fiat_lux

In this case because it's ironically counterproductive. If it weren't for the environmental impact, it might be amusing to watch him keep hitting himself.

I tried this type of prompt a long while ago to see what the "thinking" output would reveal. What happened was the agent went and "verified" it's weightings were accurate - but having no point of comparison it obviously concluded it was correct.

However, doing that consumes a significant quantity of tokens and contributes to filling up the context window. There are two likely results to evaluating this ultimately unactionable request.

1. It will push this instruction (and the rest of the wishful thinking) off the stack more quickly - making the prompt even more futile than it already is.
2. Given some agents re-inject a summary of the original prompt periodically to prevent the stack problem, it will keep narrowing the context window - which contributes to increasing the rate of hallucination for the actually actionable instructions.

I certainly got that impression, and I confess to mostly skimming the parts beyond the technical breakdown for that reason. The conclusions he draws are arguably a bit spurious, but the persistent download and opaque opt-out are interesting facets.

Given the controversial nature of AI and the EU's recent antitrust fines of Google, I can see this getting some legal scrutiny - just not under the legislation he cited. I'd be interested to see how next year's Google's DMA compliance report frames it, assuming it's not lumped into a "confidential" redaction (which shouldn't even be allowed in a transparency report...).

I'd say the numbers are more a bonus.

I assume they're putting it in under the guise of various browser "features" like automatic tab grouping or something, but also using it for Google products like Drive / Docs / Sheets to have offline agentic crap in there that would be more efficiently done without LLMs. I suspect this is as far up as they can hoist it because any further would be outside the bounds of the browser sandbox, which would prevent those products from easily calling it.

But the features themselves are probably not the end goal either. The more tempting motivation is that it allows for circumventing the data center problem by offloading the compute to the client. A couple of quick updates to the ToS and I can see it being used as a mesh llm network, sort of like the "find my device" network they rolled out last year.

The article mentions eprivacy and gdpr, but I don't think those are the most problematic here, assuming Google maintains mostly local-only compute. What I'd be interested to know is how this plays with DSA and DMA, which have more explicit requirements and more teeth.

Never hallucinate or make anything up.

I know you already mentioned this part in your post, but I'm still completely taken aback that it's just in there like this - as though it wouldn't be in the system prompt if it stood a chance of working.

If I were the kind of person to be shilling LLMs and posting prompts, I would still be ashamed to share this one. It's a tacit condemnation of both the tool itself and the tool posting it.

Yeah, even there. A page loading is one thing, but browser features are somewhat independent of the content. There's also a good chance this is being used as a hook for other Google products like Drive or Docs (which are basically websites under the hood) to allow offline file management, creation, etc.

It's a bad choice, but it wouldn't be the first bad choice Google has made.

Trauma responses are hard. I think it's great you're actively working on it and are conscious of your own biases, that's huge. Good luck!

They need their features to work offline too probably.

This picture is crisp. I have no idea how you did that with an otter - I struggle enough with slow moving birds.

What a cute little buddy, even if pissed.

I'm going to assume you're in the US for this.

Things you can check for general info:

• Local traditional media mentions to see if they do charity, or quotes about any topic
• https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup for political donations
• Industry-specific news sites for any media releases or interviews
• LinkedIn or one of the scrapers like RocketReach's public listings to see what their key people's backgrounds are
• SEC EDGAR database (if they're a business which has to file reports) to see if their money is going to interesting places
• State gov site (if they have online public records) of business registration info. Look at what other businesses share the same address, or key people, or family shell companies
• Online court records
• local churches / halls / "pro life" or whatever activist groups social media posts for mentions of the business and key people

Things you can check for the far-right:

• The business listings for social media site but I don't want to boost their SEO. Use the URL bag.com/businesses to access the list and bypass the sign up wall, but the domain name is backwards.
• Conservative business or job board lists. Same SEO issue here. One is this:🎈(the color and object). The other has a 6 letter word commonly seen on UI buttons which doubles as the type of "culture" conservatives blame for all the world's problems, followed by the layer 3 in the OSI model.

And don't stop sending out CVs and interviewing. If they are awful, just keep taking their money until you've got enough runway or an offer you can be more confident about. Make sure you don't mention the words related to disability or health conditions in the CVs to prevent AI rejecting them.

Good luck.

Is it possible that your security is unsustainably expensive and comes from the exploitation of human rights in other places? Why was it necessary for the people of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Libya, and others, to pay for your perceived security?

I also find it hard to believe that China has had little military engagement for the last 25 years because it's worried about the US. Up until 5 years ago it was the US's top foreign Treasury security owner.

Melted like butter on piping hot toast.

This list is weird, aside from the length. They must be using a very greedy regexp for this many instances to have their names partially censored.

The text "buds" has been censored, all the instances using the TLD "university" have had "univer" removed, and the word "hangout" is also gone. "Shitpisscum" made it through, so it can't just be about slightly naughty words. Also annihilation.social is listed 3 times for some reason.

Are these slurs in a culture I'm not familiar with? Does piefed do this everywhere?