I used Firefox when it first came out. Google and Mozzila got into a hot race to make the best browser and they both did well. Somehow I ended up using Chrome a lot more even though I thought that by the time the race ended they were pretty even. Both were very fast and had great plugin libraries. Chrome looked nicer out of the box, but Firefox is highly customizable. Since the end of that race, Chrome has gotten worse and Firefox is about the same. I’ve switched back fully to Firefox, and the only thing I miss is the “Piss off publisher frames” plugin, that I haven’t found a replacement for. It’s a nice browser.
I switched to chrome for several years. Back then I was using Gmail and google docs et cetera. I naively thought Google were the good guys.
At that time the chrome ui was better. As an example, Firefox still had a separate search bar and address bar, although you could search in the address bar if you wished.
More recently I think the “nice ui” thing has tipped back towards Firefox. Chrome seems to have evolved some extra buttons.
Yeah, it’s ironic that one of Google’s selling points was that Chrome didn’t have a lot of clutter. It’s even where the name comes from. Now it looks messy. It’s no Microsoft product yet, but it’s definitely one of the ways it used to be better.
As an example, Firefox still had a separate search bar and address bar, although you could search in the address bar if you wished.
The advantages of that was you could set the URL bar and search bar to different search engines. I would do a Google search with the URL bar while keeping the search bar set to Wikipedia. Eventually this feature was removed, and then the search bar itself (since there was no reason to search from the URL bar and a dedicated search bar.) It’s a feature I missed for a while, but I got over it.
I’m aware there are probably a hundred different ways to do what I want in Firefox, and that 99 of them are probably easier than the way I do them already. Now I just keep a Wiki tab open for when I want to search something.
I have never understood the desire to combine the search and the address fields. I occasional search a url when I forget the rules for what it thinks is keyword. It just seems like a scheme to collect more data by bouncing your intended site to google and increase your reliance on them rather than being a real UI feature.
I would be on Firefox myself except that I need Webassembly that functions at a decent speed and It's about 30-100 times slower on Firefox than it is on Chrome and hasn't changed in yeeeeears.
GPT is selectively useful. It’s also, as of the last few weeks dumb as a bag of bricks. Dumber than usual. 4 and 4o are messed up. 4 mini is an idiot. Not sure how they broke them, but it started roughly around the time of the assassination attempt. Not sure if it was a national security request or a mere coincidence, but just the same.
I’m even seeing 4o make comically dumb and stubborn programming mistakes lately, like:
GPT: “I totally escaped that character”
Me: “no, it’s the same as your previous response.”
GPT: “Oh, sorry, here is the corrected code.” replies with same code again.
And that’s exactly why I’ve already given up on AI before even really getting into it. The only things I use it for is when I want a basic skeleton for a simple script with the intention of turning it into a real script myself. It’s also pretty good at generating grep, sed and awk commands and oneliners (or at least it was when I last tried it), and sometimes, in spotting mistakes with them.
different guy here. It seemed to be fairly useful for software engineers to solve quick issues where the answer isn’t immediately obvious - but it’s terrible at most other jobs.
And part of why it’s bad is because you have to type into a text box what you want and read it back (unless you build you own custom API integration- which goes without saying is also a terrible way to access a product for 99% of people)
Another part of why it’s bad is because you’re sharing proprietary information with a stranger that is definitely cataloging and profiling it
Very few people interact with language in a way that is bidirectionally friendly with AI, and AI just isnt very good at writing. It’s very good at creating strings of words that make sense and fit a theme, but most of what makes “very good” writing isn’t just basic competency of the language.
Yep and if OpenAI goes under the whole market will likely crash, people will dump their GPUs they’ve been using to create models and then boom, you’ve got a bunch of GPUs available.
That would depend entirely on why OpenAI might go under. The linked article is very sparse on details, but it says:
These expenses alone stack miles ahead of its rivals' expenditure predictions for 2024.
Which suggests this is likely an OpenAI problem and not an AI in general problem. If OpenAI goes under the rest of the market may actually surge as they devour OpenAI's abandoned market share.
windowscentral.com
Active