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I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

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Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#131

Post by everdrive »

threetonesun wrote: post #59
everdrive wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be something of an historical return to form; a small class of properly educated people and then the wider, semi-literate masses.

I'm "properly educated" by most definitions, 95% of web pages are garbage and a summary is fine. Also I imagine you frequently read summaries of books and movies and many other things before deciding to read or watch the entire work.

>95% of web pages are garbage and a summary is fine.

Mmm, summarized garbage.

>Also I imagine you frequently read summaries of books

This isn't what LLM summaries are being used for however. Also, I don't really do this unless you consider a movie trailer to be a summary. I certainly don't do this with books, again, unless you think any kind of commentary or review counts as a summary. I certainly would not use an LLM summary for a book or movie recommendation.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#132

Post by slightwinder »

everdrive wrote: post #4

Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.

> Does anyone want AI in anything?

Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this. AI can be useful, and integration is beneficial. But if we are talking about the momentary hype, then no, most people are against stupidly blindly shoving AI into something and getting annoyed with it the whole time.

Personally, I would prefer for apps to safely open up for any kind of integration, and AI being just one automation of many, whatever one prefers. It's so annoying for everything being either a walled garden, guarding every little bit they can grab; or having apps open, but so limited in what they actually can do, that you are basically forced to the walled gardens.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#133

Post by perch56 »

debugnik wrote: post #32
transcriptase wrote: post #10

Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions. That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.

> kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money Nitpick: Firefox is developed by Mozilla Corp., not the non-profit.

Mozilla Corp is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Tomayto, tomahto.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#135

Post by ufocia »

thih9 wrote: post #122
andy99 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of the features doesn’t bother me. It’s the constant nagging about them. I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever. Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to…

> I can’t use a google product without being harassed (...) You can disable AI in Google products. E.g. in Gmail: go to Settings (the gear icon), click See all settings, navigate to the General tab, scroll down to find Smart features and personalization and uncheck the checkbox. Source: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/15604322

I prefer opt-in vs. opt-out. Opt-out is pretentious and patronizing.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#136

Post by badsectoracula »

rwmj wrote: post #39
mabedan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it for summarization constantly. I made iOS/mac shortcuts which call Gemini for various tasks and use them quite often, mostly summarization related.

How do you know its summaries are correct?

I've done some summarizing with my own small Tcl/Tk-based frontend that uses llama.cpp to call Mistral Small (i.e. all is done locally) and i do know that it can be off about various things.

However 99% of the times i use this isn't because i need an accurate summary but because i come across some overly long article that i do not even know if i'm interested in reading, so i have Mistral Small generate a summary to give me a ballpark of what the article is even about and then judge if i want to spend the time reading the full thing or not.

For that use case i do not care if the summary is correct, just if it is in the ballpark of what the article is all about (from the few articles i did ended up reading, the summary was in the ballpark well enough to make me think it does a good enough work). However even if it is incorrect, the worst that can happen is that i end up not reading some article i might find interesting - but that'd be what i'd do without the summary anyway since because i need to run my Tcl/Tk script, select the appropriate prompt (i have a few saved ones), copy/paste the text and then wait for the thing to run and finish, i only use it for articles i'm in already biased against reading.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#137

Post by vidarh »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #114
vidarh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most things it doesn't matter, as long as its usually correct enough , and "enough" is a pretty low bar for a lot of things.

Can you give an example? And how would I know the LLM has error bounds appropriate for my situation?

> Can you give an example?

Recipe pages full of fluff.

Review pages full of fluff.

Almost any web page full of fluff, which is a rapidly rising proportion.

> And how would I know the LLM has error bounds appropriate for my situation?

You consider whether you care if it is wrong, and then you try it a couple of times, and apply some common sense when reading the summaries, just the same as when considering if you trust any human-written summary. Is this a real question?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#138

Post by cwillu »

glenstein wrote: post #123
everdrive wrote: post #4

Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.

I believe there are good targeted tasks. One Chrome plug-in called 'Tweeks' is a reimplementation of Grease monkey user scripting where you can make changes by posing natural language to an LLM that changes the page for you. It was posted here in hn the other day. [0] Also I believe some agentic tasking can make sense: scroll through all the Kindle unlimited books for critically acclaimed contemporary hard sci-fi. Bu…

I don't want imagination in my existing tools. I don't want the designers of my tools sneaking into my toolbox and fucking with shit in the middle of the night.
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