Is one of those agents going to jerk off for you too? Who the fuck needs an agent to browse the web for them?
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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I see someone didn't use Ask Jeeves back then /s
It didn’t make sense then, and it doesn’t make sense now. Keyword searches with an understanding of search syntax was always king.
Keyword searches with an understanding of search syntax was always king.
Isn't that only because of the limitations of the available technology only being able to handle simple strings, though? Conversational computing has been a pipe dream since early sci-fi, where characters would talk to their computers as if they were human; George Jetson never spoke to Rosie in keyword queries.
I feel like keyword search syntax being "king" is more of a symptom, than an intentional choice.
You realise that the reason conversational computing is so popular in science fiction, is because it looks better on camera, right.
This is a very good point - in books/dramas it helps the exposition to have a character you can relay half the plot details to. Similarly in radio dramas, every conversation between characters starts with saying each others names and a full recap of whatever the subject is... But nobody in the real world does or wants to talk like that.
Real people just say "hey, is that thing fixed yet?", not "hello Chris, you remember yesterday we were discussing the il problem with the Thing, and you proposed Cornfootling it; what happened?"
When I want Alexa to turn on the lights, I want to just say "Alexa, turn on the lights", not have a goddamned debate. And when I want to search for whatever the hell Cornfootling is, I just want to type "Cornfootling" and hit search.
It's trying to solve a problem created by SEO slop. "Find me the cheapest car rental".... That's actually hard to do now bc SEO grift. Rather than building a more honest system, you get "agents" to do the searching for you
I loathe (couldn’t figure out a synonym more than that) the word agentic. It sums up everything bad and wrong about AI.
They want to push all this shit in browsers so that they can start automatically buying shit once they're selling ads
God, I hadn't thought of that. It's going to be like cancelling a cable subscription but worse.
This actually sounds interesting.
"Find all comments on lemmy that are wrong. Respond explaining how they are wrong."
That would save me a lot of work.
Brilliant! You'll save us all a lot of work. Plus we will finally figure out which version of Linux is the correct one.
"Let's give everyone an army of spambots! What could go wrong?"
I'm gonna start reading books again.
I don't know if he joking or not but seriously I started reading again regularly like a year ish ago and I think my attention span getting better. Just not spending as much time scrolling bullshit is a big W along with practicing a longer attention span weather it's reading or something else. Go get a terry pratchet book !
Chrome has added Auto Browse
sit down, lean back, and watch the internet scroll by /s
I love software that acts without my consent or knowledge while atrophying my brain and wasting tremendous amounts of resources
You know what this is launching just in time for?
Tax season.
Cue* 10 million people getting audited because they let their browser file their taxes for them.
Cue.
If they're auditing that many of them, there will be a queue, too.
Yeah, I realized that as soon as I posted it.
lol as if the IRS is going to audit anyone now.
They will if you're not a rich fascist.
they just don't have enough people. maybe they would target rich democrats, but in general audits are going to go way down out of necessity.
They don't need people. They have agentic browsers. Lolol
Although one day even the fascists will realize there has to be income, no one's been collecting from the plebs, so they'll go back through... getting audited for multiple past years at once isn't fun, trust and believe. So be as honest as your AI will make you.
Here's hoping they'll use the same model as their clients..
These companies are all tone deaf
Its more than tone. They are just deaf dumb and stupid when it comes to what their users are saying.
save us vivaldi you're our only hope
Vivaldi is in big part closed source, so we literally don't know what it does behind the scenes
closed source due to the small team but they're also incredibly open about both the company the advocacy for the internet
closed source due to the small team
There are open source projects created and managed by a single developer. A "small team" is not a reason to be closed source.
Nah, Firefox. Anything based on the blink engine is vulnerable to upstream fuckiness.
Ladybird is also getting there.
Nah, Firefox. Anything based on the blink engine is vulnerable to upstream fuckiness.
so aren't firefox forks
and ladybird might be nice but the dev outed himself as a right wing bigot
Servo browser is the other big from the ground browser project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_%28software%29
Firefox forks are less vulnerable purely due to the fact that the main browser engine isnt being developed by a self interested advertising company. (See the recent manifest V3 and discontinuation of V2 shitshow for a example of googles stranglehold causing problems)
& when it comes to browser engines I'll set politics aside even if someone has views in very poor taste. The project overall is FOSS and thusly is being developed by hundreds of contributors, I've contributed a few bits and pieces for it even.
Having an additional standalone browser engine serves as insurance against Mozilla doing a stupid and a bulwark against Google dominance.
In practice that looks like this: https://youtube.com/shorts/pjT0ubmENWk
It sure looks creepy when your browser suddenly starts doing all kinds of stuff.
No percent truth was in that video
He did say it makes screenshots of everything and sends it to a cloud AI for processing. I believe that. It's also a good reason for not wanting it.
But nobody that has a functioning product has to fake their demo. This is extremely disturbing behavior when it comes to AI hype influencers
In reality, it's going to screw so much stuff up and do so many things you don't want it to do, that you're going end up spending a lot of time just correcting all the mistakes it makes.
And when you're not fighting to stop it from doing more things you don't want it to do, you're going spend your time worrying about what it will do next that you're going have to fix.
And unless you pay for the most expensive phone and the most expensive tier of service, they'll probably dumb it down on purpose and your life is going be hard.
Mistake prevention is far better than mistake correction.
I'll be disabling that shit as soon as I install.