Interesting to me is the tension between remarks along the lines that this post maybe made sense in 2023, but not today, or how LLMs clearly show intelligence by solving Navier-Stokes, et cetera; versus the comments I read here often as well: "it's just a tool".

I can't quite put my finger on it, but aren't these two statements add odds with each other? Intelligence is hard to define, consciousness even more so, but wouldn't "intelligence" imply some sort of agency? If not, I'd argue computers were intelligent long before the age of LLMs. And likewise, doesn't a tool imply the lack of intelligence and agency, even if the tool's function is very elaborate?

I got the impression that both these statements are made by the same people, or at least people with similar takes on AI. Is that wrong and there are "intelligence" and "tool" factions? Or do people disagree with my assumption and there's nothing wrong with the concept of "intelligent tools"?

Kinda refreshing this discussion, compared to the builder vs. tinkerer debates, imo.

I would think the intelligence aspect is a bit hard to define, but to my mind (having called LLMs tools before), the main utility of a tool is reliability.

Given a certain world state (including a tool's internal state), its effects back on the world state (as initiated by me) are at some leve of description understandable, expected and repeatable. Swing hammer, drive nail into wood. Make slicing motion with knife, cut meat. Type ' find /path/to/some/dir -name "keyword"', find files with keyword. Point harness at codebase with prompt 'fix bug X', actually fix bug X.

All these examples are at some level of description incredibly complex (think of all particles interacting at the (sub-)atomic level even when using a hammer to only drive a nail into some wood), and of course all the electrons flowing through the GPUs doing matrix multiplications in order to fix bug X, but at some level of description (the one I just used) they are also incredibly simple and understandable.

Intelligence is rather nebulous (and as used by OpenAI/Anthropic, quite threatening), but I don't think this definition of a tool precludes it to be "intelligent". They feel more orthogonal. The intelligence (or perhaps capability) feels like it is related to the size of the chunk of the world state that it can take into account and affect, while still resulting in understandable, expected and repeatable effects. LLMs, when properly harnessed, are pretty great at this currently and we are still discovering what they are consistently capable of.

Calling harnessed LLMs tools is perhaps also a more grounding frame specifically to counter-act the anthropomorphizing framing that OpenAI and Anthropic consistently go for in their game of AI-doom-chicken talk. The tool framing is in that sense maybe a (self-)jedi-mind-trick.

Doesn't help obviously if you already lost your phone, but I recommend anyone to use a third party authenticator app. Most services offer to scan a QR code to set up MFA, which can easily be backed up. Don't use Google/Microsoft authenticator apps directly. Personally I use Stratum, but any that allows export/import will do.

This. Authy and a throwaway phone added in that sits in a safe place.

I stopped using Authy when they were bought by Twilio and stopped supporting their desktop client (thus eliminating my alternate device backups).

I can highly recommend Ente Auth though.

It's shame that the AI arms race causes such collateral damage. Free resources were always exploited, but the stakes ($T) and capabilities around AI allow unprecedented abuse. I wish we could go back... :/

I really don't see any solution to this; the scrapers probably wouldn't even mind destroying sources like IA too much, which would leave them as the only "authorative" source of knowledge in the end. Best way is likely regulation incl. hefty (!) fines, but politics are too slow and too fragmented to be effective. So... Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess.

*In Chrome.

That file editor seems to work in Firefox. I just tested the save/open functionality.

It's not using the File System Access API, on Firefox it uses <input type="file"> for file-picking, and the save just downloads it. It's not synchronizing anything with your filesystem.

I see. Thanks for enlightening me.

Do you know the reason for that? The File System API does seem to be well supported on Firefox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...

Firefox unfortunately does not support the File System Access API. You can try by calling the most fundamental function, the one that asks the user to select a file:

    window.showOpenFilePicker()

What Firefox supports is a "File System API" which creates something similar to the other old ways of storing data in a browser, like cookies and indexeddb. You cannot use it to edit normal files on your disk.

This is my main gripe with Firefox. They force their users to either store everything in the cloud or go through the arcane "download" workflow where you have to manually save files.

> Firefox unfortunately does not support the File System Access API.

I would not call it unfortunate. Browsers should not have access to the file system, USB ports, etc. Perhaps in "PWA"s, if the user has a way of giving and withdrawing consent.

I would prefer that Browsers be given access via permissions - that way webapps will become more prevalent than appstore apps.

Why shouldn’t browsers have these capabilities..?

It's unsafe and allows for even more privacy invasion.

Why is that true? Some applications require file system access. People would grant the application the permission to access files like any other resource like camera, mic, location.

Because vulnerabilities, coarse access granularity and lazy or ill-informed users. E.g., you now grant cam access per domain. Changing functionality on that domain doesn't revoke permission, so a simple bait and switch is already possible. Now imagine granting access to your file system to some Microsoft domain and finding out that there was a change of heart and some new script has uploaded your files to OneDrive and deleted them from your disk.

Taking that logic of protecting users from themselves to the extreme, a website should not be able to display text either. Because it can use text to ask the user to open their explorer and delete the files manually.

I think the flow of Chrome where the user has to select a file from disk and then acknowledge a prompt that the site will have access to that file until they close the window is fine. But if Mozilla wanted to protect users from themselves even more, they could make it as strong as they like. For example, by requiring to turn the functionality on in about:config.

Not giving the user the choice at all, if they want a cloud only browser or a browser that lets them work with local files is the wrong way.

Iirc the File System Access API should always originate File objects from an input picker so that the user selects the file to be opened and not give more access to apps than users allows?

It just downloaded the file on my firefox.

*In browsers that have implemented it

I do agree it's kinda expensive. I'm lucky enough that my employer pays the $25 plan for met because it includes access to many LLMs.

I pay the $10 and use assistant multiple times a day and never needed the fatter models since for coding I have copilot and Gemini

True. I got this as my first LLM subscription (was a long time skeptic, less so now but still a bit), but now I have cursor too so maybe I can even downgrade. Thanks for the reminder. :)

> because it includes access to many LLMs.

That is interesting, which LLMs? Asking as someone paying monthly Claude subscription.

A lot of them. Claude is a choice. Here is the list : https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html

You can even choose a model for each turn.

The sensor of the Fairphone camera is good enough, the software processing is what's lacking. Imo, owner of an FP4.

Pixel cameras seem to do tremendous amounts of software-based post-processing but specifically in the official Google app. My partner has tested some camera apps and nothing comes close to Google’s. So I imagine that’s one of the reasons for the disparity.

Imo their language is not precise enough for their intelligence to be the reason when it's difficult to understand. Maybe I'm prompting wrong, but when I don't understand, it's almost always because they just mash together words from context that don't form sentences with a clear meaning.

Looks really cool. Saved for later because I'm on my phone right now. Ignored the warning and it was fine but the site refreshed sometimes which restarted the tutorial. The third time I gave up.

Are you talking about Hamas? Israel? I.C.E.? Climate activists? Really hard these days to guess what you're talking about, since anyone is easily accused of terrorism these days. Without context, this is a baseless comment without much value. I'm not even really ask you to clairfy your comment, but I'm asking you to think a bit harder next time and at the bare minimum show up with some concrete facts instead of baseless (political?) accusations.

I think it is because they are tied to Yandex (or used to be) which is Russian. I don't know how much it directly supports State funded terrorism but it is likely none.

You'd guess wrong, because modern Yandex is essentially Kremlin owned, so it is directly supporting it, not in a huge amount (on account of Kagi being relatively tiny company), but definitely not 'none'.

Also in the discussions about removal or at least asking to make it toggle-able, so users can make sure their requests and money are not forwarded to Russia have been shut off and ridiculed (including staff member saying "our views on the war differ" whatever that meant.

I pasted it into Kagi and the smart response just showed the clear text. Usually the smart responses are much more verbose.

Just read "a deepness in the sky" last month, surprised to see a reference here.