I’m cynically viewing this as not a positive. I assume this is so they can make pages 2, 3 and so on as spammy as page 1.

Not at first, obviously. You don’t boil that frog on high heat.
You throw out a second page with a cute little text ad off to the side, then 1 or 2 at the top, then a mid-page ad. Maybe some suggested content.

Instead of having to scroll through a page’s worth of ads to get to semi-relevant results with a gem hidden in them, it’ll be a pages worth of ads for your semi-relevant results per page, and maybe what you were looking for 4 or 5 pages in.

Google used to be good. They ‘know’ what people are looking for. So they’ll probably hire someone familiar with gambling to figure out a minimum dispersion of relevant results on the pages, to keep people using the service and scrolling past ads. … I used to remember this. Variable-ratio reward schedule?

So - I don’t think Firefox would be generating captions for PDFs on PDF creation.

But of the major ways that PDF’s do get created - converted from text editors or design software, I know that Microsoft Word automatically suggests captions when the document creator adds an image (but does not automatically apply captions), and I believe that some design software does, as well.

I think that, functionally, both suggesting captions at time of document creation, or at time of document read are prone to the same issues - that the software may not be smart enough to properly identify the object, and if it is, that it is not necessarily smart enough to explain it in context.
By way of example, a screenshot of a computer program will have the automatic suggestion of “A graphical user interface” (or similar), but depending on the context and usage, it could be “A virus installer disguised as ___ video game installer.” Or “The ___ video game installer.” Between the document creator and the creation software or screen reader, only the document creator would really know the context for the image.

Which is all to say that I think that Mozilla has the right idea with auto-tagging, but it will always fail on context. The only way to actually address the issue is to deal with it within the document creation software.
But I wouldn’t be opposed to ML on those that can auto-suggest things or even critique how content authors write their descriptions.

Got addicted to rosewater in the French foreign legion, and now that she’s been kicked out as their animal handler, she’s aa to resort to bottom shelf stuff.

She liked that he had two tails. He liked that she had 3 1/2 foot long femurs.

But it was not to be, because it was an AI ripoff of an actual webcomic.

This is probably the same strain that wiped out almost all of the seal and sea lion pups last year.
Bird flu is decimating seal colonies. Scientists don’t know how to stop it — AP News

I did not realize there’s been a bird flu epidemic since 2020. I wish I were quicker to characterize my thoughts - it’s interesting that the animal kingdom has faced their own pandemic while humans had one, too. My thoughts range from solemn concerns to silly ‘Mother Earth decided to press the reset button’ jokes. I hope it mutates to be gentler, in the way that COVID has.

And not a single one of the articles OP posted refer to these as anti-genocide protests.

Every media outlet who keeps framing this as students supporting Palestine or opposing Israel is burying the lede, that these students wouldn’t be supporting or opposing anything if there wasn’t a fucking genocide.

Honestly, I’m a little surprised. I would have expected basalt to pair with a red, and granite to pair with a white.

It could be both.

A few weeks ago I blew my wife’s mind after she commented that both her and her best friend had started their period and I responded with ‘well, it is a full moon.’

She thought I was being ’boomer humor’ sexist until I brought up the studies about it. (Which are not 100% conclusive, mind you, but there are trends.)