This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
I also find LLMs decent for translating text between languages, though for serious use it still requires human review
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
So while previously the translation feature was supported by an extension, now it has to be enabled through ai.
Hate it.
Browsers don't need LLMs
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.
Im super happy to see so many upvotes for this most excellent browser!
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.
"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)
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.
What's worse....you could always toggle it. In fact, you could re-route it to your own local LLM.
Drama drama cheesecake drama
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.
