And even if there aren't that many bad AI features now, they've signalled their intent for Firefox to become an "AI browser". I don't know what they mean by that, but I know I don't want it. The chat bot sidebar is surely just the beginning.
It's primarily in response to the backlash from people who don't want an "AI browser" that they're promising a kill switch. But I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", I just wanna use a regular web browser...
My code editor has a built-in chat bot sidebar that I use every day. It's not a huge stretch that people who use chatbot sidebars in other applications would also want one in their browser.
ChatGPT is the #6 most popular website in the world, why wouldn't a browser want tighter integration with such a popular kind of service?
The way users use Facebook and LLMs are so massively different, it almost seems like a bad faith argument to equate them.
Facebook is mostly scrolling the timeline and passive consumption. It doesn't benefit from being on the side because the content you interact with on Facebook is completely separate from the content on your other tabs.
In contrast, LLMs have ongoing conversations that the user can come back to, and each conversation might relate to multiple tabs that the user is working on. On top of that, it's a very common occurrence that the user has questions about, or a task to be done using the content of the current page. This makes LLM and chatbot integration much more useful than a Facebook integration.
Also if you have the Facebook Messenger installed, Firefox already gives you an integration to share things with your Facebook contacts.
They kinda already do. Google is built in, just search right in there url bar. You also got DDG, Bing, Wikipedia, Amazon, EBay? They make it easy to add YouTube, I wouldn't be surprised if you could add Facebook.
And like every browser does that. It's been that way for like over a decade...
Okay, and? Is anyone complaining about being able to search your favorite search engine from within Firefox?
Do you genuinely think this is comparable to Facebook integration? Do you believe that it Mozilla announced Facebook account integration and a Facebook side bar tomorrow, people's reaction to that would be, "oh this is just like what they did with search, this is fine"?
If not, isn't your comment a tiny bit disingenuous?
> My code editor has a built-in chat bot sidebar that I use every day.
Even as a vim user I don't get why an AI chat bot shoved into an IDE is endlessly praised while an optional hidden chatbot in a browser is treated like some grave insult. Last I checked, OpenAI was the 5th most visited website. No one complained that browsers made it easier to interface with the most popular website (Google) by directly typing into the url bar. FFS you can also do that with the 8th most popular website, Wikipedia.
I seriously don't understand why everyone is upset about that. Do what I do and just don't open it or interact with it. No one is making you use it. It's trivial about if bytes because it's literally just a wrapper. So it doesn't affect you, why let it live rent free in your head and make you angry? Just sounds like you're looking for things to complain.
I ... am not convinced that the people who praise Microsoft for shoving Copilot into VS Code are the same people who criticize Mozilla for shoving ChatGPT into Firefox
Personally I dislike both, and VS Code marketing itself as an "AI code editor" is one of many reasons why I would never consider using VS Code.
Why is there a search bar? A browser is more than a URL bar and a rendering engine.
Search is a common operation for many people and having a unified entrypoint for different search providers in the browser makes sense.
Chatbots are also quite common now and having a single chat box that users can use with any chatbot provider (even local ones!) is a good feature. If anything it helps break the big players' chances at a monopoly, since it makes switching between providers easier.
Why is it so hard for people to just...not use a feature they don't like. Sure, the popup was annoying, but I still like that it let me know this feature exists. I don't use it now, but it might be useful to me in the future or so I can recommend it to someone who needs something like that.
To save users from copy-pasting to a separate chatbot instance, or installing sketchy extensions? It's clunky, but it's helpful and exposes users to more alternatives. AFAIK it can be made to connect to local models now, too.
LLM side tab is a powerful mode of AI use that most people haven't experienced yet; for some reason this space seems underdeveloped publicly relative to some proprietary/internal solutions at some companies that I have knowledge of.
> I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", I just wanna use a regular web browser...
Is there a difference beyond branding? FWIW, branding does matter and I hope Firefox remains a "browser with (optional) AI" and not "AI browser".
I don't know what Mozilla means by "AI browser", but one would assume it means more than "regular browser with an optional chat bot sidebar". I don't wanna figure out what it means, I don't wanna use anything that could fairly be described as an "AI browser".
> I don't know what Mozilla means by "AI browser",
Well it's not like they're being quiet about it. They've openly discussed what features they're working on and planning. So maybe start there.
> "regular browser with an optional chat bot sidebar". I don't wanna figure out what it means
It's not a hard thing you figure out. Optional means you don't have to use it. In fact, if you never open it you'll never know it exists and you'll never have to interact with it. It is an opt in system. No one is making you do anything so stop acting like it.
Fwiw, I don't use the AI sidebar. I'd have forgotten it existed if HN didn't bring it up as if it's shoved in your face like some chatbot in an IDE. But I guess if it was the latter people wouldn't be angry
Your quote doesn't make sense, you can't just rip a sentence fragment out of its context and criticize it. The thing I don't wanna figure out what means is the term "AI browser". I know what a chat bot sidebar is.
> A quick Google suggests that a regular 120v US outlet might charge EVs at a rate somewhere in the range of 3 to 5 miles per hour. So a dozen or so hours sitting, plugged in at home every day, is enough to cover most folks' every-day driving.
And this gets significantly better once you start using 240v sockets - like the US is already using for dryers. Got a dryer in your garage? Guess what, you are only a weekend project away from having an overnight EV charger in your garage!
Right. There's faster ways and the specifics vary, but I think people are broadly aware of this: When EVs come up in my conversations, I often hear ruminations about needing a special outlet or charger-box or some kind of infrastructure that needs (must be) installed or upgraded. They seem to know very well; it is, in fact, something that turns them off of EVs.
My main point is that many of us have a perfectly-usable method within reach that provides enough juice to keep the car going day after day for the driving we normally do, which can be used right now without knowing what a screwdriver even looks like.
Just buy the car and drive it to work tomorrow (and the next day, and the day after that), and leave it plugged in while it sits there at home. This is exactly what the folks I know who drive EVs and who do fast chargers already do; it's a habit for them. They get home, and if they don't plan on leaving again soon then they plug their car in.
Except: There's not even necessarily any weekend project required -- for most drivers, faster charging at home is completely optional. Needs vary, but for most people it maths out fine to just use the regular ass-plug[1] that's already right there on the wall.
Even for longer trips: Visiting family, out of town, overnight? No problem. Plug your car in after you get settled in. No big deal. It doesn't matter if they're an EV family or not; while the car is just sitting there, it may as well also be taking a charge. (As to the cost: Buy them a beer or something and fuhgettaboutit.)
Correct, but burying trees today isn't going to turn them into coal.
The big difference is that when the current coal layers were formed, bacteria to decompose trees hadn't evolved yet. There was a huge gap between trees forming and the ecosystem to break down trees forming, which led to a lot of trees dying and nothing being able to clean it up, which meant it was just left lying there until it was buried by soil and eventually turned into coal.
Try to bury a tree today, and nature will rapidly break it down. It won't form coal because there's nothing left to form coal.
If we do simple extrapolation, a cellphone-sized battery will reach the 80kWh needed to power a car in as little as 180 years.
Expecting a 5% / year growth rate sustained for 30 years is very optimistic. It is far more likely that we'll hit some kind of diminishing return well before that.
The entire point of the European Union is to eliminate all of that friction. Most of the rules and regulations have been pushed to the EU level, just like the USA pushed most of its rules and regulations to the federal level. A car only needs a single type approval granted by a single member state, and it can be sold across the entire EU.
There are of course still some tax differences and importing from another member state might be slightly trickier for a consumer than buying it from a dealership in their own country, but I don't see how that is any different from dealing with different kinds of sales tax in the various US states, or having to transfer your car title to another state.
The European single market operates as, well, a single market.
Reality already caught up with synthetic fuel for buses.
Shenzhen electrified its entire 16,000-vehicle bus fleet in 2017 - that's almost a decade ago. Since then virtually all of China has transitioned to electric, and other countries aren't far behind. Electric buses have completely taken over the market.
And it isn't just rich Western countries playing around either. We're seeing countries like Slovenia and Romania at >90% electric, and even countries like Ecuador and Colombia and targeting 100% electric in 2030 and 2035!
All the hard technical and financial problems have been solved. If your city isn't adopting electric buses yet, it will be solely due to political reasons.
Yes, this is literally bribing farmers (extremely cheaply) so that in the event of a prolonged crop failure they will have more arable land and equipment to cultivate it and compensate for the crop failure.
> it could be much more economical for very long duration storage than using batteries
Yes, but that's not the only option you have. With the absolutely awful efficiency of burning hydrogen you'd need to be building a massive amount of additional wind and solar - which in turn means you'll also have additional capacity available during cloudy wind-calm days, which means you'll need to burn substantially less hydrogen to generate power.
This leads to the irony that building the power-generation infrastructure for generating enough hydrogen means you won't even need to bother with the hydrogen part: you're basically just building enough solar that their overcast supply is enough to meet the average demand. As a bonus, you've now got a massive oversupply during sunny winter days and even more during summer days, so most of the year electricity will essentially be free.
Efficiency is not very important for very long duration storage. What's important is minimizing cost, which is dominated by capex, not by the cost of the energy used to charge the storage system. Paying more to charge it can make sense if that greatly reduces capex.
The faster fill-up time of hydrogen was mostly a lie. It could fuel a single vehicle at that speed, but then the filling station would need a significant time to build up enough pressure for the next one.
Turns out having to fill vehicles at 350 to 700 bar (5,000 to 10,000 psi) is a massive pain - especially when you can't keep it cryogenically cooled as a liquid in your storage tanks.
It was originally introduced to give countries with shorter people a chance to compete (as rowing depends a lot on height), but in practice it mainly resulted in promising candidates who didn't quite make the cut for heavyweight being forced into eating disorders.
Lightweight rowing has been cut from the olympics already, so to a lot of organisations it has lost its relevance. There are still world championships, but I bet it is only a matter of time before it'll disappear there as well.
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