Goddammit, Mr. Noodle!

The title of this comes from an old Reddit post.

So there’s only one channel in this motel. This morning when I was getting ready I was watching Sesame Street. They were doing this bit where some clown was trying to wash his hands but kept washing his feet or his elbows and Elmo would go, “no mister noodle, your HANDS!” and all the kids would laugh. Around the fourth or fifth time he couldn’t find his hands, I heard a grown man yell from somewhere else in the motel, “GODDAMMIT, MR. NOODLE.”

Basically now that’s me when a new version of Firefox comes out. So much useful stuff gone that you have to get an extension for, so many opportunities missed, so many fads chased. I’m surprised that Firefox didn’t have a feature to get you to eat Tide Pods back when that was a thing.

Anyway, good morning, Firefox 142. And, crap, there are a lot of browser.ml options in about:config. Now I have to spend Saturday morning finding the Battery-Draining “Garbage” AI in Firefox and turning it off.

Can I get a goddammit, Mr. Noodle? All right, let’s get this over with.

• Remove chatbots. In the sidebar, choose the settings icon. In the Customize sidebar panel, uncheck the AI chatbot box in the Firefox tools section. (This means that if you look at browser.ml.chat.enabled it should be False.) Another thread: how to remove AI from my Firefox?

• Remove smart tab grouping: set browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled to False.

• turn off local machine learning: set browser.ml.enable to False. This does not seem to turn off Firefox’s built-in translation feature, which is also ML-based. So maybe a better name for the preference would be browser.slop.enable? (According to most sources, this setting should turn all the ML features off, but apparently translation is an exception for now.)

Or just go to about:config and make sure these are all false:

• browser.ml.chat.enabled
• browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
• browser.ml.enable

(update 3 Oct 2025) One more, for Firefox on Apple iOS: turn off AI summaries in Firefox on iOS

Any others? I’ll update this post with any replies from other Firefox users (the Oakland baseball fans of IT) on the Fediverse or mailing lists.

Removing AI/Machine Learning/LLM integrations from Firefox has some more explanation of what these do, along with instructions for Firefox for Android.

Two pieces of good news, though. Mozilla’s first attempt at an adfraud in the browser feature looks like it will be going away next release (although they’re still going through the motions at W3C and could bring it back any time). And, well, Mozilla does tend to buy in to expensive trends at the top—so the fact that they’re so fired up about AI slop in the browser is one more data point indicating that the much-awaited AI bubble pop is near. And one more possible piece of good news. The search antitrust thing could actually be good for them. If Mozilla management can’t rely on an endless flow of Google cash to do stupid shit, they might have to cut some…superfluous…execs loose and play more nicely with open source, kind of like how OSDL had to clean up their big-spending, frequent-flying act and morph into the more responsive Linux Foundation.

Related

turn off advertising features in Firefox These have changed around quite a bit recently.

Disable AI In Firefox by fLaMEd. Explanations for a long list of these settings.

Firefox Forcing LLM Features Another list of preferences to turn off.

Reddit thread: How to completely get rid of the AI stuff : r/firefox

LinkedIn post

Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome by Avram Piltch

Bonus links

Juror Attitudes in a Polarized Society from Orrick (a big law firm.) Consistent with declining trust in institutions, jurors are increasingly willing to turn into activists and take the law into their own hands. (icymi: common sense one, bullshit documents zero, inquiring minds (have a right to) know)

It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes by Barry Petchesky. But now we have Microsoft apparently determining that “unpredictability” was something that some number of its customers wanted in their calculators. I will admit to envisioning a thrilling frisson as I review the Defector P&L statement, not knowing if it will ensure our sustainable financial future or land us all in prison for fraud. I will enjoy it as much as the next fellow when I read Kathryn’s proprietary new evaluation model that identifies Giancarlo Stanton as MLB’s fastest runner, going first-to-third in 0.4 seconds on average. One can only hope that when you point out one of Copilot’s errors, it apologizes in that wheedling, I’m-just-a-smol-bean LLM register that makes me want to pour a glass of water into its mainframe.

Ukraine Embarrasses US Defense Contractors (The defense contractors shouldn’t catch 100% of the blame. AI policy in the USA means that they’re competing for programmers with companies that are making security worse for some reason.

From Slop to Sabotage by John Wunderlich. According to the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP), which tracks major security threats, data and model poisoning is now a top-10 vulnerability for LLMs. LLM Grooming is a more subtle and insidious form of this. This approach has been identified as a strategy to manipulate large language models (LLMs) for foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) purposes.

Let’s properly analyze an AI article for once by Jussi Pakkanen. One of the great wonders of statistical science of the previous century was without a doubt the Soviet Union. They managed to invent and perfect dozens of ways to turn data to your liking, no matter the reality. Almost every official statistic issued by USSR was a lie. Most people know this. But even most of those do not grasp just how much the stats differed from reality. (Anyone else noticing more Big Tech/USSR parallels popping up in the blogosphere? Related: The Political Economy of Incompetence by Paul Krugman.

Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable by Jason Koebler (Lindsay: Well, did it work for those people? Tobias: No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but, but it might work for us!)

Meta’s Rules for How Its AI Talks to Kids Are Appalling by Jake Peterson. (one piece of good news: at least Firefox doesn’t have many under-18 users)