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422 points simedw | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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qsort ◴[] No.44433579[source]
This is actually very cool. Not really replacing a browser, but it could enable an alternative way of browsing the web with a combination of deterministic search and prompts. It would probably work even better as a command line tool.

A natural next step could be doing things with multiple "tabs" at once, e.g: tab 1 contains news outlet A's coverage of a story, tab 2 has outlet B's coverage, tab 3 has Wikipedia; summarize and provide references. I guess the problem at that point is whether the underlying model can support this type of workflow, which doesn't really seem to be the case even with SOTA models.

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simedw ◴[] No.44433628[source]
Thank you.

I was thinking of showing multiple tabs/views at the same time, but only from the same source.

Maybe we could have one tab with the original content optimised for cli viewing, and another tab just doing fact checking (can ground it with google search or brave). Would be a fun experiment.

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myfonj ◴[] No.44434460[source]
Interestingly, the original idea of what we call a "browser" nowadays – the "user agent" – was built on the premise that each user has specific needs and preferences. The user agent was designed to act on their behalf, negotiating data transfers and resolving conflicts between content author and user (content consumer) preferences according to "strengths" and various reconciliation mechanisms.

(The fact that browsers nowadays are usually expected to represent something "pixel-perfect" to everyone with similar devices is utterly against the original intention.)

Yet the original idea was (due to the state of technical possibilities) primarily about design and interactivity. The fact that we now have tools to extend this concept to core language and content processing is… huge.

It seems we're approaching the moment when our individual personal agent, when asked about a new page, will tell us:

    Well, there's nothing new of interest for you, frankly:
    All information presented there was present on pages visited recently.
    -- or --
    You've already learned everything mentioned there. (*)
    Here's a brief summary: …
    (Do you want to dig deeper, see the content verbatim, or anything else?)
Because its "browsing history" will also contain a notion of what we "know" from chats or what we had previously marked as "known".
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1. ffsm8 ◴[] No.44435060{3}[source]
> Well, there's nothing new of interest for you, frankly

For this to work like a user would want, the model would have to be sentient.

But you could try to get there with current models, it'd just be very untrustworthy to the point of being pointless beyond a novelty

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2. myfonj ◴[] No.44435219[source]
Not any more "sentient" than existing LLMs even in the limited chat context span are already.

Naturally, »nothing new of interest for you« here is indeed just a proxy for »does not involve any significant concept that you haven't previously expressed knowledge about« (or how to put it), what seems pretty doable, provided that contract of "expressing knowledge about something" had been made beforehand.

Let's say that all pages you have ever bookmarked you have really grokked (yes, a stretch, no "read it later" here) - then your personal model would be able to (again, figuratively) "make qualified guess" about your knowledge. Or some kind of tag that you could add to any browsing history entry, or fragment, indicating "I understand this". Or set the agent up to quiz you when leaving a page (that would be brutal). Or … I think you got the gist now.