> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all

There are clear AI-specific reasons why it's being crammed down everybody's necks.

Namely: someone in management has bet the entire strategy on it. The strategy is not working and they need to juice the numbers desperately.

It's not really AI itself though, it's just whatever the current hype cycle is - it was crypto and cloud before this.

Cloud is probably the better comparison, since crypto never had the sort of mainstream management buy-in that the other two got. Microsoft's handling of OneDrive in particular foreshadows how AI is being pushed out.

The difference is OneDrive is moderately useful.

i dont like onedrive very much. i get it its useful as a pigeonhole, what i really dont like is how it is used. its the thing that moves files to onedrive and destroys local copies, that i hate, and onedrive is something that enables that. so i dont hate onedrive, i just dont like it.

LLMs are also moderately useful.

the comparison is pretty good actually

"AI" agents randomly delete your files

and so does OneDrive

I have never received a Crypto spam email from any place where I opted out from it. Same for cloud. It feels different. With crypto it was everyone wanting to ride the hype train. With AI they spent a bunch of money up front and are desperate to see ROI.

There is at least a magnitude difference in the spread.

> you'll slowly get dependent on things that will eventually break in ways you will have no capacity to fix

If the commercial provider charging you $10 a month breaks it, you also have no capacity to fix it.

Your options are: send them an email, or unsubscribe and use something else.

Right but most of the time, in my experience they keep the lights on.

Keeping the lights on is fine.

But if they remove a feature I rely on, I can't put it back.

If they add a feature I hate, I can't remove it.

If they jack the price up, I have no real solution to this.

If they move features I rely on from the standard tier to the 5x more expensive pro tier, I have no real solution to this.

Why, yes, this is an echo of the old argument for open source software.

Yep. At one point I expected the software I needed to work for a reasonable time range, possibly up to a decade. Best if you could buy it once and use it from then on.

Now crap has turned into revenue sucking subscriptions, at most yearly licensing, feature flutter. And the worst is being bought up by VC/PE and milked for anything useful and thrown away.

> Now crap has turned into revenue sucking subscriptions

So much this. Each subscription is literally a small percentage of your revenue. You can't reinvest it ... it's just gone. Hopefully it enables more productivity ... but most likely, it is only marginal.

Same in the UK.

Votes close at 10pm. Might be a few stragglers left in the queue, so call it 10:15pm. (Exit poll results are embargoed until 10pm.)

Ballot boxes are transferred from individual polling station to the location of the count. The postal votes have been pre-checked (but the actual ballot envelope has not been opened or counted) and are there to be counted alongside the ballots from the polling stations.

Then a small army of vote counters go through the ballots and count them and stack together ballots by vote. There are observers - both independent and appointed by the candidates. The returning officer counts the batches up, adjudicates any unclear or challenged ballot, then declares the result.

The early results come out usually about 1 or 2. The bulk of the results come out about 4 or 5. Some constituencies might take a bit longer - it's a lot less effort to get ballot boxes a mile or two down the road in a city centre constituency than getting them from Scottish islands etc. - but it'll be clear who has the majority by 6 or 7 the next day.

I can appreciate that the US is significantly larger than the UK, but pencil-and-paper voting with prompt manual counts is eminently possible.

The actual data is being held by GPs, hospitals, other secondary care providers, and pharmacies. Enough of those providers use systems that all conform to a bunch of common standards and APIs that the NHS app can get that data (and the idea is it puts pressure on the remainder to switch to systems that are accessible).

The capabilities the NHS app offers will depend on what subset of the functionality the GP practice has implemented (on, in reality, the commercial vendor that makes the software they use).

NHS has pretty reasonable developer documentation which explains most of the high level pieces of the system - https://digital.nhs.uk/developer/guides-and-documentation

The metaverse is clearly the future. Zuckerberg said so, after all.

Browsers without metaverse integration will be a non-starter.

The metaverse is here to stay! Blockchain is the future!

Without integrating metaverse and blockchain features into Firefox, Mozilla is at a significant disadvantage compared to other browsers. Don't get left behind!

They did actually jump on metaverse with Firefox reality and Mozilla hubs. Both weren't bad products at all. Both are now cancelled and they have done basically nothing for Mozilla's market position.

Edit: so I mean I agree here in case that wasn't clear

They could even make the AI features available as extensions, downloadable from addons.mozilla.org

That way, the users who want them can download them, and the users who don't, don't.

to pump adoption number. it is well known that adoption rate is much higher when people are forced to opt-in be default.

because no one in right mind, would opt-in AI seriously. and definitely never on corporate machine

Mozilla shouldn't need to worry about adoption numbers though.

> the numbers speak for themselves

What numbers? Have Mozilla published any numbers showing their AI experiments have been warmly received by users?

When I'm unconscious in an ambulance, I'm definitely in a position to appreciate all that price transparency the free market has provided, so I can rationally weigh up all my options calmly and objectively while my organs are shutting down.

The great majority of health care is not emergency health care. Actually, the fact that emergency health is so expensive is quite the incentive for preventive medicine. And for the rest, insurance is necessary. Like for house fires or floods: I get the insurance but I also check my wires and pipes regularly.

Yes, but there would have to be an error of law in the High Court judgment.

(And you'd usually appeal to the Court of Appeal first.)