Technology

Interesting read, thanks.

You don't have to read the release notes. It literally puts it front and center in your face the first time you launch it after this update is applied.

Because the people who turn off the AI are the same people who turn off telemetry

Left translate on. Everything else off. That’s one of my main use cases for AI. As long as it gets me close, whatever.

I strongly believe that the EU should fund Mozilla, or a fork of Firefox.

Gecko is the only viable competitor to Blink/WebKit, and it is needed

I remember using Google translate that was doing that live on the phone camera and translating the text at the same time 15 years ago.

Random aside to rant about consumer OCR.

Recently for my work I had to do some OCR stuff to get some numbers out of a document that the vendor in their infinite wisdom refused to provide in an editable/selectable form. I.e. they just slapped a .jpeg onto a page and saved it as a .pdf. (This is a separate thing that infuriates me.)

Anyway, what I'm actually here to complain about is the baffling phenomenon that every single piece of OCR software I tried ranging from open source to trials of commercial programs, to the thingy that came with one of our all-in-one printer/scanners, and everything in between is that it's somehow still exactly as crap as the lousy OCR programs we were all struggling with in the late '90s.

I have absolutely no idea how this facet of technology in particular has utterly and categorically failed to make any forward progress whatsoever in literal decades. I've personally worked on machine vision driven pick-and-place machines capable of accurately determining the orientation of densely printed cosmetics tubes, among other items, and placing them all face up in a box several times per second. Yet somehow the latest and greatest OCR transcription algorithms still can't tell a 5 from a 6 or ye gods forbid an S, or an L from a J, or an M from a collection of back and forward slashes, all despite being handed crisp high contrast seriffed text that's at least 60 pixels high.

Given the incredibly low bar for performance here given that apparently every single programmer involved just walked away circa about 2001, I can't imagine that the current slop generation machines fare any better...

Yeah, ocr is a type of AI. The big advantage of modern techniques is that it can factor in context a bit better. It's the same principle but a different mechanism for how you know a red hexagon with S__P on it says stop, even if the sign is dented, a letter fully fell off, it's raining and dark.

It also means it's sometimes wildly inaccurate, like in cases where it's just so much more likely that it said something else. Like how on a bright sunny day, with perfect clarity, and a crisp new sign with extra good visuals, you'll hit the breaks for a sign that's a red hexagon that says §¥¢¶. It's just very unlikely that that would coincidentally be on a red hexagon near the road, so it's more likely you saw wrong and it was actually the normal thing.