Browsers don’t need LLMs
I don’t need LLMs for any facet of my life. This statement is without exception.
Agreed
“Kill switch” – oh the drama. Let’s call every simple toggle ‘kill switch’ from now on.
i have a violently execute switch in my room (it toggles the lamp on or off)
THERE’S A PHYSICAL KILL SWITCH FOR TYPING IN ALL CAPS ON MY KEYBOARD, BUT I HAVEN’T ACTIVATED IT YET.
For it to be a kill switch it would have to actually terminate a rogue AI.
Yeah, call me when Firefox creates terminators that infiltrate and destroy data centers and then themselves.
“Firefox is including an AI murder switch so that heartless users can take the life of our helpful little robot guy who just wants to see you happy. We added it because not everybody is a good person.” -Mozilla CEO.
What’s worse…you could always toggle it. In fact, you could re-route it to your own local LLM.
Drama drama cheesecake drama
Tablet brick potato drama
I was once a treehouse; I lived in a cake. But I never saw the way. The orange slayed the rake.
Are… are you the fabled walrus? Goo goo g’joob?
It is lyrics to this ancient proto-meme originally found on AlbinoBlacksheep
Ah. You speak of the ancient magics. Tell me…have you ever been UNCOMFORTABLY ENERGETIC?
Or maybe you should just get over your superior self and let people have fun.
And immediately blocked.
I’m not against AI, I use it, but I want to be using it on my terms, not have it shoved into everything I use.
I kept the auto translate on. It’s the only thing I can think of that I want to just have happen.
?
Step 1. Add AI. Step 2. Add (broken) switch. Step 3. Pretend to fix switch. Step 4. Hide switch in sub-menus. Step 5. Remove switch.
… And all they actually need to do is make “AI” an extension. Let the users install it if they want to, or don’t. That’s the whole point of extensions. But they would never dream of that, hell no.
And their telemetry metrics will tell them people overwhelmingly keep the switch on.
Because the vast majority don’t read release notes these days?
I have enough trouble keeping with the IRL release notes of how my democracy is falling apart. Forger checking them on my browser.
You don’t have to read the release notes. It literally puts it front and center in your face the first time you launch it after this update is applied.
Because the people who turn off the AI are the same people who turn off telemetry
People overwhelmingly kept autosave off. People just don’t like changing settings. I’m hoping Mozilla knows this.
EDIT: Typo
Because OOBE is better than tinkering. Normies will stay on OOBE. We either tinker or move to another project.
Interesting read, thanks.
The only one I turned off was the sidebar, because that’s kinda dumb. The rest seem semi useful.
Left translate on. Everything else off. That’s one of my main use cases for AI. As long as it gets me close, whatever.
Same.
And also neither cloud-based nor LLMs
The only useful thing ive found for AI is its ability to read text from an image. Which is good for taking serial numbers from a photo, and copying from an app that otherwise doesnt allow copying on phone. Thats it. A tool.
OCR did that for 20 years .
Nothing these slop generators do is novel or new.
I remember using Google translate that was doing that live on the phone camera and translating the text at the same time 15 years ago.
Random aside to rant about consumer OCR.
Recently for my work I had to do some OCR stuff to get some numbers out of a document that the vendor in their infinite wisdom refused to provide in an editable/selectable form. I.e. they just slapped a .jpeg onto a page and saved it as a .pdf. (This is a separate thing that infuriates me.)
Anyway, what I’m actually here to complain about is the baffling phenomenon that every single piece of OCR software I tried ranging from open source to trials of commercial programs, to the thingy that came with one of our all-in-one printer/scanners, and everything in between is that it’s somehow still exactly as crap as the lousy OCR programs we were all struggling with in the late '90s.
I have absolutely no idea how this facet of technology in particular has utterly and categorically failed to make any forward progress whatsoever in literal decades. I’ve personally worked on machine vision driven pick-and-place machines capable of accurately determining the orientation of densely printed cosmetics tubes, among other items, and placing them all face up in a box several times per second. Yet somehow the latest and greatest OCR transcription algorithms still can’t tell a 5 from a 6 or ye gods forbid an S, or an L from a J, or an M from a collection of back and forward slashes, all despite being handed crisp high contrast seriffed text that’s at least 60 pixels high.
Given the incredibly low bar for performance here given that apparently every single programmer involved just walked away circa about 2001, I can’t imagine that the current slop generation machines fare any better…
I have tried some of the popular LLMs a few months back when I had to digitise an old policy document from which only an old scan still existed. I had trouble reading it.
The results varied wildly. OpenAI was really poor at it while Gemini got it right completely. I was quite impressed. ABBYY FineReader is supposed to be the best non-LLM software for OCR, but it doesn’t come near the performance of Gemini
How else do people think we were translating all that hentai before the slop generators took off
OCR kinda sucked lmao
Always worked well enough for me.
I remember trying to use some pre-LLM OCRs and it often got hand-writing really poorly. LLM backed seems to perform generally better, now typed OCR was usually pretty good.
Yeah, I never really used it for handwriting. That seems basically unverifiable sometimes, when I can’t read it myself.
that function is just reskinned OCR, though
which I guess you could consider as AI and that it is a similar training data structure? not my area lol
I do also think that AI has some use as a search engine. I haven’t used it much for this purpose at all, but a while back there was a specific type of engineering analysis I needed to do, and I couldn’t remember the exact terms or topics to look up. chat GPT got me into the right area so I could look at the appropriate resources. in that specific scenario, it was better than a standard search engine
Of course once I found the materials I was looking for, I stopped using the chat bot and you know use those materials
Yeah, ocr is a type of AI. The big advantage of modern techniques is that it can factor in context a bit better. It’s the same principle but a different mechanism for how you know a red hexagon with S__P on it says stop, even if the sign is dented, a letter fully fell off, it’s raining and dark.
It also means it’s sometimes wildly inaccurate, like in cases where it’s just so much more likely that it said something else. Like how on a bright sunny day, with perfect clarity, and a crisp new sign with extra good visuals, you’ll hit the breaks for a sign that’s a red hexagon that says §¥¢¶. It’s just very unlikely that that would coincidentally be on a red hexagon near the road, so it’s more likely you saw wrong and it was actually the normal thing.
Ackshually… Stop signs are octagons!
I also find LLMs decent for translating text between languages, though for serious use it still requires human review
Not working for me, OpenAI still exists :D
Remember when they had a “kill switch” for javascript?
It’s available as an extension: https://webextension.org/listing/javascript-toggler.html
Yeah. Used to be native. Like the slop kill switch currently is. Then won’t be.
For years and years I’ve been using this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yesscript2/
Yeah, as long as it made any sense to browse the web without JS. These days you need at least an allow list.
I, the laziest man possible, have been motivated to switch already. Waterfox is working just fine.
The only people that are into LLMs are scientist (which is reasonable) and tech bros.
The later just think it’s useful while for 99% of people there just isn’t a usecase.
I guess I’m in both groups. I love LLMs, but then again I have academic degree in AI.
Though I must also admit - look how they massacred my boy. LLMs could be used in games to make every NPC a talkative character or work as a customer support during off-hours of small businesses… instead they are used to generate advertisements faster.
Having tried a game with AI NPCs, they’re fucking awful. I don’t want to sit there and have a conversation with irrelevant individuals. Give me that concise “here’s your mission and reward.”
An AI companion who can converse, comment and learn may be cool, but I definitely don’t want anything like what I’ve seen.
Im super happy to see so many upvotes for this most excellent browser!
So while previously the translation feature was supported by an extension, now it has to be enabled through ai.
Hate it.
So, there’s a “bug”, though I expect to FF it’s a feature: If you individually block all of the AI features, then click on the master switch to block all AI, everything’s great. But if you revert that master switch suddenly it “forgets” all of your settings and shit is activated again.
It seems by design. And since it’s opt in, if FF “accidentally” disables the master switch (I’m betting it will eventually) you lose that extra layer of protection. OH, and I had disabled EVERYTHING in registry (about:config) before this and translations were still available. I guess it’s time for me to explore other FF-core options…
Lmao, semi common design mistake? MUST BE INTENTIONAL!
I don’t think I’m being paranoid by saying it:
-
opt-out rollout of every AI feature
-
only slogging through registry to manual opt out until now
-
CEO and board hell bent on monetizing and delivering features users actively do not want. I.e., enshitification
-
I have seen my own AI registry changes revert already once after a patch
-
It’s just a lazy/poor design.
Instead of each setting having its own bit with one ‘override’ bit, they just set override by setting each bit.
I’d say you’re being generous calling it poor design. It’s actually reverting to “default” on settings when you uncheck instead of storing individual bits and honoring those. Why not revert to opted out - OK, that may be lazy to use a single template, but that’s not the way some of their other “master” options work. And I’ve been a FF user since it’s first releases, so this isn’t some Mozilla hate. And I won’t be going to anything Chromium and because of inertia I may just stick to FF.
It’s also crazy that I have been manually configuring away from AI since it wasn’t even opt out… it was forced in. Most aren’t going to do that and Mozilla knew it going in. And I’ve already seen those registry settings revert once. Since this control option literally should have been the first feature for AI delivered and their entire AI push has an untrustworthy stink, I’ll say it again: I await a future release bumping the setting back “on”. “Oopsie! you can just turn it back off or wait for the next patch” after Mozilla and their partners collect their information across millions of users that aren’t paying attention.
Wow some people really hate AI huh. Did a robot kill your father or something?
I like playing around with them occasionally, but I only use local models. I cannot stand all the cloud stuff in general and with the way neural nets work you can get as good or better results out of a smaller/more narrow model and the same applies to LLMs.
The massive models the big companies are putting out there are generally just bad. Even if it can occasionally give you accurate output, for whatever it is you are asking it to do, it uses way more power and resources than reasonable and you could have found what you were looking for with a simple web search.I feel like it’s essentially a superfuled semantic search.
I can put in multiple issues and symptoms and it spits out a websearch that mostly applies to my reported issue.Which is one of the few things these things can actually do because they’re entire thing is language processing.
Basically put in a vague or comprehensive description of what you are trying to do or trying to find. It can generate a few queries based on your input and do a handful of searches then give you the results and highlight which ones might be the most relevant to your input.
But, that still require traditional, and specifically deterministic, search.
The way people blindly trust it’s output without any actual search or additional context is the worst way to use it. Might as well ask a magic 8-ball.
Agreed.
It actually did help me find an older movie based on the following aspects:
- late 2000s/early 2010s
- nature catastrophe
- scene at the beach of people freezing instantly
After ruling out "Day after tomorrow"and “Geostorm” that left me with “Arctic Blast” which it actually was (beware, it’s not great!)
The way people blindly trust it’s output without any actual search or additional context is the worst way to use it. Might as well ask a magic 8-ball.
Yeah…
But those are the same that clicked on the first search result and believed it as gospel… :/
Been saying that since the start, AI kill switch should be a standart in every Application. Did that first long ago in HugstonOne, AI intelligence and speed in my own terms.
