5 ms·

The Atlas implementation isn't great, but I'll pick something that tries to represent my interests every time. The modern commercial web is an adversarial netwo

by xnx 1y ago

The Atlas implementation isn't great, but I'll pick something that tries to represent my interests every time. The modern commercial web is an adversarial network of attention theft and annoyance. Users need something working on their behalf to mine through the garbage to pull out the useful bits. An AI browser is the next logical step after uBlock.

andrewmutz 1y ago
Completely agree. Consumers won’t pay for anything online, which means every business model is user-hostile. Use the web for five minutes without an ad blocker and it’s obvious. Atlas may not be the solution but I love the idea of an LLM that sits between me and the dreck that is today’s web.
- lynx97 1y ago
  Complete unrelated to what you actual wrote about, but... This is the second time in a week that I hear dreck used in english. Before, I never noticed it anywhere. First was from the "singing chemist" scene in Breaking Bad, and now in your writing. I wasn't aware english adopted this word from German as well. Weird, that I never heard it until just now, while the scene I watched is already 15 years or so old...
  - darylteo 1y ago
    Baader-meinhof phenomenon
    - lynx97 1y ago
      Well, while I can never be sure about my own biases, I submit this particular instance is/was not an "illusion". I truely never heard the word dreck used in english before. Why do I know? I am a german native speaker, and I submit that I would have noticed it if I ever heard it earlier, simply because I know its meaning in my native lang and that would have made spotting it rather easy. I also believe noticing Baader-meinhof in the 90s is rather unsurprising, since RAF was just "a few years" ago. However, "dreck" as someone else noted is documented since the early 20th century. So I dont think me noticing this just recently isn't a bias, rather a true coincidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
  - brendoelfrendo 1y ago
    Merriam Webster dates the English word "dreck" to 1922, though it seems to come from the Yiddish drek and is therefore much older.
  - Timwi 1y ago
    As another commenter noted, it was loaned from Yiddish rather than German, although the two languages are very closely related. There are many Yiddish words in English that have come from the Jewish diaspora. Common ones I can think of are schlep (carry something heavy) and kvetch (complain loudly). Since this is Hacker News, the Yiddish word I think we use the most is glitch. Of course there are also words from Hebrew origin entering English the same way, like behemoth, kosher, messiah...
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - lynx97 1y ago
      Very interesting, thanks! Quetsch in german actually means "to squeeze". So while apparently related, has changed its meaning.
- soiltype 1y ago
  > Consumers won’t pay for anything online I think we should note that this is a situation created by the businesses more than the consumers. By offering "free" products they drove paid products out of the market. They didn't have to do that. But if I'm going to be as fair as possible, it's only regulation that could have stopped such a niche feom being exploited. One business or another would have eventually figured it out.
- 52-6F-62 1y ago
  The HN community used to RAGE against walled gardens now it begs for one? The web was supposed to set us free and you cry out for chains? It's in your hands. It's literally in the hands of this entire forum. There is nobody else to blame.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bagacrap 1y ago
  Why would you trust an LLM to make the right decisions on your behalf? You think it can't be tricked by dark patterns? LLMs can't even follow direct orders much less detect deception or ill intent. I guess you did say "the idea of" not "the reality of".
nneonneo 1y ago
uBlock just takes stuff off of a page that shouldn't be there in the first place. All the content that should be there is still there, unchanged. An AI browser is choosing to send all the stuff you browse, to a third party without a demonstrated interest in keeping it all private, and getting back stuff that might or might not be true to the original content. Or maybe not even true at all. Oh and - Atlas will represent your interests, right up until OpenAI decides it's not in their financial interest to do so. What do you do when the entire web browser UI gets enshittified?
osigurdson 1y ago
>> The modern commercial web is an adversarial network of attention theft and annoyance It feels like $10 / month would be sufficient to solve this problem. Yet, we've all insisted that everything must be free.
- cmeacham98 1y ago
  Where do I cut the $10/month? No like seriously, I'd easily pay $10/month to never see another ad, cookie banner, dark pattern, or have my information resold again. As long as that $10 is promised to never increase, other than adjustments for inflation. But I can't actually make that payment - except maybe by purchasing a paid adblocker - where ironically the best open source option (uBlock Origin) doesn't even accept donations.
  - lobochrome 1y ago
    Kagi.com
    - MengerSponge 1y ago
      Setting up Kagi is as big an improvement to search as an ad blocker is to your general internet experience. After about a week you forget how bad the bare experience is, and after a month you'll never go back.
      - brendoelfrendo 1y ago
        I'm definitely behind some of my peers on adopting LLMs for general knowledge questions and web search, and I wonder if this is why. Kagi does have AI tools, but their search is ad free and good enough that I can usually find what I'm looking for with little fuss.
  - didibus 1y ago
    You'd need to pay a lot more, because advertisers pay way more than 10$ per month per user, you'd have to outpay the advertisers.
garciansmith 1y ago
Ublock Origin allows me to control what I see while that information is still in its original context so that I can take that into account when doing research, making decisions, etc. But isn't this, instead, letting a third party strip that context away and give it its own context so that you can't make those choices and decisions properly? Information without context is, to me, nearly worthless. And even if you believe they are neutral parties and have your own interests at heart (which, quite frankly, I think is naive), once companies like that know everything about you, you don't think they'll abuse that knowledge?
didibus 1y ago
One reason I now often go to ChatGPT instead of many Google queries is that the experience is ads free, quick and responsive. That said, don't be lured, you know they're already working on ways to put ads and trackers and what not inside ChatGPT and Atlas, those 20$ sound won't pay enough to recoup all that investment and cost and maximize profits. So I think we should be careful what we wish for here.
- runako 1y ago
  > quick and responsive This is kind of surprising, because those are precisely the ways I would say that a Web search is better than ChatGPT. Google is generally sub second to get to results, and quite frequently either page 1 or 2 will have some relevant results. With ChatGPT, I get to watch as it processes for an unpredictable amount of time, then I get to watch it "type". > ads free Free of ads where ChatGPT was paid to deliver them. Because it was trained on the public Internet, it is full of advertising content. Update: Example query I just did for "apartment Seville". Google completed in under a second. All the results above the fold are organic, with sponsored way down. Notably the results include purchase, long-term and vacation rental sites. The first 3 are listing sites. There's an interactive map in case I know where I want to go; apartments on the map include links to their websites. To see more links, I click "Next." ChatGPT (MacOS native app) took ~9 seconds and recommended a single agency, to which it does not link. Below that, it has bullet points that link to some relevant sites, but the links do not include vacation rentals. There are 4 links to apartment sites, plus a link to a Guardian article about Seville cracking down on illegal vacation rentals. To see more links, I type a request to see more. For all the talk about Google burying the organic links under a flood of ads, ChatGPT shows me far fewer links. As a person who happily pays for and uses ChatGPT daily, I think it's smart to be honest about its strengths and shortcomings.
  - ghm2180 1y ago
    Google is SEOed a lot. And while apartment sevile is a subset where Google is probably very good. For many things it gives me very bad results e.g. searching for affordable haircut always gives me a yelp link(there is a yelp link for ever adjective + physical storefront SMB). That being said I've never really come across on what are some good general ways to Google to give me good results. I know some tricks e.g. Filetype:PDF , use scholar for academic search, use "site:...". smth like "site:reddit.com/r/Washington quiet cafe" for most things people would want to do in a city, because people generally ask about those things on community forums. But I have a poor time with dev related queries because 1/2 the time it's seo'd content and when I don't know enough about a subject, LLMs generally gives me a lot of lines of inquiries(be careful of X and also consider Y) that I would not bother to ask cause I don't know what I don't know.
strogonoff 1y ago
It seems naive to expect a product by a company that desperately needs a lot of revenue to cover even a tiny part of investor money that it burned—where said product offers unprecedented opportunity to productize users in ways never possible before, and said company has previously demonstrated its disregard for ethics—to represent user’s interests. It’s unlikely LLM operators can break even by charging per use, and it should be expected that they’ll race to capture the market by offering “free” products that in reality are ad serving machines, a time-tested business model that has served Meta and friends very well. The fact that Atlas browser is (and they don’t even hide it) a way to work around usage limits of ChatGPT should ring alarm bells.
- ctxc 1y ago
  Well articulated!
- xnx 1y ago
  Yes. I don't and won't use any OpenAI products, but they product category of "AI Browser" is sorely needed.
darepublic 1y ago
not sure about that. I'll be happy with ublock thanks
bandrami 1y ago
Gopher. Gemini (the protocol not the AI). IRC.
monooso 1y ago
So you believe this browser is attempting to represent your interests, and work on your behalf?
hshdhdhehd 1y ago
Oh sweet summer lamb
rchaud 1y ago
The next logical step after Ublock is to have a succession structure in place if Raymond Hill or the maintainers of the various blocklists it's based on, decide they don't want to work on it anymore.

by xnx 1y ago

andrewmutz 1y ago

Completely agree. Consumers won’t pay for anything online, which means every business model is user-hostile. Use the web for five minutes without an ad blocker and it’s obvious. Atlas may not be the solution but I love the idea of an LLM that sits between me and the dreck that is today’s web.

lynx97 1y ago
Complete unrelated to what you actual wrote about, but... This is the second time in a week that I hear dreck used in english. Before, I never noticed it anywhere. First was from the "singing chemist" scene in Breaking Bad, and now in your writing. I wasn't aware english adopted this word from German as well. Weird, that I never heard it until just now, while the scene I watched is already 15 years or so old...
- darylteo 1y ago
  Baader-meinhof phenomenon
  - lynx97 1y ago
    Well, while I can never be sure about my own biases, I submit this particular instance is/was not an "illusion". I truely never heard the word dreck used in english before. Why do I know? I am a german native speaker, and I submit that I would have noticed it if I ever heard it earlier, simply because I know its meaning in my native lang and that would have made spotting it rather easy. I also believe noticing Baader-meinhof in the 90s is rather unsurprising, since RAF was just "a few years" ago. However, "dreck" as someone else noted is documented since the early 20th century. So I dont think me noticing this just recently isn't a bias, rather a true coincidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
- brendoelfrendo 1y ago
  Merriam Webster dates the English word "dreck" to 1922, though it seems to come from the Yiddish drek and is therefore much older.
- Timwi 1y ago
  As another commenter noted, it was loaned from Yiddish rather than German, although the two languages are very closely related. There are many Yiddish words in English that have come from the Jewish diaspora. Common ones I can think of are schlep (carry something heavy) and kvetch (complain loudly). Since this is Hacker News, the Yiddish word I think we use the most is glitch. Of course there are also words from Hebrew origin entering English the same way, like behemoth, kosher, messiah...
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - lynx97 1y ago
    Very interesting, thanks! Quetsch in german actually means "to squeeze". So while apparently related, has changed its meaning.
soiltype 1y ago
> Consumers won’t pay for anything online I think we should note that this is a situation created by the businesses more than the consumers. By offering "free" products they drove paid products out of the market. They didn't have to do that. But if I'm going to be as fair as possible, it's only regulation that could have stopped such a niche feom being exploited. One business or another would have eventually figured it out.
52-6F-62 1y ago
The HN community used to RAGE against walled gardens now it begs for one? The web was supposed to set us free and you cry out for chains? It's in your hands. It's literally in the hands of this entire forum. There is nobody else to blame.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bagacrap 1y ago
Why would you trust an LLM to make the right decisions on your behalf? You think it can't be tricked by dark patterns? LLMs can't even follow direct orders much less detect deception or ill intent. I guess you did say "the idea of" not "the reality of".

nneonneo 1y ago

uBlock just takes stuff off of a page that shouldn't be there in the first place. All the content that should be there is still there, unchanged. An AI browser is choosing to send all the stuff you browse, to a third party without a demonstrated interest in keeping it all private, and getting back stuff that might or might not be true to the original content. Or maybe not even true at all. Oh and - Atlas will represent your interests, right up until OpenAI decides it's not in their financial interest to do so. What do you do when the entire web browser UI gets enshittified?

osigurdson 1y ago

>> The modern commercial web is an adversarial network of attention theft and annoyance It feels like $10 / month would be sufficient to solve this problem. Yet, we've all insisted that everything must be free.

cmeacham98 1y ago
Where do I cut the $10/month? No like seriously, I'd easily pay $10/month to never see another ad, cookie banner, dark pattern, or have my information resold again. As long as that $10 is promised to never increase, other than adjustments for inflation. But I can't actually make that payment - except maybe by purchasing a paid adblocker - where ironically the best open source option (uBlock Origin) doesn't even accept donations.
- lobochrome 1y ago
  Kagi.com
  - MengerSponge 1y ago
    Setting up Kagi is as big an improvement to search as an ad blocker is to your general internet experience. After about a week you forget how bad the bare experience is, and after a month you'll never go back.
    - brendoelfrendo 1y ago
      I'm definitely behind some of my peers on adopting LLMs for general knowledge questions and web search, and I wonder if this is why. Kagi does have AI tools, but their search is ad free and good enough that I can usually find what I'm looking for with little fuss.
- didibus 1y ago
  You'd need to pay a lot more, because advertisers pay way more than 10$ per month per user, you'd have to outpay the advertisers.

garciansmith 1y ago

Ublock Origin allows me to control what I see while that information is still in its original context so that I can take that into account when doing research, making decisions, etc. But isn't this, instead, letting a third party strip that context away and give it its own context so that you can't make those choices and decisions properly? Information without context is, to me, nearly worthless. And even if you believe they are neutral parties and have your own interests at heart (which, quite frankly, I think is naive), once companies like that know everything about you, you don't think they'll abuse that knowledge?

didibus 1y ago

One reason I now often go to ChatGPT instead of many Google queries is that the experience is ads free, quick and responsive. That said, don't be lured, you know they're already working on ways to put ads and trackers and what not inside ChatGPT and Atlas, those 20$ sound won't pay enough to recoup all that investment and cost and maximize profits. So I think we should be careful what we wish for here.

runako 1y ago
> quick and responsive This is kind of surprising, because those are precisely the ways I would say that a Web search is better than ChatGPT. Google is generally sub second to get to results, and quite frequently either page 1 or 2 will have some relevant results. With ChatGPT, I get to watch as it processes for an unpredictable amount of time, then I get to watch it "type". > ads free Free of ads where ChatGPT was paid to deliver them. Because it was trained on the public Internet, it is full of advertising content. Update: Example query I just did for "apartment Seville". Google completed in under a second. All the results above the fold are organic, with sponsored way down. Notably the results include purchase, long-term and vacation rental sites. The first 3 are listing sites. There's an interactive map in case I know where I want to go; apartments on the map include links to their websites. To see more links, I click "Next." ChatGPT (MacOS native app) took ~9 seconds and recommended a single agency, to which it does not link. Below that, it has bullet points that link to some relevant sites, but the links do not include vacation rentals. There are 4 links to apartment sites, plus a link to a Guardian article about Seville cracking down on illegal vacation rentals. To see more links, I type a request to see more. For all the talk about Google burying the organic links under a flood of ads, ChatGPT shows me far fewer links. As a person who happily pays for and uses ChatGPT daily, I think it's smart to be honest about its strengths and shortcomings.
- ghm2180 1y ago
  Google is SEOed a lot. And while apartment sevile is a subset where Google is probably very good. For many things it gives me very bad results e.g. searching for affordable haircut always gives me a yelp link(there is a yelp link for ever adjective + physical storefront SMB). That being said I've never really come across on what are some good general ways to Google to give me good results. I know some tricks e.g. Filetype:PDF , use scholar for academic search, use "site:...". smth like "site:reddit.com/r/Washington quiet cafe" for most things people would want to do in a city, because people generally ask about those things on community forums. But I have a poor time with dev related queries because 1/2 the time it's seo'd content and when I don't know enough about a subject, LLMs generally gives me a lot of lines of inquiries(be careful of X and also consider Y) that I would not bother to ask cause I don't know what I don't know.

strogonoff 1y ago

It seems naive to expect a product by a company that desperately needs a lot of revenue to cover even a tiny part of investor money that it burned—where said product offers unprecedented opportunity to productize users in ways never possible before, and said company has previously demonstrated its disregard for ethics—to represent user’s interests. It’s unlikely LLM operators can break even by charging per use, and it should be expected that they’ll race to capture the market by offering “free” products that in reality are ad serving machines, a time-tested business model that has served Meta and friends very well. The fact that Atlas browser is (and they don’t even hide it) a way to work around usage limits of ChatGPT should ring alarm bells.

ctxc 1y ago
Well articulated!
xnx 1y ago
Yes. I don't and won't use any OpenAI products, but they product category of "AI Browser" is sorely needed.

darepublic 1y ago

not sure about that. I'll be happy with ublock thanks

bandrami 1y ago

Gopher. Gemini (the protocol not the AI). IRC.

monooso 1y ago

So you believe this browser is attempting to represent your interests, and work on your behalf?

hshdhdhehd 1y ago

Oh sweet summer lamb

rchaud 1y ago

The next logical step after Ublock is to have a succession structure in place if Raymond Hill or the maintainers of the various blocklists it's based on, decide they don't want to work on it anymore.