What’s anti-power user about developing this extension?

My argument against that extension is just that it takes money and developer hours to program it. Resources that are taken away from other (more useful) things.

And I like some of the Mozilla products very much. And I think as a company, they’re not too well off. They have a limited amount of money and developers. They can now choose to invest that time in useful things, or things that attract money, or start 500 random side-projects. But then they can’t complain if that takes away from like Thunderbird and the translation tool I would like to see some attention given to.

I’m not opposed to this addon, I just don’t think it’s a wise decision to invest the limited resources in that.

I wholeheartedly agree with the rest of your comment. Linux has come a great way since then. But that means people have put in a lot of work to polish things. Directly opposed to what happens here, starting more half-baked projects and adding features, without polishing the existing ones and making them more useful or attractive to regular people.

I wish I could agree, but I don’t think I can. By that logic, Mozilla could as well stop developing their browser. It has dropped to a marketshare to like 2.5% by somewhat official statistics, maybe about 5% if we’re generous. That’s less than the ratio of Linux users. So I’d argue it’s for tinkerers, too. Seems people aren’t educating themselves, downloading Firefox, installing and configuring it either. I don’t really know what to make of this argument.

But it’s not my main point, anyways. It’s been more than a year since the translation feature got added officially to the browser. They’ve promised to add more languages from the start. But we’ve only seen small changes since then, like how you can select text. Ultimately, that translation project is from 2022. I doubt they’re actually working on it. I think it’s a shame. We’d need some good AI tools.

My point is, we already have several local LLM tools and chatbots. This is just yet another one (which isn’t ever there yet). I think you could as well use ollama for that.

While for example I still need to use Google Translate because Mozilla has a completely local translation tool for some time already. It’s just they promised to add more languages, but they don’t do it. Instead they use their time to get yet another addon to the prototype stage.

And you should try it. The (AI) translation is really good. It just needs a bit more polish and like 5 more languages… That’d help people massively. And it’s also in demand, I heard Reddit and a few other platforms have added translation as well. If you want to help people and offer privacy, I’d argue you focus on that. And this would be something useful.

Summarization however, is not useful. I get people use it anyways. I just hope they have a look at the quality of the results. Because all I’ve seen are summaries that are between misleading and wrong. And that’s by the market leading products like ChatGPT and Claude… I’m not here to dictate people’s life. But they should be aware of it to make an informed decision. I think it’s sad that Mozilla just has shiny advertising online for a product that has quite some caveats and is unlikely to ever work well. And I think misinformation is a big issue of today’s world. It’s marginally better to generate it while respecting people’s privacy. Yes. But I’m not sure if that makes it a good thing.

And please continue working on the browser, the translation, Thunderbird and the dozens of other useful Mozilla projects. I think unless Mozilla has infinite money and developer resources, they should focus on products that work well for their users.

We discussed this briefly a few days ago. No one understands why Mozilla likes to waste their time and money on random sideprojects that nobody likes or asked for… Instead of something useful, or the things lots of people ask them to do.

And summarization is among the worst things you can do with LLMs. I’m not against AI, but they’re really not good at this specific thing. I’m not sure if people will use it anyways, but I think this project is a waste of resources.

But terminal access also kind of invalidates the WebUI requirement. If you have a terminal open anyways, you could as well just do eject -t && handbrake-cli ... && eject and skip all the switching to the browser and clicking on things… That’d close the tray, rip the DVD and spit it out when finished, all in one line. At least that’s what I would do.

Do you mean something like a phone or a computer? What’s the question?

There are people out there without any kind of conscience or memorse. If they can somehow make a profit, they’ll sell somehing to you or anyone who is willing to listen.

Yeah, it’s speculation at this point anyways. I mean I’ve only ever seen webservers with a RAID. So one harddrive failure shouldn’t affect it too much. Then most people rent a VPS and that usually runs on some cluster. Even if a whole machine goes down, it’s supposed to come up again on some other machine automatically within a few minutes. And then you should have tech support of a big hosting provider answer within some timespan. I hope someone will write a summary of the events and link it somewhere. Maybe a lot of things went wrong. Or it’s some kind of error in the specific setup lemmy.ca did.

Wow, they’re really offline for a long time now. Did OVH really mess up that hard? I guess hardware in a datacenter fails every day? Wouldn’t they be prepared for that and just restore/migrate to a different machine, then?

I think so, too. I mean we also have human authors end up at a random camping site somewhere in Europe in the 70s and come up with the random idea of writing “The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy”. Either we allow randomness to inspire a novel. Or we’d need to say a lot of old novels aren’t original ideas either.

That’s an error message from Cloudflare, their tunnel provider. The server is probably unreachable. Either they’re doing some maintenance, or it’s a hiccup or something went wrong. You need to wait for a moment. Or maybe a bit longer if they’re facing any issues.

I think it’s impossible then. My experience aligns with these recommendations. First tell it to come up with interesting story ideas. Then pick one. Have it write an outline. Have it come up with story arcs, subplots and a general structure. Chapter names… Then tell it to write the chapters individually, factoring in the results from before. Once it trails off or writes short chapters, edit the text and guide it back to where you want it to be.

It’ll just write bad and maybe short stories unless you do that. I mean you could theoretically automate this. Write a program with some AI agent framework that instructs it to do the individual tasks, have it reflect on itself, always feed back what it came up with and include it in the next task.

I’ve tried doing something like that and I don’t think there is a way around this. Or you do it like the other people and just tell it “Generate a novel” and be fine with whatever result it will come up with. But that just won’t be a good result.

I don’t know which one of them is good, but I’ve seen like a dozen or so online services, mostly for roleplay / virtual girl/boyfriend stuff etc. They’re paid, though. Or you can pay openrouter (more general LLM connector, also paid). I’m not sure if you’re looking for something like that or something free. They’re definitely out there and available to the public.

It’s mostly OpenAI, Microsoft etc who have free services, but they’re limited in what they’ll talk about. And there is one free community project I’m aware of: that would be AI Horde. It’s mostly for images but offers text, too. I haven’t used it in a while, not sure how/if it works.

That’s kind of the important question… We know it sends audio on request, if you trigger it somehow. But does it transmit anything clandestinely in the background? And does it suppress any microphone icons from showing up? I believe that’s where disassembly and sniffing network traffic come into play.

Generally, you can start most programs (like Steam) from a commandline terminal. That way you’ll see the log output. Sometimes they’ll also write to a logfile somewhere, you’d have to google where a certain program keeps its logs. If you find some ‘ERROR’ message, you can start from that. Like copy and paste it into a search engine.

Btw, It’s a lot more pronounced here on the internet. Since it’s a filter bubble. If you dive into the real world, you’ll find a lot of males also have healthy lives, a lot of hobbies, they’re going out with friends, playing football once a week etc. I mean it’s certainly there, and a big issue in society. All I want to say is, don’t just look at some social media and draw conclusions from that. The perspective here is heavily skewed and making it look more desperate than it is.

Nice. Yeah, I’m aware there is one bot here which does substantially better and doesn’t use the usual LLM approach. Sadly I was so annoyed by the 99% of other bots, so I’ve muted them all…

https://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/

Btw, I think it’s pretty much accepted fact that smartphones do spy on everyone. It’s the main business model of any big tech company. Google, Meta… They definitely have algorithms to tailor their targeted ads to someones personal profile. And per default they look at what you’re doing online all day. Keep track of your location if they can… The one thing that’s unclear is whether they use the microphone and also listen to your offline conversations. My main point being: Listening in with the microphone isn’t that far off. If you feel uncomfortable with that, you might want to re-consider a few other things as well.

With the scientific method and anecdotal evidence: kind of never. It’s illegitimate to draw that conclusion, this way.

You got to dig down to the facts. Or we can just tell the fact that a lot of people feel that way. And I mean “confirmation bias” is a very good explanation. We also have thousands of people believe in esoterics, homeopathy etc. The mechanics of psychology are well-understood. And it’s kind of the reason why we invented science in the first place. Because we found things aren’t always as they seem. And there are a lot of dynamics to factor in.

If we want to get to the truth, we have to do a proper study. I’m not an expert on this, so I don’t know if we got to that, yet. I know people have demonstrated this is technically possible. But as far as I’m aware people have also taken apart a few of the major apps like Facebook etc, logged the traffic and couldn’t find anything that uses microphone data to do targeted advertising.

Conclusion: It’s either not there, or we missed it.