If you use Safari, the blockers from the App Store work fine (I use 1Blocker). If you use a third party browser, they don't get access to Safari's blockers (for no good reason, it's all WebKit after all) so you'll need to use a browser that provides its own blocking in some way.
On Android I use the insecure and questionable approach of Kiwi browser, which will run desktop chrome plugins including Ublock. Interested to hear if anyone has a better solution.
A lot of people left firefox on android, when they removed their prior version/codebase a few years back, and introduced an alpha quality product with no extensions, endless crashes, and bugs galore.
It took them a year or so to even add back in extension support. and so many things lacked for a long time.
I don't feel like using a product that is so horribly planned, amd executed. Sheer incompetence.
raises hand I'm in this group. I finally gave up on mobile Firefox a few years back despite being a user and advocate for many years prior to that. The leadership and product decisions at Mozilla are indescribably bad and have done a huge amount of damage to formerly great product. Desktop Firefox still works ok, although it also suffers from too many bad product decisions.
For mobile I use Vivaldi which is not bad. The adblocker isn't as good as uBlock Origin but is mostly good enough, and the builtin dark mode works really well.
1Blocker looks like the equivalent of unlock origin lite I use in Firefox except the darned thing is yet another subscription service.
I wish I could get u lock origin on iOS and just make a one time donation/payment to the developer.
There are many other blockers, including fully free ones. I pay the trivial cost for 1Blocker because I want to support regular updates of blocking rules, and because it has one of the most extensive initial sets. They were also among the first to adopt the dynamic blocking for things like YouTube ads when the capability was added to Safari blockers in 2022.
Sometimes I have to remember to disable the Private DNS to make some sites work. Some of them just don't work with nextDNS on. Other than that, NextDNS works great.
> How do you guys manage proper ad blocking on mobile?
On Android, I installed Firefox and uBlock Origin. It was pretty cool that the same thing I use on desktop Firefox (and other browsers) also works on mobile.
Except that it seems like Chrome on Android doesn't seem to support extensions, so I basically can't fix that browser, which mostly prevents me from using it for anything.
That said, I might soon get an iPhone (for developing/testing an app, which will probably also mean a MacBook, since they don't officially offer their software on other platforms), so I hope that things will work out there as well.
Phone runs a wireguard vpn client, uses pihole to perform dns lookups [1]. I haven't noticed anything being slower with the vpn on vs off and using whatever the mobile phone company provides for dns. Pihole deals with that page well.
I also use Wireguard (and also Tailscale), but the battery impact is significant such that I only use it when specifically need to. How do you find the impact?
settings->battery claims that it uses about 10% of my battery in 10 hours, or about as much as less than 20 minutes of firefox use.
I previously had an ulefone armor 9 which had vastly better battery life with a 3+ year old battery after switching off battery saver hacks and making no effort eg running wireguard 24/7, than the iphone 15 pro, which kinda sucks pretty hard. Struggles to get through a day. No idea how much of that is my fault. Settings claims basically none of it is, but can it be believed?
iPhone is super expensive for a device that does so many fundamental things so incredibly badly with fixes that must have been obvious for a decade. One example of many is the sheer idiocy of silent mode. My nokia 20 years(?) ago let you set it to silent for 2 hours so you weren't stuffed if you forgot to do it manually when the thing was over. Not iphone. iPhone pings when you go to bed and put it on charge when it claims to be in "sleep mode" which is just idiotic. Sucks if your partner was asleep and that's why you wanted it silent at that time. No way they haven't got feedback on that after what, 15 years of iphone? I took them a decade to replace the old silent mode switch that changes position to silent accidentally all the time for elderly relatives so I guess that's some kind of improvement but wow.
Oh before people take it personally, android sucks. And those are our only choices other than no longer participating in society.
AdAway can install itself as a VPN provider on your Android phone for the sole purpose of modifying traffic and blocking content. It is not actually a VPN. https://adaway.org/
Also Brave lets you disable JS globally and then enable it on a per-site basis.
The UX is nice; the switch to toggle JS for the current site is right under a drop-down menu in the URL bar, and it remembers your settings for each site independently.
The Orion browser might be an answer https://browser.kagi.com/ I haven't personally tried this browser as I'm on Android but heard of it as I'm a Kagi subscriber.
I finally broke down and pay the $5 a year for AdGuard on iOS. Even blocks YouTube ads and haven’t gotten the “three strikes and you’re out” notice on that yet so I’ll keep using it as long as it works. I basically never see ads.
Brave or Chrome browser with your own Nextdns.io DNS setting.
Brave specifically also offers to remove YT ads its mobile iOS browser. Worked for my wife, but she'll be switching to Android soon anyways.
I have been using purify, but it's like 5 years old and seems to be easily detectable by anti-adblockers.
I got several as they went on sale, and am trying AdBlock Pro right now, on the theory that newer and more up to date ones will more effectively anti-anti-adblock.
I found AdGuard Pro in my extensions. Must have been on sale, as it's the pricey "no subscription" version of the product. Will try if the above doesn't work out (I expect that it will)
No reason to, here is an AI generated Summary (thanks Kagi):
- OpenAI recently changed its core values from ones focused on thoughtfulness, impact, collaboration to ones focused on artificial general intelligence and scale.
- The new core values were changed without explanation and raise questions about how core they truly were.
- The top new core value is an "AGI focus" but OpenAI's definition of AGI has shifted from superhuman to average human-level intelligence.
- OpenAI was originally founded to build beneficial AI but has shifted to a for-profit model, which led to co-founder Elon Musk's departure.
- The company now describes itself as focused on building safe and beneficial AGI.
- OpenAI's goals and self-descriptions have changed over time along with its shifting business model and leadership changes.
- Questions remain around what exactly OpenAI means by AGI and its commitment to ensuring AI safety.
- The new core values list comes across as vague marketing language.
- OpenAI's focus now appears to be primarily on developing general artificial intelligence for commercial purposes.
- The article raises concerns about OpenAI's lack of transparency and consistency in its stated goals and values over time.
Companies' core value is "make money fast and repeatable".
Anything else is just window dressing to get employees to work for you and get customers to buy from you. And as companies hit the top of the sigmoid curve, they will crank every lever to extract smaller amounts of profit, while cannibalizing what made them special (hello enshittification).
You are assuming sama is not bullshitting you about the whole “own AGI” and “capture all the value in the lightcone” gobbledygook. It sounds like a high-stakes game? Of course it does! Sama isn’t some technical wizard, but an entrepreneur. He’s marketing his (completely ordinary) company.
There’s a world where ChatGPT and other GenAI tools are a multi-trillion dollar market, but where they also don’t get anywhere close to AGI, let alone some hyperintelligent machine god. Occam’s razor suggests that’s indeed the world we’re in.
Never said anything about timelines, just about convergence. Your claim - pardon the eraser lines - was simply "[t]here’s a world where [tool AIs] are [of economic importance], but where they also don’t [become agent AIs of economic importance]". Just seems incorrect to me.
I guess not really because this is more of a sci-fi possibility for now, but then, sci-fi writers explored this topic, so I’d recommend starting with Dune, Culture, dreams of electric sheep etc. ;)
If the intelligence is by definition artificial, why not the core values as well?
"Intense and scrappy," "Scale," "Make something people love," and "Team spirit," sound like values the San Francisco Giants are looking for in a new manager. I hope so, anyway.
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated.
A younger, more naive version of myself believed corporate slogans like, "Don't be evil"
Cynical takes like yours are accurate in the descriptive sense. They are useful for describing and predicting outcomes. Ideals are typically prescriptive. They call us to improve upon what is. The two concepts are not incompatible, but for many they are seemingly contradictory.
People care because they have ideals. Perhaps they confuse the two concepts. Perhaps their expectations are too idealistic.
I don't see that OPs take as cynical, just realistic. Time and time again, companies, especially major ones have shown that they will always prioritize making money over everything else. The sooner people accept this, the better.
People have ideals, companies do not. The people employed by those companies have ideals but its beyond foolish to think that those ideals would be prioritized over profit.
Businesses don't have a conscience, people do, but that doesn't mean that the business will do the right thing. Sure, the ideals of the person and the ones the company reports can match up, but it's only through luck and not out of a sense of the greater good.
agree with this. in their new values, they literally use the same words that were in the old ones ("unpretentious", "collaboration"). I also dont think this is a change "at the drop of a hat" as the article suggests - OpenAI's been through a major inflection point with GPT3.5/4, and the company's not the same one it was a few years ago. It makes sense to make updates to the company's core values
Also as the organization grows, some things have to explicitly spelled out.
If me and best friends start a company, we can get by "Let's do good" and we all know what that means. In an organization with 1000 spread across the globe, that doesn't cut it and good needs to be explicitly spelled out
Given that it's still Sam Altman, and his core value are "we market towards what will make us money", not all that different. The term "AI" has run its course, initially pulling in capital left and right, and that's drying up now that open source can do what the big boys came up with, too. So: rename the work to AGI, start a new hype train, and get the capital streams flowing anew.
I think the 'drying up' only applies to OpenAI, the capital is still there it is just being spread around to a larger number of players than a few months ago when the boom began.
Sounds like wishful thinking. I wish it was true too, but it isn’t. Or is there one reliable source which has valid benchmarks showing that they are similar? Most benchmarks I’ve seen appear cherry-picked (as is the case in ML for years already. Be skeptical of benchmarks).
If we look at crypto as the last VC/SoftBank/Saudi fund etc. trend we should get hundreds of billions invested in the next 10 years. Very much too early to call anything
Given OpenAI dropped the "open" from their principles we don't really know how "on par" anything, much less open source, is with OpenAI anymore. OpenAI is just another closed ML provider and could be just as much smoke and mirrors as any other proprietary provider. OpenAI got a lot of first mover love that buoys their brand name, and it is nothing but a brand name now, but they stopped showing their work to the public and we don't know how much "OpenAI is more competitive than open source equivalents" is just more grift.
But does anyone really, actually love enterprise accounting software? Or do they pay money for it because it’s a means towards something they actually love?
It would be a mistake to conflate being glad not to owe $250k in medical costs with loving the system that perpetuates bills of that nature in the first place.
lol the classic "AI is just a hype buzzword because some people use it as a hype buzzword" take. Your cynicism doesn't make you sound smart given it's clear how much you are viewing things just at surface level. Also FOSS competitiveness is only due to fine tuning models from big firms, without it FOSS has nothing.
Can you please not break HN's guidelines like this? They ask you not to fulminate, snark, or call names. We want curious conversation here, not denunciation.
Maybe you don't owe Sam Altman and what you imagine to be his core value better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
113 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadIt took them a year or so to even add back in extension support. and so many things lacked for a long time.
I don't feel like using a product that is so horribly planned, amd executed. Sheer incompetence.
For mobile I use Vivaldi which is not bad. The adblocker isn't as good as uBlock Origin but is mostly good enough, and the builtin dark mode works really well.
On Android, I installed Firefox and uBlock Origin. It was pretty cool that the same thing I use on desktop Firefox (and other browsers) also works on mobile.
Except that it seems like Chrome on Android doesn't seem to support extensions, so I basically can't fix that browser, which mostly prevents me from using it for anything.
That said, I might soon get an iPhone (for developing/testing an app, which will probably also mean a MacBook, since they don't officially offer their software on other platforms), so I hope that things will work out there as well.
Wireguard is pretty great.
[1] I configure pihole to use a local unbound installation on the same machine but you don't have to bother with that at all https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/
settings->battery claims that it uses about 10% of my battery in 10 hours, or about as much as less than 20 minutes of firefox use.
I previously had an ulefone armor 9 which had vastly better battery life with a 3+ year old battery after switching off battery saver hacks and making no effort eg running wireguard 24/7, than the iphone 15 pro, which kinda sucks pretty hard. Struggles to get through a day. No idea how much of that is my fault. Settings claims basically none of it is, but can it be believed?
iPhone is super expensive for a device that does so many fundamental things so incredibly badly with fixes that must have been obvious for a decade. One example of many is the sheer idiocy of silent mode. My nokia 20 years(?) ago let you set it to silent for 2 hours so you weren't stuffed if you forgot to do it manually when the thing was over. Not iphone. iPhone pings when you go to bed and put it on charge when it claims to be in "sleep mode" which is just idiotic. Sucks if your partner was asleep and that's why you wanted it silent at that time. No way they haven't got feedback on that after what, 15 years of iphone? I took them a decade to replace the old silent mode switch that changes position to silent accidentally all the time for elderly relatives so I guess that's some kind of improvement but wow.
Oh before people take it personally, android sucks. And those are our only choices other than no longer participating in society.
Haven't found anything more effective on iOS yet.
The UX is nice; the switch to toggle JS for the current site is right under a drop-down menu in the URL bar, and it remembers your settings for each site independently.
I got several as they went on sale, and am trying AdBlock Pro right now, on the theory that newer and more up to date ones will more effectively anti-anti-adblock.
I found AdGuard Pro in my extensions. Must have been on sale, as it's the pricey "no subscription" version of the product. Will try if the above doesn't work out (I expect that it will)
- OpenAI recently changed its core values from ones focused on thoughtfulness, impact, collaboration to ones focused on artificial general intelligence and scale.
- The new core values were changed without explanation and raise questions about how core they truly were.
- The top new core value is an "AGI focus" but OpenAI's definition of AGI has shifted from superhuman to average human-level intelligence.
- OpenAI was originally founded to build beneficial AI but has shifted to a for-profit model, which led to co-founder Elon Musk's departure.
- The company now describes itself as focused on building safe and beneficial AGI.
- OpenAI's goals and self-descriptions have changed over time along with its shifting business model and leadership changes.
- Questions remain around what exactly OpenAI means by AGI and its commitment to ensuring AI safety.
- The new core values list comes across as vague marketing language.
- OpenAI's focus now appears to be primarily on developing general artificial intelligence for commercial purposes.
- The article raises concerns about OpenAI's lack of transparency and consistency in its stated goals and values over time.
https://chat.openai.com/share/251675a4-7b46-470e-a14e-fe6cf3...
Ha! I like the subtle burn (and hint that OpenAI using AGI here is not carrying a whole lot of meaning other than hype)
Companies' core value is "make money fast and repeatable".
Anything else is just window dressing to get employees to work for you and get customers to buy from you. And as companies hit the top of the sigmoid curve, they will crank every lever to extract smaller amounts of profit, while cannibalizing what made them special (hello enshittification).
This one's is literally "own means of production" uh sorry "own AGI". This is potentially a post-money objective.
You can say a lot of things about sama but he does play high stakes games.
There’s a world where ChatGPT and other GenAI tools are a multi-trillion dollar market, but where they also don’t get anywhere close to AGI, let alone some hyperintelligent machine god. Occam’s razor suggests that’s indeed the world we’re in.
https://gwern.net/tool-ai
Gwern, Bostrom, Yudkowski et. al. are terrific sci-fi writers, but I’d advise against taking them too seriously.
unfortunately for parent comment, categorizing something as sci-fi doesn't make it so
Can you elaborate?
"Intense and scrappy," "Scale," "Make something people love," and "Team spirit," sound like values the San Francisco Giants are looking for in a new manager. I hope so, anyway.
OpenAI, LinkedIn, Activision Blizzard King, GitHub... many worlds have fallen to the borg.
Parsing them for meaning is nearly as useful as parsing your morning bowel movement to predict your day.
Cynical takes like yours are accurate in the descriptive sense. They are useful for describing and predicting outcomes. Ideals are typically prescriptive. They call us to improve upon what is. The two concepts are not incompatible, but for many they are seemingly contradictory.
People care because they have ideals. Perhaps they confuse the two concepts. Perhaps their expectations are too idealistic.
People have ideals, companies do not. The people employed by those companies have ideals but its beyond foolish to think that those ideals would be prioritized over profit.
Businesses don't have a conscience, people do, but that doesn't mean that the business will do the right thing. Sure, the ideals of the person and the ones the company reports can match up, but it's only through luck and not out of a sense of the greater good.
This article is clickbait at best
If me and best friends start a company, we can get by "Let's do good" and we all know what that means. In an organization with 1000 spread across the globe, that doesn't cut it and good needs to be explicitly spelled out
they couldn't chew through 10B from MSFT that fast?..
- AI investment is drying up
- FOSS AI is competitive with proprietary providers
From what I understand, AI grifting and investing has only just begun, and open source AI tools aren't on par with what Open AI is offering.
That's exactly what "make something people love" means. To love a product means to pay money for it.
If the system had given me a personal chef, I don't need to go to fancy restaurants
"I relish paying my health insurance bill" is a bit different.
It is the benefits that they receive after getting the said product / service.
And some relish is just absence of pain
We need a word for these kind of randian sociopathies.
Maybe you don't owe Sam Altman and what you imagine to be his core value better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
But what if they are right on AGI - it's here, soon.
If there is going to be a winner in the 'AI race', doesn't society want the company that 'wins' to have values similar to OpenAI's stated values?
OpenAI's competitors (Google, Anthropic, etc) are for-profit organizations, their values are shareholder profits.
Now I'm not arguing OpenAI will perfectly implement their stated goals. I'm sure it'll get messy.
But all things being equal, we know the for-profit guys will accrue profits at the expense of society, and OpenAI has stated the opposite.
Is there anyone else more credible offering better ideas?