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Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

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Re: Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

#61

Post by tempodox »

saurik wrote: post #55
tempodox wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browser will be even less under our control than before, surveillance will go to the next level, and your private data will land in even more obscure places than before. Ridiculous maybe, but by no means pointless. “AI” will be the end of ad blockers and a whole host of measures to secure a remnant of privacy on the net.

> “AI” will be the end of ad blockers... On the contrary, I feel like AI--even if it doesn't advance much further than the level we already have achieved--is putting us at the cusp of finally being able to have good end-game fully-working ad blockers: I'll just have an AI in my browser read / look at / watch / "experience" your content and then launder away any and all ads in its presentation to me... I can even have…

That's definitely a valid way of looking at it. I do hope your first paragraph comes to pass.

Re: Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

#62

Post by imiric »

dkarras wrote: post #60
imiric wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the AI is summarizing web pages, why couldn't this be done with a browser extension? If the AI is summarizing files the user downloads, why couldn't this be done with external tools? In general though, why does the browser itself need to be "smart"? Its primary, and perhaps only, goal should be to render web pages... I feel like this push to integrate AI features into browsers is done so that companies can promote…

It can be done with a browser extension, and external tools. I only care about the friction, speed and ease of use. I am indifferent to where the functionality comes from, really. I'd like to have a very scriptable barebones browser alas such a thing does not exist as far as I know, so if the browser has them handy and it provides good experience, it is a net positive for me in any case.

Sure, I can see how it would be useful, but wouldn't you prefer to have the choice of which AI to use? What if Brave's AI is worse than Chrome's, which is worse than ChatGPT? Or what if it's better, and you're now tied to that browser, even though you'd otherwise use something else?

Even if I had this functionality built-in, I would still prefer to use something else. Even if that's slightly more cumbersome, though there will probably be extensions for this sort of thing, if they don't exist already.

But, to each their own. :)

Re: Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

#63

Post by Vinnl »

rekoil wrote: post #42
malauxyeux wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind saying what you would like to do but can't with FF? I don't think I'm part of a cult, but I've used FF as my default browser for over a decade and I guess I don't know what else people want from a browser.

For me it's how user-defined search engines work. In Chromium-based browsers you can just supply a URL-template, a name, and a shorthand, and you're off to the races, it takes 10 seconds to add one. In Firefox it used to be you needed to like create your own little mini-addon or something like that, and these days they have "smart bookmarks", but it's such a weird name and doesn't really work the same. At any rate, I…

It's not the same, and you can't import them from Chrome, but I'll share what works for me just in case it works for you as well. Which is: set DuckDuckGo as your default search engine, and use their "bangs" - you'll be able to guess most of them, and never have to set them up yourself. For example, you could use !deepl, !wiki, !wse, !wt, !aw, etc. etc.

(If you do still want to use e.g. Google for search, you can use !g.)

Re: Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

#64

Post by Vinnl »

donkeyboy wrote: post #2

Different topic, but can someone talk about which browser they use now? I’ve used Chrome for the past N years with ublock Origin, but recently I’ve been getting some ads on Youtube. Also some websites just didn’t work in Chrome. I switched to Brave a week ago and things seem ok, but it’s a weird browser with Tor built in, and also Spotify.com always crashes with a Memory problem. Does anyone have any thoughts on brow…

If ads, in particular on YouTube, are the problem, anything Chromium-based is probably only going to get worse and worse (see [1] and [2]). So that basically leaves you with Firefox and Safari.

I work for Mozilla (speaking for myself, of course), so I'll leave you to guess which I'd recommend :P

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...

Re: Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

#65

Post by 65 »

donkeyboy wrote: post #2

Different topic, but can someone talk about which browser they use now? I’ve used Chrome for the past N years with ublock Origin, but recently I’ve been getting some ads on Youtube. Also some websites just didn’t work in Chrome. I switched to Brave a week ago and things seem ok, but it’s a weird browser with Tor built in, and also Spotify.com always crashes with a Memory problem. Does anyone have any thoughts on brow…

I still use Chrome, mostly because I much prefer Chrome dev tools over any other dev tool options. And I have a bunch of custom browser extensions I've made for Chrome.

I haven't had issues with uBlock Origin - very occasionally an ad will seep through on YouTube, maybe once every 6 months, but when that happens I refresh the page and the ad is gone.

Safari is the new IE and Firefox I've always found to just be alright - for sure not as big of a fan of Firefox dev tools over Chrome dev tools. And Firefox scrolling behavior can be annoying.

Re: Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

#66

Post by 123yawaworht456 »

everdrive wrote: post #49
123yawaworht456 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are several AI features I would absolutely love to see integrated into the browser, primarily, content filtering with my own custom criteria. for example, I don't want to see yuppie shit on news.ycombinator.com. right now, I have a userscript that filters out links from the worst offenders (e.g. newyorker), but every day, there are many more that shit up the front page and waste my time and attention. this coul…

This is just an arms race. It expends more energy, and the "solution" from the other side will be to pump more garbage in.

you could save even more energy by not using computing devices at all.

Re: Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

#67

Post by mcpar-land »

A lot of this new wave of "privacy focused" "we're not Chrome" browsers are A) just Chrome and B) venture capital funded. They're cool and fun now, but their ultimate goal is to burn VC money in a giant advertising pyre in hopes of pulling enough of the market away from Chrome to justify their existence. They'll either fail and burn out, or succeed and promptly enshittify to be even worse than Chrome. Please just use Firefox.

Re: Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

#68

Post by freedomben »

Unrelated but about Brave and interesting to me: I recently found myself having a large upstream project that I need to maintain some custom patches for, and there's a need for deeper customizations and I worry that my rudimentary system of applying .patch files will turn into an unmaintainable nightmare of merge conflicts after every rebase. I was thinking about possible solutions, and it occurred to me that Brave being Chromium-based must have this same challenge but an order of magnitude more difficult, so I looked for their code to see how they solved this issue.

It's pretty interesting! They do basically the same thing for core Chromium, applying a (big) set of patches[1].

Incidentally, I'd be interested to hear any ideas/approaches to this problem. I'm guessing if there was something clearly better, Brave would be doing it, but it seems like there should be a better way even if I can't think of one.

[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches

Re: Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

#69

Post by alanjdev »

donkeyboy wrote: post #2

Different topic, but can someone talk about which browser they use now? I’ve used Chrome for the past N years with ublock Origin, but recently I’ve been getting some ads on Youtube. Also some websites just didn’t work in Chrome. I switched to Brave a week ago and things seem ok, but it’s a weird browser with Tor built in, and also Spotify.com always crashes with a Memory problem. Does anyone have any thoughts on brow…

I use Safari for personal browsing, Firefox for work stuff (because my work machine is Windows). Firefox with uBlock Origin works quite well at keeping me mostly safe from ads.

Re: Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

#70

Post by aqfamnzc »

saurik wrote: post #55
tempodox wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browser will be even less under our control than before, surveillance will go to the next level, and your private data will land in even more obscure places than before. Ridiculous maybe, but by no means pointless. “AI” will be the end of ad blockers and a whole host of measures to secure a remnant of privacy on the net.

> “AI” will be the end of ad blockers... On the contrary, I feel like AI--even if it doesn't advance much further than the level we already have achieved--is putting us at the cusp of finally being able to have good end-game fully-working ad blockers: I'll just have an AI in my browser read / look at / watch / "experience" your content and then launder away any and all ads in its presentation to me... I can even have…

Your "end-game" AI tool sounds good, and would work I think, but I think the opposing endgame strategy for advertisers is fully verified DRM chain all the way from incoming network packets to the display's pixels.

Network -> Web Environment Integrity -> HDCP. No room in there for an AI middleman. :(

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