Microblog Memes

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.)

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.

Can you elaborate on "Hassle-free self-hosting" & "and you're wrong"

genuinely curious to see what your argument is here.

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.

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.

DDG lets you turn it off completely fwiw

Its not surprising. Duckduckgo search has ai.

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.

Blocklists are a much more efficient way to do this, and TBH many "traditional" adblockers are still huge performance hogs. Ublock is an exception in this regard due to webassembly and its explicit dedication to lightness.

Vision models are a pretty good way to build sponsorblock/adblock databases though, and maybe even engineer HTML workarounds automatically. It would be cool if you, say, encounter an ad or a dysfunctional web page, and you can opt-in to automatically contribute a fix with your own compute.