Stuff and Such

Seen on ycombinator news: "TLDR: All your data are belong to you.

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Chrome is introducing window.ai - which essentially will allow any website to run AI / LLM tasks on YOUR device, via your chrome browser. Basically chrome will add the "Gemini Nano" language model to your browser locally.

Like advertising, I never asked for this, and I don't want this, and I don't want websites to be able to do this.

I make loads of browser extensions (for fun and profit).

So I thought, "why don't I just make an ad-blocker equivalent, an 'AI-block-er'?"

And thus AI Block was born.

You install the extension, it runs automatically whenever a site loads, and programmatically blocks access to the window.ai API by overriding it.

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But also, I don't trust, that this window.ai API will be particularly secure or used in an honest-manner.

I worry it may leak sensitive on-device data to websites, or be used to "call-home" to Google and send juicy advertising data back to Google about me, this time the data will be LLM-verified.

Just note that the install will say

"Can read and change your data on all websites" - this is simply because its a content script with the host_permission "<all_urls>" so it works on all sites (thats a broad permission so it triggers the warning).

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Happy webbing folks.

Papillon"

"Dollar hegemony means selective austerity at home too. Extravagance is only admissible when it comes to certain kinds of spending. It’s spending that will not promote wage inflation or empower labor or the poor. Why? Because as soon as there’s any threat of wage-price inflation, you will have a flight from the dollar by financial asset holders around the world, as you saw in 1978. The United States can be extravagant with military spending or tax expenditures, but not with redistributive social spending. The supply-side economist Paul Craig Roberts put it succinctly when he said that there are basically two kinds of deficits—Keynesian and non-Keynesian, inflationary and non-inflationary. Obviously, they preferred the latter."

"Life at home with small children requires self-governance. One must be free of slavery to lower passions, lower pursuits, character weakness, and laziness in order to do it really well. And almost no one notices when you do it poorly, particularly in the early years. You could slip into depression and watch soap operas all day while your kid languishes in his crib, and no one would know. You could fail to interact with your child at all—only accomplishing the bare minimum washing and feeding—and most people would shrug and say well, you’re doing your best."

"Assisted dying is the quintessential policy of our times. It is a policy that reflects the fatalistic mindset of those who rule over us, leaders who can no longer promise a good life so instead offer a “good death.” Opponents of assisted dying in Canada and elsewhere have asked how a society can maintain a commitment to preventing suicide with one hand while enabling it with the other. The answer is that our society doesn’t actually value human life and so doesn’t oppose suicide. What it opposes is the lack of a bureaucratic process that oversees, controls, and administers suicide."