4 ms·

The web was a hype-train, and then a bubble, too. It's not enough that a new technology is adopting the hype cycle, what matters is what's left of it afterwards

The web was a hype-train, and then a bubble, too. It's not enough that a new technology is adopting the hype cycle, what matters is what's left of it afterwards How many of us got their workflow disrupted by AI? It's been a while since I've googled a "how do I..." type thing, because of how much I appreciate Bing Copilot or Phind Safe to say my life did not change with the arrival of Web3!

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> How many of us got their workflow disrupted by AI? It's been a while since I've googled a "how do I..." I did about an hour ago. AI answers run the gamut from boilerplate that's useful that still ends up needing tweaking to utterly making shit up that doesn't exist. I did a copilot search once that referred to an entire framework that it just made the fuck up, and you know it would've been great if it did exist, the framework would've suited my needs perfectly, it was just complicated by the fact that it didn't. I'm off that train, I hate having my time wasted and until they can guarantee veracity in answers it's just a google search that's even less reliable than google, which is saying something lately.
- jprete 2y ago
  OT but the "best" part of it is that the text-continuation foundations inherently encourage this exact behavior. People don't write "I don't know" very often, much less "wait a minute, I think I dreamed that, but it's too bad that doesn't exist".
- kdmtctl 2y ago
  You should've asked it to sketch it for you.
- sebstefan 2y ago
  Did you set Bing Copilot to "precise" mode? I've asked it pretty niche questions and I've never seen it make up anything, much less a whole framework Plus it gives you its sources so I don't see how this could've happened. A whole framework?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    What the hell is "precise" mode? Why do I need to select that, who in the world wants their code AI running in imprecise mode? I dunno maybe that would help, but it seems like a deeply un-serious product then.
    - sebstefan 2y ago
      There's "precise", "balanced" and "creative" If you're asking it to write a story about a camel in a hat you probably shouldn't choose "precise" mode
      - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
        Why the hell does Copilot have the ability to write a story about a camel in a hat? My god the more I learn about these things the less seriously I'm able to take any of them
        sebstefan 2y ago
        There's Bing Copilot and just "Copilot" Bing Copilot is your old regular ChatGPT applied to searching the web. * Generating Bing queries based on what you're asking * Reading the web results * Giving you an answer based on those (highlighting in the answer where it got the facts from and linking to it latex-style at the end) It has a Creative/Balanced/Precise slider to inform how close it should stay to the info it just read online "Copilot" alone is the coding companion that's integrated in your IDE It does not have that slider
betaby 2y ago
> How many of us got their workflow disrupted by AI? Single digit percentage?
- inanutshellus 2y ago
  You're kidding, I assume? Or maybe you misread "workflow" to mean something like "work-life"? For sure more than a single-digit percentage of people have tried a Q&A bot by now. Shoot, Windows just updated to insert Copilot into users' machines, with the icon right next to the Windows button. It can't not continue to grow. It's such an amazingly effective way to get information versus scouring through web pages.
  - soatok 2y ago
    > For sure more than a single-digit percentage of people have tried a Q&A bot by now. Tried is doing a lot of heavy lifting. https://meow.social/@crumbcake/113156927685392932 https://meow.social/@crumbcake/113156927685392932 > Shoot, Windows just updated to insert Copilot into users' machines, with the icon right next to the Windows button. This goes back to my point about consent and opt-in vs opt-out. > It can't not continue to grow. "If we shove this down people's throats enough maybe their gag reflex will adapt." > It's such an amazingly effective way to get information versus scouring through web pages. The only reason I stopped using Google isn't to choose AI instead. It's because the obtrusive "AI Overview" pissed me off.
  - thereddaikon 2y ago
    I hardly use it at all. ChatGPT was interesting at first but it slowly got worse and worse as changes had to be made to it so OpenAI wouldn't get sued. The same is true for all the other ones. LLMs can be great if they are allowed to blatantly violate copyright. But once everyone started circling the wagons and walling off their information they quickly started to lose their value.
    - inanutshellus 2y ago
      Feel free to not use it, it's your time. Some recent examples: * "I installed windows and now I can't access my linux partition" * "I want to add an `in` variable to an existing pl/sql function, can it go on the end of the parameter list? (Answer: No, because...)" * "What size soccer ball does AYSO U10 use?" * "what is the name of that python library that handles command line arguments, and could you provide an example that demonstrates required flags?" nothing earth shaking. not things that're impossible to find, but... instead of reading someone's blog post in which they work as hard as possible to belabor the point so you'll scroll through all 14... this thing just gives you the answer.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
marcosdumay 2y ago
Disrupted? As in destroyed so that you need to create a completely different one? There are some reports of people hired to write low quality spam articles that fit this. There isn't much else. There exist lots of people that claim some small gains, mostly because they use shitty tools that can't do what some tools could do 15 years ago (often the same tools). I'm afraid that's not enough to keep our current LLMs alive.
- bbor 2y ago
  I think they mean 'disrupted' in a more benign, quotidian sense. Like, changed significantly. That said, perhaps you could clarify your comment about "shitty tools that can't do what some tools could do 15 years ago"? Like what? I'd preemptively argue that Google Search has changed for market reasons, not technical ones, but I'm curious to hear if you meant something else. Objectively speaking, chatbots from 15 years ago (or 2...) were just not at all coherent. You can criticize modern LLMs all day, but they're definitely coherent.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    > That said, perhaps you could clarify your comment about "shitty tools that can't do what some tools could do 15 years ago"? Yep, a large part is Google. But the most popular IDEs seem to be less capable of providing useful information nowadays too. (Yet, there exist good ones out there, and they haven't been explicitly enshitified, it's the languages and ecosystems that changed.)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- sebstefan 2y ago
  There's a bunch of crap and most of the AI bubble is low-value BS, and back when the Web was starting there was Pets.com. Realistically how many people are currently employed "writing low quality spam articles" That's not reality. That's just reddit crapping on strawmen because a lot of the visible results from AI is 1) Crap creative work and 2) Polluted search results/comment sections These are red herrings There's real people doing real productive things with AIs that do boring things right now. The ability to search for things that are still fuzzy in my mind, ask open-ended questions and get an answer back, or find something when you can't come up with a good keyword I've never had the google-fu that some other developers have so this was something that often required asking a peer before. Sometimes a forum or some Discord, even. Now you just feed your garbage question to a large language model that swallowed the entirety of the internet and a few seconds later it's spitting back something useful. It's the first time I have access to a robot that's on stand-by with surface level knowledge of everything. I suspect people who don't find this extremely valuable in their day-to-day life are just not catching the moments when they could've used it -- while on the other side of the spectrum the value it removes from comment sections/image search results is impossible to ignore.
klabb3 2y ago
> It's been a while since I've googled a "how do I..." type thing Same, but you’re missing planet-sized elephant in the room here. This use-case has been technically solved for 20 years. What’s happened is that web search was ripe for consumer value extraction (aka enshittification). Have you ever seen a market more saturated with perverse incentives, from ad delivery, content farms, data mining, and of course the very search engine that prints money from it? Now, if you wanna do an apples-apples comparison, imagine popups, consent forms, hidden influences from advertisers, recommendation engines, arbitrary lock-outs from community guidelines violations, ads while waiting for responses, JS bloat at recipe-website levels, and so on and so forth. By all means, enjoy ChatGPT or whatever in its naked current form. But make no mistake that this is the honeymoon phase. Potential doesn’t govern the direction of new tech. Incentive does.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

> How many of us got their workflow disrupted by AI? It's been a while since I've googled a "how do I..." I did about an hour ago. AI answers run the gamut from boilerplate that's useful that still ends up needing tweaking to utterly making shit up that doesn't exist. I did a copilot search once that referred to an entire framework that it just made the fuck up, and you know it would've been great if it did exist, the framework would've suited my needs perfectly, it was just complicated by the fact that it didn't. I'm off that train, I hate having my time wasted and until they can guarantee veracity in answers it's just a google search that's even less reliable than google, which is saying something lately.

jprete 2y ago
OT but the "best" part of it is that the text-continuation foundations inherently encourage this exact behavior. People don't write "I don't know" very often, much less "wait a minute, I think I dreamed that, but it's too bad that doesn't exist".
kdmtctl 2y ago
You should've asked it to sketch it for you.
sebstefan 2y ago
Did you set Bing Copilot to "precise" mode? I've asked it pretty niche questions and I've never seen it make up anything, much less a whole framework Plus it gives you its sources so I don't see how this could've happened. A whole framework?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  What the hell is "precise" mode? Why do I need to select that, who in the world wants their code AI running in imprecise mode? I dunno maybe that would help, but it seems like a deeply un-serious product then.
  - sebstefan 2y ago
    There's "precise", "balanced" and "creative" If you're asking it to write a story about a camel in a hat you probably shouldn't choose "precise" mode
    - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      Why the hell does Copilot have the ability to write a story about a camel in a hat? My god the more I learn about these things the less seriously I'm able to take any of them
      - sebstefan 2y ago
        There's Bing Copilot and just "Copilot" Bing Copilot is your old regular ChatGPT applied to searching the web. * Generating Bing queries based on what you're asking * Reading the web results * Giving you an answer based on those (highlighting in the answer where it got the facts from and linking to it latex-style at the end) It has a Creative/Balanced/Precise slider to inform how close it should stay to the info it just read online "Copilot" alone is the coding companion that's integrated in your IDE It does not have that slider

betaby 2y ago

> How many of us got their workflow disrupted by AI? Single digit percentage?

inanutshellus 2y ago
You're kidding, I assume? Or maybe you misread "workflow" to mean something like "work-life"? For sure more than a single-digit percentage of people have tried a Q&A bot by now. Shoot, Windows just updated to insert Copilot into users' machines, with the icon right next to the Windows button. It can't not continue to grow. It's such an amazingly effective way to get information versus scouring through web pages.
- soatok 2y ago
  > For sure more than a single-digit percentage of people have tried a Q&A bot by now. Tried is doing a lot of heavy lifting. https://meow.social/@crumbcake/113156927685392932 https://meow.social/@crumbcake/113156927685392932 > Shoot, Windows just updated to insert Copilot into users' machines, with the icon right next to the Windows button. This goes back to my point about consent and opt-in vs opt-out. > It can't not continue to grow. "If we shove this down people's throats enough maybe their gag reflex will adapt." > It's such an amazingly effective way to get information versus scouring through web pages. The only reason I stopped using Google isn't to choose AI instead. It's because the obtrusive "AI Overview" pissed me off.
- thereddaikon 2y ago
  I hardly use it at all. ChatGPT was interesting at first but it slowly got worse and worse as changes had to be made to it so OpenAI wouldn't get sued. The same is true for all the other ones. LLMs can be great if they are allowed to blatantly violate copyright. But once everyone started circling the wagons and walling off their information they quickly started to lose their value.
  - inanutshellus 2y ago
    Feel free to not use it, it's your time. Some recent examples: * "I installed windows and now I can't access my linux partition" * "I want to add an `in` variable to an existing pl/sql function, can it go on the end of the parameter list? (Answer: No, because...)" * "What size soccer ball does AYSO U10 use?" * "what is the name of that python library that handles command line arguments, and could you provide an example that demonstrates required flags?" nothing earth shaking. not things that're impossible to find, but... instead of reading someone's blog post in which they work as hard as possible to belabor the point so you'll scroll through all 14... this thing just gives you the answer.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

marcosdumay 2y ago

Disrupted? As in destroyed so that you need to create a completely different one? There are some reports of people hired to write low quality spam articles that fit this. There isn't much else. There exist lots of people that claim some small gains, mostly because they use shitty tools that can't do what some tools could do 15 years ago (often the same tools). I'm afraid that's not enough to keep our current LLMs alive.

bbor 2y ago
I think they mean 'disrupted' in a more benign, quotidian sense. Like, changed significantly. That said, perhaps you could clarify your comment about "shitty tools that can't do what some tools could do 15 years ago"? Like what? I'd preemptively argue that Google Search has changed for market reasons, not technical ones, but I'm curious to hear if you meant something else. Objectively speaking, chatbots from 15 years ago (or 2...) were just not at all coherent. You can criticize modern LLMs all day, but they're definitely coherent.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > That said, perhaps you could clarify your comment about "shitty tools that can't do what some tools could do 15 years ago"? Yep, a large part is Google. But the most popular IDEs seem to be less capable of providing useful information nowadays too. (Yet, there exist good ones out there, and they haven't been explicitly enshitified, it's the languages and ecosystems that changed.)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sebstefan 2y ago
There's a bunch of crap and most of the AI bubble is low-value BS, and back when the Web was starting there was Pets.com. Realistically how many people are currently employed "writing low quality spam articles" That's not reality. That's just reddit crapping on strawmen because a lot of the visible results from AI is 1) Crap creative work and 2) Polluted search results/comment sections These are red herrings There's real people doing real productive things with AIs that do boring things right now. The ability to search for things that are still fuzzy in my mind, ask open-ended questions and get an answer back, or find something when you can't come up with a good keyword I've never had the google-fu that some other developers have so this was something that often required asking a peer before. Sometimes a forum or some Discord, even. Now you just feed your garbage question to a large language model that swallowed the entirety of the internet and a few seconds later it's spitting back something useful. It's the first time I have access to a robot that's on stand-by with surface level knowledge of everything. I suspect people who don't find this extremely valuable in their day-to-day life are just not catching the moments when they could've used it -- while on the other side of the spectrum the value it removes from comment sections/image search results is impossible to ignore.

klabb3 2y ago

> It's been a while since I've googled a "how do I..." type thing Same, but you’re missing planet-sized elephant in the room here. This use-case has been technically solved for 20 years. What’s happened is that web search was ripe for consumer value extraction (aka enshittification). Have you ever seen a market more saturated with perverse incentives, from ad delivery, content farms, data mining, and of course the very search engine that prints money from it? Now, if you wanna do an apples-apples comparison, imagine popups, consent forms, hidden influences from advertisers, recommendation engines, arbitrary lock-outs from community guidelines violations, ads while waiting for responses, JS bloat at recipe-website levels, and so on and so forth. By all means, enjoy ChatGPT or whatever in its naked current form. But make no mistake that this is the honeymoon phase. Potential doesn’t govern the direction of new tech. Incentive does.