I am indeed lucky because the company I work for cares about its employees. It’s literally written in the company statutes: the company exists to make money of course, but first and foremost to serve its workforce and the community, and takes decisions to maximize the well-being and the personal growth of the employees and the community.

We took an honest look at including AI in our workflow, but we decided it wasn’t worth the social destruction. Only a few employees use it - mostly the marketdroids to generate illustrations on the sales literature.

I am aware that this is a rare type of company and I cherish that job.

Unsurprisingly, it’s necessary to understand a problem to solve it - just like the proverbial infinite monkey would in theory produce the entire body of work of Shakespeare given enough time, in reality, only Shakespeare managed to write proper Shakespeare the first time out.

AI is the infinite monkey of coding. I, as a senior developer, have spend entirely too many hours of my working life fixing code written by monkeys, and I have already had to correct AI code (thankfully small and generated by a colleague who promptly apologized and decided to do his homework and study the problem at hand instead of winging it with Crapilot).

Google does not automatically mean bad

Yes it does.

Google does everything with an angle, and that angle is putting you under surveillance and collecting monetizable data on you.

Google has (or had, maybe?) fantastic products. They’re truly great! The translator, the map, Youtube… But they’re great for exactly the purpose of luring you into using them, so they can abuse your privacy with them.

Google products are trojan horses: they’re irresistible but their true purpose is nefarious.

He who cares about privacy even a little bit and uses Google DNS servers doesn’t really care about privacy.

I am doubly pissed off:

• Mozilla opts me into an analytics scheme without requiring my permission. That’s bad.
• Mozilla partners with fucking FACEBOOK to spring this shit on me? Now THAT takes the cake!

But… I would be pissed off if I used straight Firefox, and I don’t: I use LibreWolf, and I have no doubt they’ll strip this latest round of Mozilla nonsense from the LibreWolf browser.

I don’t know… I have a love/hate relationship with Mozilla: on the one hand, they’re pretty much the only thing that stands between the final overrun of the web by the Google monoculture and still having some kind of a choice what you use to hit the internet, and they make one of the only email clients worth its salt in Linux. On the other hand, every time they decide to do something, it’s always a screw-up, and it’s been like that for decades. Surely in their position, they should know what not to do to piss off everybody all the time, and yet… What a weird bunch.