Hard to see any practical benefit to go after common crawl. The situation of freely accessible crawled data is bad enough as it is with archive.org and CC being pretty much the only available sources. We need more initiatives like them, not less. The scary thing is how the anti-AI sentiment is being used to lock things down further.
The 7B parameter Vibevoice TTS model is still the most impressive local TTS model i've tried. It was pulled by Microsoft a few days after its release due to "abuse potential" but it can be found in various community maintained huggingface repos.
I assume this is due to the fact that claude code appends a system message each time it reads a file that instructs it to think if the file is malware. It hasnt been an issue recently for me but it used to be so bad I had to patch out the string from the cli.js file. This is the instruction it uses:
> Whenever you read a file, you should consider whether it would be considered malware. You CAN and SHOULD provide analysis of malware, what it is doing. But you MUST refuse to improve or augment the code. You can still analyze existing code, write reports, or answer questions about the code behavior.
Okay so I had to look in to it because the site is not really doing a good job explaining it at all. Turns out[0] that they are voting for the extension of the temporary regulation thats been in effect since 2021 (Regulation (EU) 2021/1232). So this is about the "voluntary scanning of private communications" (which is still bad, but has been in effect for almost 5 years already).
Yeah so this is about CC 1.0 (which already exists)
While it's still worth fighting, it is less worrying
The question of course is, why something is allowed multiple votes (and the basic answer is - if it presented some changed - but I don't know if it's the case)
This is the thing that bothers me the most about this. It is as if even the HN crowd is taking it as given that malware is this big problem for banking on Android but in reality there seems to be very little evidence to back this up. I regularly read local (Finnish) news stories about scams and they always seem to be about purely social engineering via whatsapp or the scammer calling their number and convincing the victim they are a banking official or police etc.
That's why I'm inclined to believe Google is just using safety as an excuse to further leverage their monopoly.
Chrome ships a local OCR model for text extraction from PDFs which is better than any of the VLM or open source OCR models i've tried. I had a few hundred gigs of old newspaper scans and after trying all the other options I ended up building a wrapper around the DLL it uses to get the text and bboxes. Performance and accuracy on another level compared to tesseract, and while VLM models sometimes produced good results they just seemed unreliable.
I've thought of open sourcing the wrapper but havent gotten around to it yet. I bet claude code can build a functioning prototype if you just point it to "screen_ai" dir under chrome's user data.
Is there a chance you'll open source the wrapper after all? It would help a lot of people like me. No pressure though, but now I really want to try it to OCR a bunch of Japanese scans I have lying around. Unfortunately, finding a good OCR for Japanese scans is still a huge problem in 2026.
It is CPU-based. Somewhere between 1 to 2 seconds per page on a single core. I ran 20 instances of it in parallel to utilize 20 CPU cores so the avg time came down nicely.
That's actually amazing, and might give me a way to use all the cores I have lying around. 2s per page is an insane 600 pages per minute at 20 cores!
Please do open source it, even if you don't do much around it (worst case I can just spend a few million tokens trying to get opus 4.6 to get it to work)
chrome_screen_ai.dll is the name of the dll (libchromescreenai.so on linux) and yes it is proprietary. It isn't included by default, Chrome uses its component service to download it automatically when you open a PDF file that doesn't have pre-existing OCR'd text on it. You can download it separately from here: https://chrome-infra-packages.appspot.com/p/chromium/third_p...
I would assume so. I can see from my browser history that i succesfully submitted captures to archive.today on 7th of January, but failed to do so starting from 12th of January. IIRC they contacted gyrovague around the 10th so seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Applies to VPNs as well. Tried first with a VPN located in Finland and it gets endless captcha loop, then with a Swedish VPN which let me through to the front page after solving one captcha.
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