking what they said a fair bit further than they actually said. They said a class a day for technology literacy, and you reacted like they advocated for nothing except advanced computing.

Teaching tech literacy is part of the basics.
You can say it should be learned on their own time, but why not say that of drawing and color theory? Math, history, civics?
Some parts of primary and secondary education are about teaching you how to live in the society you’ll be living in. Technology is part of that.

So for the first part, I don’t disagree at all. I just don’t think the logistics or theoretical necessity is a bearing on the symbolic-ness of it. Same for the effectiveness of it. Even if it changed literally nothing and no one would ever know I still wouldn’t shake hands with someone I considered evil.

I don’t see defining a subset of what you consider evil, like dissemination of hate speech, to be a downside.

There’s a lot of complex questions around a platform curating ideological content which could possibly make them loose certain platform protections. Right now most platforms are roughly content neutral because it allows them to be viewed as platforms, rather than publishers. This is more a response to the claim that there’s no reason for them not to remove ice. It may or may not be compelling, but it’s a real reason.

As for the use of the word “service”, sometimes my hands type slower than my brain thinks. My intent was to convey “those who develop and control the mastodon license”. Hopefully my original statement makes more sense in that context.
Those are the people providing the printing press schematic analog. Obviously an idea can’t support an ideology in that sense.

I’m not of the opinion either supports them in a way that’s worth getting angry over.
We also aren’t talking about being angry at ISPs for being willing to deliver packets to and from ice or Nazis, or any of the other entities that do less then the most they could possibly do to distance themselves.

Says the fact that it’s come up multiple times amongst a wide swath of the open source community, and look about you. Those licenses aren’t used. One or two exist and have a vanishingly small usage level and a couple more I have been “in progress” for years.
The people who write most of the open source licenses have explanations for why it’s not compatible.

Group behavior is a collective decision and a reflection of the group.

No, you’re not understanding what I’m saying. I’m not the person you were replying to.
Mastodon is a piece of software. It has a license, just like bluesky or any other. You can put a clause in the license saying the software cannot be used for the dissemination of hate speech. The open source community has discussed this and decided it goes against the principles of free software and open source.

If you’re mad at one and not the other, you’re applying different standards because being part of the fediverse weighs more.

Personally I hold platforms to a different standard and so I’m neither mad at mastodon nor bluesky. I just think it’s hypocritical to be mad at someone for publishing a fascists letter but not be mad at the person who gave the same fascist a printing press.

So the mastodon service supports Nazis.

nobody owns it and anyone can run it

They could have chosen a license that forbid usage for spreading hate. They put “free software” and “open source” above blocking hate speech.
They’re providing software to Nazis, and I don’t really see how that makes them better than providing a place to post.

Yup, that’s a good one.

Purely for discussions sake, I’d say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
No freewill or consciousness, but it’s selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances.

It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.

You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.

Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.

The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ if you’re actually interested in donating.

Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.

It’s why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don’t stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.

All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren’t simply being paid by Google.

Their CEO makes more than I think CEOs should earn in general, but the rest of their executives earn relatively normal to low salaries for their roles and the sector.

Non-profit doesn’t mean everyone works for free.

But that’s just saying that instead of using Firefox and not turning on the feature, you’ll use a less maintained version of Firefox where they didn’t enable the feature. I don’t feel like those projects have much value add in the privacy spectrum compared to Firefox, particularly when one of them was owned by an advertising company, and neither of them actually has the resources to maintain or operate a browser in isolation, which is a major concern regarding security and privacy both.

A very vocal portion of the user base, but we don’t actually know what absolute portion cares. I’m personally unlikely to use possible AI features outside translation, but Mozilla has generally done enough that I don’t feel particularly worried they’re going to mess with my privacy or force me to use a feature I don’t want.

Oh, they totally will. It’ll be another website boom. A lot of the big web presences will be damaged by the bust and hosting costs will fall through the floor. Less barrier to entry for making your little website and some portion of those will become problematicly large due to cheap cost driving bad design and we’ll go through the third or fourth round of this.

Or, for deepest irony, some of the most optimally located datacenters could be converted into steel mills and industrial bakeries.