> tab 1 contains news outlet A's coverage of a story, tab 2 has outlet B's coverage, tab 3 has Wikipedia; summarize and provide references.

I think this is basically what https://ground.news/ does.

(I'm not affiliated with them; just saw them in the sponsorship section of a Kurzgesagt video the other day and figured they're doing the thing you described +/- UI differences.)

Thank you.

I was thinking of showing multiple tabs/views at the same time, but only from the same source.

Maybe we could have one tab with the original content optimised for cli viewing, and another tab just doing fact checking (can ground it with google search or brave). Would be a fun experiment.

LLMs to generate SEO slop of the most utterly piss-poor quality, then another LLM to lossilly "summarise" it back. Brave new world?

Another great example of LLM hype train re-inventing something that already existed [1] (and was actually thought out) but making it worse and non-deterministic in the worst ways possible.

https://schema.org/Recipe

Which it apparently does by completely changing the recipe in random places including ingredients and amounts thereof. It is _indeed_ a very good microcosm of what LLMs are, just not in the way these comments think.

There are extensions that do that for you, in a deterministic way and not relying on LLMs. For example, Recipe Filter for chrome. It just shows a pop up over the page when it loads if it detects a recipe

> Removing all the cruft from a recipe is a brilliant case for an LLM

Is it though, when the LLM might mutate the recipe unpredictably? I can't believe people trust probabilistic software for cases that cannot tolerate error.

I foreseen this a couple years ago. We already have web search tools in LLMs, and they are amazing when they chain multiple searches. But Spegel is a completely different take.

I think the ad blocker of the future will be a local LLM, small and efficient. Want to sort your timeline chronologically? Or want a different UI? Want some things removed, and others promoted? Hide low quality comments in a thread? All are possible with LLM in the middle, in either agent or proxy mode.

I bet this will be unpleasant for advertisers.

Do you also like what it costs you to browse the web via an LLM potentially swallowing millions of tokens per minutes ?

LLM adds cruft, LLM removes cruft, never a miscommunication

Unfortunately in the modern web simply walking the DOM doesn't cut it if the website's content loads in with JS. You could only walk the DOM once the JS has loaded, and all the requests it makes have finished, and at that point you're already using a whole browser renderer anyway.

Each user have distinct needs, and has a distinct prior knowledge about the topic, so even the "raw" super clean source form will probably be eventually adjusted differently for most users.

But yes, having some global shared redundant P2P cache (of the "raw" data), like IPFS (?) could possibly help and save some processing power and help with availability and data preservation.

Cache headers exist for servers to communicate to clients how long it safe to cache things for. The client could be updated to add a cache layer that respects cache headers.

If the goal is to have a more consistent layout on each visit, I think we could save the last page's markdown and send it to the model as a one-shot example...

The author says this is for “personalized views using your own prompts.” Though, I suppose it’s still useful to cache the outputs for the default prompt.

Something tells me we'll see more ad-inserting

The problem, as always, is that LLMs are not deterministic. Accessibility needs to be reliable and predictable above all else.

You are right, it's Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite

I actually made a CLI tool recently that uses Puppeteer to render the page including JS, summarizes key info and actions, and enables simple form filling all from a CLI menu. I built it for my own use-cases (checking and paying power bills from CLI), but I'd love to get feedback on the core concept: https://github.com/jadbox/solomonagent

True for stuff requiring interaction, but to help their LCP/SEO lots of sites these days render plain html first. It's not "usable" but for viewing it's pretty good

I built a project that basically does this for emacs

https://github.com/sstraust/simpleweb

also with lynx because it can browse from stdin

Does anyone really get addicted to linkedin? Its so sanitized and clinical. Nobody acts real on there or even pretends to.

We’ll probably have to add some custom code to log in, get an auth token, and then browse with it. Not sure if LinkedIn would like that, but I certainly would.

Curious about that different purpose ...

Good sir, no.

The web has existed for long before javascript was around.

The web was useful for long before javascript was around.

I literally hate javascript -- not the language itself but the way it is used. It has enabled some pretty cool things, yes. But javascript is not required to make useful webpages.

If Amazon.com can work with JavaScript disabled, any site could be rewritten to do without. But I think to even get to the content on a lot of SPAs this would need to be running a headless browser to render the page, before extracting the static content unfortunately

No - an experiment: try disabling javascript in your browser settings, and then whenever you see a webpage that isn't working, enable javascript for that domain. You'd be surprised how fast 90% of the web feels with JS disabled.

That would violate the do-one-thing-and-do-it-well principle for no apparent benefit. There are plenty of tools to convert markdown to basic HTML already.

Fantastic catch! It led me down a rabbit hole, and I finally found the root cause.

The recipe site was so long that it got truncated before being sent to the LLM. Then, based on the first 8000 characters, Gemini hallucinated the rest of the recipe, it was definitely in its training set.

I have fixed it and pushed a new version of the project. Thanks again, it really highlights how we can never fully trust models.

Great catch. I was getting ready to mention the theoretical risk of asking an LLM be your arbiter of truth; it didn't even occur to me to check the chosen example for correctness. In a way, this blog post is a useful illustration not just of the hazards of LLMs, but also of our collective tendency to eschew verity for novelty.

oh damn...

Did you actually observe this, or is just meant to be illustrative of what could happen?

can you flesh this out a tiny bit? because for indy-crawlers the javascript rendering is the main problem.

It can inject its own!

Couldn't this time reasonably well on a local machine is you have some kind of neutral processing chip and enough ram? Conversion to MD shouldn't require a huge model.

only if you use an API and not a dedicated distill/tune for html to MD conversion.

But the question of Javascript remains

Finally, web browsers work for the user, not the website owners!

Because the modern web isn't reliably HTML, it's "web apps" with heavy use of JavaScript and API calls. To first display the HTML that you see in your browser, you need a user agent that runs JavaScript and makes all the backend calls that Chrome would make to put together some HTML.

Some websites may still return some static upfront that could be usefully understood without JavaScript processing, but a lot don't.

That's not to say you need an LLM, there are projects like Puppeteer that are like headless browsers that can return the rendered HTML, which can then be sent through an HTML to Markdown filter. That would be less computationally intensive.

Because this isn't just converting HTML to markdown. I'd recommend taking another look at the website and particularly read the recipe example as it demonstrates the goal of the project pretty well.

That would also keep your wallet or GPU rag coller

something I found challenging when I was building was -- how do you make the speed fast enough so that it still creates a smooth browsing experience?

I'm curious how you tackled that problem

what does it do about javascript?

That's the world we live in. You can either not have access to content or you must accept abstractions to remove all the bad decisions browser vendors have forced on us the last 30 years to support ad-browsing.

I 100% agree -- but still I find this a feature and not a bug. It's always an arms race, and I like this shot fired.

If the web site is a SPA that is hydrated using an API it would be conceivable that the LLM can build a reusable interface around the API while taking inspiration from the original page. That interface can then be stored in some cache.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a good idea but perhaps a bad/fun idea that can inspire good ideas?

> this is another layer of abstraction on top of an already broken system

pretty much like all modern computing then, hey.

Think of it as a secretary that is transforming and formatting information. You may desire for the original medium to be something like what you want but you don’t get that so you can get a cheap dumber secretary instead.

I take it you never use "Reader mode" in your browser?