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Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just runnin

Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.

coldpie 11mo ago
> Does anyone want AI in anything? Yeah, they do. Go talk to anyone who isn't in a super-online bubble such as HN or Bsky or a Firefox early-adopter program. They're all using it, all the time, for everything. I don't like it either, but that's the reality.
- smlavine 11mo ago
  > They're all using it. Not really. Go talk to anyone who uses the internet for Facebook, Whatsapp, and not much else. Lots of people have typed in chatgpt.com or had Google's AI shoved in their face, but the vast majority of "laypeople" I've talked to about AI (actually, they've talked to me about AI after learning I'm a tech guy -- "so what do you think about AI?") seem to be resigned to the fact that after the personal computer and the internet, whatever the rich guys in SF do is what is going to happen anyway. But I sense a feeling of powerlessness and a fear of being left behind, not anything approaching genuine interest in or excitement by the technology.
- gbear605 11mo ago
  If I talk to the people I know who don’t spend all their time online, they’re just not using AI. Quite a few of my close friends haven’t used AI even once in any way, and most of the rest tried it out once and didn’t really care for it. They’re busy doing things in the real world, like spending time with their kids, or riding horses, or reading books.
  - vidarh 11mo ago
    Being busy riding horses and reading books are both niche activities (yes, reading too, sadly, at lest above a very small number of books which does not translate to people being busy doing it more than a tiny fraction of their time), which suggests perhaps your close friends are a rather biased set. Nothing wrong with that, but we're all in bubbles.
  - coldpie 11mo ago
    I talk to an acquaintance selling some homemade products on Etsy, he uses & likes the automatically generated product summary Etsy made for him. My neighbor asks me if I have any further suggestions for refinishing her table top beyond the ones ChatGPT suggested. Watching all of my coworkers using Google search, they just read the LLM summary at the top of the page and look no further. I see a friend take a picture, she uses the photo AI tool to remove a traffic sign from the background. Over lunch, a coworker tells me about the thing she learned about from the generated summary of a YouTube video. We can take principled stands against these things, and I do because I am an obnoxiously principled dork, but the reality is it's everywhere and everyone other than us is using it.
- lucasoshiro 11mo ago
  > They're all using it, all the time, for everything Do you know someone? Using Firefox nowadays is itself a "super-online bubble"
- 52-6F-62 11mo ago
  Way off. I've polled about this (informally) as well. Non-technical people think it's another thing they have to learn and do not want to (except for those who have been conditioned into constant pursuit of novelty, but that is not a picture of mental health or stability for anyone). They want technology to work for them, not to constantly be urged into full-time engagement with their [de]vices. They are already preached at that they need a new phone or laptop every other year. Then there's a new social platform that changes its UI every 6 months or quarterly, and now similarly for their word processors and everything.
  - coldpie 11mo ago
    > I've polled about this (informally) as well. This is kinda like how if you ask everyone how often they eat McDonald's, everyone will say never or rarely. But they still sell a billion burgers each year :) Assuming you're not polling your Bsky buddies, I suspect these people are using AI tools a lot more than they admit or possibly even know. Auto-generated summaries, text generation, image editing, and conversation prompts all get a ton of use.
    - 52-6F-62 11mo ago
      Only if you are assuming I am asking so directly...
Adrig 11mo ago
My mom recently praised the brave AI summary of a webpage so who knows, the usage might be higher than we think.
- giancarlostoro 11mo ago
  I used to hate Twitter when it first launched because I thought short form text was stupid, now I see everything will become summaries with AI and nobody will ever read anything meaningful.
  - everdrive 11mo ago
    It could be something of an historical return to form; a small class of properly educated people and then the wider, semi-literate masses.
    - mythrwy 11mo ago
      Communicating in pictographs
      - ponector 11mo ago
        That should be a next step. It takes too much time to read summary. So the result should be a summary picture! Text based image generation is quite good now. How would you call this chatgpt feature?
      - giancarlostoro 11mo ago
        Gotta love them emojis
        mghackerlady 11mo ago
        If someone wanted to do this for whatever reason, there's actually a language that can be written exclusively in emojis. It's called toki pona, and while emojis aren't the standard writing system, there have been several proposals. It works well since toki pona has a very small syntax (only around ~150 words iirc)
mabedan 11mo ago
I use it for summarization constantly. I made iOS/mac shortcuts which call Gemini for various tasks and use them quite often, mostly summarization related.
- deleted 11mo ago
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- rwmj 11mo ago
  How do you know its summaries are correct?
  - Quothling 11mo ago
    You already know that they aren't. Yesterday my wife and I were discussing Rønja Røverdatter. When we were kids it used to have danish talk over, so you could still hear the original swedish sound as well. Now it has been dubbed, and we were talking about the actor who voices Birk. Anyway, we looked him up and found out he was in Blinkende Lygter, which neither of us remebered. So we asked Gemini and it told us he played the child flashback actor of the main character... except he doesn't, and to make matters worse, Gemini said that he played Christian a young Torkil... So it even got the names wrong. Sure this isn't exactly something Gemini would know, considering Rønja Røverdatter is an old Astrid Lingren novel that was turned to film decades ago, and Blinkende Lygter is a Danish movie from 20ish years ago where Sebastian Jessen plays a tiny role. Since they are prediction engines though, they'll happily give you a wrong answer because that's what the math added up to. I like LLM's, I've even build my own personal agent on our Enterprise GPT subscription to tune it for my professional needs, but I'd never use them to learn anything.
  - kristofferR 11mo ago
    Because they mostly are, and even if not, it doesn't usually matter. For example - you summarize a YouTube link to decide if the content of it is something you're interested in watching. Even if summarizations like that are only 90% correct 90% of the times it is still really helpful, you get the info you need to make a decision to read/watch the long form content or not.
  - 11mo ago
giancarlostoro 11mo ago
I do want AI for some things but I actively go out of my way to find it, I dont want AI forced everywhere its like cryptominers you are forced into wasting compute energy resources you never asked to waste but much worse at least cryptominers are limited by your hardware, in this case you have an entire datacenter churning just until you can click “Disable” on the model.
RansomStark 11mo ago
In firefox yeah! I use it often. I have it connected to a local Gemma model running in ollama and use it to quickly summarize webpages, nobody really wants to read 15 minutes worth of personal anecdotes before getting to that one paragraph that actually has relevant information, and for finding information within a page, kinda like ctrl-f on steroids. The machine is sitting there anyway and the extra cost in electricity is buried in the hours of gaming that gpu is also used for, so i haven't noticed yet, and if you game, the graphics card is going to be obsolete long before the small amount of extra wear is obvious. YMMV if you dont already have a gaming rig laying around
- distances 11mo ago
  Something like this I wouldn't mind, privacy focused local only models that allow you to use your own existing services. Can you give a quick pointer on how to connect Firefox to Ollama?
  - RansomStark 11mo ago
    Use openwebui with ollama. Openwebui is compatible with the firefox sidebar. So grab ollama and your prefered model. Install openwebui. Connect openwebui to ollama Then in firwdox open about:config And set browser.ml.chat.provider to your local openwebui instance Google suggests the you might also need to set browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost to false. But i dont remember having to do that
  - RansomStark 11mo ago
    Docs here: https://docs.openwebui.com/tutorials/integrations/firefox-sidebar/ https://docs.openwebui.com/tutorials/integrations/firefox-si... I think its technically experiemntal, but ive been using this since day one with no issue
- rpdillon 11mo ago
  The default AI integration doesn't seem to support this. The only thing I could find that does is called PageAssist, and it's a third-party extension. Is that what you're using? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/page-assist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/page-assist/
jmkni 11mo ago
I agree I like to keep AI at arms length, it's there if I want it but can fuck off otherwise Lots of people really do seem to want it in everything though
- shevy-java 11mo ago
  That's fine. My gripe here is that Firefox, Google etc.. try to force this onto everyone. If I could I would just disable the crap AI as I don't need or use or want it. But we are not given an easy option here; the Google "opt-out" is garbage. I actually had to install browser extensions to eliminate that Google AI spam. That extension works better than those "Google options" given to us. I actually rarely use Firefox so I can not even want to be bothered to install an installation, but I know that I don't need any AI crap from Firefox/Mozilla either. People are no longer given a choice. The big companies and organisations abuse people. I have said since years that we, the people, need back control over the world wide web. That includes the UI.
jve 11mo ago
> Does anyone want AI in anything? I want in Text to speech (TTS) engines, transliteration/translation and... routing tickets to correct teams/persons would also be awesome :) (Classification where mistakes can easily be corrected) Anyways, we used TTS engine before openai - it was AI based. It HAD to be AI based as even for a niche language some people couldn't tell it was a computer. Well from some phrases you can tell it, but it is very high quality and correctly knows on which parts of the word to put emphasis on. https://play.ht/ https://play.ht/ if anyone is wondering.
- boplicity 11mo ago
  Automatic captions has been transformative, in terms of accessibility, and seems to be something people universally want. Most people don't think of it as AI though, even when it is LLM software creating the captions. There are many more ways that AI tools could be embedded "invisibly" into our day-to-day lives, and I expect they will be.
  - bildung 11mo ago
    Do you have an example of a good implementation of ai captions? I've only experienced those on youtube, and they are really bad. The automatic dubbing is even worse, but still. On second thought this probably depends on the caption language.
    - satvikpendem 11mo ago
      There are projects that will run Whisper or another transcription service locally on your computer, which has great quality. For whatever reason, Google chooses not to use their highest quality transcription models on YouTube, maybe due to cost.
      - sjsdaiuasgdia 11mo ago
        I use Whisper running locally for automated transcription of many hours of audio on a daily basis. For the most part, Whisper does much better than stuff I've tried in the past like Vosk. That said, it makes a somewhat annoying error that I never really experienced with others. When the audio is low quality for a moment, it might misinterpret a word. That's fine, any speech recognition system will do that. The problem with Whisper is that the misinterpreted word can affect the next word, or several words. It's trying to align the next bits of audio syntactically with the mistaken word. Older systems, you'd get a nonsense word where the noise was but the rest of the transcription would be unaffected. With Whisper, you may get a series of words that completely diverges from the audio. I can look at the start of the divergence and recognize the phonetic similarity that created the initial error. The following words may not be phonetically close to the audio at all.
allan_s 11mo ago
3 month I was annoyed by the "let me translate the page for you" and last week in vacation I was browsing some local website, and I was more than happy to have firefox being able to translate the website dynamically, the result was okay-ish , but okay enough that I was able to proceed. And I'm more than happy that it didn't left my mobile device.
hansmayer 11mo ago
I'd upvote this a 100 times. It's gotten to a point where, when I see a UI element, text, or email subject featuring those irritating twinkling-emojis that are supposed to indicate something between "magic" and "incredible speed", I feel physical uneasiness. Maybe it's precisely because of this contradiction that these symbols now stand for. Recently we purchased an .io domain for a product we're working on. Guess what, few days later there comes an e-mail with that twinkly-crap-start containing a suggestion that a ".com" domain for the same name is available, and that at a rather low price! Gasp! So I look it up...well yeah, it is a .com alright. But missing the bloody last letter of our name. Such is the crap that you get out of those LLMs, always incomplete, always missing something and this is increasingly the sentiment in the tech professionals community - no thanks, we don't want you to keep feeding us your slop, billions that you burned already into nothing be damned!
nerdjon 11mo ago
Yes and no and this is the problem with the current marketing around AI. I very much do want what used to be just called ML that was invisible and actually beneficial. Autocorrect, smart touch screen keyboards, music recommendations, etc. But the problem is that all of that stuff is now also just being called "AI" left and right. That being said I think what most people think of when they say "AI" is really not as beneficial as they are trying to push. It has some uses but I think most of those uses are not going to be in your face AI as we are pushing now and instead in the background.
- cratermoon 11mo ago
  Nobody wants what's currently marketed as "AI" everywhere.
  - nerdjon 11mo ago
    I mean, that is kinda exactly what I said.. But we do have to acknowledge that AI is very much turned into an all encompassing term of everything ML. It is getting harder and harder to read an article about something being done with "AI" and to know if it was a custom purpose built model to do a specific task or is it throwing data into an LLM and hoping for the best. They are purposefully making it harder and harder to just say "No AI" by obfuscating this so we have to be very specific about what we are talking about.
    - cratermoon 11mo ago
      For a while I made an effort to specify LLM or generative AI vs AI as a whole, but I eventually became convinced that it was no longer valuable. Currently AI is whatever OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, NVidia, etc say it is, and that is mostly hype and marketing. Thus I have turned my language on its head, specifying "ML" or "recommendation system" or whatever specific pre-GPT technology I mean, and leave "AI" to the whims of the Sams and Darios of SV. I expect the bubble to pop in the next 3-6 months, if not before the end of 2025, taking with it any mention of "AI" in a serious or positive way.
andy99 11mo ago
The existence of the features doesn’t bother me. It’s the constant nagging about them. I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever. Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda. Now we’re seeing this in action.
- vidarh 11mo ago
  The worst one w/Google is how they've highjacked long-press on the power button on Android, and you can change what it does but your options are arbitrarily limited.
  - ortusdux 11mo ago
    My annoyance with Samsung's dedicated Bixby button factored into my switch to Pixel. The long-press highjack was disappointing.
    - LtWorf 11mo ago
      On my samsung i did find a setting to restore the off button being able to shut off the telephone. I can only hope they won't change it back at the next update (already happened once).
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - kelvinjps10 11mo ago
    I hate it how they're gonna change the power button to something else that's not power options. Just to push their annoying google assistant
    - seszett 11mo ago
      What are you guys talking about? I have a Pixel 8, didn't install Lineage OS on it, and my power button works fine?
vidarh 11mo ago
Just half an hour ago I needed to extra some text from a Notion page as JSON, and just popped the URL into Claude code and told it to use Playwright to extract the fields. I'd prefer to have it in Firefox, but the Firefox AI sidebar doesn't provide much meaningful integration (I'm sure there are extensions, and will probably look for that later, but the Playwright MCP server provided what I needed for now) So, yes, I want AI in "everything". And it's not a waste of resources if it's not triggered automatically.
- reaperducer 11mo ago
  The person you're replying to noted that there will be "edge cases." Your response exemplifies this. In fact, I'd say you're an edge case's edge case. There should be a word for that. Maybe "one-off."
  - vidarh 11mo ago
    I don't think it exemplifies that at all. Using Playwright absolutely is, but that was my niche fallback to the lack of an integrated AI solution. The use-case, which generalised is "pull some information from a web page", is far less niche, and I'd argue extremely common. I know a lot of people - including non-technical people - who spend a lot of time doing that in ways ranging from entirely manual to somewhat more sophisticated, and the more technically knowledgeable of those have started looking for AI tools to help them with that. To the extent users "don't want" AI available for things like this, it is mostly because they don't know AI could help with this. E.g. just a few days ago, I had someone show me how they painstakingly copied column by column from the exact same Notion site I mentioned into a Google sheet, without realising it was trivially automatable. Or rather: Trivially automatable to a technical user like me. But it could be trivially automatable to anyone with relatively little integration effort in the browsers.
TimByte 11mo ago
There's a big difference between having access to AI tools and baking AI into everything by default
gchamonlive 11mo ago
I don't mind AI. It can be pretty helpful sometimes in surprising ways. I just deeply dislike spywares.
glenstein 11mo ago
I believe there are good targeted tasks. One Chrome plug-in called 'Tweeks' is a reimplementation of Grease monkey user scripting where you can make changes by posing natural language to an LLM that changes the page for you. It was posted here in hn the other day. [0] Also I believe some agentic tasking can make sense: scroll through all the Kindle unlimited books for critically acclaimed contemporary hard sci-fi. But stapling on a chat sidebar or start page or something seems lacking in imagination. 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916525
- cwillu 11mo ago
  I don't want imagination in my existing tools. I don't want the designers of my tools sneaking into my toolbox and fucking with shit in the middle of the night.
- danudey 11mo ago
  Slight correction: the LLM doesn't change the page for you, the LLM creates sort of a mini-extension (like GreaseMonkey) that changes the page for you. This means you only make one request to the LLM and it creates something to modify the page from that point on.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    Fair enough, you are right. To me this is a good example of a tailored LLM application that actually does something you want.
- cobbal 11mo ago
  Like most attempts to put AI in the browser, that feels stupidly vulnerable to injection.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    Definitely worth asking the devs about, they're active on HN.
benterix 11mo ago
If you want a short answer: most people don't. But a more nuanced is: the term "AI" has become almost meaningless as everything is being marketed as AI, with startups and bigger companies doing it for different reasons. However, if you mean GenAI subset, then very few people want it, in very specific products, and with certain defined functionality. What is happening now though is that everybody and their mum try to slap it everywhere and see if anything sticks (spoiler: practically nothing does).
slightwinder 11mo ago
> Does anyone want AI in anything? Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this. AI can be useful, and integration is beneficial. But if we are talking about the momentary hype, then no, most people are against stupidly blindly shoving AI into something and getting annoyed with it the whole time. Personally, I would prefer for apps to safely open up for any kind of integration, and AI being just one automation of many, whatever one prefers. It's so annoying for everything being either a walled garden, guarding every little bit they can grab; or having apps open, but so limited in what they actually can do, that you are basically forced to the walled gardens.
- xinayder 11mo ago
  > Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this. No? If anything, adding AI features to something is just driving away your user base. No one asked for a built-in AI. Why not provide an extension?
  - Certhas 11mo ago
    And you know this how? Have you seen usage statistics of AI integrations? I personally don't like them, but I don't expect that I am a representative user. Nor are the people I know.
mkayokay 11mo ago
Looks like the comments on Mozilla Connect are not that positive either: Building AI the Firefox way: Shaping what’s next together - <https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-firefox-way-shaping-what-s-next-together/td-p/109922 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-f...>
nijave 11mo ago
>Does anyone want AI in anything? Well, yes. It's extremely useful. However, the hype bubble means it's getting added everywhere even when there's not a clear and vetted use case. It works really well for navigating docs as a super-charged search--much better at mapping vague concepts and words back to the official terminology in the docs. For instance, library Z might have "widgets" and "cogs" as constructs, but I'm used to library A which has similar constructs "gadgets" and "gears". I can explain the library A concepts and LLMs will do a pretty good job of mapping that back to the library Z concepts--much better than traditional search engines can do.
rpdillon 11mo ago
I want AI in lots of stuff, but not like how it is now. I was working on a Google Doc last night and I was curious about whether or not Google Docs had the ability to transclude a live preview of another document as an object that can be inserted in the current document. So I popped open the AI sidebar and asked. I got three hallucinated answers telling me to do things that did not exist in the UI before I finally convinced it that it didn't know what it was talking about and that I should just use bookmarks. That could have been an amazing experience where the AI told me exactly how to use the product. That's what I want. It's not what I got.
- chemotaxis 11mo ago
  > before I finally convinced it that it didn't know what it was talking about Spoiler: you didn't.
Theodores 11mo ago
AI is fine for phones and consumer operating systems, you don't have to use the features but they are there for you. However, I think there is a demand of at least one (me) for a Linux system with no AI whatsoever. Firefox could make itself the browser of choice for the minority that don't want any AI. Sure, you can configure it to be AI free, but that is a bit like being able to be vegan at a meaty restaurant where you can always spit out the meat. Firefox has been struggling of late and they don't do scoped CSS, which makes it as good as IE6 to me, but I think they could get their mojo back by being cheerleaders for the minority that have decided to go AI free. This doesn't mean AI is bad, but there is a healthy niche there. Apart from anything else, there are new browsers like Atlas that are totally AI. I would say that an AI enabled Firefox is not going to compete with Atlas, but AI free is a market that could be dominated by them. There is going to be a growing market for no AI. In my own case, my dad was 'pig butchered by an AI chatbot' to die penniless, so I have opinions on AI. Sam Altman would not want to meet me on a bad day, unless he has some AI that specialises in extreme ultraviolence. Then there is an ever growing army of people that have lost their job to AI to get nothing but rejections from AI powered job boards. Then there are those that have lost friends to AI psychosis, then there are those that have no water and massive utility bills due to AI data centers. The list goes on! Sounds like I need to put together an AI free operating system with AI free browser for those that have their own reasons for resenting AI!
killerstorm 11mo ago
If you want to ask LLM about the page you're on, rather often you CANNOT just paste a link: a lot of publicly accessible documents are blocked for AI assistants. So give-LLM-access-to-the-thing-I'm-now-looking-at is quite useful.
vharuck 11mo ago
I'm not a big user of LLMs, but instead of AI in everything, I'd like to see more web services and local software offer APIs that LLMs (and my own code) can access. Hopefully, "embedded AIs" only become as prevalent and required as "embedded browsers."
andrewmutz 11mo ago
The web is extremely user-hostile. The necessity of ad blockers is just one example of this. Social Media feed algorithms that maximize engagement at the cost of mental health and political unrest are another I think there is a ton of potential for having an LLM bundled with the browser and working on behalf of the user to make the web a better place. Imagine being able to use natural language to tell the browser to always do things like "don't show me search engine results that are corporate SEO blogspam" or "Don't show me any social media content if its about politics".
- xinayder 11mo ago
  We both know this is never going to happen on mainstream browsers, they'll just keep shoving AI into your face until you become dependent to it.
flenserboy 11mo ago
Quite. The last thing I want is opinionated software that might mess with the end product of whatever I'm working on, searching for, etc. Digital computing has the capacity to give us complete predictability, & those in charge of building it seem to want to prevent users from having it. It's bad enough what Google did to search; a future where the only thing you get back is a) what the machine allows you to see or create (which may be determined by the built-in agent or by the programmers); b) what the machine wants you to see, & modified to be in line with its whims; & c) hallucinated slop where it is difficult to determine what is real, what is human-originated, & what is constructed out of whole cloth.
tjpnz 11mo ago
That was part of what made the announcement of the Steam Machine such a joy - not one mention of it in sight. I suppose you could install Ollama on it, but where's the fun in that?
999900000999 11mo ago
It's magic when it's optional. I've vibe coded a few Godot games. It's all good fun. But now everything is forcing it. Google is telling people what rocks are tasty, on Reddit bots are engaging with bots. From what I can tell the only way to raise VC money is by saying AI 3 times. If the ritual is done correctly a magic seed round appears. As they say, don't hate the player, hate the game.
mtillman 11mo ago
Many years ago now, Mozilla hired an adtech exec to run the show and I arrived at the conclusion that Firefox would be staffed by for-profit thinkers in direct conflict with their non-profit foundation. That’s the moment I stopped donating. I daily drive Orion as even though Kagi is for profit, they have managed to keep trash out of their free version.
RyanOD 11mo ago
For me, it's exactly what you said...asking specific questions. That's what I use search engines for and much of the time I'm online, it's asking questions and seeking answers. And, as near as I can tell, AI does that very well and very fast.
RiverCrochet 11mo ago
I want the LLM outside of the apps, telling the apps what to do on my behalf and gathering information from them privately towards doing what I ask it or answering questions I have for it. If an app is a gateway to a bunch of data, it's cool to be able to "talk" to that data via any built-in LLM-based stuff, but typically the app is just a frontend anyway in that case, so the app isn't really needed.
Kye 11mo ago
The new similar sound search in Ableton Live is handy. It's getting stem separation soon and I expect to get some use out of it.
vbezhenar 11mo ago
I'm extensively using ChatGPT Web UI. I don't use it much but I see value in Claude Code CLI. I've used Copilot in the past, recently I stopped using it, but I can see the value. Other than that, I don't think I'd be happy to see AI anywhere else. I pretty much don't want no AI in my operating system, browser.
ilikehurdles 11mo ago
AI is useful. I use Claude code every single day for building software. I also wouldn’t want to go back to only web search for finding things out. Search engines are generally inferior.
pjmlp 11mo ago
Exactly, for me it only makes sense when it is transparent, meaning voice controlling devices, handwriting recognition, getting better IDE tooling, and such. Unfortunately got to meet those KPIs.
a_t48 11mo ago
Gemini in GCP for SQL queries is mildly useful, as I’m rusty and forget how to write but generally know enough not to run a query that mutates the db.
- danudey 11mo ago
  "How do I get a list of every resource in a project" "How do I change the resource limits for CPU core count" Beyond that I've never used Gemini for any actual purpose.
  - a_t48 11mo ago
    Yeah, basically.
GuB-42 11mo ago
I am not against AI in Firefox. The thing is "what AI". For example, translation can be considered AI, and I find it very useful, it is local too. Other AI features that could be nice would be speech-to-text, text-to-speech, advanced spellchecking, text autocomplete, etc... Bonus points if local models are used. I also see nothing wrong with having a "ask a LLM" entry in the right click menu like you have search, I think it is a common enough thing for people to do. The problem with many AI features in software is that they serve no purpose besides "hey look, we have AI". Usually in the form of some button or text field that is always visible and does nothing more than prompt a poorly tuned LLM.
beefnugs 11mo ago
What is it called where capitalism is this constant fight to push out all cooperation or collaboration? Why cant firefox just support whatever extension features would allow other people to create this AI trash and anyone who WANTS it can install it? Its this constant fight that everyone must CAPTURE all revenue opportunities at the cost of complete overwhelming tsunami of bad forceful decisions on users, all JUST INCASE its an actual revenue stream that they could be missing out on, before even knowing if a single user gives the slightest shit about it
quitit 11mo ago
I really don't mind having AI-driven features — if it's an improvement. Turns out that "if" part is fantastically difficult for some types to fathom, and what we're all experiencing now is just the same add-on tech-stench that has been typical of every digital era before us: 1970s: Calculators, calculators, calculators! 1980s: Miniaturised, digital quartz clocks anywhere they can fit. 1990s: Wouldn't this toaster be better.. WITH A LCD SCREEN? 2000s: MP3 players must outnumber the human population. No object or space should be without shitty, tinny music. 2010s: This easy-to-use device would be wonderfully enshittified by removing all of the buttons and switching to a touchscreen aka "Smart"-appliances. 2020s: AI, AI, AI!
etempleton 11mo ago
Step 1. Integrate AI Step 2. ??? Step 3. Profit
georgeecollins 11mo ago
For simple searches it really is better, as long as you don't take the answers as fact. Certain search terms (most?) cause you to be bombarded with ads. Try asking a search engine about details of a particular bond. The answer won't be on the second page. The AI to give you sources you check if you need the answer to be right. That's still better than a google search in many cases.
Aurornis 11mo ago
The AI tools can be an amazing upgrade over normal search boxes. I rarely let Claude write any code, but I get a lot of value out of pointing it at an unfamiliar repo and asking it to track down which files contain the code I’m looking for and to summarize how the pieces fit together. There are also a lot of subtle AI tools that aren’t in-your-face LLM prompts that flatter you with “Excellent question!”. It’s great having my photo library automatically annotated so I can search for things like “moose” and it will bring up that picture of the moose we saw, rather than me having to remember what year it happened and scroll through photos until I find it.
Sharlin 11mo ago
What I want is a thesaurus, dictionary and translator easily available anywhere (eg. in Spotlight on Mac – but Apple has of course stubbornly refused to make Spotlight more useful for some unfathomable reason). Those tools don't need an LLM, though, just calls to good old human-curated databases. Currently I make do with Firefox search keywords, but the workflow could be smoother.
- rsaz 11mo ago
  Have you considered Raycast? I don’t use it for those features myself, but it is extensible and has a large community, so even if it can’t do those things by default, I’m sure you could configure it to.
junon 11mo ago
I can't even open Adobe Acrobat anymore. There's AI shit in almost every corner and toolbar of the app. This shit makes me want to stop interacting with tech altogether and live on a farm. I don't know how much more of this I can take.
ls-a 11mo ago
They need to access your data somehow
paradox460 11mo ago
The only AI product where I've seen a meaningful quality of life improvement is the AI features in DaVinci resolve. They do things like detect music beats, automatically level audio, transcribe and detect audio, allow seamless redubs of flubbed voice lines with a good facsimile of the original voice, handle motion tracking, and more Most (all?) of it runs locally too
paulddraper 11mo ago
Yes. I want AI in my email to speed up (and avoid typos) in replying. I want AI in my news feed to pull the topics that are interesting to me. I want AI in online shopping to filter and recommend products by complex conditions. I want AI in my car to make me safer. I want AI in my calendar to schedule with a minimum of interruptions. I want AI in my work chats to answer questions that people have already asked me. I want AI to make clinical diagnoses more accurate. I want AI for a thousand things and most people do, or will.
phplovesong 11mo ago
Honestly, i have never got any real benefit from an AI. I tried it on multiple occasions, but compared to my pre-ai life, AI has not really improved anything. AI is basically only a shortcut to wikipedia, and i always anyway have to double check any AI response, making it kind of useless.
nickff 11mo ago
Customers want humans to perform each menial task, while paying almost nothing for that privilege, so that they can have the satisfaction of screaming at someone when a mistake is made.
tim333 11mo ago
I actually use Chrome over Firefox largely because of a couple of 'AI' features though they aren't really chatbot slop AI. Google translate built in is very handy - I know there are add ons for Firefox but they don't work well for twitter etc, and Google Lens is also very handy especially for text in image format. I guess they key is not in your face when you don't want them and actually useful.
muppetman 11mo ago
No one I've spoken to is happy with the AI shove. It's great to see people finally really speaking up and saying no. The bubble is getting close to popping.
darepublic 11mo ago
I assume that most of the resources usage only kicks on once you start querying the ai. That being said the intrusiveness and general lack of utility or consideration is certainly irritating. I recently saw code completion options in my chrome devtool console, and in postman sigh
notatoad 11mo ago
Copilot completions in vscode are pretty great, and i think a lot of people are happy with that. in general i agree with you, adding an AI chat window to an app that isn't an AI chat app is almost always a detriment. but i think it's shortsighted to assume there won't be other important use cases for AI, and we're in the experimentation phase right now where companies are trying to learn what that looks like. it's just unfortunate that there's so much incentive for apps to frame their AI chat as the best new thing ever and you should really use it, instead of introducing it more subtly.
- subscribed 11mo ago
  I love that thing specifically, copilot tab completions in vscode. It makes my life SO much easier (less time spent on editing config files, less chance to make a silly typo whilst writing scripts). It definitely has its place.
crazygringo 11mo ago
> Does anyone want AI in anything? I most definitely do. I want to be able to type into Finder on my Mac to rename all the files a certain way, without spending 10 minutes figuring out the right regex for it. I want to be able to type into Firefox to go through 50 different versions of the current URL, using a different US state parameter for each, and download the table it shows into a single combined CSV with an added column for "state". Every day there's 20 things like this. I absolutely want everything in my OS and browser to be exposed to an LLM that can do everything so much faster. Without the intermediate stage of having it write a script to do it. It would save so much time. Unfortunately we're not quite there yet because the GUI programs we use haven't exposed all the views and actions. But hopefully soon!
- vitaflo 11mo ago
  Literally this. I don’t know why this hasn’t been worked on. It’s the low hanging fruit with the most utility. Maybe that’s why cuz it’d be actually useful.
mvdtnz 11mo ago
I work on a traditional product that has a lot of AI touch points and people use them, a lot. Like, a lot more than other newly introduced features.
mannanj 11mo ago
The AI companies do. They want us to train their AIs for free by using them, and in many intense gaslightty cases as you've seen they even make us pay for it! What a powerful market though.
wslh 11mo ago
Right, I don't want AI integrated in my mobile phone either and just use it when I understand the information I am "leaking" (e.g. prompting)
hidelooktropic 11mo ago
Yes. I want AI in some things (some)
wahnfrieden 11mo ago
I want AI in all my development and entrepreneurial tools
geooff_ 11mo ago
I'm looking for AI features in a few places, one example is a git client that can draft commit Summary and Descriptions. This should be a very simple task and could use a simple on-device model. It feels like AI features are a firehose though. You either get none and a very 2018 product experience or a complete rework of everything "designed for agents".
raffael_de 11mo ago
It's been a habit of mine for more than a decade to deactivate any feature with "smart" in its name by default. I want my machines to be predictable and stupid.
mattmaroon 11mo ago
It’s great in photo shop. Removing a background has never been easier. There are certainly lots of great use cases, the problem is everyone is shoving it everywhere because they don’t want to feel behind the times and for every great use case there are several times where it accomplishes nothing but makes the UI worse.
bambax 11mo ago
Well said. I use AI often, but I don't want it "in" any other tool. It's annoying and in my experience, tools get worse the more "intelligent" they try to be. They get in your way and become unpredictable. I want silent, dumb, perfectly deterministic interfaces. And guessable, too (if that's a word?)
anthem2025 11mo ago
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standardly 11mo ago
Imagine putting down your AI-assisted smartphone to look up at the computer screen and minimize your AI-assisted vscode, glance past the Windows-integrated Copilot AI, open up firefox and move your mouse past the built-in AI search... only to go to chatgpt.com
ericmcer 11mo ago
We are just in a weird transitory period right now so it is all shitty implementations replacing what we are used to. I am semi-confident that LLM backed interfaces will be the future of many UIs though. When it works it just is a way better UX. A smart chat instead of a <form> or crawling through pages of search results is just nicer. It is bridging the gap between the hard data computers use and the generalized way humans communicate.
wartywhoa23 11mo ago
How dare you deny your AI overlord an oportunity to train itself further on your data for free?!
Krasnol 11mo ago
I would love it if it could clean up my mp3 collection. I know there are tools where you can do it yourself but it is a hellish mess. I just move it drive to drive through the decades until it comes.
kulahan 11mo ago
Yep. I use it a lot. It's nice when you're getting started on some new topic, and as someone whose attention bounces and then sticks hard for a while, it has made getting started on topics much faster for me. I personally do want it in a browser, because that's... pretty much the only way I use LLMs.
mark_l_watson 11mo ago
Good question. I like to have AI only when I specifically want it. Usually I just code in Emacs. If I specifically want help with something then for an IDE experience I will use the TRAE coding agent. For command line, I will use gemini-cli or codex. I like to use AI coding help 4 or 5 times a week. As an example, today I wanted some Python code that used a few libraries converted to Common Lisp (using several popular CL libraries). TRAE one-shotted this for me in two minutes. I think it would have taken me over 20 minutes to write it myself. AI is OK for easy stuff you can do yourself, and save time. The book AI Atlas tells a good narrative about natural resources used for AI, BTW.
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> Does anyone want AI in anything? AI ad blocking might be nice.
8note 11mo ago
i probably do, but i want it to work as some magic behind the scenes, not as an embedded chat app that i have to type in. a sandboxed LLM ad block or filter could be handy, for instance
dreamcompiler 11mo ago
> Does anyone want AI in anything? Absolutely. I want a browser with AI -- just not the browser Mozilla wants to build. I want my browser to use AI-based adblocking and content filtering. I want my AI browser to notice when the site sends some stupid sticky high Z-index thing down the pipe and just quietly not show it to me at all. I want my AI browser to automatically detect cookie dialogs and click "Reject All" and if that option isn't available, I want it to parse the "Cookie Preferences" page and click all the buttons that equate to "Reject All". I want an AI layer in my phone that spoofs my location and my contacts so that apps that insist on seeing those things see fake data that nevertheless looks plausible. Best of all, I want the AI agents in my browser and my phone to do their work without leaving any trace of their activities so that the server on the other end cannot tell that I even have an AI agent at all. Most of the above is possible now but it requires a plethora of different tools that are not cleanly integrated. And no VC is going to pay you to build such an integrated tool because it would not create a continuing revenue stream or a continuing stream of harvestable data compromising the user's privacy. We are a very fucked-up industry.
tigerali 11mo ago
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rmwaite 11mo ago
I think AI can add a lot of functionality but on the margins. Making things “work better”. I think AI as a focal point—in that it is The feature is a mistake for most things. But making code completion work better or suggestions more accurate? Things that are largely invisible UI-wise.
kure256 11mo ago
More and more people now start with an AI assistant instead of traditional browsing — not because they love AI everywhere, but because it’s simply faster than navigating websites. The shift is already visible: assistants can surface structured information directly, and they’re beginning to prioritize citations, so sources that are clear and machine-readable get more visibility. If the web doesn’t adapt, a lot of high-quality content will slowly disappear from the “AI layer” of discovery. We’re trying to document this shift here: https://github.com/ai-first-guides/first.ai/blob/main/docs/index.md https://github.com/ai-first-guides/first.ai/blob/main/docs/i...
cncjchsue7 11mo ago
I want it. They just need to figure out the ux. Chat ain't it. I'd love voice chat to access the web.
frxx 11mo ago
That's what I've been saying for some time now... "No one really wants AI! They want their software to be faster or better, but do they care if the people in the background of the image have been removed by AI or not?" And in fact they don't. Managers think they want AI but they actually want their people to work faster or better. Higher managers think they want AI so they can save money, or at least not fall behind the competitors, if those were to use AI to get an advantage. Companies making software think they want AI because their competitors are using it, and they think the users want AI so the software can be perceived as modern, not falling behind. And so on, and so on... other than Nvidia, openAI, Anthropic, etc, no one really wants AI.
jjaksic 11mo ago
Yes, exactly. AI has its uses and can sometimes be extremely useful. But at this point it's not nearly as ubiquitously useful as various companies would want us to believe, based on how much they're forcing it on us, pushing it in our faces, shoving it down our throats, etc. I don't want that. I'll use it if and when I want to, thank you very much. Microsoft is of course the worst offender.
cykros 11mo ago
What, you don't want AI in your "mv" command, so that it guesses where you want your file moved to, rather than having to type in the destination? Personally I hate the extra keystrokes -- I think we should automate it to run in the background constantly, to make file relocation more efficient.

coldpie 11mo ago

> Does anyone want AI in anything? Yeah, they do. Go talk to anyone who isn't in a super-online bubble such as HN or Bsky or a Firefox early-adopter program. They're all using it, all the time, for everything. I don't like it either, but that's the reality.

smlavine 11mo ago
> They're all using it. Not really. Go talk to anyone who uses the internet for Facebook, Whatsapp, and not much else. Lots of people have typed in chatgpt.com or had Google's AI shoved in their face, but the vast majority of "laypeople" I've talked to about AI (actually, they've talked to me about AI after learning I'm a tech guy -- "so what do you think about AI?") seem to be resigned to the fact that after the personal computer and the internet, whatever the rich guys in SF do is what is going to happen anyway. But I sense a feeling of powerlessness and a fear of being left behind, not anything approaching genuine interest in or excitement by the technology.
gbear605 11mo ago
If I talk to the people I know who don’t spend all their time online, they’re just not using AI. Quite a few of my close friends haven’t used AI even once in any way, and most of the rest tried it out once and didn’t really care for it. They’re busy doing things in the real world, like spending time with their kids, or riding horses, or reading books.
- vidarh 11mo ago
  Being busy riding horses and reading books are both niche activities (yes, reading too, sadly, at lest above a very small number of books which does not translate to people being busy doing it more than a tiny fraction of their time), which suggests perhaps your close friends are a rather biased set. Nothing wrong with that, but we're all in bubbles.
- coldpie 11mo ago
  I talk to an acquaintance selling some homemade products on Etsy, he uses & likes the automatically generated product summary Etsy made for him. My neighbor asks me if I have any further suggestions for refinishing her table top beyond the ones ChatGPT suggested. Watching all of my coworkers using Google search, they just read the LLM summary at the top of the page and look no further. I see a friend take a picture, she uses the photo AI tool to remove a traffic sign from the background. Over lunch, a coworker tells me about the thing she learned about from the generated summary of a YouTube video. We can take principled stands against these things, and I do because I am an obnoxiously principled dork, but the reality is it's everywhere and everyone other than us is using it.
lucasoshiro 11mo ago
> They're all using it, all the time, for everything Do you know someone? Using Firefox nowadays is itself a "super-online bubble"
52-6F-62 11mo ago
Way off. I've polled about this (informally) as well. Non-technical people think it's another thing they have to learn and do not want to (except for those who have been conditioned into constant pursuit of novelty, but that is not a picture of mental health or stability for anyone). They want technology to work for them, not to constantly be urged into full-time engagement with their [de]vices. They are already preached at that they need a new phone or laptop every other year. Then there's a new social platform that changes its UI every 6 months or quarterly, and now similarly for their word processors and everything.
- coldpie 11mo ago
  > I've polled about this (informally) as well. This is kinda like how if you ask everyone how often they eat McDonald's, everyone will say never or rarely. But they still sell a billion burgers each year :) Assuming you're not polling your Bsky buddies, I suspect these people are using AI tools a lot more than they admit or possibly even know. Auto-generated summaries, text generation, image editing, and conversation prompts all get a ton of use.
  - 52-6F-62 11mo ago
    Only if you are assuming I am asking so directly...

Adrig 11mo ago

My mom recently praised the brave AI summary of a webpage so who knows, the usage might be higher than we think.

giancarlostoro 11mo ago
I used to hate Twitter when it first launched because I thought short form text was stupid, now I see everything will become summaries with AI and nobody will ever read anything meaningful.
- everdrive 11mo ago
  It could be something of an historical return to form; a small class of properly educated people and then the wider, semi-literate masses.
  - mythrwy 11mo ago
    Communicating in pictographs
    - ponector 11mo ago
      That should be a next step. It takes too much time to read summary. So the result should be a summary picture! Text based image generation is quite good now. How would you call this chatgpt feature?
    - giancarlostoro 11mo ago
      Gotta love them emojis
      - mghackerlady 11mo ago
        If someone wanted to do this for whatever reason, there's actually a language that can be written exclusively in emojis. It's called toki pona, and while emojis aren't the standard writing system, there have been several proposals. It works well since toki pona has a very small syntax (only around ~150 words iirc)

mabedan 11mo ago

I use it for summarization constantly. I made iOS/mac shortcuts which call Gemini for various tasks and use them quite often, mostly summarization related.

deleted 11mo ago
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rwmj 11mo ago
How do you know its summaries are correct?
- Quothling 11mo ago
  You already know that they aren't. Yesterday my wife and I were discussing Rønja Røverdatter. When we were kids it used to have danish talk over, so you could still hear the original swedish sound as well. Now it has been dubbed, and we were talking about the actor who voices Birk. Anyway, we looked him up and found out he was in Blinkende Lygter, which neither of us remebered. So we asked Gemini and it told us he played the child flashback actor of the main character... except he doesn't, and to make matters worse, Gemini said that he played Christian a young Torkil... So it even got the names wrong. Sure this isn't exactly something Gemini would know, considering Rønja Røverdatter is an old Astrid Lingren novel that was turned to film decades ago, and Blinkende Lygter is a Danish movie from 20ish years ago where Sebastian Jessen plays a tiny role. Since they are prediction engines though, they'll happily give you a wrong answer because that's what the math added up to. I like LLM's, I've even build my own personal agent on our Enterprise GPT subscription to tune it for my professional needs, but I'd never use them to learn anything.
- kristofferR 11mo ago
  Because they mostly are, and even if not, it doesn't usually matter. For example - you summarize a YouTube link to decide if the content of it is something you're interested in watching. Even if summarizations like that are only 90% correct 90% of the times it is still really helpful, you get the info you need to make a decision to read/watch the long form content or not.
- 11mo ago

giancarlostoro 11mo ago

I do want AI for some things but I actively go out of my way to find it, I dont want AI forced everywhere its like cryptominers you are forced into wasting compute energy resources you never asked to waste but much worse at least cryptominers are limited by your hardware, in this case you have an entire datacenter churning just until you can click “Disable” on the model.

RansomStark 11mo ago

In firefox yeah! I use it often. I have it connected to a local Gemma model running in ollama and use it to quickly summarize webpages, nobody really wants to read 15 minutes worth of personal anecdotes before getting to that one paragraph that actually has relevant information, and for finding information within a page, kinda like ctrl-f on steroids. The machine is sitting there anyway and the extra cost in electricity is buried in the hours of gaming that gpu is also used for, so i haven't noticed yet, and if you game, the graphics card is going to be obsolete long before the small amount of extra wear is obvious. YMMV if you dont already have a gaming rig laying around

distances 11mo ago
Something like this I wouldn't mind, privacy focused local only models that allow you to use your own existing services. Can you give a quick pointer on how to connect Firefox to Ollama?
- RansomStark 11mo ago
  Use openwebui with ollama. Openwebui is compatible with the firefox sidebar. So grab ollama and your prefered model. Install openwebui. Connect openwebui to ollama Then in firwdox open about:config And set browser.ml.chat.provider to your local openwebui instance Google suggests the you might also need to set browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost to false. But i dont remember having to do that
- RansomStark 11mo ago
  Docs here: https://docs.openwebui.com/tutorials/integrations/firefox-sidebar/ https://docs.openwebui.com/tutorials/integrations/firefox-si... I think its technically experiemntal, but ive been using this since day one with no issue
rpdillon 11mo ago
The default AI integration doesn't seem to support this. The only thing I could find that does is called PageAssist, and it's a third-party extension. Is that what you're using? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/page-assist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/page-assist/

jmkni 11mo ago

I agree I like to keep AI at arms length, it's there if I want it but can fuck off otherwise Lots of people really do seem to want it in everything though

shevy-java 11mo ago
That's fine. My gripe here is that Firefox, Google etc.. try to force this onto everyone. If I could I would just disable the crap AI as I don't need or use or want it. But we are not given an easy option here; the Google "opt-out" is garbage. I actually had to install browser extensions to eliminate that Google AI spam. That extension works better than those "Google options" given to us. I actually rarely use Firefox so I can not even want to be bothered to install an installation, but I know that I don't need any AI crap from Firefox/Mozilla either. People are no longer given a choice. The big companies and organisations abuse people. I have said since years that we, the people, need back control over the world wide web. That includes the UI.

jve 11mo ago

> Does anyone want AI in anything? I want in Text to speech (TTS) engines, transliteration/translation and... routing tickets to correct teams/persons would also be awesome :) (Classification where mistakes can easily be corrected) Anyways, we used TTS engine before openai - it was AI based. It HAD to be AI based as even for a niche language some people couldn't tell it was a computer. Well from some phrases you can tell it, but it is very high quality and correctly knows on which parts of the word to put emphasis on. https://play.ht/ https://play.ht/ if anyone is wondering.

boplicity 11mo ago
Automatic captions has been transformative, in terms of accessibility, and seems to be something people universally want. Most people don't think of it as AI though, even when it is LLM software creating the captions. There are many more ways that AI tools could be embedded "invisibly" into our day-to-day lives, and I expect they will be.
- bildung 11mo ago
  Do you have an example of a good implementation of ai captions? I've only experienced those on youtube, and they are really bad. The automatic dubbing is even worse, but still. On second thought this probably depends on the caption language.
  - satvikpendem 11mo ago
    There are projects that will run Whisper or another transcription service locally on your computer, which has great quality. For whatever reason, Google chooses not to use their highest quality transcription models on YouTube, maybe due to cost.
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 11mo ago
      I use Whisper running locally for automated transcription of many hours of audio on a daily basis. For the most part, Whisper does much better than stuff I've tried in the past like Vosk. That said, it makes a somewhat annoying error that I never really experienced with others. When the audio is low quality for a moment, it might misinterpret a word. That's fine, any speech recognition system will do that. The problem with Whisper is that the misinterpreted word can affect the next word, or several words. It's trying to align the next bits of audio syntactically with the mistaken word. Older systems, you'd get a nonsense word where the noise was but the rest of the transcription would be unaffected. With Whisper, you may get a series of words that completely diverges from the audio. I can look at the start of the divergence and recognize the phonetic similarity that created the initial error. The following words may not be phonetically close to the audio at all.

allan_s 11mo ago

3 month I was annoyed by the "let me translate the page for you" and last week in vacation I was browsing some local website, and I was more than happy to have firefox being able to translate the website dynamically, the result was okay-ish , but okay enough that I was able to proceed. And I'm more than happy that it didn't left my mobile device.

hansmayer 11mo ago

I'd upvote this a 100 times. It's gotten to a point where, when I see a UI element, text, or email subject featuring those irritating twinkling-emojis that are supposed to indicate something between "magic" and "incredible speed", I feel physical uneasiness. Maybe it's precisely because of this contradiction that these symbols now stand for. Recently we purchased an .io domain for a product we're working on. Guess what, few days later there comes an e-mail with that twinkly-crap-start containing a suggestion that a ".com" domain for the same name is available, and that at a rather low price! Gasp! So I look it up...well yeah, it is a .com alright. But missing the bloody last letter of our name. Such is the crap that you get out of those LLMs, always incomplete, always missing something and this is increasingly the sentiment in the tech professionals community - no thanks, we don't want you to keep feeding us your slop, billions that you burned already into nothing be damned!

nerdjon 11mo ago

Yes and no and this is the problem with the current marketing around AI. I very much do want what used to be just called ML that was invisible and actually beneficial. Autocorrect, smart touch screen keyboards, music recommendations, etc. But the problem is that all of that stuff is now also just being called "AI" left and right. That being said I think what most people think of when they say "AI" is really not as beneficial as they are trying to push. It has some uses but I think most of those uses are not going to be in your face AI as we are pushing now and instead in the background.

cratermoon 11mo ago
Nobody wants what's currently marketed as "AI" everywhere.
- nerdjon 11mo ago
  I mean, that is kinda exactly what I said.. But we do have to acknowledge that AI is very much turned into an all encompassing term of everything ML. It is getting harder and harder to read an article about something being done with "AI" and to know if it was a custom purpose built model to do a specific task or is it throwing data into an LLM and hoping for the best. They are purposefully making it harder and harder to just say "No AI" by obfuscating this so we have to be very specific about what we are talking about.
  - cratermoon 11mo ago
    For a while I made an effort to specify LLM or generative AI vs AI as a whole, but I eventually became convinced that it was no longer valuable. Currently AI is whatever OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, NVidia, etc say it is, and that is mostly hype and marketing. Thus I have turned my language on its head, specifying "ML" or "recommendation system" or whatever specific pre-GPT technology I mean, and leave "AI" to the whims of the Sams and Darios of SV. I expect the bubble to pop in the next 3-6 months, if not before the end of 2025, taking with it any mention of "AI" in a serious or positive way.

andy99 11mo ago

The existence of the features doesn’t bother me. It’s the constant nagging about them. I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever. Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda. Now we’re seeing this in action.

vidarh 11mo ago
The worst one w/Google is how they've highjacked long-press on the power button on Android, and you can change what it does but your options are arbitrarily limited.
- ortusdux 11mo ago
  My annoyance with Samsung's dedicated Bixby button factored into my switch to Pixel. The long-press highjack was disappointing.
  - LtWorf 11mo ago
    On my samsung i did find a setting to restore the off button being able to shut off the telephone. I can only hope they won't change it back at the next update (already happened once).
- deleted 11mo ago
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- kelvinjps10 11mo ago
  I hate it how they're gonna change the power button to something else that's not power options. Just to push their annoying google assistant
  - seszett 11mo ago
    What are you guys talking about? I have a Pixel 8, didn't install Lineage OS on it, and my power button works fine?

vidarh 11mo ago

Just half an hour ago I needed to extra some text from a Notion page as JSON, and just popped the URL into Claude code and told it to use Playwright to extract the fields. I'd prefer to have it in Firefox, but the Firefox AI sidebar doesn't provide much meaningful integration (I'm sure there are extensions, and will probably look for that later, but the Playwright MCP server provided what I needed for now) So, yes, I want AI in "everything". And it's not a waste of resources if it's not triggered automatically.

reaperducer 11mo ago
The person you're replying to noted that there will be "edge cases." Your response exemplifies this. In fact, I'd say you're an edge case's edge case. There should be a word for that. Maybe "one-off."
- vidarh 11mo ago
  I don't think it exemplifies that at all. Using Playwright absolutely is, but that was my niche fallback to the lack of an integrated AI solution. The use-case, which generalised is "pull some information from a web page", is far less niche, and I'd argue extremely common. I know a lot of people - including non-technical people - who spend a lot of time doing that in ways ranging from entirely manual to somewhat more sophisticated, and the more technically knowledgeable of those have started looking for AI tools to help them with that. To the extent users "don't want" AI available for things like this, it is mostly because they don't know AI could help with this. E.g. just a few days ago, I had someone show me how they painstakingly copied column by column from the exact same Notion site I mentioned into a Google sheet, without realising it was trivially automatable. Or rather: Trivially automatable to a technical user like me. But it could be trivially automatable to anyone with relatively little integration effort in the browsers.

TimByte 11mo ago

There's a big difference between having access to AI tools and baking AI into everything by default

gchamonlive 11mo ago

I don't mind AI. It can be pretty helpful sometimes in surprising ways. I just deeply dislike spywares.

glenstein 11mo ago

I believe there are good targeted tasks. One Chrome plug-in called 'Tweeks' is a reimplementation of Grease monkey user scripting where you can make changes by posing natural language to an LLM that changes the page for you. It was posted here in hn the other day. [0] Also I believe some agentic tasking can make sense: scroll through all the Kindle unlimited books for critically acclaimed contemporary hard sci-fi. But stapling on a chat sidebar or start page or something seems lacking in imagination. 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916525

cwillu 11mo ago
I don't want imagination in my existing tools. I don't want the designers of my tools sneaking into my toolbox and fucking with shit in the middle of the night.
danudey 11mo ago
Slight correction: the LLM doesn't change the page for you, the LLM creates sort of a mini-extension (like GreaseMonkey) that changes the page for you. This means you only make one request to the LLM and it creates something to modify the page from that point on.
- glenstein 11mo ago
  Fair enough, you are right. To me this is a good example of a tailored LLM application that actually does something you want.
cobbal 11mo ago
Like most attempts to put AI in the browser, that feels stupidly vulnerable to injection.
- glenstein 11mo ago
  Definitely worth asking the devs about, they're active on HN.

benterix 11mo ago

If you want a short answer: most people don't. But a more nuanced is: the term "AI" has become almost meaningless as everything is being marketed as AI, with startups and bigger companies doing it for different reasons. However, if you mean GenAI subset, then very few people want it, in very specific products, and with certain defined functionality. What is happening now though is that everybody and their mum try to slap it everywhere and see if anything sticks (spoiler: practically nothing does).

slightwinder 11mo ago

> Does anyone want AI in anything? Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this. AI can be useful, and integration is beneficial. But if we are talking about the momentary hype, then no, most people are against stupidly blindly shoving AI into something and getting annoyed with it the whole time. Personally, I would prefer for apps to safely open up for any kind of integration, and AI being just one automation of many, whatever one prefers. It's so annoying for everything being either a walled garden, guarding every little bit they can grab; or having apps open, but so limited in what they actually can do, that you are basically forced to the walled gardens.

xinayder 11mo ago
> Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this. No? If anything, adding AI features to something is just driving away your user base. No one asked for a built-in AI. Why not provide an extension?
- Certhas 11mo ago
  And you know this how? Have you seen usage statistics of AI integrations? I personally don't like them, but I don't expect that I am a representative user. Nor are the people I know.

mkayokay 11mo ago

Looks like the comments on Mozilla Connect are not that positive either: Building AI the Firefox way: Shaping what’s next together - <https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-firefox-way-shaping-what-s-next-together/td-p/109922 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-f...>

nijave 11mo ago

>Does anyone want AI in anything? Well, yes. It's extremely useful. However, the hype bubble means it's getting added everywhere even when there's not a clear and vetted use case. It works really well for navigating docs as a super-charged search--much better at mapping vague concepts and words back to the official terminology in the docs. For instance, library Z might have "widgets" and "cogs" as constructs, but I'm used to library A which has similar constructs "gadgets" and "gears". I can explain the library A concepts and LLMs will do a pretty good job of mapping that back to the library Z concepts--much better than traditional search engines can do.

rpdillon 11mo ago

I want AI in lots of stuff, but not like how it is now. I was working on a Google Doc last night and I was curious about whether or not Google Docs had the ability to transclude a live preview of another document as an object that can be inserted in the current document. So I popped open the AI sidebar and asked. I got three hallucinated answers telling me to do things that did not exist in the UI before I finally convinced it that it didn't know what it was talking about and that I should just use bookmarks. That could have been an amazing experience where the AI told me exactly how to use the product. That's what I want. It's not what I got.

chemotaxis 11mo ago
> before I finally convinced it that it didn't know what it was talking about Spoiler: you didn't.

Theodores 11mo ago

AI is fine for phones and consumer operating systems, you don't have to use the features but they are there for you. However, I think there is a demand of at least one (me) for a Linux system with no AI whatsoever. Firefox could make itself the browser of choice for the minority that don't want any AI. Sure, you can configure it to be AI free, but that is a bit like being able to be vegan at a meaty restaurant where you can always spit out the meat. Firefox has been struggling of late and they don't do scoped CSS, which makes it as good as IE6 to me, but I think they could get their mojo back by being cheerleaders for the minority that have decided to go AI free. This doesn't mean AI is bad, but there is a healthy niche there. Apart from anything else, there are new browsers like Atlas that are totally AI. I would say that an AI enabled Firefox is not going to compete with Atlas, but AI free is a market that could be dominated by them. There is going to be a growing market for no AI. In my own case, my dad was 'pig butchered by an AI chatbot' to die penniless, so I have opinions on AI. Sam Altman would not want to meet me on a bad day, unless he has some AI that specialises in extreme ultraviolence. Then there is an ever growing army of people that have lost their job to AI to get nothing but rejections from AI powered job boards. Then there are those that have lost friends to AI psychosis, then there are those that have no water and massive utility bills due to AI data centers. The list goes on! Sounds like I need to put together an AI free operating system with AI free browser for those that have their own reasons for resenting AI!

killerstorm 11mo ago

If you want to ask LLM about the page you're on, rather often you CANNOT just paste a link: a lot of publicly accessible documents are blocked for AI assistants. So give-LLM-access-to-the-thing-I'm-now-looking-at is quite useful.

vharuck 11mo ago

I'm not a big user of LLMs, but instead of AI in everything, I'd like to see more web services and local software offer APIs that LLMs (and my own code) can access. Hopefully, "embedded AIs" only become as prevalent and required as "embedded browsers."

andrewmutz 11mo ago

The web is extremely user-hostile. The necessity of ad blockers is just one example of this. Social Media feed algorithms that maximize engagement at the cost of mental health and political unrest are another I think there is a ton of potential for having an LLM bundled with the browser and working on behalf of the user to make the web a better place. Imagine being able to use natural language to tell the browser to always do things like "don't show me search engine results that are corporate SEO blogspam" or "Don't show me any social media content if its about politics".

xinayder 11mo ago
We both know this is never going to happen on mainstream browsers, they'll just keep shoving AI into your face until you become dependent to it.

flenserboy 11mo ago

Quite. The last thing I want is opinionated software that might mess with the end product of whatever I'm working on, searching for, etc. Digital computing has the capacity to give us complete predictability, & those in charge of building it seem to want to prevent users from having it. It's bad enough what Google did to search; a future where the only thing you get back is a) what the machine allows you to see or create (which may be determined by the built-in agent or by the programmers); b) what the machine wants you to see, & modified to be in line with its whims; & c) hallucinated slop where it is difficult to determine what is real, what is human-originated, & what is constructed out of whole cloth.

tjpnz 11mo ago

That was part of what made the announcement of the Steam Machine such a joy - not one mention of it in sight. I suppose you could install Ollama on it, but where's the fun in that?

999900000999 11mo ago

It's magic when it's optional. I've vibe coded a few Godot games. It's all good fun. But now everything is forcing it. Google is telling people what rocks are tasty, on Reddit bots are engaging with bots. From what I can tell the only way to raise VC money is by saying AI 3 times. If the ritual is done correctly a magic seed round appears. As they say, don't hate the player, hate the game.

mtillman 11mo ago

Many years ago now, Mozilla hired an adtech exec to run the show and I arrived at the conclusion that Firefox would be staffed by for-profit thinkers in direct conflict with their non-profit foundation. That’s the moment I stopped donating. I daily drive Orion as even though Kagi is for profit, they have managed to keep trash out of their free version.

RyanOD 11mo ago

For me, it's exactly what you said...asking specific questions. That's what I use search engines for and much of the time I'm online, it's asking questions and seeking answers. And, as near as I can tell, AI does that very well and very fast.

RiverCrochet 11mo ago

I want the LLM outside of the apps, telling the apps what to do on my behalf and gathering information from them privately towards doing what I ask it or answering questions I have for it. If an app is a gateway to a bunch of data, it's cool to be able to "talk" to that data via any built-in LLM-based stuff, but typically the app is just a frontend anyway in that case, so the app isn't really needed.

Kye 11mo ago

The new similar sound search in Ableton Live is handy. It's getting stem separation soon and I expect to get some use out of it.

vbezhenar 11mo ago

I'm extensively using ChatGPT Web UI. I don't use it much but I see value in Claude Code CLI. I've used Copilot in the past, recently I stopped using it, but I can see the value. Other than that, I don't think I'd be happy to see AI anywhere else. I pretty much don't want no AI in my operating system, browser.

ilikehurdles 11mo ago

AI is useful. I use Claude code every single day for building software. I also wouldn’t want to go back to only web search for finding things out. Search engines are generally inferior.

pjmlp 11mo ago

Exactly, for me it only makes sense when it is transparent, meaning voice controlling devices, handwriting recognition, getting better IDE tooling, and such. Unfortunately got to meet those KPIs.

a_t48 11mo ago

Gemini in GCP for SQL queries is mildly useful, as I’m rusty and forget how to write but generally know enough not to run a query that mutates the db.

danudey 11mo ago
"How do I get a list of every resource in a project" "How do I change the resource limits for CPU core count" Beyond that I've never used Gemini for any actual purpose.
- a_t48 11mo ago
  Yeah, basically.

GuB-42 11mo ago

I am not against AI in Firefox. The thing is "what AI". For example, translation can be considered AI, and I find it very useful, it is local too. Other AI features that could be nice would be speech-to-text, text-to-speech, advanced spellchecking, text autocomplete, etc... Bonus points if local models are used. I also see nothing wrong with having a "ask a LLM" entry in the right click menu like you have search, I think it is a common enough thing for people to do. The problem with many AI features in software is that they serve no purpose besides "hey look, we have AI". Usually in the form of some button or text field that is always visible and does nothing more than prompt a poorly tuned LLM.

beefnugs 11mo ago

What is it called where capitalism is this constant fight to push out all cooperation or collaboration? Why cant firefox just support whatever extension features would allow other people to create this AI trash and anyone who WANTS it can install it? Its this constant fight that everyone must CAPTURE all revenue opportunities at the cost of complete overwhelming tsunami of bad forceful decisions on users, all JUST INCASE its an actual revenue stream that they could be missing out on, before even knowing if a single user gives the slightest shit about it

quitit 11mo ago

I really don't mind having AI-driven features — if it's an improvement. Turns out that "if" part is fantastically difficult for some types to fathom, and what we're all experiencing now is just the same add-on tech-stench that has been typical of every digital era before us: 1970s: Calculators, calculators, calculators! 1980s: Miniaturised, digital quartz clocks anywhere they can fit. 1990s: Wouldn't this toaster be better.. WITH A LCD SCREEN? 2000s: MP3 players must outnumber the human population. No object or space should be without shitty, tinny music. 2010s: This easy-to-use device would be wonderfully enshittified by removing all of the buttons and switching to a touchscreen aka "Smart"-appliances. 2020s: AI, AI, AI!

etempleton 11mo ago

Step 1. Integrate AI Step 2. ??? Step 3. Profit

georgeecollins 11mo ago

For simple searches it really is better, as long as you don't take the answers as fact. Certain search terms (most?) cause you to be bombarded with ads. Try asking a search engine about details of a particular bond. The answer won't be on the second page. The AI to give you sources you check if you need the answer to be right. That's still better than a google search in many cases.

Aurornis 11mo ago

The AI tools can be an amazing upgrade over normal search boxes. I rarely let Claude write any code, but I get a lot of value out of pointing it at an unfamiliar repo and asking it to track down which files contain the code I’m looking for and to summarize how the pieces fit together. There are also a lot of subtle AI tools that aren’t in-your-face LLM prompts that flatter you with “Excellent question!”. It’s great having my photo library automatically annotated so I can search for things like “moose” and it will bring up that picture of the moose we saw, rather than me having to remember what year it happened and scroll through photos until I find it.

Sharlin 11mo ago

What I want is a thesaurus, dictionary and translator easily available anywhere (eg. in Spotlight on Mac – but Apple has of course stubbornly refused to make Spotlight more useful for some unfathomable reason). Those tools don't need an LLM, though, just calls to good old human-curated databases. Currently I make do with Firefox search keywords, but the workflow could be smoother.

rsaz 11mo ago
Have you considered Raycast? I don’t use it for those features myself, but it is extensible and has a large community, so even if it can’t do those things by default, I’m sure you could configure it to.

junon 11mo ago

I can't even open Adobe Acrobat anymore. There's AI shit in almost every corner and toolbar of the app. This shit makes me want to stop interacting with tech altogether and live on a farm. I don't know how much more of this I can take.

ls-a 11mo ago

They need to access your data somehow

paradox460 11mo ago

The only AI product where I've seen a meaningful quality of life improvement is the AI features in DaVinci resolve. They do things like detect music beats, automatically level audio, transcribe and detect audio, allow seamless redubs of flubbed voice lines with a good facsimile of the original voice, handle motion tracking, and more Most (all?) of it runs locally too

paulddraper 11mo ago

Yes. I want AI in my email to speed up (and avoid typos) in replying. I want AI in my news feed to pull the topics that are interesting to me. I want AI in online shopping to filter and recommend products by complex conditions. I want AI in my car to make me safer. I want AI in my calendar to schedule with a minimum of interruptions. I want AI in my work chats to answer questions that people have already asked me. I want AI to make clinical diagnoses more accurate. I want AI for a thousand things and most people do, or will.

phplovesong 11mo ago

Honestly, i have never got any real benefit from an AI. I tried it on multiple occasions, but compared to my pre-ai life, AI has not really improved anything. AI is basically only a shortcut to wikipedia, and i always anyway have to double check any AI response, making it kind of useless.

nickff 11mo ago

Customers want humans to perform each menial task, while paying almost nothing for that privilege, so that they can have the satisfaction of screaming at someone when a mistake is made.

tim333 11mo ago

I actually use Chrome over Firefox largely because of a couple of 'AI' features though they aren't really chatbot slop AI. Google translate built in is very handy - I know there are add ons for Firefox but they don't work well for twitter etc, and Google Lens is also very handy especially for text in image format. I guess they key is not in your face when you don't want them and actually useful.

muppetman 11mo ago

No one I've spoken to is happy with the AI shove. It's great to see people finally really speaking up and saying no. The bubble is getting close to popping.

darepublic 11mo ago

I assume that most of the resources usage only kicks on once you start querying the ai. That being said the intrusiveness and general lack of utility or consideration is certainly irritating. I recently saw code completion options in my chrome devtool console, and in postman sigh

notatoad 11mo ago

Copilot completions in vscode are pretty great, and i think a lot of people are happy with that. in general i agree with you, adding an AI chat window to an app that isn't an AI chat app is almost always a detriment. but i think it's shortsighted to assume there won't be other important use cases for AI, and we're in the experimentation phase right now where companies are trying to learn what that looks like. it's just unfortunate that there's so much incentive for apps to frame their AI chat as the best new thing ever and you should really use it, instead of introducing it more subtly.

subscribed 11mo ago
I love that thing specifically, copilot tab completions in vscode. It makes my life SO much easier (less time spent on editing config files, less chance to make a silly typo whilst writing scripts). It definitely has its place.

crazygringo 11mo ago

> Does anyone want AI in anything? I most definitely do. I want to be able to type into Finder on my Mac to rename all the files a certain way, without spending 10 minutes figuring out the right regex for it. I want to be able to type into Firefox to go through 50 different versions of the current URL, using a different US state parameter for each, and download the table it shows into a single combined CSV with an added column for "state". Every day there's 20 things like this. I absolutely want everything in my OS and browser to be exposed to an LLM that can do everything so much faster. Without the intermediate stage of having it write a script to do it. It would save so much time. Unfortunately we're not quite there yet because the GUI programs we use haven't exposed all the views and actions. But hopefully soon!

vitaflo 11mo ago
Literally this. I don’t know why this hasn’t been worked on. It’s the low hanging fruit with the most utility. Maybe that’s why cuz it’d be actually useful.

mvdtnz 11mo ago

I work on a traditional product that has a lot of AI touch points and people use them, a lot. Like, a lot more than other newly introduced features.

mannanj 11mo ago

The AI companies do. They want us to train their AIs for free by using them, and in many intense gaslightty cases as you've seen they even make us pay for it! What a powerful market though.

wslh 11mo ago

Right, I don't want AI integrated in my mobile phone either and just use it when I understand the information I am "leaking" (e.g. prompting)

hidelooktropic 11mo ago

Yes. I want AI in some things (some)

wahnfrieden 11mo ago

I want AI in all my development and entrepreneurial tools

geooff_ 11mo ago

I'm looking for AI features in a few places, one example is a git client that can draft commit Summary and Descriptions. This should be a very simple task and could use a simple on-device model. It feels like AI features are a firehose though. You either get none and a very 2018 product experience or a complete rework of everything "designed for agents".

raffael_de 11mo ago

It's been a habit of mine for more than a decade to deactivate any feature with "smart" in its name by default. I want my machines to be predictable and stupid.

mattmaroon 11mo ago

It’s great in photo shop. Removing a background has never been easier. There are certainly lots of great use cases, the problem is everyone is shoving it everywhere because they don’t want to feel behind the times and for every great use case there are several times where it accomplishes nothing but makes the UI worse.

bambax 11mo ago

Well said. I use AI often, but I don't want it "in" any other tool. It's annoying and in my experience, tools get worse the more "intelligent" they try to be. They get in your way and become unpredictable. I want silent, dumb, perfectly deterministic interfaces. And guessable, too (if that's a word?)

anthem2025 11mo ago

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standardly 11mo ago

Imagine putting down your AI-assisted smartphone to look up at the computer screen and minimize your AI-assisted vscode, glance past the Windows-integrated Copilot AI, open up firefox and move your mouse past the built-in AI search... only to go to chatgpt.com

ericmcer 11mo ago

We are just in a weird transitory period right now so it is all shitty implementations replacing what we are used to. I am semi-confident that LLM backed interfaces will be the future of many UIs though. When it works it just is a way better UX. A smart chat instead of a <form> or crawling through pages of search results is just nicer. It is bridging the gap between the hard data computers use and the generalized way humans communicate.

wartywhoa23 11mo ago

How dare you deny your AI overlord an oportunity to train itself further on your data for free?!

Krasnol 11mo ago

I would love it if it could clean up my mp3 collection. I know there are tools where you can do it yourself but it is a hellish mess. I just move it drive to drive through the decades until it comes.

kulahan 11mo ago

Yep. I use it a lot. It's nice when you're getting started on some new topic, and as someone whose attention bounces and then sticks hard for a while, it has made getting started on topics much faster for me. I personally do want it in a browser, because that's... pretty much the only way I use LLMs.

mark_l_watson 11mo ago

Good question. I like to have AI only when I specifically want it. Usually I just code in Emacs. If I specifically want help with something then for an IDE experience I will use the TRAE coding agent. For command line, I will use gemini-cli or codex. I like to use AI coding help 4 or 5 times a week. As an example, today I wanted some Python code that used a few libraries converted to Common Lisp (using several popular CL libraries). TRAE one-shotted this for me in two minutes. I think it would have taken me over 20 minutes to write it myself. AI is OK for easy stuff you can do yourself, and save time. The book AI Atlas tells a good narrative about natural resources used for AI, BTW.

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago

> Does anyone want AI in anything? AI ad blocking might be nice.

8note 11mo ago

i probably do, but i want it to work as some magic behind the scenes, not as an embedded chat app that i have to type in. a sandboxed LLM ad block or filter could be handy, for instance

dreamcompiler 11mo ago

> Does anyone want AI in anything? Absolutely. I want a browser with AI -- just not the browser Mozilla wants to build. I want my browser to use AI-based adblocking and content filtering. I want my AI browser to notice when the site sends some stupid sticky high Z-index thing down the pipe and just quietly not show it to me at all. I want my AI browser to automatically detect cookie dialogs and click "Reject All" and if that option isn't available, I want it to parse the "Cookie Preferences" page and click all the buttons that equate to "Reject All". I want an AI layer in my phone that spoofs my location and my contacts so that apps that insist on seeing those things see fake data that nevertheless looks plausible. Best of all, I want the AI agents in my browser and my phone to do their work without leaving any trace of their activities so that the server on the other end cannot tell that I even have an AI agent at all. Most of the above is possible now but it requires a plethora of different tools that are not cleanly integrated. And no VC is going to pay you to build such an integrated tool because it would not create a continuing revenue stream or a continuing stream of harvestable data compromising the user's privacy. We are a very fucked-up industry.

tigerali 11mo ago

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rmwaite 11mo ago

I think AI can add a lot of functionality but on the margins. Making things “work better”. I think AI as a focal point—in that it is The feature is a mistake for most things. But making code completion work better or suggestions more accurate? Things that are largely invisible UI-wise.

kure256 11mo ago

More and more people now start with an AI assistant instead of traditional browsing — not because they love AI everywhere, but because it’s simply faster than navigating websites. The shift is already visible: assistants can surface structured information directly, and they’re beginning to prioritize citations, so sources that are clear and machine-readable get more visibility. If the web doesn’t adapt, a lot of high-quality content will slowly disappear from the “AI layer” of discovery. We’re trying to document this shift here: https://github.com/ai-first-guides/first.ai/blob/main/docs/index.md https://github.com/ai-first-guides/first.ai/blob/main/docs/i...

cncjchsue7 11mo ago

I want it. They just need to figure out the ux. Chat ain't it. I'd love voice chat to access the web.

frxx 11mo ago

That's what I've been saying for some time now... "No one really wants AI! They want their software to be faster or better, but do they care if the people in the background of the image have been removed by AI or not?" And in fact they don't. Managers think they want AI but they actually want their people to work faster or better. Higher managers think they want AI so they can save money, or at least not fall behind the competitors, if those were to use AI to get an advantage. Companies making software think they want AI because their competitors are using it, and they think the users want AI so the software can be perceived as modern, not falling behind. And so on, and so on... other than Nvidia, openAI, Anthropic, etc, no one really wants AI.

jjaksic 11mo ago

Yes, exactly. AI has its uses and can sometimes be extremely useful. But at this point it's not nearly as ubiquitously useful as various companies would want us to believe, based on how much they're forcing it on us, pushing it in our faces, shoving it down our throats, etc. I don't want that. I'll use it if and when I want to, thank you very much. Microsoft is of course the worst offender.

cykros 11mo ago

What, you don't want AI in your "mv" command, so that it guesses where you want your file moved to, rather than having to type in the destination? Personally I hate the extra keystrokes -- I think we should automate it to run in the background constantly, to make file relocation more efficient.