this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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I got a copy of the text from the email, and added it below, with personal information and link trackers removed.

Hello [receiver's name],

I’ve long dreamed about working for Mozilla. I learned how to send encrypted e-mail using Mozilla Thunderbird, and I’ve been a Firefox user since almost as long as I can remember. In more recent years, I’ve been an avid follower of Mozilla’s advocacy work, and was lucky enough to partner with Mozilla on investigative journalism in my last job.

In many ways, Mozilla was the dream – and now, as the leader of the Foundation, my job is to make my dreams for Mozilla come true. What that means, though, is making your dreams come true – for a trustworthy and open future of technology; for tech that is a tool for liberation, not limitation; and for tech that values people over profit.

So I’m reaching out to technologists, activists, researchers, engineers, policy experts, and, most importantly, to you – the people who make up the Mozilla community – to ask a simple question.

[receiver's name]. What is your dream for Mozilla? I invite you to take a moment to share your thoughts by completing this brief survey.

Let’s start with this question:

Question 1: What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?

  • Protecting my privacy online
  • Avoiding scams
  • Choosing products, apps, technology, and services that I can trust
  • Keeping children safe online
  • Responsible use of AI
  • Keeping the internet is open and free
  • Knowing how to spot misinformation
  • Other (please specify)

Take the survey now →

With your help, together we can imagine and create the Internet we want. Thank you for being a part of this.

Always yours,

Nabiha Syed Executive Director Mozilla Foundation

(page 2) 37 comments
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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago

You can submit the survey without checking any of the boxes on the AI question, just FYI.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The audacity to direct you to a donations page after you fill out their survey 😂

[–] [email protected] -3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

What if the whole survey is just a ploy for donations

[–] [email protected] -2 points 14 hours ago

Always has been.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago

gecko webview for android, better site isolation

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (4 children)

They seem to have a foregone conclusion that AI is a positive thing, rather than something that should be eradicated like smallpox or syphilis.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 day ago (2 children)

"Responsible use of AI" could mean things like providing small offline models for client-side translation. They're actually building that feature and the preview is already amazing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Not just building it's shipping by default. That is, language detection and code that displays a popup asking you whether you want to download the actual translation model is shipping by default. About twelve megs per model, so 24 for a language pair.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

You're going to upset a lot of chess players if you get rid of all AI.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's because it is a positive thing. Just because awful businesses hijacked and abused it doesn't mean it's all bad. Mozilla is approaching it in a positive way imo.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 day ago (4 children)

And what, exactly, is positive about it, that has no associated negative outcomes?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Specific to generative AI, I think client side generation can be a good thing, such as sentiment analysis or better word suggestions/autocomplete.

A number of other helpful tasks have negative outcomes, but if someone is going to use it, then I prefer they use the version of the tech that minimizes those negative outcomes. Whether Mozilla should be focussing on building that is a different matter though

AI that isn't generative AI has a lot of positive uses, but usually that's not what these discussions are about

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Prolong your browser for as long as necessary and explore the possibility of using the internet without any web browsers. Firefox is a last stand of competition, and without choice there might as well not be browsers at all.

Is it wise to have such a complex everything-app with no end in sight? (more like, no end in site)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

good set of questions while trying to be non biased on certain topics.

for me, topics about privacy and misinformation matter more than ai. i would like them to lean more on helping me identify ai generated text and deepfakes as far as ai is concerned.

i also liked that mozilla study about smart cars so more of that is nice.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

Besides the already sketchy AI thing, I wonder why they need to know gender & ethnicity.

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