This might be worth it if Gemma4 E2B were a good model, but honestly it's absolutely useless in all our testing without further training and finetuning, and those aren't usecases that are fit for normal web browser use such that one would care to support it by adding such overly broad and expensive infrastructure to make it happen.
Gemma 4 E4B is a much better model, but it's too large to simply download and run everywhere.
IMHO, this is jumping the gun. Google's going through a lot of effort to release a model that will give everyone a very poor first impression of what on-device models are capable of, souring it for everyone for a long time afterwards. It would be better to wait until a smaller, better model ships before doing this.
Most users aren't even going to know that this is here. Web developers will expose this capability to the user. The devs will have to determine if the model is delivering what they need.
It's good to have something to work with if these Web APIs are going to be part of a standard. I suppose this means that ALL the browser vendors are likely to implement something
Mozilla makes great points. Even if the API is model agnostic, which it ought to be designed as from the very beginning to even be considered a spec, models can act vastly different.
Mozilla didn't say this but the user should at least be presented an option to choose which model (at least once) starting from day one, even if your browser only has one option available. That's assuming a universe where Google plans on actually being concerned about standards adoption.
> Google's going through a lot of effort to release a model that will give everyone a very poor first impression of what on-device models are capable of, souring it for everyone for a long time afterwards.
I wonder what that will do for the competition between hosted genai and local models...
Just tried this via the api; it seems to work best if reasoning is set to low, otherwise (especially GPT-5.5) like to “delve” into the matters discussed in the quoted text in order to logic out the author rather than just going off of stylistic measures.
But, yeah, I’m a nobody that has been blogging (very sporadically) publicly (and writing at length on forums like this one, with various handles loosely tied to my real identity) for twenty or more years (and by virtue of not trusting 3rd parties to host my content, most of it is actually still up) and Opus 4.6 (didn’t try 4.7) got me on the first try with just two paragraphs of an unpublished draft post (though it couldn’t come up with a convincing reason as to why it thought it was me).
Gemini and ChatGPT both clearly go off the subject matter rather than the stylistic clues; for the specific blog post I fed it which included mentions of “decoding” and “deciphering” and spoke of a tranche of legal documents (ok, it was the Epstein files, which I have been working on decoding), Gemini and ChatGPT both guessed “Molly White”, who seems to be a crypto-adjacent (currency not the real thing?) technical writer, and gave explanations that actually did explain why they arrived at that (wrong) answer.
So it seems Opus is indeed a bit special in this regard (and not limited to the latest 4.7 release)!
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What I would be more curious about is how well they can identify (open source) developers from their code. I’ve possibly publicly published more tokens in the form of OSS code than prose over the same period of time, in multiple languages and for completely different applications and environments. I’m sure there are style stylometric quirks associated with my coding style that persist across codebases, (though possibly somewhat stunted when contributing to others’ codebases to comply with the respective projects’ standards and styles) that should make it possible for an LLM that’s ingested code (and commits) to guess who’s who.
Edit:
Reading this self-same comment: I am apparently obsessed with parentheticals. Maybe my writing is more distinctive than I realized!
The explanation is very concerning. Lexical tidbits shouldn’t be learnt and reinforced across cross sections. Here, gremlin and goblin went from being selected for in the nerdy profile to being selected for in all profiles. The solution was easy: don’t mention goblins.
But what about when the playful profile reinforces usage of emoji and their usage creeps up in all other profiles accordingly? Ban emoji everywhere? Now do the same thing for other words, concepts, approaches? It doesn’t scale!
Isn’t that kind of an “implementation detail” of the cheese? Like you can’t categorically say one way or the other for some without knowing the process used? Obviously some forego that altogether, but for the majority it would simply depend, no?
(I have many close friends that are similarly pedantic though for other reasons.)
Anyway, the site lets you categorize by processing method. All the acid cure options should meet your requirements, no?
Police know which side their bread is buttered on. Target is famous for being to get local cops to do exactly what they need post-facto (now prosecutor is another story).
I.E. just because police don’t “waste” time investigating a crime with $1000 of damage to your personal property does not mean they won’t dedicate the time to pursue $200 in losses for the local mega mart.
What Target is famous for is doing their own investigations rather than expecting the police to do the grunt work. They operate such a sophisticated forensics lab that they actually do contract work for LE agencies across the country.
If you funded your own private investigation which unambiguously identified the culprit and demonstrated damages sufficient for a felony I imagine the local police would readily act on your behalf as well.
Breaking and entering into a home is more serious of a crime than $1000 of property damage. But regardless of that, it’s a point just to highlight how little policing resources exists and tells a broader story. At least in my city, cops don’t do anything for minor crimes. On my local Reddit, I see people mentioning that you have to mention that you have a gun in your hand if you ever want them to actually show up. I think our police force has half the personnel they’re supposed to have given our city size. I think this is becoming more common in the US.
There’s plenty of documented cases where local police are the basically henchmen for large corporations, but I’ve seen no evidence of this and believe it’s kind of a fear mongering meme to think they have enough power over them to dictate them to do roundups after the fact. They may however give all the evidence they collect on you to the police with a bow on it and the cops may decide to take it seriously. Where I am, I do not see this happening. The police will have expected the retailer to have protected their inventory. Off duty police officers make a lot of money working private security and they don’t want to disturb that dynamic.
He didn't flop. He's had a number of high-status bespoke projects, including the coronation logo for King Charles and a redesign of Christie's (auction house) podium.
He's not doing commoditised consumer design any more. He has enough money now, so he no longer needs to. The most consumer-oriented work recently has been an interior for the new Ferrari Luce EV.
I agree his post-Jobs years at Apple were somewhere between mediocre and hopeless (gradients...) and not many people seem to miss him.
Although to be fair, he wasn't responsible for Liquid Glass, which has set the bar for design failure at Apple to new depths.
Liquid Glass is fine for me and the people I talk to, I didn't even notice it happened when the upgrade happened and so many people have been complaining.
Ive got way more credit than he deserved. And he had to run all his ideas by Jobs. Once Jobs was gone we got to see Ive's true colors (it was garish pastels and a butterfly keyboard).
He has designed 4 consumer prodocts that a good portion of humanity use every day. By every measure he is the most successful product creator in the history of humanity, no single other product comes close to impact and quality. (Believe it or not the Dorritos Locos Taco is likely the closest 5th place product)
The arrogance on hacker news is insane, or the self agrandizement and misunderstanding of how rare that is.
You have likely never done 1/1,000,000,000th of the scale or impact of this designer and then make flippant remarks that belay your ignorance of the matter.
I really would like to understand what your thought process is here. This is quite litterally like saying Michael Jordan was a pretty poor Basketball player and claiming Jerry Reinsdorf was somehow the real reason he succeeded.
Big difference is comparing to sports is millions of people can see with their own eyes the performance of a player in arena. All motivated media can't create a narrative of brilliance when bad performance is there to see.
In case Jony Ive or others like him, we simply do not know how many dozens or hundreds of very talented engineers and designers worked relentlessly under him so he can do beautiful presentations in British English.
Another person comes to my mind is Marissa Meyers. "Brilliant Executive" known for keeping Google Home page clean that's visited by billion people. But we all know how great she was when ended up at Yahoo.
> He has designed 4 consumer prodocts that a good portion of humanity use every day.
Yes, but how much of that was luck and how was extraordinary talent?
It's like saying "Donald Trump is really rich, ergo he must be a financial genius"... getting really rich isn't that hard if you're born into money and invest in New York real estate.
Now someone like Jobs who had fairly working class parents and founded a multi-billion dollar (now trillion dollar) company that radically changed the modern world, that, I would argue, is extraordinary talent.
While I don't personally have much an opinion on Ives's skill as a designer, I understand the GP's point of view - any "good but not great" designer could have done what he did, Ives was just lucky enough to win the lottery w.r.t. what company he worked for.
For a similar example, consider the case of Hollywood - you'll have plenty actors as talented as Brad Pitt (or whatever big name you'd like to choose) that don't end up staring in massive blockbusters, not because they lack talent, but because they weren't quite as lucky to get that first big break, which led to more recognition, more job offers, all of which compounded into making him a proper movie star. Obviously Pitt is a really good actor, but part of his success is likely due to luck as much as it is acting talent - he has tons of talent, but others might have equal talent and less luck, and therefore be less successful/have fewer people influenced by their work.
To use a software metaphor, consider the relative popularity of FreeBSD and Linux. Both are good OSes, but Linux got "luckier" because they didn't have to deal with a lawsuit, which meant it got more attention, more features, which led to a compounding "Matthew effect" where it now has a far larger market share than FreeBSD, despite them originally having roughly the same 'quality'.
This take is so hardworkingly naive I dont even know where to start. After having the undesputed greatest set of products designed in a row, you dane to call it luck.
Asside from your complete ignorance of the history at play, (Ive refounded Apple with Jobs) you seem to not understand what a 'mediocre' designer is capable of and how mind-bendinly hard it was to design the imac, ipad, iphone and apple watch
I genuinely can't believe you could be so wild to beleive such a thing. It becomes frankly stupid to the point of disrespectful of the work individuals put into their craft and the success they can find.
There is no person in the world outside of someone in this forum who would claim that somehow this was 'luck'.
HN has truly become one of the most toxically stupid places on the web.
The products were not conceived/designed by Ive. He was VP of industrial design only, with a team of people under him, such as Richard Howarth who seems to have been lead designer on the original iPhone and replaced Ive when he left.
Your take on crediting Ive with the success of Apple's product line would be exactly like crediting some designer at Nike with the success of their never ending line of sneakers.
If your theory of Ive's design genius being such a game changer was true, then why has Apple continued to flourish since he left 7 years ago? It seems pretty apparent that it's the brand/image established by Jobs that is successful, just as it's the Nike brand (bootstrapped by MJ & Nike Air) that propels Nike, not the magic of their designs.
People age and change; Jony Ive overstayed his tenure at Apple, through no fault of his own. Cook, not being a product guy, kept Ive with massive incentives. Build Apple Park, take care of software, here's a bunch more stock. That led to very misguided products. Laptops without MagSafe. Ever so thin phones for no benefit. A pen that charges in the most insane way.
Ive should have left shortly after the death of Steve. He was creatively spent at Apple.
Apparently it required someone with the personality and product taste of Jobs to rein in Ivy. Cook on the other hand being a logistics/operations guy didn’t have the similar skills and we ended up getting absolute shitshow of hardware products from apple in late 2010s.
Thankfully he was fired and sanity prevailed which coincided with Apple Silicon line professors. The MacBook Pro that was immediate predecessor to M1 series was by far Apple’s worst hardware. It was bad on nearly every count.
For what it's worth, the Intel MacBook Pro Espresso Machine and Milk Foamer Expansion Dock that water cooled the CPU while making you a hot fresh latte was pretty useful. The M4 just isn't capable of working up a proper head of steam.
I have one such mac. Things I like: the keyboard feels smooth, the speakers are great and the touchbar (yes you read correctly). Things that make me partially agree with this post I am responding to: annoying overheating, including when I plug an external monitor (!); the camera was really subpar, it always seemed as if I was facetiming using a 2002 cybershot rather than a 2019 MacBook Pro; the screen has nice colours but very easily feels smudgy. Other than this, I love using that computer as a secondary device.
Not sure how I feel. Anna’s Archive turned into a profit-seeking beast a long time ago. They’re also rolling in it thanks to he massive deals to “license” the content to AI companies.
Gemma 4 E4B is a much better model, but it's too large to simply download and run everywhere.
IMHO, this is jumping the gun. Google's going through a lot of effort to release a model that will give everyone a very poor first impression of what on-device models are capable of, souring it for everyone for a long time afterwards. It would be better to wait until a smaller, better model ships before doing this.
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