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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

#71

Post by freedomben »

tempodox wrote: post #50
vouaobrasil wrote: post #10

In my opinion, the goal of increasing automation has gone from a useful relief of labor to an obsession that will lead nowhere. Globally, this seems to be reflected only by increasing resource use and increasing ignorance of the natural world by producing purely for the sake of making consumerism more efficient. AI assistant in a browser...it's getting ridiculous.

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.

well once KOSA[1][2] passes and every website requires KYC stuff like uploading a copy of your ID just so you can get access to potentially dangerous/offensive ideas, we might need an AI agent to automate that deep level of privacy invasion for us :-(

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/02/dont-fall-latest-chang...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39446355

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

#72

Post by freedomben »

aqfamnzc wrote: post #70
saurik wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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. :(

Indeed, that's the endgame. End-to-end DRM, and there's enough money behind it that it will happen. I've been advocating heavily against DRM for many years now and nobody cares. Occassionally when somebody has a need in the moment where they are annoyed, and I explain "you can't share with your spouse/sibling/friend because DRM" they will say something like, "oh yeah, that's annoying" but just continue paying for DRM-ed media.

Unless perhaps people boycott, but that sure ain't gonna happen (in anywhere near large enough numbers to make a difference), Apple, Google, and Microsoft will build it into their platforms, and anyone not on the big three will be unable to consume more and more as time goes on, including most web browsing. It won't happen overnight. It will be an iterative/progressive encroachment where just a little changes each day. Boiling frogs and all that.

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

#74

Post by aqfamnzc »

freedomben wrote: post #72
aqfamnzc wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :(

Indeed, that's the endgame. End-to-end DRM, and there's enough money behind it that it will happen. I've been advocating heavily against DRM for many years now and nobody cares. Occassionally when somebody has a need in the moment where they are annoyed, and I explain "you can't share with your spouse/sibling/friend because DRM" they will say something like, "oh yeah, that's annoying" but just continue paying for DRM…

Who knows, maybe the climax of the advertising/drm war will result in an ideological split of the Internet:

On the one side: Big tech. E2E DRM, Chromium is the only browser engine sites will respond to, unavoidable and unblockable ads, siloed content and whitelisted domains only. Verified real identities. Linux clients and VPN IPs completely banned or pushed to captcha hell.

The rebels: Fediverse, the small web, fringe projects, experimentation, perhaps some "indie" ads. (And the problems that come with it: Spam, scraping, etc.)

I know which part I'd like to participate in.

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

#76

Post by bad_user »

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 Brave. It's a fine browser. The ad-blocking is almost on par with uBlock Origin. And I like its built-in Tor, BTW. I don't have any issues with Spotify.com, and it doesn't crash on me. I'm on a Macbook Pro M2 Max, and I also use it on a Galaxy S21U (Android).

I tried using Firefox on and off, but it's sadly technically inferior to Chromium, and that gap has gotten worse. It still has things that it does better than Chromium browsers, like history sync actually working, or reader view. But those are few and far between. And Multi-Account Containers, one of its apparent advantages, comes with the caveat that Firefox doesn't have usable profiles and the security for its extensions is worse (e.g., no click to activate, no ability to disable extensions in certain containers).

What finally pushed me to Chromium is the poor PWA support in Firefox. On Android, it has bugs that haven't been fixed for years (never mind the poor performance that's well known), and on desktop they've basically dropped the ball.

I use several PWAs. If it's a chat app, I use it as a PWA. Also Spotify, since you mentioned it ... as I like having better sandboxing and ad-blocking in my apps. On Android, too.

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

#77

Post by salad-tycoon »

bheadmaster wrote: post #33
rekoil wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And regular advertising (where the audience doesn't get paid for consuming adverts) isn't a grift?

Regular advertising doesn't promise the user that they will get paid for clicking ads. Regardless, whataboutism doesn't make Brave's scheme any less of a grift.

You don’t need to click the ads. You swipe them away. It’s based on attention not clicking. Not trying to be pedantic but it’s a difference.

You can also disable them. I did. Although when I had them on actually got some pretty good deals. Anyways, I just use safari these days and brave lives for YouTube for me to bypass ads and download for offline viewing.

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

#78

Post by SushiHippie »

freedomben wrote: post #68

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 b…

I don't know why they went with patch files instead of forking chromium and rebasing the changes via git.

They document how developers should "rebase" chromium:

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Chromium-rebases...

And it looks like way more work than doing it with git via

  git rebase chromium/master

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

#79

Post by quesera »

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…

I think this works equivalently in Firefox, but I don't know if there is a mechanism to import from other browsers.

E.g., I use a bookmark of:

  https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_%s
With a keyword set to:

  caniuse
And then type in the URL bar:

  caniuse div
To open:

  https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_div

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

#80

Post by pixxel »

Kuinox wrote: post #52
rekoil wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't get this hate Brave gets on HN and other tech forums. It's a de-Googled Chromium fork which retains support for Manifest v2 extensions and has a bunch of neat extra features like first-party ad-blocking, an (underused and probably at this point should be considered a failed experiment) advertising network where users are paid for the ads they consume, Tor-integration, Web3 integrations. Yes, it default…

> I really don't get this hate Brave gets on HN Well maybe due to the multiples bad things that brave did in the past.

Why are you in this thread?
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