The US disappeared a local business owner down the street from me in a sleepy suburb because he happened to be walking to his business one morning while brown.
ICE/BP was looking for someone else, but saw another brown person while waiting, and took the opportunity to grab him, too.
He was imprisoned for more than a month and shuffled around the country before anyone bothered to look at his identification or acknowledge their validity.
Are you aware of what's going on in the US right now?
NYT: Those Deported to El Salvador Were Shackled, Beaten, and Sexually Assaulted[1]
And if you're saying to yourself, "what do I have to worry about, I'm not brown", well, do you have kids who you don't want to have abducted and zip-tied naked in the middle of the night by paramilitaries using grenades and rappelling from helicopters into your home[2][3]?
> Neighbors like Eboni Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flash bangs.
> "They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other," Watson said. "That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where's the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, 'fuck them kids.'"
> “It was heartbreaking to watch,” she said. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”
> "They just treated us like we were nothing," Fisher said.
To speak to this importance, it wasn't long ago that the sentiment I heard about the country was that it isn't, or wouldn't be, ascendant due to their "culture".
It's the Schrodinger's cat of cultures. Or maybe generalities about culture aren't to explain for economic and political velocity.
Yeah, also it shows the comment is ignorant of history.
In the immediate aftermath of the Korean war, the North was actually more prosperous than the South. That changed with time, dramatically so, but initially it'd be reasonable to see the north as having better economic prospects.
Imagine paying $100 a year for the privilege to develop apps, only to have your revenue confiscated to the tune of 15% - 30% and for the same entity to spam users who are looking for your apps, on the only place they can look for apps, with ads for your competitors, or with scummy ads that make you look bad by association.
If such a platform can get your business billions of dollars I think they are happy to have access to such a platform. Businesses are free to partner with other platforms if they don't like the agreement.
Yes, they can go to the 1 other option, where they've boiled the frog completely by matching the App Store's policies, practices and advertising schemes. The entire mobile app and mobile app distribution markets are captured by two entities, including Apple.
I'd buy your suggestion when Apple's duopoly status is rightfully fixed, perhaps by breaking out the App Store into its own independent business, along with the rest of Apple.
They are not free to do that when there is a duopoly and in most countries the platforms don't even allow competitors for that market (especially true for Apple).
Seriously, playing the "free market" card in the tech (especially mobile) space is really brave.
No one is forcing people to make businesses that release ios apps. A business could be based off of a Windows app. Or they could even not have an app and do business through an existing one like Discord.
Reality forces people to do that. When 90% of people do whatever they use programs for via mobile, you (as in, a business who wants to succeed) are forced to make an android and an iOS app.
Plenty of apps are Android only or iOS only. The only "force" is that businesses see these platforms as worth it to make enough money to be a return on investment.
Well there's only a single other mobile platform and it has the same pricing as the other one (I'm sure it's a total coincidence, nothing to see here!)
Yeah, and no way of using a browser with ad blocker for a decade or to avoid them in apps. If anything, the iOS experience has always been more ad-riddled than Android.
The App Store came out in 2008, ad blocking in browsers came out in 2016.
I have exactly one ad supported app on my phone - Overcast. Mobile games have become so enshittified they aren’t interesting.
The only reason I haven’t paid for ad free Overcast is just because when I was about to in order to support an indie developer, the author introduced his own ad platform that wasn’t scammy and its ads for other podcasts in the same category for the one you are actually listening to. I found his ads good and I found other interesting podcasts because of it.
Personally, I don't need AI in my browser at all. But if I did, why would I want to run a crappy model that can't think and hallucinates constantly, instead of using a better model that kinda thinks and doesn't hallucinate quite as often?
I generally agree with you, but you'd be surprised at what lower parameter models can accomplish.
I've got Nemo 3 running on an iGPU on a shitty laptop with SO-DIMM memory, and it's good enough for my tasks that I have no use for cloud models.
Similarly, Granite 4 based models are even smaller, just a couple of gigabytes and are capable of automation tasks, summarization, translation, research etc someone might want in a browser.
Both do chain of reasoning / "thinking", both are fast, and once NPU support lands in runtimes, they can be offloaded on to more efficient hardware.
They certainly aren't perfect, but at least in my experience, fuzzy accuracy / stochastic inaccuracy is good enough for some tasks.
The FUD is the implications of making it opt out, with reports that there's already other features that requires changing the settings/flags in order to "opt out".
The absolute reactionary response to anything Mozilla does is quite the something to watch, I've never seen another company held to the same standards.
If you read the Mozilla and Firefox related threads over the past week, you'd think Mozilla was the scourge of the internet, worse than DoubleClick in their heyday and worse than Google's hobbling of Chrome.
That said, the AI options for Firefox are opt-in. If you don't want them, don't use them. You are correct in that this is where software is heading, and AI integration is what users will expect going forward.
Just so everyone else knows, the complaining is by definition reactionary.
> In politics, a reactionary is a person who favors a return to a previous state of society which they believe possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society.
But I guess HackerNews is infamous for being conservative, so it's not too surprising.
> I've never seen another company held to the same standards.
The only "standard" expected from them is the same as any other for-profit company - "stick to your stated values and don't be duplicitous". For example, Apple, Meta, Microsoft are all lambasted here when they claim to "respect" user privacy and their products do the opposite.
Also, you should note that unlike these BiGTech that make multiple products and services, the company behind Firefox (and Thunderbird) makes only a few products and earns 100's of millions of dollars in annual revenue from it (some here in HN say they currently make more than a half a billion dollars a year now!). That's a lot of money. And yet, most of their products continues to be "shitty" (i.e. subpar). That's why they are losing user base. Instead of really improving their core product, the company just continues to seek new avenues of creating revenues. That's the "MBA CEO mindset" that everyone here in HN usually complain about. Do you want a browser that's faster and light on resources, or a browser that would display even more ads to you right in the browser? (Guess what Firefox prioritised?). Every user of Firefox can already avail ChatGPT (or some other AI service) if they want to. The only reason to embed it onto Firefox is to just make extra money by violating user privacy (we all know AIs are now personal data harvesters), without adding any real value to the browser.
Now, consider the opensource philosophy they espouse. Again, with the 100's of millions of dollars they have in hand, Gecko, the rendering engine of the browser is still not a truly modular piece of code that can be easily used in other projects. And that's by design (this is why most of the browsers that use the Firefox-Gecko codebase are just Firefox clones with superficial changes to the UI and config). If I remember right, Nokia spent considerable effort to try and reuse Gecko (make it modular?) - https://web.archive.org/web/20180830103541/http://blog.idemp... - and Sailfish OS now uses that fork in its mobile browser. (It was only when Mozilla feared that they were losing the mobile browser war that they decided to offer Gecko as a hacky modular codebase for only the Android platform, to be used as webviews or create other browsers. Similar options for Desktop platforms still don't exist).
Isn't all that a valid criticism, whether you are a capitalist or an opensource developer?
Believe it or not well-intentioned developers, product managers, etc can read the writing on the wall and see where user expectations are heading based on the apps and products they already use.
I don't like it, but ChatGPT is a product that nearly a billion people are using. It's broken into popular culture. My mom, who has trouble sending an email, uses it. She found it on her own.
More importantly, generative AI is incredibly popular with younger cohorts. They will grow up to be your customer base if they aren't already. Their expectations are being set now.
> I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for tasks I want the AI to perform. That relationship is healthy and responsible. It doesnt need to be in everything else. Its like those old jokes about how inventions are just <existing invention> + <digital clock>.
> I dont need AI on the desktop, in microsoft office, replying to me on facebook, responding to my google searches AND doing shit in my browser. One of these would be too much, because I can just access the AI I want to speak to whenever I want it. Any 2 of these is such substantial overkill. Why do we have all of them? Justify it. Is there a user story where a user was trying to complete a task but lacked 97% accurate information from 5 different sources to complete the task?
Being against the random inclusion of AI in the browser, isnt the same as being against AI completely. It needs to justify its presence.
Firefox needs to immediately build Candy Crush into the browser. Users expect to be able to access Candy Crush and only at the layer of web browser can such a thing be implemented.
Co-worker was talking about how he tried to make invitation card with chatgpt, just a picture of his house and text and AI failed to do it. It said he didn't have copyright to the picture and used another random pic, layout was wrong etc.
Then younger co-worker gave tips how to do it, what tools to use and offered to make it with his better AI program.
What could be done in few minutes with a free program is now multiple hours with billion dollar AI tools and you have less control what the end result is.
And assuming people want deeper integration is the browser even the right level of abstraction? Arguably it would be better to have something that was operating at the OS level, like siri/gemini assistant style.
When Microsoft completely integrates its LLM into Windows, would you rather give that access to your browser, or would you rather plug in your own local model / turn it off entirely while browsing?
If a global LLM becomes standard, I'd want to plug in my own local model or disable it entirely, but I don't think Microsoft nor Apple are going to open up their operating systems and make it easy to do that any time soon. The option to granularly use your own models is a plus to me in that situation.
Every app has to open itself for integration, especially if it's not a native app like Firefox. From where they get the AI at the end doesn't really matter, they will support them all anyway.
Filling out forms, booking tickets, summarizing content ...
Even at work, have seen few junior developers use AI browsers to attend mandatory compliance courses and complete quizzes. Not necessarily a good thing but AI browsers may win in the end and it might be too late for Firefox.
"why do I have to go and fill with copy paste that form or navigate through that page to do $something if that AI browser can do it for me?"
And in that scenario, there is a GIGANTIC need for a user-first, privacy-respecting browser using ideally local models (in a few years, when HW is ready)
You people need to be forced to use your product in the exact form your product is presented to end users. With the exact frequency it's presented to end users. In all the wrong places as it is presented to end users.
Maybe then you'll understand why shoving AI in every conceivable crevice is incredibly obnoxious and distracting and, most importantly, not useful.
Shoving an AI agent in every website is distracting and not that useful.
Shoving an AI agent in every app is distracting as well.
Having one global AI agent per operating system or browser (where most of the digital life happens, in the case of desktop browsers), for the people that want to have an AI agent, it's probably going to be useful, if well implemented.
I know, but at the end of the day most people nowadays do the vast majority of their job in a browser, and there is already a well defined API to manage its content. Also browsers are coming there faster and at some point it will become what people expect, rather what's most optimal.
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