smiletolerantly

As the author of an obscure static site generator. I feel called out.

My personal blog currently has one (1) post. It's about how to get started blogging with my SSG. Oops.

(Not the person you responded to)

I'm curious, what exactly are your issues with the AI implementations the poster above you mentioned?

Because to me, they seem like very specific usecases where they actually offer benefits. It doesn't seem like someone just went "everyone is doing ai... Let's slap ai on Firefox so we stay one of the cool kids!".

Example: I live in a country where I don't speak the language. Instead of using a plugin for Firefox which translates e.g. government sites by sending them to Google translate, FF has been handling this locally for a couple of months now. Seems like a win to me.

Similarly, I imagine that vision impaired folks will receive a real benefit by not having to deal with the way-too-large number of websites not providing alt tags for images.

If (yes, I know, big IF) the models FF ships are indeed ethically trained and run fully locally... Then I kinda don't get the issue

And usually Usenet does lend quite a bit of releases you usually see on private indexers or some publics.

Right, that's also true.

Yes, they do!! With torrents, it just takes a single seeder to keep the torrent alive, but Usenet isn't peer to peer - you're downloading stuff from a centralized server(s), and they simply cannot keep everything alive forever.

IMO it's fine though. Usenet provides you with very timely access to all the "newest" stuff, in excellent, very consistent quality.

And for older stuff, there's torrents.

I pay for one Usenet provider/indexer. I also still use tons of torrent sources.

90% of the time, stuff that I'm monitoring gets downloaded via Usenet for currently airing or rather new shows.

50% of the time when actively looking for stuff from the past 5-10 years I use Usenet, the other half is torrents

90% of stuff older than that, I only find torrents

100% of non-English stiff I get from torrents (I'm subscribed to an English Usenet indexer though, so that tracks).

In short: Why not use both?