IMO the problem with these social-networks now is that they all turned into ad-machines & "like-bait". The original products worked extremely well - but you gotta make money somehow, and ads seem to be the go-to model.
I lived in Hamburg for a few years. The single most jarring thing was always healthcare - expertise & availability. My personal opinion was that physicians seemed to be overly dependent on tech/equipment so their clinical diagnoses skills really suffered (that or just being scared of making a mistake maybe).
I would say the article is a bit nit-picky IMO. For every pattern there are probably dozens of poor-use examples. I personally really like the Gmail undo mechanism.
LLM's are not useful enough to me to want them integrated with my daily-drivers (web browser, email client, etc.) - so this is a great take & one that I personally identify with.
This very much. I think folks should center around a couple of dedicated LLM web apps like chatgpt.com (plus maybe gemini.google.com for a second opinion) but that should be it.
If every company and their dog started churning out their own LLM as a business or revenue model, one can easily see the supply overwhelming demand here apart from many other problems.
> If every company and their dog started churning out their own LLM as a business or revenue model, one can easily see the supply overwhelming demand here apart from many other problems.
This certainly seems the case on the iOS/Play stores. Primary AI apps from the big hitters (OpenAI/Gemini/Copilot etc.) but then loads of knock-off ones from those riding the AI hype train. All the knockoffs being basically wrappers around APIs from the big hitters with ads/in-app purchases.
I don't want them in my browser either, but if implemented correctly, it would just be another feature you wouldn't use. So Vivaldi deliberately not having this feature only hurts people who _would_ find it useful, and thus the adoption of their browser. This is not a good strategic decision.
LLMs are difficult to run and very few people have the hardware to run a big enough model to be useful. This means you have to integrate LLMs over an API, which costs you money. LLMs are to expensive for a free browser to just give away free usage. Implementing APIs that you can login with an account and use a specific LLM is a lot of work and difficult to communicate the privacy nightmare that comes with sending that data to some LLM.
You don't have to cater to every user. Focusing on things you do better for a huge portion of potential users is a much better decision. If features turn out to be so useful that everyone needs to integrate them to not be left behind you have to do it. LLMs are not there yet. They are to unreliable, expensive and difficult to run locally. In a few years when most users might be able to run decent models locally you can reevaluate that decision
The opportunity cost of it though, like every major feature decision in a browser, is presumably very significant. What could they be doing that their users actually want?
As a dyed in the wool Firefox user, I am of course very used to disappointment about how they direct their development effort. There are a million things I'd rather see them work on than strapping in an LLM. I don't know much about the Vivaldi community but I assume they took this into account when making this decision.
