Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

browser.ml.enable

extensions.ml.enabled

browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

to get rid of the revamped sidebar, which is also trying to incorporate ai:

sidebar.revamp

browser.ml.enable

browser.ml.chat.enabled

browser.ml.chat.menu

browser.ml.chat.page

browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge

browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge

browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled

browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

extensions.ml.enabled

browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate

Saying ‘good morning’ to a person is already a bit in the queerplatonic zone (if you said ‘good morning’ to every single person you were ‘merely friends’ with, you’d have like a dozen different threads going on- it denotes a special place in your sphere) and since a lot of people conflate emotional closeness with romance and ergo sex, this makes perfect sense as a clarification

take out a hit on dead person

georgia desecration of a corpse penalty

find a gravesite covington georgia

At 81, she just voted for the first time: ‘Made me feel like I was American’

@northgreatern okay so listen. idk what your living situation is but imagine if you will: you live with roommates. you have a friend who wants to come over and watch TV. you want to have a steady viewing experience that is free from interruptions. so you tell your roomates: "hey I have a friend coming over later to watch TV, try and keep it down if you have to go through the living room while we're watching."

this is like a totally normal interaction to have, right? but the best part is, you can say this for literally any activity and it's fine. even for sex. you can literally just say "hey I'm having a hookup come over later, so take whatever precautions you think are necessary to not hear me fuck." (you might want to say it more delicately than that but that's not important here)

the reason you can do this for sex is because sex is not special, it's literally just another activity that people can do for fun. I sometimes see people posting shit like "if you have sex in your house while other people are there then you are a sex criminal traumatizing your cohabitants by exposing them to sexual activity without their consent" but like, you literally are not doing that. you are just doing an activity with a friend, most likely within the relative privacy of your bedroom, while everyone else in your house does their own thing. I feel like we can agree that if your roommate said to you, "you're not allowed to watch TV in the living room because I don't want to hear any noises produced by your activities", that would be completely insane, so there's no reason that sex should be held to a different standard

relatedly, I'm kind of bothered by your usage of the phrase "just for the sake of your roommates hooking up". sometimes people want to have sex! those of us who do it tend to think it's a lot of fun! living with other people should not (and does not) require you to Simply Forsake The Unnecessary Pleasures Of The Flesh for the (imagined) benefit of those other people!

and speaking of those other people: in what I imagine is the vast majority of situations, all of you pay for the apartment you all live in. that includes the people who want to have sex there! they are also allowed to "just chill in the apartment (they) pay for"!

now, sometimes one person's chilling can conflict with the ways in which another person wants to chill, this is true. but frankly, that's just the reality of living with other people, regardless of your relationship with them. you gotta compromise with each other sometimes. communicate your needs and desires so you can all experience chilling sometimes, instead of living with the impossible expectation that you specifically can chill all the time. it's a necessary skill for group living, which is something people have been doing since long before the invention of paying rent, and will continue to do long after the idea of rent is merely a memory.

Election Day is important.

Vote. Call out sick to vote. Use a PTO day. Work extra hours to make up the money ahead of time.

Vote.

If you don’t vote, you can’t complain. You did not even try to make change, you just hoped other people would do it for you.

There are services to help make that happen. Vote.

Every single on of those registrations was a single person deciding to register. When you think you're just "lil ol me" and your voice doesn't matter that much: Remember this. Your actions have impact, your voice and your vote matter.

Get Registered and VOTE

I was today years old. That is disgusting.

No Child Left Behind is one of the worst things to ever be incentivized in schools. It was signed into law when I was 14. Reading Rainbow was my show as a kid. LeVar Burton played a big part in why I became an avid reader to date. The joy of it. It's an adventure around the globe and through different time periods without stepping on a plane or time machine.

Children parrot behavior. In grade school, I always wanted to read the same amount of books as my teachers (50 books) and managed to double that each year. Before No Child Left Behind, book fairs and Scholastic catalogs were a serious matter like your grandma's Fingerhut catalogs. Libraries were (and still are) a wonderland.

This concentrated schools and other education programs entirely on those tests, especially schools with students who were already struggling, at the cost of art and music programs, home economics and shop type programs, and any in depth exploration of pretty much anything that wasn't on the test, which were pretty narrowly focused. Reading Rainbow was a relaxed encouragement to be imaginative and curious. It didn't teach kids the answers to questions on the test. So it didn't make the cut.

This widened the gap between public and private school educations significantly, because students in public schools learned mostly how to regurgitate information, while students in private schools learned how to understand it, analyze it, think critically about it, and apply it - in short, if you could afford to go to private school, you still got to have agency over your education. And sure, many public school teachers were dedicated and still taught their students more than the curriculum demanded, but they were under a lot of pressure and scrutiny and their hands were often tied. Many of them couldn't sustain the effort it took (and how little they got paid) and changed careers. Meanwhile basic necessarily skills disappeared when arts and non-academic budgets were slashed into oblivion - you used to be able to learn how to sew, mend, cook, budget, do woodworking, fix a car (hell, build one), paint, draw, do pottery, and so much more in elective classes. What's mostly remained is performing arts programs, which struggle to continue existing, but since you can charge admission to performances they've had a better chance than shop class and home ec.

You have no idea what it's like to have watched all that happen under the Bush administration and now see the second emerging generation of young people who were deprived of the education they deserve and don't understand critical thought or media analysis. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Bush era are frustrated, but not at all surprised to see how reductive and binary fandom discourse is, or that critical media analysis has diminished significantly and turned into fandom discourse instead (ie. that being a child during the "what you feel is more valid than facts" Bush administration has led to the second emerging generation of people who struggle to separate their personal feelings about a piece of media from the idea that fiction is social commentary, who struggle to understand nuance and are more concerned about judging others for their even slightly divergent political views than about what makes for effective activism, or that fandom has become a way for people to judge and condemn others).

You have no idea how terrifying it is to have watched No Child Left Behind unfold in your early 20s and have thought "this is going to lead to generations of kids who will be ripe for manipulation by propaganda" and to now watch how hard it is to get Gen Z and Alpha to understand the ways they're being manipulated by fascists. Believe me when I say the very real purpose of forcing education to focus on tests instead of knowledge was to create generations of people whose brains are trained at an early age to accept information unquestioningly. That's what I see when people reblog screenshots without sources and base their political opinions on tumblr funnymen.