Sure, blind loyalty is bad, but your characterization of Mozilla is either ignorant or disingenuous. From Wikipedia:

The Mozilla Foundation will ultimately control the activities of the Mozilla Corporation and will retain its 100 percent ownership of the new subsidiary. Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary. The Mozilla Foundation will continue to own the Mozilla trademarks and other intellectual property and will license them to the Mozilla Corporation. The Foundation will also continue to govern the source code repository and control who is allowed to check in.

This doesn’t mean that enshittification can’t happen, but Mozilla Corporation clearly has different pressures than most corporations.

Thanks. Fixed.

Not versions. Distributions. They’re all developed and maintained by different organizations and are geared towards different types of users. It isn’t like Windows where your choice is Microsoft or nothing.

This means that different distributions can have a completely different UI and even approach things like installing software in very different ways. That’s why I tell people that if they install it and they don’t like it, try a different distribution. Or a different version of the same distribution. Changing your desktop environment can make a huge difference. Most distros push GNOME on their flagship version, but I’ve had a much better experience with KDE. If you don’t like the GNOME version, download and install the KDE version. If you like a Windows-style desktop, you can have that. If you prefer Mac, you can have that. Or you can do something completely different! The sky’s the limit, really.

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they are generally completely non invasive.

Does this mean that you usually always have great privacy?

It’s a bit surreal how stupid it is. Almost a work of art.

It’s not exploitative, it doesn’t exploit anyone.

It had to be trained on music created by human artists. Those artists were not compensated.

It’s not trash, and if it were you wouldn’t need to regulate it because people would reject it on the merits.

I would reject if I knew it was AI. I can’t always tell, though.

The space belongs to whoever wants to create art, with whatever tools they want to do it.

The owners of Bandcamp get to set the rules, because they own it.

They fucked the union, though.

The massive layoff that gutted Oakland-based music service Bandcamp hit one group at the company particularly hard: leaders of its nascent union.

As of Monday, Bandcamp has been sold by video game juggernaut Epic Games to Songtradr, a music licensing firm. The acquisition closed with just half of Bandcamp’s employees offered jobs at the Santa Monica-based company.

The job cuts, which SFGATE reported Monday amounted to about 60 of 118 employees, disproportionately hit union leaders, Bandcamp United told SFGATE in a Tuesday press release. Every member of the union’s eight-person bargaining team was laid off, it said, and in sum, 40 of the bargaining unit’s 67 people lost their jobs.

I haven’t noticed any change since they’ve been bought up. The new owners did bust up an attempt at unionizing, though, so there’s that.

I can imagine lots of things, but I don’t confuse it with reality, because I’m an adult.

I’m aware that it’s a computing term. My argument is that it’s a bad one.

You could say “the model’s output was inaccurate” or something like that, but it would be much more stilted.

The interface makes it appear that the AI is sapient. You talk to it like a human being, and it responds like a human being. Like you said, it might be impossible to avoid ascribing things like intentionality to it, since it’s so good at imitating people.

It may very well be a stepping-stone to AGI. It may not. Nobody knows. So, of course we shouldn’t assume that it is.

I don’t think that “hallucinate” is a good term regardless. Not because it makes AI appear sapient, but because it’s inaccurate whether the AI is sapient or not.

Because of what they produce.

Except that “hallucinate” is a terrible term. A hallucination is when you perceive something that doesn’t exist. What AI is doing is making things up; i.e. lying.

What they really need to do is put it on a blockchain.

Walled gardens go against the spirit of the Internet, anyway.