Not only are loading times and total network usage ridiculous, sites will continue to violate your privacy via trackers and waste your CPU even when background idling. I've written about these issues a few times in the last few years, so just sharing for those interested:
- Currently using Mistral 7B, but ability (by Mozilla) to swap the model used to another open source at any point.
- Hosted "by Mozilla" on their GCP instance.
- No obvious info about what it will cost them to run this since it is free to use.
- No training on user data.
Like others here, I'm very curious about the cost for Mozilla to run this service. It may be less than it initially appears given the 7B model they chose. I do wish they would focus their efforts on creating a very long-term endowment to pay devs for continued Firefox development in lieu of projects like this given the tenuous situation with their Google funding.
I'm not against this kind of thing in theory, but I hope it's being done in a cost-sustainable way.
I wasn't able to get many decent results after playing with the demo for some time. I guess my question is...what exactly is this for? I was able to get substantially better results about 2 years ago running SD 2 locally on a gaming laptop. Sure, the images took 30 seconds or so each, but the quality was better than I could get in the demo. Not sure what the point of instantly generating a ton of bad quality images is.
It does seem like this is one of those domains where new AI models could thrive. From my understanding, the amount and variety of data necessary to make these models work is huge. In addition to historical data, you've got constant satellite data, weather stations on the ground for data collection, weather balloons going high into the atmosphere multiple times daily per location, Doppler radars tracking precipitation, data from ships and other devices in the ocean measuring temps and other info, and who knows what else.
It's incredible that we are able to predict anything this far into the future, but the complexity seems like it lends itself to this kind of black box approach.
*This is all speculation, so I'd be grateful if someone more knowledgeable could tell if if I'm mistaken about these assumptions. It's an interesting topic.
I like the general idea of this, but this feels like it is trying to do too much. Removing ads, trackers, and unnecessary widgets is mostly a solved problem using unlock origin (+ possibly privacy badger).
I think it is a step too far to try and completely remove the step of actually visiting the website you get content from. This is the same thing Google is trying to do with their AI summarizer in search. Is the expected endgame of this that all useful websites just shut down because no one but bots visits them anymore? Even if those sites are user-funded and not reliant on ads, I find it hard to believe that many people would use AI summaries from the site then subsequently donate to financially support it.
I'm much more in favor of an approach that involves still visiting the actual website, but removes the content that the user does not want to see (ublock origin style).
I would suggest that once the browser extension exists, that it should transform the site "in-place" after visiting the site then pressing a button on the extension. And I could see that potentially having value (but I suspect this would take a lot of work to get right).
I genuinely think this is a great thing to offer and very much needed. Great work. Your ffmpeg tutorial also looks really interesting, and I'll definitely be checking that out when I have time.
But please consider removing or changing that huge cookie banner on the main page. The amount of people that will simply choose to not interact with the site at all and X out immediately when seeing this might be higher than you think. That would be my first instinct.
Honestly, this is just repulsive. Crypto has brought nearly zero benefits to society and has made income inequality even worse. Not to mention the environmental impact.
I don't see how any reasonable person can celebrate this. Ask yourself who is benefiting most from this.
You make a very good point about "good" option source options. There are also situations where plenty of open tools exist, but whole-system complexity is such that people choose proprietary/managed options anyway. Email hosting comes to mind.
This is not surprising, and unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to get better any time soon given our increasingly conservative (corp friendly) federal courts. It's really a shame because these corps have shown they can't be trusted to properly archive their own games, and any change of ownership or economic fortune can mean they are lost forever.
From a personal level, I'll just keep doing what I've always done. Help archive the things I can. Support and buy games from smaller devs or publishers who care about their games. And if you want to play something from a shitty AAA dev, nothing is stopping you from playing it anyway for free and just giving the money to your favorite charity instead. Consumers can have a lot of power if they choose to exercise it.
Gotta be honest, given much of the news I have been consuming in the past few weeks, I could read 100 articles like this. Concise, well-written, interesting and about potentially useful research...
And the prospect of helping wounds heal with nano spaghetti is just cool
Sorry that I wasn't clear. This was in Toronto. I've yet to see quite as many such ads here in the US, but it's possible they were just pushed out by political ads during this period.
I'm American but lived in Toronto from 2022 until a couple months ago.
I was astounded by the amount of online gambling ads just literally pasted everywhere in Toronto. When I got YouTube ads, a huge percentage was for these. They were pasted over the whole body of streetcars and in transit stations throughout the city.
I don't know much about the current status in the U.S., but Ontario at least seems to be completely infected by gambling ads. They must be making insane amounts of money off exploiting people's gambling addictions, as well as creating new addictions daily.
1) mit license
2) using plausible instead of Google analytics. Practically speaking, uBO is going to block both by default, but for non-tech users this is great.
3) appreciate how the app respects your pc when the web app is running in the background. Very low footprint, no random CPU spikes or anything.
Is anyone able to access the USPS website? I have been trying from multiple different IPs and had no luck. Could not find any info on social media about it.
I would normally think nothing of it, but the timing is conspicuous.
Having produced only a single book for standardebooks, I don't think many people appreciate the amount of effort that goes into the corrections, semantic html additions, and other edits it takes to go from a typical Gutenberg file to a standardebooks release. Granted, the tool chain you guys have created is great and is immensely helpful.
All that to mainly say..I appreciate you. It's one of my favorite projects, and I hope it keeps going strong indefinitely.
A comparison of CPU usage for idling popular webpages: https://ericra.com/writing/site_cpu.html
Regarding tracker domains on the New Yorker site: https://ericra.com/writing/tracker_new_yorker.html