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:
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.
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.
Reader mode is great, though I’ve seen some sites that seem to have taken deliberate steps to make their articles unviable with it by making all the text disappear as soon as you turn it on
yeah, whenever I have to look at someone else's browser and it's an ad-filled hellscape I'm really grateful for uBlock. The internet would be completely unusable for me without it.
Same when people talk about how creepily the ads target them based on circumstantial stuff* it feels like an alien experience bc even if I get targeted despite employing quite a few tracking blockers, I never actually see the ads lol.
(* like that story of the father hearing about the daughter's pregnancy because he got spammed with baby care ads after the daughter googled some medical symptoms)
+ bonus recommendation for those of us who still have to use Facebook: F.B. Purity is great
and ironically, LLMs could be great for this! recognizing what's ads and what's content, what's slop and what's high-effort, wading through the cesspool of feeds and dark patterns to find the stuff that's relevant to you.
unfortunately, the money is in using LLMs to generate more slop and make things even worse, not make it better.
I could believe it for advertising versus content (to an extent), but I think it would not be useful in 'slop' versus content, for the same reason it's output is slop. If an AI approach can detect slop, then a related AI approach can generate better slop that it could no longer detect.
But it could also make advertising more baked into a content that is hard to extricate.
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
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.
right now AI is mostly used for spying, and stealing data, thats why all the tech bros are pushing it. For spying in general, something like thiels palintir is doing for evil purposes, and probably musks AI too.
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.
Imho there is a difference between voluntarily opening AI and asking it to generate or do something or having it shove down your throat. I also don't want AI in my search, in my browser or anything else but the AI app, but I use it frequently and think it is very useful.
I get what they are trying to say, but I definitely don't want my browser to just facilitate me raw-dogging the internet. I had to use someone else's computer at work the other day, and they don't have any ad block and have apparently clicked "yes" to every dialog box for years. It was a fucking nightmare. Every web page was so full of ads, pop-ups, notifications, banners, auto-playing videos, etc. Jesus christ, I just needed to check the weather on a local news website and the internet skull-fucked me until I had ocular hepatitis. Decided the safest course of action was to just stand outside and look for tornadoes myself.
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.
AKA ANY details about its training data, and its training hyperparameters, and literally any other details about its training. An 'open' secret among LLM tinkerers is that the Chinese companies seem to have particularly strong English/Chinese training data (not so much other languages though), and I'll give you one guess on how.
Deepseek is unusal in that they are open sourcing the general techniques they used and even some (not all) of the software frameworks they use.
Don't get me wrong, I think any level of openness should be encouraged (unlike OpenAI being as closed as physically possible), but they are still very closed. Unlike, say, IBM Granite models which should be reproducible.
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.
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 hadn't, but at a glance, while well intentioned that's pretty much exactly the "still a bridge too far" thing I'm talking about.
Effectively that mimics the interface (bit uglier, but same idea) you get in a Synology NAS or other commercial home server services.
Here's the problem, Jellyfin itself might already be alien tech. The type of solution they're proposing is trying to streamline something end users don't even know exists.
And I'd be moderately interested on it at my level of awareness, but now I am looking at redoing my own self hosting machine from scratch and wondering if some of the things I'm doing with it will be doable with this, so as of right now, moving to it is more complicated, not less.
The bar self hosting needs to be mainstream is this: I click a button on a Windows PC and it downloads a piece of software. I click "install" and said software installs itself like a normal application.
There is now an application I can use to do a thing everywhere.
Alternately, I buy a little box, plug it in and there is now an application I can use to do a thing everywhere.
The only examples that approximate this in my view are Plex (NOT Jellyfin) for scenario one and HA Yellow/Green for scenario two. And even those two will set up the hardware and software but you'll still be pointing at a LAN IP for access. They both will only do remote access via a subscription and a connection to an external could-based service, so they aren't even a fully self hosted solution if you want to go with the "easy" proper external access.
I think there's a bit of misunderstanding there. I'm not saying we should force self-hosting. I'm saying that when you get enshittification to a certain point, the idea of a non-shitty service becomes a selling point and you can compete on that as a feature.
You see that in commercial software all the time. Davinci Resolve exists because nobody wants to deal with Adobe, ClipStudio grew for the same reason, then went around that loop and now Affinity is getting some attention, and so on.
So what I'm saying is a self-contained package/service for self-hosting has a good chance to compete on price and features with enshittified services. The problem with getting that out of the OSS community is that they typically have more decisionmaking power on the engineering side and you end up with overly flexible, customizable software no mom and pop normie would ever get into unless they're making a project out of it.
See, Jellyfin should be a hit. Everybody should have a Jellyfin server. But instead they have an overly powerful thing that is trying to allow you to customize the UI and incorporate every single piece of media and do everything Plex does except for the one useful thing Plex does which is give you Internet access to your library.
That's the opposite of what an eventually successful self-hosted thing would be. You want one thing that does one thing with zero hassle and has the hard feature but none of the superfluous easy features. That's why I'm saying HA, Plex and Synology are best positioned.
I think Synology is going the Plex route, where they are starting to enshittify their hardwareto sell you more hard drives. Their software is a better version of Yunohost already, though. And crucially they do provide a one click OpenVPN install, which is the still-too-complicated version of how all of this should work.
But if you really wanted to make some money one can envision a world in which a ISP (particularly a Starlink-style connect-anywhere ISP) sells you a one time stop package with a box that does your routing and also has a big app manager thing that sets you up for what you want. "It works just like Gmail but it's at your place" is the pitch, not "ironclad security and full access to set it up just like you want". That's for nerds.
And then you charge them for cloud backups, if you're clever.
Thanks for coming to my pitch, I'll be in meeting room 4 all week.
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.
I want to search for information about a hobby or new interest. I dont want to see 61 pages of the same 3 websites with different summaries to make it seem like I've got a lot to choose from. I dont want ad content shoved down my proverbial throat. I dont want to see influencer bullshit.
The internet is the single greatest repository of information that this planet has ever seen, and we allow it to overflow with drivel so that a billionaire can get a bit more rich.
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.
A bajillion things are "AI" now, and weren't before recently. It's so frustrating to see people hate them all equally. It's like when everything started to get called an "app" but worse.
AI has so many uses and it has been employed in scientific research for years, Google's DeepMind event got the Nobel Prize for that. It's sad seeing people hating AI and claiming it has nothing to offer. But what else can you expect from haters.
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.
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.
Every citation is not fake or irrelevant. In wikipedia it's "citation needed" or "page does not exist". Same problems.
All you have to do is click it or search again.
But hey, of you prefer the old fashioned way of opening every returned search result starting with page 1 to page 6 until you just search again anyway, go ahead and do that. I'll deal with sifting through occasional bad advice in an eighth of the time.
I've been an editor on Wikipedia for decades now. I've followed sources to clarify information, fix broken links, and remove inaccurate information. I know how it works.
It’s always worth a double check.
That's exactly my point. Wikipedia is transparent about where it gets its information. You can double-check citations, and if the citations don't exist or don't support a relevant claim, you can discard them (or edit them to flag that fact, or go above and beyond to provide a new source, if you're so willing.) With AI summaries, you can't do any of that. You're given a summation without automatic citations (or sometimes, with bogus made-up ones), and you can't do anything to correct any misinformation you encounter. Maybe you can report it, but you can't do anything in real time to prevent others from finding that same inaccurate information - not in the way that you can to immediately correct an inaccuracy on Wikipedia.
For something like perplexity under brave where you're given inline citations, yeah, go follow them and get to an authoritative source faster.
We didn't start with "I can't submit an updated review if I find mistakes", we started at "there's another unnecessary layer of indirection". Which, sure, but it's hardly different than getting a start with a medium article of "best xxx of 2025" or, yes, a wikipedia page. It may not be to your taste, but I've had some occasions where it's convenient.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
I always assumed adblocks already were first-passing against known-advertizing patterns and then rewriting the DOM on the fly. I'm surprised that a vision model would be more performant given that it's still going to have to adjust the DOM anyways.
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.
There's AI in firefox? I'm on the beta version and can't find anything except a "try solo ai" option in the settings that I haven't clicked.
EDIT: Oh, you have to open the side-bar, specifically select the chatbot option, then choose a provider if you even want to use it. and it's not active until you choose. If someone complains about something I actually had to google to find, they're obsessed. Because I still get the "Try our assistant" notifications shoved down my throat regularly on other services.
Anyway, this morning I was driving on my browser to work, sipping on some coffee from my browser. Suddenly I realized that I was browsery wearing no browsering browser! So I hit the home button.
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.
The worst part about the Firefox AI stuff is their provider selection is shit. No Deepseek, no OpenRouter, so I have a stupid pane and a stupid popup button every time I select text that only works with models that are either inferior or closed off.
To be fair, Firefox on desktop doesn't let you add custom search engines, by default. Unless you flip magic key browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh to true.
Wow that's depressing. Apparently also Firefox makes it very difficult to install extensions that aren't signed by Mozilla, which I learned when a pro-Palestine extension got removed from the Mozilla store and we were discussing alternative ways to distribute it. It's an issue in LibreWolf as well, although there might have been less hoops I had to jump through to disable that.
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.
If i have a question i want an answer not a bunch of links where i might find the answer to my question if i read all the pages and try to connect the dots. So yes, i want all of it.
This is honestly kinda scary to read. You want an intransparent software that can by definition not think to try and check what facts are correct instead of doing it yourself? And that's if we're assuming there's no intentional fact skewing in the software.
So you also never use google for instance or do you first compare the results of google, DuckDuckGo, ecosia,… before actually open a page? Interesting, i wonder how long it takes before you find something on the web.
So you don't use any search engine at all i understand. For instance, are you confident that google is fully transparent and gives you only checked facts? No intentional skewing towards favouring websites that pay for a high ranking?
Maybe the difference between me and you is that i always check the facts …for example where they come from. If the answer is given by a human or machine makes no difference for me. The machine though gives me the links where it derived the information from… not many humans do that.
So you either crawl back in fear fuelled by a lack of understanding or you embrace new tools when they come and learn how to work with them, what can be trusted and not, what improvements can be made. 🤷🏼
Imma ignore your blatant rudeness and strawman based ad hominems in the above comment for a sec
So, if you're going to check each of those sources, what's the advantage of those over using searx? Basically, if you're going to do your due diligence, you're not even going to have to look at the generated summary at all. Searx has the additional advantage of being open source, so you can go check how it does what it does. That's impossible to do with AI by its very definition- even the devs can't know why it does what it does.
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?
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:
https://youtu.be/Gfcpb-sKvUg
https://youtu.be/majf9ffuzl8
Pi to 100 decimals is pretty funny
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.
“Kill your creators” would be great if it worked.
At which point it would start killing every contributor to the training dataset.
Cool
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
Reader mode on mobile is a let down because there's no way to force it.
Reader mode is great, though I’ve seen some sites that seem to have taken deliberate steps to make their articles unviable with it by making all the text disappear as soon as you turn it on
yeah, whenever I have to look at someone else's browser and it's an ad-filled hellscape I'm really grateful for uBlock. The internet would be completely unusable for me without it.
Same when people talk about how creepily the ads target them based on circumstantial stuff* it feels like an alien experience bc even if I get targeted despite employing quite a few tracking blockers, I never actually see the ads lol.
(* like that story of the father hearing about the daughter's pregnancy because he got spammed with baby care ads after the daughter googled some medical symptoms)
+ bonus recommendation for those of us who still have to use Facebook: F.B. Purity is great
i had 2-3 other ones for extra protection.
and ironically, LLMs could be great for this! recognizing what's ads and what's content, what's slop and what's high-effort, wading through the cesspool of feeds and dark patterns to find the stuff that's relevant to you.
unfortunately, the money is in using LLMs to generate more slop and make things even worse, not make it better.
I could believe it for advertising versus content (to an extent), but I think it would not be useful in 'slop' versus content, for the same reason it's output is slop. If an AI approach can detect slop, then a related AI approach can generate better slop that it could no longer detect.
But it could also make advertising more baked into a content that is hard to extricate.
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.
De-googled Chromium?
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.
right now AI is mostly used for spying, and stealing data, thats why all the tech bros are pushing it. For spying in general, something like thiels palintir is doing for evil purposes, and probably musks AI too.
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.
Most people do want to be monetised as long as they don't have to pay money for anything.
Imho there is a difference between voluntarily opening AI and asking it to generate or do something or having it shove down your throat. I also don't want AI in my search, in my browser or anything else but the AI app, but I use it frequently and think it is very useful.
Nah man get with the times
if you aren't against it, you are for it!!!
Yea that's the first thing I noticed x)
Somewhat ironic that the avatar looks AI generated.
It looks like the avatars in the mobile game Hogwarts Mystery.
I get what they are trying to say, but I definitely don't want my browser to just facilitate me raw-dogging the internet. I had to use someone else's computer at work the other day, and they don't have any ad block and have apparently clicked "yes" to every dialog box for years. It was a fucking nightmare. Every web page was so full of ads, pop-ups, notifications, banners, auto-playing videos, etc. Jesus christ, I just needed to check the weather on a local news website and the internet skull-fucked me until I had ocular hepatitis. Decided the safest course of action was to just stand outside and look for tornadoes myself.
I want my browser to let me raw-dog the internet until I tell it otherwise.
I wouldn't mind a decent LOCAL open source AI helping
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
There are a few that are "truly" open like IBM Granite, and a handful of others over the 7B range.
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".
AKA ANY details about its training data, and its training hyperparameters, and literally any other details about its training. An 'open' secret among LLM tinkerers is that the Chinese companies seem to have particularly strong English/Chinese training data (not so much other languages though), and I'll give you one guess on how.
Deepseek is unusal in that they are open sourcing the general techniques they used and even some (not all) of the software frameworks they use.
Don't get me wrong, I think any level of openness should be encouraged (unlike OpenAI being as closed as physically possible), but they are still very closed. Unlike, say, IBM Granite models which should be reproducible.
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
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.
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 hadn't, but at a glance, while well intentioned that's pretty much exactly the "still a bridge too far" thing I'm talking about.
Effectively that mimics the interface (bit uglier, but same idea) you get in a Synology NAS or other commercial home server services.
Here's the problem, Jellyfin itself might already be alien tech. The type of solution they're proposing is trying to streamline something end users don't even know exists.
And I'd be moderately interested on it at my level of awareness, but now I am looking at redoing my own self hosting machine from scratch and wondering if some of the things I'm doing with it will be doable with this, so as of right now, moving to it is more complicated, not less.
The bar self hosting needs to be mainstream is this: I click a button on a Windows PC and it downloads a piece of software. I click "install" and said software installs itself like a normal application.
There is now an application I can use to do a thing everywhere.
Alternately, I buy a little box, plug it in and there is now an application I can use to do a thing everywhere.
The only examples that approximate this in my view are Plex (NOT Jellyfin) for scenario one and HA Yellow/Green for scenario two. And even those two will set up the hardware and software but you'll still be pointing at a LAN IP for access. They both will only do remote access via a subscription and a connection to an external could-based service, so they aren't even a fully self hosted solution if you want to go with the "easy" proper external access.
I think there's a bit of misunderstanding there. I'm not saying we should force self-hosting. I'm saying that when you get enshittification to a certain point, the idea of a non-shitty service becomes a selling point and you can compete on that as a feature.
You see that in commercial software all the time. Davinci Resolve exists because nobody wants to deal with Adobe, ClipStudio grew for the same reason, then went around that loop and now Affinity is getting some attention, and so on.
So what I'm saying is a self-contained package/service for self-hosting has a good chance to compete on price and features with enshittified services. The problem with getting that out of the OSS community is that they typically have more decisionmaking power on the engineering side and you end up with overly flexible, customizable software no mom and pop normie would ever get into unless they're making a project out of it.
See, Jellyfin should be a hit. Everybody should have a Jellyfin server. But instead they have an overly powerful thing that is trying to allow you to customize the UI and incorporate every single piece of media and do everything Plex does except for the one useful thing Plex does which is give you Internet access to your library.
That's the opposite of what an eventually successful self-hosted thing would be. You want one thing that does one thing with zero hassle and has the hard feature but none of the superfluous easy features. That's why I'm saying HA, Plex and Synology are best positioned.
I think Synology is going the Plex route, where they are starting to enshittify their hardwareto sell you more hard drives. Their software is a better version of Yunohost already, though. And crucially they do provide a one click OpenVPN install, which is the still-too-complicated version of how all of this should work.
But if you really wanted to make some money one can envision a world in which a ISP (particularly a Starlink-style connect-anywhere ISP) sells you a one time stop package with a box that does your routing and also has a big app manager thing that sets you up for what you want. "It works just like Gmail but it's at your place" is the pitch, not "ironclad security and full access to set it up just like you want". That's for nerds.
And then you charge them for cloud backups, if you're clever.
Thanks for coming to my pitch, I'll be in meeting room 4 all week.
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.
Those are the sites that I block in my pihole.
Prompt: please summarize this meme for me
Browser ai bad
Browser go to webpages good
Jarvis, summarise this comment, I ain't reading allat
The same for search engines.
I want to search for information about a hobby or new interest. I dont want to see 61 pages of the same 3 websites with different summaries to make it seem like I've got a lot to choose from. I dont want ad content shoved down my proverbial throat. I dont want to see influencer bullshit.
The internet is the single greatest repository of information that this planet has ever seen, and we allow it to overflow with drivel so that a billionaire can get a bit more rich.
Firefox offered me a survey the other day on this exact topic. I said I don't want it in my browser for all questions.
"What if your browser.."
No, just no. Please stop shoving new features in that I won't use.
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.
Oh don't get me wrong. I hate it as well!
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.
Same! Also SearXNG search engine
I personally used and don't recommend LibreWolf
https://lemmy.zip/comment/18932137
Yeah, too many websites stop working or throw captchas at you. If unnecessary features is your only concern, consider other Firefox forks.
Its more like the default settings are annoying:
Removing them makes you stand out more, so it makes using LibreWolf worse
I'm partial to Vivaldi
Howdy, fellow Vivaldi user! 👋
You dont get a choice in the matter, you will have ai slop shobe down your throat and you are gonna like it
You get the choice: move to another browser and search engine that doesn't. I moved to Vivaldi and Startpage and haven't looked back since.
If I need to I'll use Elinks.
Right, except even if you find a browser that returns pure searches, it won't be long before it's just AI slop with extra steps
Generally agree, I do appreciate Firefox' built-in translation tool though, that also falls under "AI" I guess.
A bajillion things are "AI" now, and weren't before recently. It's so frustrating to see people hate them all equally. It's like when everything started to get called an "app" but worse.
AI has so many uses and it has been employed in scientific research for years, Google's DeepMind event got the Nobel Prize for that. It's sad seeing people hating AI and claiming it has nothing to offer. But what else can you expect from haters.
Says the AI post. Okay ChatGPT. You can go to bed now. The humans have it from here.
Oh, fuck off, idiot.
Go touch grass, that's obviously not an AI post lmao.
Idk if that uses AI i am unsure
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.
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.
they make them up, and they dont source it properly.
Go ask perplexity.ai a question about programming or troubleshooting FAQ and then follow a cited link. I assure you they are not all made up.
AI fabricates citations.
Every citation is not fake or irrelevant. In wikipedia it's "citation needed" or "page does not exist". Same problems.
All you have to do is click it or search again.
But hey, of you prefer the old fashioned way of opening every returned search result starting with page 1 to page 6 until you just search again anyway, go ahead and do that. I'll deal with sifting through occasional bad advice in an eighth of the time.
I've been an editor on Wikipedia for decades now. I've followed sources to clarify information, fix broken links, and remove inaccurate information. I know how it works.
That's exactly my point. Wikipedia is transparent about where it gets its information. You can double-check citations, and if the citations don't exist or don't support a relevant claim, you can discard them (or edit them to flag that fact, or go above and beyond to provide a new source, if you're so willing.) With AI summaries, you can't do any of that. You're given a summation without automatic citations (or sometimes, with bogus made-up ones), and you can't do anything to correct any misinformation you encounter. Maybe you can report it, but you can't do anything in real time to prevent others from finding that same inaccurate information - not in the way that you can to immediately correct an inaccuracy on Wikipedia.
Same. But now this is a different topic.
For something like perplexity under brave where you're given inline citations, yeah, go follow them and get to an authoritative source faster.
We didn't start with "I can't submit an updated review if I find mistakes", we started at "there's another unnecessary layer of indirection". Which, sure, but it's hardly different than getting a start with a medium article of "best xxx of 2025" or, yes, a wikipedia page. It may not be to your taste, but I've had some occasions where it's convenient.
This ^.
I think people forget the fabled "old" internet was actually a pile of trolls where one had to double check what they read.
Basic sanity checks really aren't that hard. But its a forgotten habit, I guess.
"oh my god, AI makes shit up!"
I've never had a result that helpful. I've seen it make up sports results in advance though.
I suppose I'm mostly using it for programming, movie look up, vocab, and so on. Not sports/weather/news kinds of things.
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:
That's the opposite of forever.
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
cogwheel, top right, disable all check boxes you want.
You're the best, thank you
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
I'm fine with ai, as long as its off by default
A good
OSbrowser gives you the tools you need, then steps out of the way.Tek Syndicate
Laughs in LibreWolf user
This is how I felt when Windows 3.1 dropped
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.
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.
I always assumed adblocks already were first-passing against known-advertizing patterns and then rewriting the DOM on the fly. I'm surprised that a vision model would be more performant given that it's still going to have to adjust the DOM anyways.
I’m talking theoretically, heh, I don’t think anyone actually does that yet.
And I am just talking edge cases where existing blockers fail and there’s no manpower to figure out a customization.
Really looking forward to when Ladybird is stable
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.
I use Qwant.
I clear my cookies everytimes my browser closes.
Qwant uses a cookie to remember I don't want AI summary.
Does op not want bookmarks or ubo? These aren't 'just showing the webpage' :)
Tbh the Firefox ai is effectively an addon. Can be disabled even I guess at packaging level (like Firefox-no-ai flatpak).
There's AI in firefox? I'm on the beta version and can't find anything except a "try solo ai" option in the settings that I haven't clicked.
EDIT: Oh, you have to open the side-bar, specifically select the chatbot option, then choose a provider if you even want to use it. and it's not active until you choose. If someone complains about something I actually had to google to find, they're obsessed. Because I still get the "Try our assistant" notifications shoved down my throat regularly on other services.
Anyway, this morning I was driving on my browser to work, sipping on some coffee from my browser. Suddenly I realized that I was browsery wearing no browsering browser! So I hit the home button.
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
Accept cookies?
Cómo ha cambiado todo y lo que queda...
The worst part about the Firefox AI stuff is their provider selection is shit. No Deepseek, no OpenRouter, so I have a stupid pane and a stupid popup button every time I select text that only works with models that are either inferior or closed off.
I don't understand why they don't let you add any LLM you want like you can with search engines.
To be fair, Firefox on desktop doesn't let you add custom search engines, by default. Unless you flip magic key
browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefreshtotrue.Wow that's depressing. Apparently also Firefox makes it very difficult to install extensions that aren't signed by Mozilla, which I learned when a pro-Palestine extension got removed from the Mozilla store and we were discussing alternative ways to distribute it. It's an issue in LibreWolf as well, although there might have been less hoops I had to jump through to disable that.
Well I do, so fuck him and fuck you too.
You think I give a damn about a Grammy?
the user should have a choose, if they want it they should be able to have it, but if they don't it shouldn't be forced on them
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?
If i have a question i want an answer not a bunch of links where i might find the answer to my question if i read all the pages and try to connect the dots. So yes, i want all of it.
This is honestly kinda scary to read. You want an intransparent software that can by definition not think to try and check what facts are correct instead of doing it yourself? And that's if we're assuming there's no intentional fact skewing in the software.
It is certainly the most convenient interface, and that's what makes it enticing.
I don't think I'll ever trust one source enough to use it like that, though.
So you also never use google for instance or do you first compare the results of google, DuckDuckGo, ecosia,… before actually open a page? Interesting, i wonder how long it takes before you find something on the web.
Where did i say i want intransparent software that can by definition not think to try and check what facts are correct instead of doing it yourself?
Thats unfortunately the only way to get what you say you want. Unless you're paying a human to do the web searching for you.
So you don't use any search engine at all i understand. For instance, are you confident that google is fully transparent and gives you only checked facts? No intentional skewing towards favouring websites that pay for a high ranking?
Maybe the difference between me and you is that i always check the facts …for example where they come from. If the answer is given by a human or machine makes no difference for me. The machine though gives me the links where it derived the information from… not many humans do that.
So you either crawl back in fear fuelled by a lack of understanding or you embrace new tools when they come and learn how to work with them, what can be trusted and not, what improvements can be made. 🤷🏼
Example:
I get an answer AND a list where the answer is based on. Personally, i don’t understand your issue at all.
Imma ignore your blatant rudeness and strawman based ad hominems in the above comment for a sec
So, if you're going to check each of those sources, what's the advantage of those over using searx? Basically, if you're going to do your due diligence, you're not even going to have to look at the generated summary at all. Searx has the additional advantage of being open source, so you can go check how it does what it does. That's impossible to do with AI by its very definition- even the devs can't know why it does what it does.
Just responding to you with examples. The rudeness is yours.
I think its fine as long its not forced on users that don't want it
There are always options 🤷🏼