This is the best summary I could come up with: It’s “members of Congress, conservative activists and wealthy tech investors.”

Unless you’re doing something unusual, it’s probably because you’re browsing youtube without being logged in.

Who are all these extremist wackos who don’t already want to abolish capitalism?

Amazing how Johnson’s government managed to combine this callous indifference to the fates of its people with one of the most cruel and restrictive “lockdown” regimes in the world, arresting people for going out to walk their dogs and so on. Boris really had a talent for ineptitude that was exceptional even among prime ministers.

More evidence that all political leaders need someone whose job it is to sneak up on them and whisper “remember, you too will die” whenever they seem in danger of forgetting it.

You might think that things have changed over the years, but I was around in 1995 and I can assure you this looked exactly as ridiculous then as it does now.

AI that is used to monitor cameras and identify our faces to track everywhere everyone goes: Why would that concern you? Do you have something to hide, citizen?

AI that might be used to generate agitprop, competing with conventional advertising: HOLY SHIT we need a new international treaty right away!

What’s the difference? They both speak Swahili, right?

My time was wasted by LLM-generated nonsense just yesterday. I wanted to know when whistling tea kettles similar to the classic design we know today first became popular. The first search result I got was a 3000-word essay all about the history of kettles, so I started reading. You’ll know you’ve found the same one I did if at various points it claims that the kettle was invented “ca. 8000 BC”, “4000 years ago”, “around 3000 BC”, “15,000 years ago”, and “approximately 906-1127 AD”.

There are various other inconsistencies and things that make no sense at all by human standards, but it’s written in an authoritative tone, looks pretty nice, and was the first result on my searx instance, appearing in the results from several well-known search engines. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that it’s all bullshit, and there’s probably at least some truth mixed in there somewhere.

It’s not exactly something to panic over I’d say, but it sure is annoying.

It seems like a coordinated effort

It’s nice to see this getting noticed for once in mainstream mass media.

Firefox being free software, it wouldn’t make much sense for them to try and do something like this. So obviously we know that Mozilla would never go along with such an absurd law and start doing censorship on behalf of France. … right, Mozilla? Slightly strange that you didn’t say so?