A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
Related communities:
I want my web browser to actively defend me against tracking/enshittification/exploitation/hostile design, then show me cleaned-up web pages with all the ads and shit removed, then get out of the way.
I want it to show me the information (which is not same thing as the "page" as a whole) that I'm looking for without modifying it or hallucinating some kind of AI summary, but I want it to aggressively get rid of as much of the extraneous crap obfuscating said information as possible.
Thank fuck for uBlock origin
And Firefox's reader mode, and noscript.
also consent-o-matic and canvas blocker
Actual proof of good in the world
I personally use and recommend LibreWolf.
I completely agree. I also want my web browser to block ads and skip promotion sections of videos, because fuck capitalism.
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.
Agreed. I've also been very impressed with Perplexica (linked to a self-hosted LLM on Ollama). It ties into SearXNG and will perform web searches, dive into the results, and summarize what it finds. Not just the pages themselves, but the specific information on those pages that addresses your original questions, including references which link back to the pages that were used to generate the summary. It's easy to identify hallucinations when it links to the specific page where it got the information from (though I have yet to experience any hallunications with Perplexica yet).
I think Lemmy's userbase is a bit predisposed to that. Unfortunately, that sentiment isn't common enough, and while most people don't want to be monetized if asked, with the convenience the reaction is a collective shrug.
But another thing we are predisposed to is dev bugs, and I think the average person won't like how unreliable many such features are.
Generally agree, I do appreciate Firefox' built-in translation tool though, that also falls under "AI" I guess.
This is how I felt when Windows 3.1 dropped
Somewhat ironic that the avatar looks AI generated.
It looks like the avatars in the mobile game Hogwarts Mystery.
Accept cookies?
This is so me
DDG started with this bs yesterday and it drove me nuts.
At least it is easy to disable in ddg. Read your comment opened browser. 10seconds later all ai features disabled.
Yeah. Still pissed me off I had to do it at all.
If I want AI, I will search and dl. It shouldn't be added to any browser without permission.
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:
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
Fun fact: Firefox was originally intended to be the "minimalist" alternative to Netscape Navigator / Mozilla SeaMonkey, where everything but the most basic functionality would be implemented as extensions.
It was meant as a less-bloated replacement for what was at the time known as the Mozilla Suite, which included NN and other programs. It wasn't exactly minimalist, as it was one of the first browsers to ship with a popup blocker, for example, but it was far less bloated than it's predecessor
I wish that existed as a browser. I guess minbrowser is close but struggles logging into university stuff.
Next closest I could find still has multithreading and all.
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.
Honestly it's easier to find an addon that'll hook to ollama instead, fire fox's inbuilt support is shit
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.)
There are a few that are "truly" open like IBM Granite, and a handful of others over the 7B range.
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
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'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.
back-to-basics apps and services.
I think these do exist, but they're in such a sea of shit that most users scrolling on their phones can't find them. Shameless apps have an intractable engagement/marketing advantage over them, as do the 'lets get acquired by Big Tech' ones.
I guess big companies could engage in this, but... shrug.
Hassle-free self hosting is hard, yeah, AI or not. Not going to argue with that one bit.
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.
Have you heard of YUNOHOST? Thats all I'll ask I dont want to like waste your time if you have and you already have an opinion.
