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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

#81
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. :(

While I clearly generally do agree with you--this is why I have that second paragraph about pervasive DRM being the enemy here--and have spent much of my life fighting DRM in various ways, I will at least try to offer you a ray of hope: building functional DRM gets much harder as the analog loophole gets stronger, and now that we are nearly at (not quite, but so damned close to) being able to strap a "retina" screen over our eyes and implement real-time AR on our perceptions, to build DRM that functions is going to end up requiring AI detectives that suss out whether we are actually there or not... it will be ridiculous if we get to the point where instead of merely putting a piece of tape over our webcam we find ourselves having to hang a tiny screen in front of it designed to pretend to the computer that we are awake / present / not wearing a headset.

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

#82
post #81

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. :(

While I clearly generally do agree with you--this is why I have that second paragraph about pervasive DRM being the enemy here--and have spent much of my life fighting DRM in various ways, I will at least try to offer you a ray of hope: building functional DRM gets much harder as the analog loophole gets stronger, and now that we are nearly at (not quite, but so damned close to) being able to strap a "retina" screen…

> requiring AI detectives that suss out whether we are actually there or not

Please drink verification can to continue

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

#83

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.

It truly is just a modern day Clippy.

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

#84

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 Chrome for work on all my devices, and avoid any non-work browsing on it. It's an attempt to keep the two halves of my life apart.

For all personal browsing and projects, I generally used Firefox, but switched over a couple years ago to using Brave on the phone, and am kind of half-transitioned from Firefox to Brave on desktop. I've been a Firefox user forever, but it's slowly losing me.

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

#85

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

If you do that kind of rebase you have to force-push to your branch, and that's not great for many reasons. The other option is to `git merge chromium/master` into your fork. This way you don't have to force-push, but the history is not that clean and bisecting can be tricky.

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

#86

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…

Something I would like to mention, as a dev on Brave, is that patches are considered a last resort. If there are patches, we try to keep them lightweight - like patch to have Chromium create the Brave version of the object (something we can restrict to one line).

What you'll notice more often is a folder we have called `chromium_src`. This directory mirrors the directory structure for Chromium under `src` and the build system will look for matches. If there's a file with the same name under `chromium_src`, it'll prefer that one. That file then does what it needs to differently and then includes the original file.

This approach helps keep things much more lightweight - but it has challenges too. If code fails to apply (file that `chromium_src` is matching gets renamed, etc) it can be hard to detect. This is where you'd want to have a test to catch that.

Another person shared - but here's a link to our patching documentation: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Patching-Chromiu...

You'll notice the actual patching itself is introduced with the caveat:

  > When other options are exhausted, you can patch the code directly

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

#87
post #80
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

What do you mean? Kuinox was guessing a reason for the thread author's disapproval of Brave.

Brave failed to tell the user that the people they donated BAT to won't receive the money if they didn't sign up to Brave Creators [1]:

> In December 2018, British YouTube content creator Tom Scott said that he had not received any donations collected on his behalf by Brave.[42][43] Two days after the complaint, Brave issued an update to "clearly indicate which publishers and creators have not yet joined Brave Rewards so users can better control how they donate and tip"[44] and in January 2020 another update to change the behaviour of unclaimed tips.

Brave (by accident? or so the company said) automatically added referral codes to cryptocurrency site URLs in the address bar [1]:

> On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance.[47][48] Further research revealed that Brave also redirected the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

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

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this can be done with an extension that would work on all browsers. Like parse each page, save compressed text that supports fast decompressing (maybe even images), build tf/idf + cosine distance for verbantim searches & save in db and maybe add some ai to enhance the search. The next steps would be custom ai searches like "show me pages related to x", it'll quickly decompress the pages & apply the search for…

i’d want a feature to only do this for pages i mark as interesting (so, a bookmarked page i guess). i may not care to recall the match summary of as milan vs napoli. i have rafts of bookmarked pages, but i don’t know which of the 45 postgres-related pages contains a helpful sentence or phrase about indexing that i think i remember reading a few months ago.

I made this for myself, and some of my friends found it useful so I opened the tool up to the public.

i called it tinydesk.ai, and it's free

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

#90

How do they support this financially?

They are running mixtral, which is open source, so they can keep LLM costs to a minimum since they're probably running on their own hardware

Also I think they have loads of funding, and are factoring all of this into user acquisition costs

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