The "upvote good, downvote bad" mentality needs to die. As others have said, the arrows are to promote/reduce visibility of content. Whether you agree with the content of the post should be irrelevant.
People have been saying some variant of this at least as far back as Slashdot in the late 90s. Nobody has come up with a viable way to change peoples habits.
Instead of fighting it, what can we do knowing that this is how it works?
New idea I've just come up with, we make it so, before upvoting or downvoting something, you have to press a button, and then wait at least a minute, or, better yet, solve a captcha, and then you don't even have to have accounts anymore and that takes about a minute. The only people upvoting or downvoting will be those who are really reflecting on what it is that they're doing, or the people who are really really committed and pissed off about something. I'm sure the latter won't happen like, ever.
I think maybe that's exactly how people are using it, it's just that most people aren't thinking "oh, well, this post made me a little mad or uncomfy, but I like the content and discussion that it's spurned, so I'll toss it an upvote". I think most people are more inclined to go "THIS POST MADE ME MAD! GRUG DOWNVOTE!". It doesn't even really not make sense, it would be kind of insane to spend like, even just a minute, thinking consciously about every single upvote or downvote you make, it would take a million years for anyone to ever upvote or downvote anything, and a lot of people would just not engage unless they were really committed, which doesn't necessarily map to their level of discernment, but might just instead map to how mad people could get over a given thing. Plenty of people could get mad enough about a thing to sit through a minute long wait period to downvote something.
I've been trying Arc browser that has a bunch of AI shoved in it and.... It's actually kinda nice. I think Firefox COULD possibly not fuck this up. Before you down vote me, I too believe that Firefox would be better off focusing on the core browser experience. And I really hope they have a good solution to AI being all cloud based right now. Like having a lightweight local model. This is why I was glad Arc was trying it, not Firefox.
I don't really see it this way it's just marketing. Saying "all other browsers descend from big bad corporate Apple" is scary, saying "all other browsers descend from another open source project" is meh.
That's quite the bummer. But still. Saying that almost all browsers can trace their lineage to Apple and Webkit is technically correct, but it's just a half-truth. As Apple and Webkit were once based on KHTML.
I mean yes no kinda Konqueror simply accepted a bunch of downstream patches, including a name change.
...more or less. It could for a long time use all three of KHTML, WebKit (fork of KHTML) and QtWebEngine (Blink wrapped for Qt, that is, a fork of WebKit), they recently removed KHTML support because noone was updating it and it hadn't been the default for ages.
If they hadn't implemented multi-engine support in the past they probably would've switched over to "whatever Qt provides" right-out, it's KDE after all. Ultimately they're providing a desktop, not a web browser. Back in the days they did decide to roll their own instead of going with Firefox but it was never a "throw project resources at it" kind of situation, there were simply KDE people who felt like working on it. Web standards were a lot less involved back around the turn of the millennium, and also new and shiny. Back in the days people thought that HTML 4.01 Strict and XHMTL would be a thing that servers actually would start to output instead of the usual tagsoup.
If you're that kind of person right now I'll point you in the direction of Servo. No, Firefox doesn't use it and it's not a Mozilla project any more, Firefox only included (AFAIK) parallel CSS handling, the rest is still old Gecko.
I hate that they are laying people off. I do however want to use some machine learning powered adblock, for those harder to block ads. otherwise I don't feel like every app needs an AI assistant. It's bad for the Internet generally and for the power grid.
In practice, it will most likely need to send the contents of your browser to some third-party server. No, thanks.
(Unless it's crowdsourced, like the first person to visit a page gets dinged, but then the next persons just downloads the set of rules instead of uploading content.)
Privacy preserving federated learning is a thing - essentially you train a local model and send the weight updates back to Google rather than the data itself....but also it's early days so who knows what vulnerabilities may exist
One of 70 flavors of Chromium including the "privacy centric" Opera who run Chinese loan shark gangs for some reason, Edge which is Microsoft Chromium and aside from hardware acceleration capabilities is pretty meh, and Brave which despite operating their own separate search engine index are one of the most likely to sell your data and/or kidneys
Rapidly Enshitifying Firefox
Safari - no comment
Whatever the fuck Gecko is...
Tor Browser (for people with infinite time to wait for pages to load, or maybe just drug dealers)
RE: point 1, I'm a fan of Vivaldi, a privacy-focused highly modified chromium build developed by former Opera developers who were disillusioned by the direction that company went in.
Librewolf is built on Gecko, people often accredit it as a "firefox fork".
Tor Browser seems cool, it's what I use on my phone whenever I have spare time to let it load before searching things which don't require a lot of bandwidth. I'll edit the above list.
Mullvad? Is that some kind of slur? I've never heard of that but searches say it's a VPN client. ¯\(ツ)/¯
But it's a hellishly expensive thing that seems to not attract enjoyment from current Firefox users, and seems unlikely to bring new users, and (again) seems to be prioritised over other things that could better use the money, like developers, so...
The paradox of tech right now "we are going to build the most complex technology known to man into our product in the next 12 months. Are we hiring record numbers of people to get it done? No. We fired a bunch of people and everyone else will just have to be extremely hardcore."
I bet I know much more on the topic than you, but please enlighten me on which part of this is complex?
The core concepts of DNNs are taught in high-school, and putting them together can done by a Bachelor student. Shit, people often advise writing a NN libraries as a good learning exercise when picking up a new programming language.
I think mathematically illiterate people assume that incredible results necessarily imply complexity, but that's simply not the case here. Or the idea that unknown things are necessarily complex, maybe.
The main reason DNNs are popping up is because we finally have the hardware for it. And the second reason is that tech companies have the resources (both financial and in terms of available data) to throw at it.
They're refocusing on Firefox and continuing the ai stuff they were already doing. They fireded people who were working on fediverse and metaverse platforms. Did you even read the article?
I'm starting to think FF is being deliberately run into the ground by the higher ups. It would be good to hear from some of the devs about their thoughts on all this.
I think they were commenting on how people seem to be zealots for Firefox on Lemmy, despite having some (reasonable) flaws. Despite this news, I'd bet a lot of them will continue. Not a pro-Chrome stance by any means.
(I had to block the Firefox and Linux subs day 1 because of how much anti-Chrome/ anti-Windows I saw).
I think it's more that the Firefox/Mozilla community is relatively small and has a self imposed echo chamber.
For example, when discussing mobile browsers on Android, it's a fact that Chromium based ones have significantly better security then those based on Firefox for Android. It sucks, but it's true.
Whenever that's brought up, downvotes follow.
Whether, or not, that echo chamber is so large that includes Mozilla leadership, I can't speak to. But I wouldn't be surprised.
Have you read any of the other comments in this thread? Large numbers of people are gleefully dumping all over Mozilla, it's the few who are trying to go against that narrative that are getting downvotes.
You enjoy your angry mob. I'll enjoy having AI tools in my browser.
It's funny. I'm using a different browser that gets shit on constantly on here despite being really solid. I always see posts on here about having to use addon ABC cause XYZ stopped working, or faking the browser to look like Chrome, so sites work with Firefox.
I just eat my popcorn, open my add-on free browser, and surf ad free and problem free. People here REALLY try to justify Firefox. It's not a shit browser by any means, but damn do you have to tweak it to get it to run right.
Ditto. FF/Mozilla community (especially the /r/firefox mods), along with the nonsense changes to FF, are a big reason why I decided to leave FF after 20 years and use something else. At the moment, I couldn't care less about Mozilla future.
Decent models are huge; an average one requires 8GB to be kept in memory (better models requires something like 40 to 70 GB), and most currently available engines are extremely slow on a CPU and requires dedicated hardware (and even relatively powerful GPU requires a few seconds of "thinking" time). It is unlikely that these requirements will be easily squeezable in current computers, and more likely that dedicated hardware will be required.
I don't think any inference engines have actually been optimised to run on CPUs. You're stuck with 32-bit floats but OTOH that just means that you can do gigantic winograd transformations with the excess precision, needing far fewer fmuladds in total and CPUs are better at dealing with the memory access patterns that come with transforming the convolution. Most people have at least around 1TFLOP of compute in their CPU (e.g. a Ryzen 3600 has that much) that's not ever seeing the light of day. About a fifth of what an RX 570 has, it's a difference but not a magnitude and you can run SDXL with that kind of class of card (maybe not the 570 dunno about software support but a 5500 works, despite AMD's best efforts to cripple rocm).
Also from what I gather they're more or less doing summarybot for your browsing history, that's not a ChatGPT or Llama-style giant model you can talk with.
ONNX Runtime is actually decently well optimized to run on CPUs; even with large models. However, the simple truth is that there’s really no escaping that Billion+parameter models need to be quantized and even pruned heavily to fit in memory and not saturate the CPU cache so inferences/generations don’t take forever. That’s a reduction in accuracy, so the quality of the generations aren’t great.
There is a lot of really interesting research and development being done right now on smart quantization and pruning. Model serving technologies are improving rapidly too—paged attention is a really cool technique (for transformer based models) for effectively leveraging tensor core hardware—I don’t think that’s supported on CPU yet but it’s probably not that far off.
It’s a really active field and there’s just as much interest in running huge models on huge hardware as there is big models on small hardware. I recently heard of layerwise inference for CPUs; load each layer of the network to the CPU cache on demand. That’s typically a bottleneck operation on GPUs but CPU memoery so bloody fast that it might actually work fine. I haven’t played with it myself, or read the paper all that deeply so I can’t really comment more than it’s an interesting idea.
Sorry but has anyone in this thread actually tried running local LLMs on CPU? You can easily run a 7B model at varying levels of quantization (ie. 5 bit quantization) and get a generalized prompt-able LLM. Yeah, of course it's going to take ~4GB of RAM (which is mem-mapped and paged into memory), but you can easily fine tune smaller more specific models (like the translation one mentioned above) and have surprising intelligence at a fraction of the resources.
Take, for example, phi-2 which performs as well as 13B param models but with 2.7B params. Yeah, that's still going to take 1.5GB RAM which Firefox wouldn't reasonably ship, but many lighter weight specialized tasks could easily use something like a fine tuned 0.3B model with quantization.
Yes, I did. And yes, it is possible. It's terribly slow in comparison, making it less useful. It very quickly devolves into random mumbling or get stuck in weird loops. It also hogs resources that are actually used by other tasks you may be doing.
I mainly test dev AI solutions, and moving from 1B to 7B models made them vastly more pertinent. And moving from CPU implementation (Ryzen 7 3700X) to GPU (RTX 3080 Ti) made them fast enough to be used as quick completion and immediate suggestion without breaking workflow, in addition to freeing resources for IDE, building tools and the actual software being run, while running it on CPU had multi-seconds delay, which made this use case completely useless.
