Mozilla said Firefox will have a “kill switch” that disables all AI features in the browser. Someone witty quipped it will be the “Uninstall” button.
Asides
It’s possible that Time magazine’s Person of the Year selection — which in this issue named “the AI architects” (i.e., big-tech AI CEOs) — was chosen by an AI. First clue: calling several people the otherwise singular “Person” of the Year. Second and stronger clue: only something as dumb as an AI would pick that bunch of clowns as Person(s) of the Year.
A few months ago, youtubers reported unsolicited interventions by Google to “improve” their videos with generative AI. It appeared to be a test; now it’s official.
Channel owners can disable this feature in Studio: go to Settings, Channel, Advanced settings and uncheck the two options under Video quality enhancements. For viewers, Google’s suggested workaround is to change the resolution in the player’s settings.
Many people were surprised to learn on the 20th that Signal uses Amazon/AWS infrastructure. Signal’s president, Meredith Whittaker, had to explain why:
Instant messaging demands near-zero latency. Voice and video in particular require complex global signaling & regional relays to manage jitter and packet loss. These are things that AWS, Azure, and GCP provide at global scale that, practically speaking, others (in the western context) don’t.
It’s important to note that Signal uses end‑to‑end encryption, which means nobody at AWS can access the content.
(By the way: the “reply guys” issue on Mastodon shows up in almost every technical post Meredith makes.)
I find it fascinating that so many people fall for the fallacy that artificial intelligence is reliable enough to guide decision‑making. And sometimes I find it funny, too.
Brazilian startup Jumpad is intriguing from the pitch itself: a “self‑hosted platform, deployed on the company’s cloud” that lets you enable APIs from external services like OpenAI and Google. Hm, okay. The service “involves engagement dashboards and gamified trainings, contributing to cultural transformation.” As an example of “cultural transformation,” we’re treated to this gem:
At one client, it was found that 25% of employees’ time was spent on calls and meetings, but about 80% of them were not actively participating. In other words, it was a huge waste of time.
Imagine having to burn the planet to “discover” that most meetings could have been an e‑mail.
(The information comes from Brazil Journal [pt_BR].)
The US ruled the “remedies” to be applied to Google in the case where the company was found guilty of monopolistic practices in the search market:
- Prohibition from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app
- Requirement to make certain search index and user-interaction data available to rivals and potential rivals.
- Requirement to offer search and search text ads syndication services to enable rivals and potential rivals to compete.
And that’s it.
It wasn’t much and everyone complained. Well, almost everyone: Apple and Mozilla — which receive huge payments from Google to keep its search engine as the default in iOS/Safari and Firefox, respectively — are relieved.
Old people on the internet probably remember phpBB, a discussion board software that was very popular in the early 2000s. I discovered, by chance, that it still exists and has active development, albeit slow: the phpBB3 series was released in December 2007 and the last major update (3.3), in January 2020. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…?
The Washington Post reports on the discomfort that white-collar professionals are experiencing with the increasing presence of AI note-taking bots in video calls. There are cases where there are more bots than human beings in meetings.
This might be a positive result of the chaotic adoption of artificial intelligence in companies. When everyone is sending bots to online meetings and reading text summaries of them, maybe these people will finally realize that all those meetings could have, in fact, been emails.
Between Meta announcing that its AI, Meta AI, reached 1 billion users and Google saying that AI Overviews are used by 1.5 billion, I’m curious to know how many of these people intentionally use the feature, or prefer it to what the AI replaces.
AI Overviews appear at the top of searches, with no option to turn them off. Meta AI, I suspect many people trigger accidentally by tapping that horrible button in WhatsApp, in search results across its three core apps, or when trying to tag someone in a group by typing an @ symbol.
It’s very easy to reach enormous numbers when you already have a giant platform. I don’t think that’s even part of the discussion. The issue is trumpeting these numbers as if they were earned, rather than imposed.
Just a QR Code is a simple, straightforward QR code generator without ads or invasive trackers.
Just a QR Code was born from Gabe Schuyler’s dissatisfaction with online generators of this type. “Isn’t it possible to just make a one-page website that uses Javascript to generate QR codes? Something I could save to disk and run locally”, he pondered.
And from that, Just a QR Code was born. Gabe himself was committed to cover the operating costs. In exchange, he asks:
If you find it valuable, you can pay it back by creating your own useful thing for the world and releasing it for free. Let’s take back the friendly web, one vexingly-monetized utility at a time!
It’s this spirit that drives PC do Manual, a host of FOSS apps from Manual do Usuário. Which, by the way, has two QR code generation tools, a general one and another for joining Wi-Fi networks.
Mozilla has announced the shutdown of Pocket, one of the pioneering “read later” services.
Starting July 8th, Pocket will no longer allow saving content, essentially going into read-only mode. Data can be exported until October 8th, 2025. After that date, it will be deleted.
According to the company, “the way people use the web has evolved,” which justifies redirecting resources into “projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs.”
Signal has found a brilliant solution to shield its app from Recall, Microsoft’s official spyware for Windows 11: setting the app as protected by copyright (DRM), just like Netflix’s, which prevents it from appearing in screenshots — including those taken by Recall.
Recall, in case you’ve forgotten, is an “AI” feature that Microsoft announced in May 2024 for Copilot+ computers, which takes screenshots every few seconds and creates a searchable archive. Basically spyware. The launch was delayed due to public backlash, but testing resumed in April and it’s expected to arrive on eligible computers soon.
Airbnb announced its new app this Tuesday (13th). The app, know for its short-term housing rental service, expanded its scope to include experiences and services. I was struck by the absence of any mention of artificial intelligence in the press release. Is this the beginning of a new trend?
In the lawsuit where the US Justice is deciding which “remedy” to give to Alphabet, following its conviction for monopolizing the search engine market, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of services, said that in April, the volume of searches made via Safari shrank for the first time in history — that is, in almost two decades.
Eddy attributes the decline to the rise of generative AI assistants that deliver pre-digested search results, such as Perplexity (with whom Apple is reportedly in talks), ChatGPT, and Claude.
Alphabet (Google) shares took a 7.5% dive following the Apple executive’s statement, as reported by Bloomberg. The company released a statement disputing the information, saying that “we continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platform”
Who to believe? I don’t know, but if there were doubts that a seismic shift is underway, data like this helps dispel them.
Eddy Cue also said that Apple is considering changing Safari so that the browser can incorporate AI assistants, and that he has lost sleep over the possibility of losing the annual USD 20 billion that Google pays as a “sweetener” to be Safari’s default search engine. I almost feel sorry for him.