Hacker News: scriptsmith

New comment by scriptsmith in "Claude Opus 5"

scriptsmith — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 05:18:12 +0000

It's a reference to this story where an OpenAI model broke out of its sandbox during cyber benchmarking and hacked into HuggingFace, in order to obtain test solutions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548

New comment by scriptsmith in "Text art tools"

scriptsmith — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 07:44:30 +0000

I made these to create styled text art for the MOTD of my university's HPC login node:

https://github.com/ScriptSmith/tart

https://tart.sh/

New comment by scriptsmith in "Kimi K2.7 Code is generally available in GitHub Copilot"

scriptsmith — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 06:37:12 +0000

Is GitHub Copilot the best positioned platform for enterprise? They support Claude, GPT, Gemini, and now even open weight models. Larger orgs are paying at API rates anyway so it costs just as much as anywhere else. They have a pretty good agent CLI and SDK, and now a desktop app. They have hosted agents, and you can run their 'Agentic Workflows' in CI.

Has their reputation tanked so much that the alternatives get all the buzz? Or is it that non-enterprise users are priced out by the usage costs, so no free marketing?

New comment by scriptsmith in "Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

scriptsmith — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 02:15:12 +0000

Definitely took longer than I was expecting, then after two weeks I thought we'd never get it.

New comment by scriptsmith in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

scriptsmith — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 01:22:25 +0000

And now is this going to be a one-off, or routine with every new generation of models?

New comment by scriptsmith in "Local AI needs to be the norm"

scriptsmith — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:30:04 +0000

It's based on a Gemma 3n model, and yeah it's not the best. But if you have a use case that needs constrained JSON output for example, it's pretty neat.

Maybe it would do better with the new Gemma 4 models, which the Chrome devs have been hinting at moving to. And why the API doesn't let you introspect / pick the model, I'm still not sure.

New comment by scriptsmith in "Local AI needs to be the norm"

scriptsmith — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:22:42 +0000

I've got some demos of what the new Prompt API in Chrome that uses a local model can do: https://adsm.dev/posts/prompt-api/#what-could-you-build-with...

As OP says, it shines in constrained environments where the model is transforming user-owned data. Definitely less useful for anything more open-ended.

New comment by scriptsmith in "Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers"

scriptsmith — Thu, 07 May 2026 22:41:41 +0000

Chromium mostly does not support this, because it doesn't have the binary blob required to run the inference. However, it does still download the model weights and expose the LanguageModel API, because that part is hooked up.

https://adsm.dev/posts/prompt-api/#which-browsers-support-th...

Packagers might eventually disable that but I tested this behaviour in chromium 148 a few hours ago, and it would download the weights but has trouble running them.

New comment by scriptsmith in "Google's Prompt API"

scriptsmith — Wed, 06 May 2026 23:23:56 +0000

> My understanding is that you’ll have to explicitly agree to download alternate models in the future, per the specification

I don't get that from the spec. Closest thing I could find in the Writing and Assistance APIs spec [1] (which the Prompt API refers to) says:

> [It] allows the user agent to prompt the user for permission

But that's talking more about initiating the 'download' process more than choosing the model.

I think Chrome wants the browser to be 'opinionated' about the model used however, rather than letting the webpage pick, at least for now.

[1] https://webmachinelearning.github.io/writing-assistance-apis...

New comment by scriptsmith in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

scriptsmith — Wed, 06 May 2026 08:06:37 +0000

Depends on where you get it. By default the flags will be enabled, but some packagers may choose to disable them. I haven't seen a major distro release chromium 148 yet.

Weirdly though, chromium won't be able to actually use the model even though it can download it, because the inference engine is a closed-source blob.

https://adsm.dev/posts/prompt-api/#which-browsers-support-th...

New comment by scriptsmith in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

scriptsmith — Wed, 06 May 2026 04:23:34 +0000

I wrote a more detailed blog post here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028662

New comment by scriptsmith in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

scriptsmith — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:13:55 +0000

Chromium doesn't support this API because it needs a binary blob to run the inference, although in theory it may still be configured to download the weights:

https://adsm.dev/posts/prompt-api/#which-browsers-support-th...

New comment by scriptsmith in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

scriptsmith — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:46:59 +0000

It can only be called after the user has interacted with the page, but there's no dialogue from the browser

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/get-started#user-activa...

New comment by scriptsmith in "The Prompt API is now on by default in Chrome"

scriptsmith — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:58:53 +0000

Author here. After trying out the Prompt API over the last week, I wrote up some details on the chromium internals, how to use the API, and made some toy demos.

It's a 4 GB model that can be used to run on-device inference.

New comment by scriptsmith in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

scriptsmith — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:15:24 +0000

In my understanding, yes. I wrote a blog post about some of the internals here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028662

The Prompt API is now on by default in Chrome

scriptsmith — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:12:57 +0000

Article URL: https://adsm.dev/posts/prompt-api/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028662

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by scriptsmith in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

scriptsmith — Tue, 05 May 2026 11:32:40 +0000

Google has been trialling the Prompt API in chrome for the over a year, so before Gemma 4 existed. But they are indicating they'll move to Gemma 4: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/iR6R7...

New comment by scriptsmith in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

scriptsmith — Tue, 05 May 2026 09:25:25 +0000

It's based on Gemma 3n, and it's not the best.

I find it works fine for simple classification, translation, interpretation of images & audio. It can write longer prose, but it's pretty bad.

It can also write text in the format of a JSON schema or regexp for anything you might want to do with structured data.

New comment by scriptsmith in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

scriptsmith — Tue, 05 May 2026 08:46:52 +0000

Those flags will exist already, but will default to enabled in 148.

That other flag is for using a different open-source inference engine to the (from what I can tell) closed-source one that's used by default.

New comment by scriptsmith in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

scriptsmith — Tue, 05 May 2026 08:26:02 +0000

If Chrome has the #optimization-guide-on-device-model and #prompt-api-for-gemini-nano flags enabled, either because it's part of some Origin Trial / Early Stable Release or something, then web pages will have access to the new Prompt API which allows any webpage to initiate the (one-time) download of the ~2.7 GiB CPU or ~4.0 GiB GPU model using LanguageModel.create()

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api

When Chrome 148 releases tomorrow, this will be the default behaviour on desktop.

To download, it should check for 22 GiB free disk space on the volume where your Chrome data dir is, and at least double the model size of free space in your tmp dir.