this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Microblog Memes

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Accept cookies?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

This is how I felt when Windows 3.1 dropped

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago

I completely agree. I also want my web browser to block ads and skip promotion sections of videos, because fuck capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 112 points 1 day ago (10 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Generally agree, I do appreciate Firefox' built-in translation tool though, that also falls under "AI" I guess.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

DDG started with this bs yesterday and it drove me nuts.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

At least it is easy to disable in ddg. Read your comment opened browser. 10seconds later all ai features disabled.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 day ago (8 children)

So long as the citations are there I'm not usually taking the summary at it's word. I find searching "hard to Google" terms easier with AI.

When having accurate and properly sourced material matters, I hope you're not trusting the descriptions of citations laid out by wikipedia editors who are also just another layer of interpretation. It's always worth a double check.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've never had a result that helpful. I've seen it make up sports results in advance though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I suppose I'm mostly using it for programming, movie look up, vocab, and so on. Not sports/weather/news kinds of things.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Somewhat ironic that the avatar looks AI generated.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

Laughs in LibreWolf user

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

It's use cases like this where all the hyper AI hatred loses its appeal to me

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 days ago

How do I 10x my upvote for a post?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I wouldn't mind a decent LOCAL open source AI helping

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Firefox can use a local llamafile model, but you have to enable it in about:config first.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

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.)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

Unless training data is made available, a model is not open source. DeepSeek is better described as "open weight".

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

genuinely curious to see what your argument is here.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (6 children)

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.

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