Hacker News: jaffathecake

New comment by jaffathecake in "window.showDirectoryPicker opens up a whole new world"

jaffathecake — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:00:36 +0000

> So websites can now nag users to allow access to the root of their local disk

No, Chrome doesn't allow this.

Here's a simple demo: https://output.jsbin.com/kekekac/quiet - note that you can't select root, Downloads etc.

New comment by jaffathecake in "Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API"

jaffathecake — Fri, 01 May 2026 07:32:07 +0000

> The user agent is the proper channel for the agency Jake is seeking here. Theres nothing preventing the user & their user agent from negotiating what model they use.

This isn't how it works. As the developer, you use the system prompt to set a particular personality for the chat bot. Eg, when you use an LLM in VSCode, it comes with a system prompt to make it an effective code assistant.

Now, in VSCode, you can select a different model, which is maybe where your misconception comes from. But when you select a different model, it will also use a different system prompt, designed to achieve the same personality, but tailored for that particular model.

Once you figure out why they do that, you'll understand why your position here doesn't make sense.

New comment by jaffathecake in "Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API"

jaffathecake — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:48:10 +0000

Yes! It might lie or hallucinate. But also, all browsers claim to be "Mozilla/5.0" in their user agent string. It's a very similar problem.

New comment by jaffathecake in "Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API"

jaffathecake — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:45:27 +0000

It's fun that I get to be called both "anti-AI" and an "AI shill" by people on the internet depending on the day of the week.

New comment by jaffathecake in "Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API"

jaffathecake — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:39:22 +0000

Thank you for posting this.

On interoperability, time will tell I guess. I've only been working on Firefox for a few months, but general interop issues are way worse than I realised when we worked together at Chrome. Firefox frequently gets bug reports for not behaving like Chrome, even when Firefox is complying with the spec, and Chrome is not. We end up having to just behave like Chrome.

On developer signals… I'm sure there's better evidence of positive sentiment than Chrome provided, but there's a lot of negative sentiment too. I think it would be fair to call the developer signal "mixed", or maybe even "polarised".

New comment by jaffathecake in "Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API"

jaffathecake — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:53:59 +0000

Aww thanks for saying that! I've been doing little videos on https://www.youtube.com/@FirefoxWebDevs (and accounts of the same name, pretty much everywhere). Although they're designed to be short, so they're pretty different to HTTP203.

New comment by jaffathecake in "Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API"

jaffathecake — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:23:32 +0000

Agreed. Maybe Google will propose a CSS text formatting property that cannot be used on paragraphs that are critical of the US administration.

Like, that sounds daft, but it's not really far from what they're doing here.

New comment by jaffathecake in "Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API"

jaffathecake — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:59 +0000

I think the objection here is unrelated to the love or hate of LLMs. It's about the viability of this particular proposed open web API.

I personally use LLMs for coding assistance, and some home automation stuff, but I do not think this particular API is good for the web.

New comment by jaffathecake in "Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API"

jaffathecake — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:37:32 +0000

Aww thanks! To be fair I didn't toe the party line when I was at Google (imo). Although, that caused me increasing amount of grief internally, until I left. From what I hear, things have gotten exponentially worse in that regard for folks still on the team.

New comment by jaffathecake in "Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API"

jaffathecake — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:13:37 +0000

Sigh, when I posted this, I linked to https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213#i... (which was posted 11 hours ago). Unfortunately someone changed the link.

New comment by jaffathecake in "Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API"

jaffathecake — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:13:01 +0000

When I posted this, I linked to the latest statement https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213#i..., which is the content relevant to the title (the details of our opposition to the API). Unfortunately someone removed the link to the specific post.

New comment by jaffathecake in "Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API"

jaffathecake — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:02:17 +0000

The Chrome model requires either "16 GB of RAM or more and 4 CPU cores or more" or "Strictly more than 4 GB of VRAM", and "22 GB of free space" (it uses around 4.4GB but it doesn't want to use the remaining free space).

The model is pretty slow on my M4 Pro mac.

The API allows the browser to use a cloud service instead, but then privacy is lower. So, more privacy for the rich.

New comment by jaffathecake in "Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API"

jaffathecake — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:35:14 +0000

The rate of model development is an issue here. Once there are many cross-origin models, it becomes a fingerprinting vector. Also even the small models are many GBs.

Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

jaffathecake — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 07:43:55 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213#issuecomment-4347988313

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47959463

Points: 663

# Comments: 231

New comment by jaffathecake in "Show HN: What's my JND? – a colour guessing game"

jaffathecake — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:15:13 +0000

A lot. My scores:

- 0.0028 on my MacBook pro screen

- 0.0045 on my Dell monitor

- 0.0033 on my Pixel 10 pro

And those scores are pretty consistent.

New comment by jaffathecake in "Show HN: What's my JND? – a colour guessing game"

jaffathecake — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:06:17 +0000

The associated deep-dive article is great https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/too-much-color/

New comment by jaffathecake in "Goodbye InnerHTML, Hello SetHTML: Stronger XSS Protection in Firefox 148"

jaffathecake — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:54:18 +0000

fwiw, if you serve your page with:

Content-Security-Policy: require-trusted-types-for 'script'

…then it blocks you from passing regular strings to the methods that don't sanitize.

New comment by jaffathecake in "Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal"

jaffathecake — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 19:15:06 +0000

Fwiw, JPEG XL takes around 2.5x the time to decode as an equivalent AVIF, and has worse compression https://jakearchibald.com/2025/present-and-future-of-progres...

Importing vs. Fetching JSON in JavaScript

jaffathecake — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 10:07:04 +0000

Article URL: https://jakearchibald.com/2025/importing-vs-fetching-json/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45680187

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by jaffathecake in "Firefox Interop Feature Ranking"

jaffathecake — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 09:06:10 +0000

I know this isn't quite what you mean, but when you first hit the page, the list is in a random order, but it's then stable across reloads.

I considered the 'vs' approach, but I worried that there might be a lot of iterations where one or two of the options would be things that the person didn't understand, or didn't care about.

How do you feel about something like this: The user goes through the long list, picking what they understand and don't dislike, then the 'vs' system is there for helping determine the order of those items. Then the user gets the ranking which they can tweak.