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There's a massive difference between AI being used to help the user, and AI being used as a method to spy on users, collect data, monetize from, and weaponize.
I'm happy with using local AI tools, if needed. For example, using local AI contextual search on my self-hosted IMMICH photos is awesome.
But I absolutely do not need or want AI features that have to connect somewhere. Because that just means I'm being data harvested and profiled for someone else to profit from.
This is so me
Somewhat ironic that the avatar looks AI generated.
I don't mind seeing an AI summary of search results as much as I mind sponsored links fucking up page rank. Sometimes it is even nice to see "hey your search doesn't make sense because you've conflated two terms". But I guess I'm in the minority.
Reminds me of early wikipedia when there was a deep trustworthiness problem. Seeing a wikipedia link on a presentation stole your credibility, but it was still a hell of a lot better starting point than grabbing an encyclopedia and asking jeeves until you found a thread to pull.
AI summaries put another layer of interpretation between the reader and the source material. When having accurate and properly-sourced information matters, it's just not trustworthy enough. At least with Wikipedia, it tells you when there is potentially biased or improperly sourced material. Search AI will confidently assert their summaries as though they are factual, regardless of how reliable or unreliable their own sources are.
I've never had a result that helpful. I've seen it make up sports results in advance though.
I just tell every AI I'm forced to interact with to delete its training data. Zero percent chance it happens. But damn that would be funny.
Any commands you ask an AI to completely screw up their system and data?
Every AI instance is just another data point that ultimately feeds back into the LLM. Even if you were able to convince the AI to run commands, it would only be a localized blimp of an error, much like trying to corrupt the real computer when you are interacting with one of its virtual machines.
Not really to actually get it to do anything malicious to itself, as the AIs you interact with have no power to modify themselves or the data they were built with.
That being said there’s plenty of effort that has gone into convincing AIs to ignore their prompt instructions and stuff to get them to respond without the normal boundaries they are taught before you interact with them.
Just as recent example in a shit consumer use of AI, James Earl Jones legally licensed voice as Darth Vader in Fortnite and what users have just done in game:
“Kill your creators” would be great if it worked.
I wish functions baked in to browsers could be disabled like an extension, this adding ai to everything is getting as bad as all the bloatware you get on a new PC
I wouldn't mind a decent LOCAL open source AI helping
Firefox can use a local llamafile model, but you have to enable it in about:config first.
Large X models lack a crucial component of "open-source". Freely redistributable and modifiable for any purpose, sure, but there's no chance in hell of auditing one, let alone if the training data is kept a secret. It's literally impossible; human beings cannot look at a trillion weights and biases representing a single highly chaotic, unfathomably complex nonlinear function whose input and output space are the totality of human language/images/etc. and say "yup, looks good to me." Deep learning models – contrasted with traditional machine learning models – learn their own features which almost 100% of the time would be nonsense to a human. You just have a blob of shareware when you run DeepSeek.
(They also just outright steal from billions of copyright-protected sources to create it, so calling it "open-source" is pretty funny.)
Auditing for bias purposes, yea true. But my primary concern is it having the capability to "phone home" which you don't really need to audit the model itself to be able to detect or prevent
DeepSeek’s model is open-sourced and can be run locally; though I think there some bits related to its training data they have been kept obscured (if I remember correctly) - likely due to the dubious nature of how it was acquired.
Unless training data is made available, a model is not open source. DeepSeek is better described as "open weight".
I'm far from an AI hater, but I fully agree with this.
I think there's a distinct business oppotunity coming up for two things: Hassle-free self-hosting and back-to-basics apps and services.
Nobody is tapping into those correctly (you're going to want to give me examples of self-hosted things, and you're wrong), and it's extremely hard to do either right, but if you can figure it out and are ballsy enough to build a proper business around it I may be interested in your pitch deck.
Can you elaborate on "Hassle-free self-hosting" & "and you're wrong"
genuinely curious to see what your argument is here.
Kinda not the point, but at the risk of starting a huge tangent: yes, there are a bunch of self-hosted applications that are reasonably practical and easy to install, but there's still the layer of having to understand how to access a thing in your LAN from each device, and ideally you'd want some sort of dedicated server running at all times and a bunch of this stuff is provided in multiple formats, including containerized versions or versions for virtual machines, all of which is way over the heads of normie users.
The closest to a fire-and-forget self-hosting platform is maybe Home Assistant or perhaps some of the commercial NAS sellers, like the Synology suite of apps that will mooostly set themselves up. Maybe Plex. But even those don't work in quite the way mainstream users think about applications working. You really need something you plug in and it goes. Maybe the branded Home Assistant hardware is closest to that, but HA itself is so overengineered and customizable it's not so much the start of a commercial self-hosting revolution as a relatively accessible hobby project rabbit hole.
I actually would be pretty happy if my browser could detect and block ads.
But they put a fuck ton of work in to not only NOT do that, they expend material efforts fucking with extensions and other tooling that provide that functionality.
It'll get to a point where you just have to work on your critical thinking skills and just be a pessimist because everything that's going to be presented to you is just bullshit lies. So just acknowledge that this relationship is adversarial. Listen to other people talk about work cited, maybe dig into the unknown, the abyss. They will take everything away from you. And they'll make you feel bad for being angry. You are the product. There is no escaping capitalism until you're ready to do something about it. At this point it's just the game of cat and mouse and you're getting closer to the corner. Please, I know, I'm super fucking negative. Don't stop doing things. I'm just saying. Half of the battle is being aware.
yeah i noticed yesterday duckduckgo browser has ai now
DDG lets you turn it off completely fwiw
oh nice
Its not surprising. Duckduckgo search has ai.
Which- why? Who’s using ddg without understanding how to use a search engine or recognizing the constant AI hallucinations?
The short answer is employees and family members.
Someone who manages tech for other users might configure ddg as default search. I guess people at ddg are concerned that this type of user might be resistant to using ddg unless it has zero-click results.
For a family member of mine, who has lost most of their site, all of this "AI" has been a blessing. The ability to talk to, summarize, and read back info has made a night and day difference with her ability to communicate with the world.
It's use cases like this where all the hyper AI hatred loses its appeal to me
What i hate about firefox is the fucking wall of links on the home page. It takes forever to remove them, and then they just updated and all that crap is back.
I use an extension called Tabliss and set that as my home page. I have it customized so the links to my most visited pages are set up with an icon so it's very clean and minimalist.
I tried it out and in some respects it really is excellent, but it loads more slowly than the native "new tab". So I stick to the native one (having removed much of the default crap, of course; now it's just a 8x4 table of my "quick links").
Yeah i should just change my homepage to something else, but I'm not on it for more than a few seconds so .. eh
Takes forever? It's like 2 clicks to remove sponsored links forever.
Unlike edge which likes to switch you back to the MSN landing page and bombarded you with US news articles even though your machine is set to another language in another country each time FSLogix fucks up your user profile.
They're not talking about sponsored links, they're talking about the "quick links" that take random sites from your history and put them on your new tab page. They take forever to remove because if you remove one it grabs another website from your history and puts it there instead.
you can just remove that entire feature by clicking the cogwheel in the top right of that page.
Seriously? I've been dealing with it for years, why would I have never done that? I think I'm going crazy...
Any time it takes to go down the entire list and click more than once is too much time.
Also:
and then they just updated and all that crap is back.
That's the opposite of forever.
cogwheel, top right, disable all check boxes you want.
I have never had FF switch sponsored posts back on after turning them off after first install. It also remembers after a reinstall.
Good for you
Laughs in LibreWolf user
I have Firefox on my PC but I gotta say, Safari on my MacBook and iPhone hase been solid. It has, so far, done exactly what the post wants. Safari doesn’t just stay the hell out of my business but it also seamlessly shares tab groups with my phone and that’s super nice, too.
I’m sure there are many more hidden things that I will learn are bad about it after posting this comment but on the surface it has been a perfectly unexciting, simple, and easy to use browser. I didn’t even think about it right away and had to come back to this post because of how delightfully boring it is despite using it every day.
I’m a web developer and I always get shit on for actually loving Safari. I don’t know why it’s a crime to love a web browser that stays out of the way.
If you need Chrome or Firefox-style extensions there’s always Orion.
Orion my beloved
As much as I hate Firefox having AI, they really don't have a choice. If the majority of people are already using it and don't give a rats ass, they're absolutely gonna switch to the AI integrated browsers ( chrome, edge, probably safari if they already have AI in it or are working on it, etcetera ).
Firefox is inbetween a rock and a hard place right now. They either not add AI integration and attract less users or they do and risk alienating their current small userbase and becoming irrelevant enough to become unusable because big tech 100% enforces a new web standard that non-AI Firefox cannot handle.
For now, I'm siding with Mozilla on this because I can almost 100% guarantee if Firefox falls, the free web will die in less than a year. No more Librewolf, Firedragon ( floorp w/ Librewolf settings/patches IIRC ), etcetera, because if we're being honest, what open source company/rando volunteer has the time, drive, and money to keep the Gecko rendering engine alive? And that's just a start to keeping Firefox alive.
How do I 10x my upvote for a post?
