Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

waterfox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 344 posts

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#91

Post by eszed »

_heimdall wrote: post #77
kbelder wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like using your turn signal even when you know there's nobody around you. Politeness is a habit you don't want to break.

That's an interesting example to use. I only use turn signals when there are other cars around that would need the indication. I don't view a turn signal as politeness, its a safety tool to let others know what I'm about to. I do also find that only using a turn signal when others are around is a good reinforcement to always be aware of my surroundings. I feel like a jerk when I don't use one and realize there was so…

> when there are other cars around that would need the indication

This has a failure state of "when there's a nearby car [or, more realistically, cyclist / pedestrian] of which I am not aware". Knowing myself to be fallible, I always use my turn signals.

I do take your point about turn signals being a reminder to be aware. That's good, but could also work while, you know, still using them, just in case.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#92

Post by derekdahmer »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #81
someothherguyy wrote: post #44

This feature can be easily disabled with policies: https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#generativeai https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#preferences https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/browser/app/profil... https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/modules/libpref/in...

This is like when people defend Windows 11's nonsense by saying "you can disable or remove that stuff". Yes, you can. But you shouldn't have to, and I personally prefer to use tools which don't shove useless things into the tool because it's trendy.

How is this different from linux? People happily spend hours customizing defaults in their OS. It’s usually a point of praise for open source software.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#93

Post by jrjeksjd8d »

inkysigma wrote: post #32

> Large language models are something else entirely*. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn't sit well. Am I being overly critical here or is this kind of a silly position to have right after talking about how neural machine translation is okay? Ma…

To be more charitable to TFA, machine translation is a field where there aren't great alternatives and the downside is pretty limited. If something is in another language you don't read it at all. You can translate a bunch of documents and benchmark the result and demonstrate that the model doesn't completely change simple sentences. Another related area is OCR - there are sometimes mistakes, but it's tractable to create a model and verify it's mostly correct.

LLMs being applied to everything under the sun feels like we're solving problems that have other solutions, and the answers aren't necessarily correct or accurate. I don't need a dubiously accurate summary of an article in English, I can read and comprehend it just fine. The downside is real and the utility is limited.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#94

Post by jacquesm »

_heimdall wrote: post #77
kbelder wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like using your turn signal even when you know there's nobody around you. Politeness is a habit you don't want to break.

That's an interesting example to use. I only use turn signals when there are other cars around that would need the indication. I don't view a turn signal as politeness, its a safety tool to let others know what I'm about to. I do also find that only using a turn signal when others are around is a good reinforcement to always be aware of my surroundings. I feel like a jerk when I don't use one and realize there was so…

I would strongly suggest you use your turnsignals, always, without exception. You are relying on perfect awareness of your surroundings which isn't going to be the case over a longer stretch of time and you are obliged to signal changes in direction irrespective of whether or not you believe there are others around you. I'm saying this as a frequent cyclist who more than once has been cut off by cars that were not indicating where they were going because they had not seen me, and I though they were going to go straight instead of turn into my lane or the bike path.

Signalling your turns is zero cost, there is no reason to optimize this.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#95

Post by tdeck »

inkysigma wrote: post #32

> Large language models are something else entirely*. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn't sit well. Am I being overly critical here or is this kind of a silly position to have right after talking about how neural machine translation is okay? Ma…

Aside: Does anyone actually use summarization features? I've never once been tempted to "summarize" because when I read something I either want to read the entire thing, or look for something specific. Things I want summarized, like academic papers, already have an abstract or a synopsis.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#96

Post by hatefulheart »

kevmo314 wrote: post #29

> Machine learning technologies like the Bergamot translation project offer real, tangible utility. Bergamot is transparent in what it does (translate text locally, period), auditable (you can inspect the model and its behavior), and has clear, limited scope, even if the internal neural network logic isn’t strictly deterministic. This really weakens the point of the post. It strikes me as a: we just don't like those…

Your tone is kind of ridiculous.

It’s insane this has to be pointed out to you but here we go.

Hammers are the best, they can drive nails, break down walls and serve as a weapon. From now on the military will, plumber to paratrooper, use nothing but hammers because their combined experience of using hammers will enable us to make better hammers for them to do their tasks with.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#97

Post by move-on-by »

AuthAuth wrote: post #52
mindcrash wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not "wanting" to introduce AI, they already did. And now we have: - A extra toolbar nobody asked for at the side. And while it contains some extra features now, I'm pretty much sure they added it just to have some prominent space to add a "Open AI Chatbot" button to the UI. And it is irritating as fuck because it remembers its state per window. So if you have one window open with the sidebar open, and you cl…

All your complaints can be resolved in a few seconds by using the settings to customize the browser to your liking and not downloading extensions you dont like. And tons of people asked for that sidebar by the way. We have to put this all in the context. Firefox is trying to diversify their revenue away from google search. They are trying to provide users with a Modern browser. This means adding the features that peo…

For me, the complaint isn’t the AI itself, but the updated privacy policy that was rolled out prior to the AI features. Regardless of me using the AI features or not, I must agree to their updated privacy policy.

According to the privacy policy changes, they are selling data (per the legal definition of selling data) to data partners. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-...

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#99

Post by charcircuit »

XorNot wrote: post #71
kevmo314 wrote: post #29

> Machine learning technologies like the Bergamot translation project offer real, tangible utility. Bergamot is transparent in what it does (translate text locally, period), auditable (you can inspect the model and its behavior), and has clear, limited scope, even if the internal neural network logic isn’t strictly deterministic. This really weakens the point of the post. It strikes me as a: we just don't like those…

Translation AI though has provable behavior cases though: round tripping. An ideal translation is one which round-trips to the same content, which at least implies a consistency of representation. No such example or even test as far as I know exists for any of the summary or search AIs since they expressly lose data in processing (I suppose you could construct multiple texts with the same meanings and see if they sum…

That is not an ideal translation as it prioritizes round tripability over natural word choice or ordering.

Re: No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

#100

Post by PunchyHamster »

user3939382 wrote: post #66
inkysigma wrote: post #32

> Large language models are something else entirely*. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn't sit well. Am I being overly critical here or is this kind of a silly position to have right after talking about how neural machine translation is okay? Ma…

Firefox should look like Librewolf first of all, Librewolf shouldn’t have to exist. Mozilla’s privacy stuff is marketing bullshit just like Apple. It shouldn’t be doing ANYTHING that isn’t local only unless it’s explicitly opt in or user UI action oriented. The LLM part is absurd bc the entire overton window is in the wrong place.

It's frankly desperate trend chasing from management that lost after starting from near total market domination, and have no idea what to do now.
Post reply on HN