Human interaction is all politics to varying degrees.

Unless you are an extreme outlier someone at some point will need to interact with someone outside of the business to get the things the business needs.

Unless you are a dictatorship of a business, coming to a consensus on what the business needs is going to require dealing with people.

I agree that politics for personal gain or CV juice is bullshit though.

Being competent should be enough, unfortunately that’s not generally how it works, which is also bullshit.

Not necessarily, they have been known to shut down accounts they think are trying to evade a ban.

Not sure how sophisticated it is, but it does exist.

If you look at a bullet point list and see drama I think I can safely ignore your threshold for “drama”.

TL;DR;

On by default is exactly what forcing interaction looks like.

There are many effects regardless of whether or not you interact with the features directly.

Disagreeing vehemently doesn’t make you correct.

Some of these things are on by default, that’s the very definition of forcing an interaction, even if it’s just to hunt through the settings to turn it off.

Regardless, just don’t interact with the AI stuff and you won’t even know the difference.

It’s so close to the same energy it’s even parroting the same kind of “make absolute statements without understanding the realities of the subject” mindset.

Let’s start with some basics.

• At least some of these features are on by default so from the get go you are already being affected, even if it’s just a minor annoyance.
  • You need go out of your way to turn them all off (and keep on top of new additions, again, some of which are on by default).
  • They are also regularly “reset” during upgrades
• Assuming you’re a regular user and don’t religiously go turning all of these features off at the root, some of them will be part of interacting with the daily usage of the browser, incurring a performance cost.
  • Right click context actions are a good example of this, as is AI tab grouping and the planned Link Preview (though the latter currently needs a key press to activate)
  • Even if you never use the tab grouping, the analysis of what’s needed to suggest things is still a performance cost, possible a non-trivial one.
• Any new code or feature added to the browser contributes to bug and maintenance surface area, meaning resources used to develop, test and maintain that code.
  • This is resource not being used on other, non AI, bugs and features.
  • Project management is complicated so it isn’t a one-to-one ratio of resources from one thing to another, but it’s still a non-zero percentage.

Now for the slightly more esoteric

• LLM’s as a whole are provably bad for the environment, power grids and water supplies , that’s both the running and the model generation
  • People might not care about this, but not caring doesn’t negate negative impacts in this case.
  • Some might consider the tradeoff to be worth it, that’s fine, still affected by it though.

I’m not arguing for or against LLM features (though for the record i’m not a fan of them being auto-included) i’m saying that your statement about not being affected if you don’t use them is incorrect.

Same energy