Good connection of the worrying story about removing anti-ICE apps to bigger problems in tech.

Oof, hadn’t thought of this, but as much as I’d like to further reduce Google dependence, this would really hurt.

This seems performative to me, and this paragraph gets at why I think so:

AI companies are increasingly pushing into education — perhaps in part to try and fight the reputation that AI tools have acquired that they help students cheat. Features like Gemini’s guided learning mode and ChatGPT’s similar study mode, which was announced last week, could theoretically help with actual learning, but the question is whether students will want to use these modes instead of just using the AI chatbots for easy answers.

This article is one more push in the direction of my finally subscribing to Kagi.

Voilà pourquoi il faut parler de la théorie de connaissance quand on parle de IA:

On est passé d’un moteur de recherche à un moteur de réponse. C’est-à-dire que les algorithmes proposent des versions rédigées à partir des données qu’ils auront collectées sur Internet, puis reformulées sans que vous ayez rendu visite aux sites contenant ces éléments de réponse à votre requête.

Look, I have some sympathy for Mozilla because it’s Mozilla… but Mozilla’s dependence on Google is a real problem.

I didn’t need to read a printer recommendation article today, but I’m so glad I did. The rage about the world we live in is great.

I have been meaning for months to embrace Kagi, and this is pushing me further over that edge.

What reckless hubris. As I wrote earlier today, I’m in favor of more liberal IP law, but not so that businesses can swallow up content to profit from it.

It’s that time of year (again) for signing the acceptable use policy for kiddo’s school, and I’m again grumpy about a lot of the details in here. Some of these details are me being a nitpicky academic, like the use of the word “technology” to refer to digital technologies alone. Others strike me as more serious, though.

Let’s take a look at this paragraph, listed under a “Roles and Responsibilities of Parents/Guardians” header:

This sucks so much—and encapsulates our world’s obsession with financial success over environmental health.

If AI is indeed going to help us reduce emissions, it seems to me that that will be the product of targeted, scientific and industrial use of AI, not shoving AI into a load of commercial products. Are these commercial companies using AI to figure out how to reduce emissions? If not (and maybe even if so), it seems disingenuous to express optimism that their increased energy use will be magically cancelled out by someone else.

Some good thoughts here by Masnick.

I don’t know if I’m using OneDrive wrong or if it is just that much worse than Google Drive for syncing local files.

Team Firefox foreverrrrrr

Lots to appreciate here.

Some good comments in here—especially on how AI enforces and normalizes certain kinds of writing instead of allowing us to determine what writing should look like.

I don’t like Paxton, and I can’t imagine this is much more than performative railing against a strawman version of Big Tech, but this is a real issue, so I’m interested to see where it goes.

Politicians need to better understand the internet. This is just as dumb (and perhaps more devious) than the nonsense the governor of Missouri was up to.

I knew my distrust of spellcheck would be validated one day! Seriously, though, this is bad news.

Ashamed to say I hadn’t ever thought about this possibility.

This is why the EFF and others have concerns about overreach of even clearly well intentioned content moderation. CSAM is clearly despicable, but automated content moderation can make mistakes, and consequences for those mistakes aren’t small.

Nooooo thank you. Don’t like this about Grammarly, don’t like this about Word, won’t like this about Google Docs. I am very skeptical of giving algorithms authority over style.

Speaking of the non-neutrality of platforms… Granted, Google has a difficult line to walk here, but this is still disappointing.

Another reason to be wary of automated ad exchanges.