Hacker News: scriptsmith

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: 2

# 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.

New comment by scriptsmith in "No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user"

scriptsmith — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 05:13:19 +0000

Yes, you could turn it around to say that using Anthropic models in Cursor, Copilot, Junie, etc. is 'subsidising' Claude Code users.

New comment by scriptsmith in "Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST"

scriptsmith — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:14:16 +0000

The "First-class syntactic selection" reminds me of my most used shortcut(s) in Jetbrains IDEs: the Expand / Shrink Selection.

  Ctrl + W
  Ctrl + Shift + W

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/working-with-source-code...

It really changed my perspective on interacting with the 'text' of a file.

VS Code, Zed, etc. have similar operations, but in my experience they expand and shrink too coarsely.

New comment by scriptsmith in "Quantized Llama models with increased speed and a reduced memory footprint"

scriptsmith — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 22:05:59 +0000

Yes, I've used the v3.2 3B-Instruct model in a Slack app. Specifically using vLLM, with a template: https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/blob/main/examples/tool...

Works as expected if you provide a few system prompts with context.

New comment by scriptsmith in "Zero regrets: Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years"

scriptsmith — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 05:00:49 +0000

To keep on-top of tabs in Firefox, I use 'Auto Tab Discard' [1] to discard tabs after a certain amount of inactivity. Then when I need to clean up my list of tabs, I click on any discarded tabs I want to keep, and then use my extension 'Close Discarded Tabs' [2] to clear the rest.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-discard...

New comment by scriptsmith in "CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops"

scriptsmith — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 05:46:10 +0000

Someone posted this in the thread, but I also can't log in to verify

> Summary

> CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor.

> Details

> Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor.

> Current Action

> Our Engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket.

> Status updates will be posted below as we have more information to share, including when the issue is resolved.

> Latest Updates

> 2024-07-19 05:30 AM UTC | Tech Alert Published.

> Support

> Find answers and contact Support with our Support Portal

New comment by scriptsmith in "CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops"

scriptsmith — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 05:27:44 +0000

It's crowdstrike: https://www.reddit.com/r/crowdstrike/comments/1e6vmkf/bsod_e...

> 7/18/24 10:20PT - Hello everyone - We have widespread reports of BSODs on windows hosts, occurring on multiple sensor versions. Investigating cause. TA will be published shortly. Pinned thread.

> SCOPE: EU-1, US-1, US-2 and US-GOV-1

> Edit 10:36PT - TA posted: https://supportportal.crowdstrike.com/s/article/Tech-Alert-W...

> Edit 11:27 PM PT:

> Workaround Steps:

> Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment

> Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory

> Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.

> Boot the host normally.

New comment by scriptsmith in "Training for one trillion parameter model backed by Intel and US govt has begun"

scriptsmith — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 13:08:40 +0000

Seems like he actually disagrees here:

If you train a bigger model on more text, we have a lot of confidence that the next-word prediction task will improve. So algorithmic progress is not necessary, it's a very nice bonus, but we can sort of get more powerful models for free, because we can just get a bigger computer, which we can say with some confidence we're going to get, and just train a bigger model for longer, and we are very confident we are going to get a better result.

https://youtu.be/zjkBMFhNj_g?t=1543 (23:43)

New comment by scriptsmith in "Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding"

scriptsmith — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 15:05:00 +0000

How are people using these local code models? I would much prefer using these in-context in an editor, but most of them seem to be deployed just in an instruction context. There's a lot of value to not having to context switch, or have a conversation.

I see the GitHub copilot extensions gets a new release one every few days, so is it just that the way they're integrated is more complicated so not worth the effort?

New comment by scriptsmith in "tRPC – Build and consume typesafe APIs without schemas or code generation"

scriptsmith — Sat, 12 Aug 2023 11:58:12 +0000

Is there some trick to doing validation of request data using this process? That's a valuable part of using something like tRPC, JSON Schema + type generation, zod, etc.