AI-powered web browsers are such a serious risk that Gartner warned organizations to block any and all web browsers with so much as an AI sidebar in them for fear that the companies running the models powering them would “accidentally” slurp up confidential information.
On how “mere” console/terminal can display graphics, from wikipedia (Sixel - Wikipedia):
Sixel, short for “six pixels”, is a bitmap graphics format supported by terminals and printers from DEC. It consists of a pattern six pixels high and one wide (in black and white), resulting in 64 possible patterns. Each possible pattern is assigned an ASCII character, making the sixels easy to transmit on 7-bit serial links.
Sixel was first introduced as a way of sending bitmap graphics to DEC dot matrix printers [way back when]
Old is new again. But I wasn’t longing for a need to re-remember vim.
[Btw. Haven’t had a chance to try, but Contour and Konsole has aarch64 version - at least in flathub (and it installs on L5). Might work via them as they have sixel support…]
Going into this rabbit hole… Browsh - another terminal browser rendering pages. It renders anything that a modern browser can; HTML5, CSS3, JS, video and even WebGL. Its main purpose is to be run on a remote server and accessed via SSH/Mosh or the in-browser HTML service in order to significantly reduce bandwidth and thus both increase browsing speeds and decrease bandwidth costs.
What I noticed is that Brow6el uses Chromium for rendering. Browsh uses Firefox. Graphics seem more blockier than what sixeled offers, accoring to pics.
If you only have a 3kbps internet connection tethered from a phone, then it’s good to SSH into a server and browse the web through, say, elinks. That way the server downloads the web pages and uses the limited bandwidth of an SSH connection to display the result. However, traditional text-based browsers lack JS and all other modern HTML5 support. Browsh is different in that it’s backed by a real browser, namely headless Firefox, to create a purely text-based version of web pages and web apps. These can be easily rendered in a terminal or indeed, ironically, in another browser. Do note that currently the browser client doesn’t have feature parity with the terminal client.
[…]
One final reason to use terminal Browsh could be to offload the battery-drain of a modern browser from your laptop or low-powered device like a Raspberry Pi. If you’re a CLI-native, then you could potentially get a few more hours of life if your CPU-hungry browser is running somewhere else on mains electricity.
but you have too look on this LLMs like super individuals. They are the future and both everything and nothing. We privacy folks need to step up to them, because its like you, using a computer vs. some of your family do not like them or math or internet….
There is no difference. But a change in ways and computation. We have to support some LLMs..
That would have been my first question. For terminal emulator, ABC, does it support sixels?
I typically use gnome-terminal or PuTTY and, per your link, neither of those supports sixels (although I didn’t attempt to verify that).
(What about kgx on the Librem 5?)
I tried xterm (had to install it as I don’t normally use it) and, yes, sixels do indeed appear to work (as claimed in your link).
As this isn’t something I have ever played with, take with a grain of salt but xterm appears to need to be invoked as xterm -ti 340 in order to output sixels (information courtesy of some random web page).
Whether I am quite ready to use this to render a web page is another question …
