Posted by AndrewDucker 4 days ago
But also, it’s not the 20-somethings building this people making decisions are in their 40’s and 50’s.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/archive-your-browser-hi...
> By default, we don’t use the content you browse to train our models. If you choose to opt-in this content, you can enable “include web browsing” in your data controls settings. Note, even if you opt into training, webpages that opt out of GPTBot, will not be trained on.
The end goal for AI companies has always been to insert themselves into every data flow in the world.
Option 2: Ad data
Option 3: None of the above
I'm going with the first two because I like to contribute my data to help out a trillion dollar company that doesn't even have customer support :)
Investors are never happy long term because even if you have a fantastic quarter, they'll throw a tantrum if you don't do it even better every single time.
How can you know what you're reading is true when you can't verify what's happening out there?
This is true from global events to a pasta recipe.
This thing is an absolute security nightmare. The concept of opening up the full context of your authenticated sessions in your email, financial, healthcare or other web sites to ChatGPT is downright reckless. Aside from personal harm, the way they are pushing this is going to cause large scale data breaches at companies that harbour sensitive information. I've been the one pushing against hard blocking AI tools at my org so far but this may have turned me around for OpenAI at least.
Yay!! Let’s all make a not-for-profit!!
Oh, but hold on a minute, look at all the fun things we can do with lots of money!
Ooooh!!
Well, unless the scenario is moot because such a vendor would never have released it in the first place.
No we didnt.
Heck, just look at what's happening at this very moment: I'm using a textarea with a submit button. Even as a developer/power-user, I have zero interest in replacing that with:
echo "I think the..." | post_to_hn --reply-to=45742461Also, some commenters here at HN stating that the CLI/TUI it's just the fallback option... that's ridiculous. Nvi/vim, entr, make... can autocompile (and autocomplete too with some tools) a project upon writting any file in a directory thanks to the entr tool.
But most of those will likely be developers, that use the CLI in a very particular way.
If we now subdivide further, and look at the people that use the CLI for things like browsing the web, that's going to be an even smaller number of people. Negligible, in the big picture.
In any case, Claude Code is not really CLI, but rather a conversational interface.
claude -p "Question goes here"
As that will print the answer only and exit.
If I’d anticipated breaching containment and heading towards the orange site, I may not have risked the combination of humor and anything that’s not completely literal in its language. Alas.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that expansion of GUI based interfaces wasn't a good thing. There's plenty of things I prefer to interact with that way, and the majority of people wouldn't use computers if CLIs were still the default method. But what he's describing is literally not how any ever used the commandline.
Anyone who deals with any kind of machine with a console port.
CLIs are current technology, that receive active development alongside GUI for a large range of purposes.
Heck Windows currently ships with 3 implementations. Command Prompt, Powershell AND Terminal.
CLI is ALWAYS fallback when nothing else works (except when it is a niche fetish of people on HN). even most devs use IDEs most of the time.
It’s unlikely LLM operators can break even by charging per use, and it should be expected that they’ll race to capture the market by offering “free” products that in reality are ad serving machines, a time-tested business model that has served Meta and friends very well. The fact that Atlas browser is (and they don’t even hide it) a way to work around usage limits of ChatGPT should ring alarm bells.
Atlas may not be the solution but I love the idea of an LLM that sits between me and the dreck that is today’s web.
I also believe noticing Baader-meinhof in the 90s is rather unsurprising, since RAF was just "a few years" ago. However, "dreck" as someone else noted is documented since the early 20th century. So I dont think me noticing this just recently isn't a bias, rather a true coincidence.
That said, don't be lured, you know they're already working on ways to put ads and trackers and what not inside ChatGPT and Atlas, those 20$ sound won't pay enough to recoup all that investment and cost and maximize profits.
So I think we should be careful what we wish for here.
This is kind of surprising, because those are precisely the ways I would say that a Web search is better than ChatGPT. Google is generally sub second to get to results, and quite frequently either page 1 or 2 will have some relevant results.
With ChatGPT, I get to watch as it processes for an unpredictable amount of time, then I get to watch it "type".
> ads free
Free of ads where ChatGPT was paid to deliver them. Because it was trained on the public Internet, it is full of advertising content.
Update: Example query I just did for "apartment Seville". Google completed in under a second. All the results above the fold are organic, with sponsored way down. Notably the results include purchase, long-term and vacation rental sites. The first 3 are listing sites. There's an interactive map in case I know where I want to go; apartments on the map include links to their websites. To see more links, I click "Next."
ChatGPT (MacOS native app) took ~9 seconds and recommended a single agency, to which it does not link. Below that, it has bullet points that link to some relevant sites, but the links do not include vacation rentals. There are 4 links to apartment sites, plus a link to a Guardian article about Seville cracking down on illegal vacation rentals. To see more links, I type a request to see more.
For all the talk about Google burying the organic links under a flood of ads, ChatGPT shows me far fewer links. As a person who happily pays for and uses ChatGPT daily, I think it's smart to be honest about its strengths and shortcomings.
That being said I've never really come across on what are some good general ways to Google to give me good results.
I know some tricks e.g. Filetype:PDF , use scholar for academic search, use "site:...". smth like "site:reddit.com/r/Washington quiet cafe" for most things people would want to do in a city, because people generally ask about those things on community forums.
But I have a poor time with dev related queries because 1/2 the time it's seo'd content and when I don't know enough about a subject, LLMs generally gives me a lot of lines of inquiries(be careful of X and also consider Y) that I would not bother to ask cause I don't know what I don't know.
If I’m trying to learn about a topic (for example, how a cone brake works in a 4WD winch), then ChatGPT gives me a great overview with “ Can you explain what a cone brake is and how it works, in the context of 4WD winches?” while google, with the search “4wd winch cone brake function explained”, turns up a handful of videos covering winches (not specifically cone brakes) and some pages that mention them without detailing their function. ChatGPT wins here.
If I were trying to book a flight I’d never dream of even trying to use ChatGPT. That sort of use case is a non-starter for me.
My mistake, you're completely correct, perhaps even more-correct than the wonderful flavor of Mococoa drink, with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners!
As it is, I find there are some things LLMs are genuinely better for but many where a search is still far more useful.
It feels like $10 / month would be sufficient to solve this problem. Yet, we've all insisted that everything must be free.
- Kagi
- YouTube Premium
- Spotify Premium
- Meta ad-free
- A bunch of substacks and online news publications
- Twitter Pro or whatever it’s called
On top of that I aggressively ad-block with extensions and at DNS level and refuse to use any app with ads. I have most notifications disabled, too.
It is a lot better, but it’s more like N * $10 than $10 per month.
But, doesn't Youtube Premium include Youtube Music? So why pay for Spotify premium too?
But I can't actually make that payment - except maybe by purchasing a paid adblocker - where ironically the best open source option (uBlock Origin) doesn't even accept donations.
I think the most telling is the breakdown of Average Revenue Per User per region for Facebook specifically [1]. The average user brought in about $11 per quarter while the average US/CA user brought in about $57 per quarter during 2023.
[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2023/q4... (page 15)
It’s closer to $100 than $10 though, for all the services I pay for to avoid ads, and you still need ad blockers for the rest of the internet.
But isn't this, instead, letting a third party strip that context away and give it its own context so that you can't make those choices and decisions properly? Information without context is, to me, nearly worthless.
And even if you believe they are neutral parties and have your own interests at heart (which, quite frankly, I think is naive), once companies like that know everything about you, you don't think they'll abuse that knowledge?
An AI browser is choosing to send all the stuff you browse, to a third party without a demonstrated interest in keeping it all private, and getting back stuff that might or might not be true to the original content. Or maybe not even true at all.
Oh and - Atlas will represent your interests, right up until OpenAI decides it's not in their financial interest to do so. What do you do when the entire web browser UI gets enshittified?
If you post for ad revenue, I truly feel sorry for you. How sad.
I think this is a bit dismissive towards people who create content because they enjoy doing it but also could not do it to this level without the revenue, like many indie Youtubers.
https://i.postimg.cc/br7F8NLd/chat-GPT.png
I wonder when webmasters will take theirs gloves off and just start feeding AI crawlers with porn and gore.
The complaint about the OpenAI browser seems to be it didn't show any links. I agree, that is a big problem. If you are just getting error prone AI output then it's pretty worthless.
> We left command-line interfaces behind 40 years ago for a reason
Man I still love command-line so much
> And it would go on like this for hours while you tried in vain to guess what the hell it wanted you to type, or you discovered the outdoors, whichever came first. [...] guess what secret spell they had to type into their computer to get actual work done
Well... docs and the "-h" do a pretty good job.
I think same here, while there are docs "please show me the correct way to do X," the surface area is so large the the analogy holds up still, in that you might as well just be guessing fo rhte right command.
There's 2 dimensions to it: determinism and discoverability.
In the Adventure example, the ux is fully deterministic but not discoverable. Unless you know what the correct incantation is, there is no inherent way to discover it besides trial and error. Most cli's are like that (and imho phones with 'gestures' are even worse). That does not make a cli inefficient, unproductive or bad. I use cli all the time as I'm sure Anhil does, it just makes them more difficult to approach for the novice.
But the second aspect of Atlas is its non determinism. There is no 'command' that predictivly always 'works'. You can engineer towards phrasings that are more often successfull, but you can't reach fidelity.
This leeway is not without merrit. In theory the system is thus free to 'improve' over time without the user needing to. That is something you might find desirable or not.
It could just as well degrade, improvement is not the only path.
- Atlas slurps the web to get more training data, bypassing Reddit blocks, Cloudflare blocks, paywalls, etc. It probably enriches the data with additional user signals that are useful.
- Atlas is an attempt to build a sticky product that users won't switch away from. An LLM or image model doesn't really have sticky attachment, but if it starts storing all of your history and data, the switching costs could become immense. (Assuming it actually provides value and isn't a gimmick.)
- Build pillars of an interconnected platform. Key "panes of glass" for digital lives, commerce, sales intent, etc. in the platformization strategy. The hardware play, the social network play -- OpenAI is trying to mint itself as a new "Mag 7", and Atlas could be a major piece in the puzzle.
- Eat into precious Google revenue. Every Atlas user is a decrease in Google search/ads revenue.
Response: Already achieved by OpenAI!
I guess Mag 7 is the new FAANG, not the mag-7 shotgun
