19 ms·

The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

• gkn 1y ago
  Google is the greatest shopping center in the world and I must admit; I really do like it. Must be more shoppers around than the information seekers it seems.
• DavidPiper 1y ago
  > The LLM providers [are] businesses that have to find a way to earn a ridiculous amount of money for a huge number of big investors, and capitalism does not have builtin morals. What externalities will the broader public end up paying? I actually have a theory about this. I hate it, but I can absolutely imagine this future. I'm going to specifically talk about the software engineering industry, but let's assume that LLMs progress to the stage where "vibe coding" can be applied to other areas ("vibe writing", "vibe research", "vibe security", "vibe art", "vibe doctors", "vibe management", "vibe CEOs", etc.) It only takes a few years of "vibe coding graduates" to be successful in their work to create a new class of software engineer - this is in fact what AI companies are actively encouraging / envisioning as the future. Assuming this happens in the next few years, we're still in the phase where AI companies are burning money acquiring as many of these users as possible. In about 5 years, some of those vibe coders will become vibe managers, and executives will no doubt be even more invested in LLMs as the solution to their problems. At a certain tipping point, a large part of the industry can't actually function effectively without LLMs. I don't know when this point will be, but vibe coders (or other vibe <industry>ers) don't have to be a majority, they just have to be a large enough group. Suddenly AI companies have all their losses called in and they have to pay back their VCs. LLM usage prices skyrocket. ---- Four things happen across 2 axes: - [A] Companies that can afford to pay skyrocketing LLM costs, vs. [B] those that can't - [C] Companies that have reached a critical mass of vibe coders, vs. [D] those that haven't ---- [BC] These companies collapse. They don't have talent and they can't afford to outsource it to LLMs anymore. [BD] These companies lay off all their vibe coders because they can't afford LLMs anymore. They survive on the talent they retain, but this looks very different if you're a large or small business. Small businesses probably fail too. [AC] These companies see an enormous increase in costs that they cannot avoid. Large layoffs likely, but widespread vibe coding continues. [AD] These companies have a decision to make: lay off all their vibe coders, or foot the LLM bill. The action they take will depend on their exact circumstances. Again, most small business in this situation probably fail. --- The real question is, for the surviving vibe companies [AC, AD]. Will they be able to sustain such high costs in the long-run, and even if they can, will enough be able to sustain them to successfully pay back all the AI companies' losses to that date? Interesting times ahead, maybe.
• boothby 1y ago
  > These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themselves in this way, if they haven't already.
  • micromacrofoot 1y ago
    fortunately for our investors we have found a way to solve this with more ai
    • quesera 1y ago
      "AI is like XML — if it's not working for you, you're not using enough of it."
  • dhosek 1y ago
    I kind of look forward to freshman composition essays “written” with AI that are rife with appeals to use online casinos.
    • huskyr 1y ago
      Can't wait for all school essays promoting dubious crypto schemes of some sort.
  • nperez 1y ago
    I'm not going to disagree because greed knows no bounds, but that could be RIP for the enthusiast crowd's proprietary LLM use. We may not have cheap local open models that beat the SOTA, but is it possible to beat an ad-poisoned SOTA model on a consumer laptop? Maybe.
    • rusk 1y ago
      On the flip side, there could be a cottage industry churning out models of various strains and purities. This will distress the big players who want an open field to make money from their own adulterated inferior product so home grown LLM will probably end up being outlawed or something.
• gerdesj 1y ago
  I am deliberately keeping away from LLMs for search. I'm old enough to remember finally ditching Altavista for the new upstart Google. I did briefly flirt with Ask Jeeves but it was not good enough. I don't think anyone has it sorted yet. LLM search will always be flawed due to being a next token guesser - it cannot be trusted for "facts". A LLM fact is not even a considered opinion, it is simply next token guessing. LLMs certainly cannot be trusted for "current affairs" - they will always be out of date, by definition (needs training) Modern search - Goog or Bing or whatever - seem to be somewhat confused, ad riddled and stuffed with rubbish results at the top. I've populated a uBlacklist with some popular lists and the results of my own encounters. DDG and co are mostly useful now, for me.
  • myself248 1y ago
    I miss Altavista every day. Case-sensitive search is how you tell DOS from DoS. Putting "exact phrases" in quotes no longer seems to work. Then they added insult to injury by forcing you to +mandate a term otherwise they might just ignore it. Now that no longer works either. I've entirely given up on Google. I've made extensive shortcuts so I can directly search various sites straight from my location bar: wikipedia, wiktionary, urbandictionary, genius, imdb, onelook, knowyourmeme, and about two dozen suppliers/distributors/retailers where I regularly shop. If I need something that's not on that list, I'll try some search engines but I start with the assumption that I'm not going to find it, because the battle for search is lost.
    • sgarland 1y ago
      Altavista was the OG. I remember it being cantankerous and requiring you to specific in how you searched, but if you knew how to use it, it was unmatched. Until Google.
      • devilbunny 1y ago
        It was fast, which almost nothing else was at the time. And if people on dialup connections think you’re slow, it’s because you are.
      • 1y ago
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• jay_kyburz 1y ago
  The web is in such a bad state, I think there is probably an opportunity for traditional publishers (or somebody else, like a university) to start a walled garden web. A vast trove of interesting, and valuable information on every topic. No shopping, no ads. Just the content you would find in the library. People used to spend money on books and magazines, I'm sure some of them could be convinced to sign up for a Netflix of books and magazines.
  • alisonatwork 1y ago
    We already have that and it's Wikipedia.
    • jay_kyburz 1y ago
      Can you imagine how much better it would be if people were paid to create the content!
      • bawolff 1y ago
        I think it would be worse. Money tends to ruin collaborative communities.
        • melagonster 1y ago
          They should offer more money. Wikipedia invited some professor writing. thye take responsibility for their whole life on job.
          • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
            Professors don't necessarily want to waste their time fighting with Wikipedia admins.
        • ars 1y ago
          It doesn't need to be collaborative, people write books for money all the time. It's how the vast majority of human knowledge has been stored and perpetuated for millennia. This new business of people writing up their knowledge for free (wikpedia, stackexchange, forums, reddit, etc) is relatively new, and only semi-working.
• cbsmith 1y ago
  Some curious misconceptions here about how the search industry works. There's a very strong financial incentive for ad-powered search engines to keep SEO spam out of search results, because that makes advertisers more willing to pay for search placement. A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the commons" type scenario where the engine is overtaken with spam. Yes, there are perverse incentives to populate search engine results with paid placements, but the best corrective force I can think of is having more competition in the search space. As long as people are willing to try other search engines (spoiler: for the most part, they are currently not), this creates a strong incentive to ensure that paid placements that harm the search experience are kept to a minimum. ...and I think the concerns about profitability of the LLM space is completely missing the larger agenda. Even if public use of OpenAI and its competitors NEVER TURNS A PROFIT, there is tremendous economic opportunity that investors expect to realize from a company with intelligent/powerful LLMs. That is why they are pumping so much money into these companies.
  • nehal3m 1y ago
    This reeks of “communism is when capitalism” to me, because: >A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the commons" type scenario where the engine is overtaken with spam. But then how come that is exactly what is happening with modern search engines? It’s just always advertising that comes along and fucks up a good thing.
    • hnbad 1y ago
      If "the government" were to run Google Search, it would be bad because nobody cares about making it good because profit is the only motivating force for organizations. Because Google runs Google Search, it's instead only bad because profit motivates Google to push its services, increase ad impressions/interactions and incentivize users to not actually leave the search engine result page (e.g. by citing or summarizing content of the related web pages on the result page). And because competition is good that means Google actively competing with the sites it indexes for the attention of its users is a good thing even if those sites losing out and failing would result in worse search results over time. Hang on, maybe "content stealing" really already was a problem before LLMs made it their entire MO and those greedy newspaper publishers were onto something when they complained about Google lifting their news feeds even if it provided "exposure" for them.
• hug 1y ago
  The author would do well to check out Kagi -- the search results for all of the suggested queries are, to my eye, better than the results they found. Given that Kagi's higher tier plans come with search-enabled LLM chat interfaces, and those searches use Kagi's results (which, again, appear to be superior) it seems to me that you get the best of both worlds: Better search, and better search results to feed into your search-enabled LLM queries. I am not affiliated with Kagi or anything, it's just honestly that good a product.
  • bigstrat2003 1y ago
    I second the recommendation for Kagi. It just blows all competitors out of the water in my opinion, and I'm happy to pay for it as long as they keep that quality up.
    • mplanchard 1y ago
      Third. The ability to uprank sites makes the “finding known content” use case absolutely amazing. The specific postgres docs case in the blog post is one I am constantly using kagi as my external brain for.
  • galaxyLogic 1y ago
    I've been using Preplexity lately while learning to use Yamaha SeqTrack synthesizer. I have the UserGuide, but I find it easier and faster to ask Preplexity for things like "How do I mute a track?". It never occurred to me I could use Google this way. And it is a novel idea to me, that it seems to be better to use AI than read a manual.
    • otabdeveloper4 1y ago
      If Google's LLM is trained on the SeqTrack manual, then yes. If it's not then it will just invent some plausible-souding bullshit that doesn't actually work. After the fifth time you get burnt by this the whole LLM experience starts to sour.
      • 1y ago
• iamkeithmccoy 1y ago
  > AIs are much better at responding to my intent, and they rarely attempt to sell me anything Yet. It's only a matter of time before AI becomes ad-riddled and enshittified.
  • bdangubic 1y ago
    they won’t as long as you are paying $200+/month
    • vintermann 1y ago
      Bold to assume they won't try to double-dip and profit from you in more than one way. Cable TV got ads, subscription newspapers got ads (and advertorials). Just because it's not free doesn't mean you aren't the product.
      • carlosjobim 1y ago
        In that moment you cancel your subscription. Why does this argument come up again and again? The past, present, and future are not the same thing. You should especially notice that when having a meal.
      • lesuorac 1y ago
        Cable never claimed to be ad-free; it's an old wives tale.
    • chgs 1y ago
      If they can make an extra $20 from adverts on to they will. Sky TV makes 10 times as much from subscription as adverts but spends 30% of the time showing you adverts. London underground revenue is a similar ratio - for every £9 tickets they make £1 in adverts. If I go to the cinema they spend 20 minutes showing adverts to people who spent £50 on tickets and popcorn. Companies shave very little incentive not to make things shit with adverts. The measurable cost to them is tiny, the cost to the rest of the world is massive. Odeon won’t attribute lost revenue from my reduced visits to their adverts, but will measure the 50p or whatever they get.
• WiggleGuy 1y ago
  I built a portal that makes it easier to query against multiple different search engines (https://allsear.ch/ https://allsear.ch/). It's open source, free, all that. I must say, building it really expanded my view of the internet. I am also a heavy Kagi and Reddit user for search, and usually that's enough. But when it's not, its concerning how much better other search engines can be, especially since non-tech savvy folks will never use them.
  • ccvannorman 1y ago
    using my default browser (brave) and pressing "enter" (doing a search) did not do anything. The page just sits there. apparently, I need to make a selection of a search engine to use this. I would not use this as a replacement for my duckduckgo or google searches simply because of the UX of not being able to type a query and press "enter" as the default.
    • WiggleGuy 1y ago
      That's fair. You can probably hack that experience by making use of the "rules" feature. You can have certain search engines or macros launch automatically upon pressing enter based on the content of the query. You if you set a rule to check if your search contains a vowel (which most will), it's effectively a catch all rule. Hacky, but it will work.
• magarnicle 1y ago
  So why aren't real libraries like this? Can you fund the internet the same way?
  • DoctorOW 1y ago
    The equivalent of the library for online research IS real libraries. Your library card likely gives you access to ad free online resources, I know mine does and I've been a patron of several libraries as I've moved around.
  • hnbad 1y ago
    Because real libraries are not for-profit enterprises and have a negative (or at least extremely unimpressive) ARR. Incidentally their leadership positions also don't provide anywhere near the levels of compensation you'd expect for a C-level position at an equally large company. Asking for "the Internet" to be funded the same way as real libraries is quite the contrary to the dominant cultural narrative which asks for public services and entire governments to be operated "like a business", which usually means cutting funding, selling assets, doing layoffs and eventually scrapping it for parts once it has become predictably defunct.
  • fancyfredbot 1y ago
    In the UK 190 libraries have been closed in the last five years. Before closure some of these only opened 2 days a week. It's common for libraries which remain open to be staffed by unpaid volunteers. My point is that the funding model for libraries is not exactly a massive success! I expect these libraries would have accepted advertising funding before they chose closure. I'm not aware of any advertising funded libraries although I'm sure the idea has been considered. I think that in the physical world the cost per visitor in a library is probably too high for such a funding model to be successful. Also the library is not typically visited by the highest value advertising targets limiting the amount which can be raised this way. I think these are probably the real reason why real libraries aren't like this!
    • graemep 1y ago
      I think that is more the result of bad government than anything else. Libraries are a low profile resource with long term benefits (e.g. improving education and quality of life) in ways that are not immediately captured by metrics. They are incredibly good value for money, if you understand the benefits and take a long view. However, politically they are an easy thing to cut.
• Peteragain 1y ago
  A proposal for a solution. The data is the unique selling point. Put that in public hands with an API, published algorithms, and it's own development team. The free market can then sell user interfaces, filters, and whatever. The metaphor is roads (state managed) and vehicles (for profit). Today I can (physically) go to the British Library and get any published book, or go on line and pay for the privilege.
• eviks 1y ago
  > These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. > This is just my anecdata Not a single example, so it's not even that, just vibes > the past few years. There’s recent science to read about the quality of search. Let's look at the "science" > We monitored Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for a year on 7,392 product review queries. Oh, so there is nothing about the past few years either. And this isn't "search", but a very narrow category of search that is one of the prime targets for SEO scam, so it's always been bad, and the same incentives made review content highly suspect before any SEO was ever involved. Which multiple engines can help you here? Which LLMs?
• petesergeant 1y ago
  I mean sure, but also, I feel like the ability to query an LLM for something is an invaluable resource I never had before and has made knowledge acquisition immeasurably easier for me. I definitely search the web much, much less when I'm trying to learn something.
• BrenBarn 1y ago
  This is another article that, for me, sort of walks right by the answers without realizing it. As I was reading, I was thinking "does this person really not think AI is going to be flooded with ads soon enough?" Then they asked the LLM that, and it basically said yes, and then the response. . . to go "Hmmm, I wonder if that will happen"? Yes, of course it's going to happen. Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering whether ads would infect search engines or the web would be flooded with sites which are ads masquerading as actual content. Why would we believe anything different of AI? The only way it won't happen is if we decide we don't want it, instead of accepting it as inevitable. And well, the article is ostensibly about AI, but then at the end: > The investors aren’t just doing this to be nice. Someone is going to expect returns on this huge gamble at some point. > ... > The LLM providers aren’t librarians providing a public service. They’re businesses that have to find a way to earn a ridiculous amount of money for a huge number of big investors, and capitalism does not have builtin morals. Those are the things that need to change. They have nothing to do with AI. AI is a symptom of a broken socioeconomic system that allows a small (not "huge" in the scheme of things) number of people to "gamble" and then attempt to rig the table so their gamble succeeds. AI is a cute bunny rabbit and our runaway-inequality-based socioeconomic system is the vat of toxic waste that turned that innocent little bunny into a ravening mutant. Yes, it's bad and needs to be killed, but we'll just be overrun by a million more like it if we don't find a way to lock away that toxic waste.
  • itzjacki 1y ago
    > They have nothing to do with AI. Not inherently, but I think LLM services (and maybe other AI based stuff) are corruptible in a much more dangerous way than the things our socioeconomic system has corrupted so far. Having companies pay to end up on the top of the search engine pile is one thing, but being able to weave commerciality into what are effectively conversations between vulnerable users and an entity they trust is a whole other level of terrible.
    • BrenBarn 1y ago
      I'm not so sure. We've commercialized medicine, housing, music, you name it. It is that process of corruption that is at issue here. If we had ended it 10 or 20 years ago we wouldn't have AI in the sense we have it now (and that would be a good thing).
• willvarfar 1y ago
  My dream solution: The EU creates an institution for public knowledge, a kind of library+tech solution. It probably funds classic libraries in member countries, but it also invests in tech. It dovetails nicely into a big push to get science to thrive in the EU etc. The tech part makes a in-the-public-interest search engine and AI. The techies are incentivised to try and whack-a-mole the classic SEO. E.g. they might spot pages that regurgitate, they might downscore sites that are ad-driven, they might upscore obvious sources of truth for things like government, they might downscore pages whose content changes too much etc. And the AI part is not for product placement sale. This would bring in a golden age of enlightenment, perhaps for - say - 20 years or so, before the inevitable erosion of base mission. And all the strong data science types would want to work for it!
  • SoftTalker 1y ago
    Sounds like Wikipedia, except for the EU ownership.
  • graemep 1y ago
    > The tech part makes a in-the-public-interest search engine and AI. Which will be provided by a private sector contractor and it goes to the lowest bidder who offsets their costs with advertising.
    • willvarfar 1y ago
      hey! it's my dream, and in my dream world it would be commissioned from academia :)
      • beAbU 1y ago
        I hope the academia of your dreams create code that is not like real-world academia :)
        • wood_spirit 1y ago
          Academia has the full gamut of software quality. A good example what springs to mind is Wirths operating systems work at ETH. In the same way that the early google made it great to put top minds on mundane problems, let’s imagine that an institute can make a knowledge-first search engine and AI. It’s about aligning incentives.
• Kiyo-Lynn 1y ago
  The current search engines really feel like a librarian who's always trying to sell you something. I just want to find a simple answer, but I keep getting led to all kinds of other pages. I believe if search engines were more like public libraries, focused on providing information rather than recommending things for commercial reasons, the experience would be so much better.
  • therein 1y ago
    Did Google take another nosedive? I genuinely truly did not use it once in the last 6 months. Kagi actually works as a complete substitute now.
• karel-3d 1y ago
  The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all!
  • Mistletoe 1y ago
    I’m constantly confused why Google wants me to use Gemini so much. Why would they want me to use an AI that doesn’t show ads, isn’t their search, and costs them money to generate the responses? The instant we see ads in LLMs we will stop using them, it will be as abrupt and as annoying as the vuvuzela example because using an LLM is a very intimate interaction. It will feel much more jarring when your intimate chat friend becomes a used car salesman to you. I get that AI=stock go up right now but it seems like they are poisoning their own well deeply down this path.
    • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      > I’m constantly confused why Google wants me to use Gemini so much. Why would they want me to use an AI that doesn’t show ads, isn’t their search, and costs them money to generate the responses? The instant we see ads in LLMs we will stop using them, it will be as abrupt and as annoying as the vuvuzela example because using an LLM is a very intimate interaction. I think with the last sub-clause (that I emphasized), you answered your question: because the conversation is more intimate, Google learns more about your "true interests", be it to make advertising to you more targeted, or for more sinister purposes.
    • lipowitz 1y ago
      Google thinks it is going to charge a monthly fee for Gemini so they are basically correcting their model to be user paid in the switch from search to LLM. They are also trying to reduce workers in search, etc, somewhat through the trained LLMs so the other idea is that they have lower costs per user. I don't think many people will pay monthly fees or will want to pay them for each platform they use which is why they all tend to do so many questionable integration attempts to try to get users to not want to use a separate LLM of their choice in a browser instead.
• pajamasam 1y ago
  SEO spam was still easy enough to spot and skip through in search results before the masses of LLM-generated content took over. They seem to generate extremely specific websites and content for every conceivable search phrase. I'm not even sure what their end goal is since they aren't even always riddled with affiliate links. Sometimes I wonder if the AI companies are generating these low-quality search results to drive us to use their LLMs instead.
  • Retr0id 1y ago
    > they aren't even always riddled with affiliate links. Presumably the goal is to build up a positive-ish reputation, before they start trying to monetize it. Or perhaps to sell the site itself for someone else to monetize, on the basis of the number of clicks it's getting per month.
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  > I would rather use a library where the librarians don’t have financial incentives to show me certain kinds of books more often than others. Oh, you sweet summer child... I have family that used to be in charge of dealing with institutional corruption. In particular, public service corruption. It's bad. Very, very bad. When "public servants" are paid less than their private counterparts, are routinely treated like crap by their employers, as well as those they serve, and they are in charge of services that could be incredibly lucrative to others, you're guaranteed to get corruption. "Let's just use AI!" is the rallying cry. Now, let's examine a scenario, where the folks that can make money from the service, also run the tools that implement the service...
  • rightbyte 1y ago
    What are you claiming here? That librarians get kickbacks on certain books?
    • ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      Probably in that case (the hypothetical), but everyone knows librarians do it for the bananas. ook
• elif 1y ago
  Completely agree with this post I don't even think he's exaggerating. I tried to search the full name of a specific roof company in my area in quotes, and they weren't in the first page of results. But I got so many disclosed and not disclosed ads for OTHER contractors. SEO has turned search engines into a kind of quasi-mafia "protection" racket.. "oh you didn't pay your protection fee, wouldn't it be a shame if something happened to your storefront?"
• GnarfGnarf 1y ago
  What makes the author think we are entitled to free search? How much would you pay for ad-free search? The “golden era” of free search was just setting us up for the plucking.
• zkmon 1y ago
  Selling has poisoned human life. As someone who grew on a farm, with a culture that never bothered to sell anything, and never cared to impress anyone, we pitied on the pathetic business/sales people and anyone who tries to impress other through art/acts etc. The street performer such as drama artists and acrobats got some kind give-aways. Today, I can't watch any TV without immediately realizing that every face I see on TV is forced to sell their expression and talk. They are basically selling, not expressing their true feelings. Every great movie, actor, great singer, great anchor - everyone. There is nothing natural in human interactions any more.
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  This example falls apart because libraries are paid for by taxes. I wish I could violently shake every internet user while yelling "If you are not paying money for it, you cannot complain about it" The librarian is selling you a vuvuzela because that is the only way the library has been able to keep the lights on. They offered a membership but people flipped out "Libraries are free! I never had to pay in the past! How dare you try and take my money for a free service!". They tried a "Please understand the service we provide and give a donation" but less than 2% of people donated anything. Never mind that there is a backdoor that you can use, allowing you to never need to interact with a librarian while fully utilizing the libraries services (that the library still pays for). The internet was ruined by people unwilling to pay for it. And yes, I know the internet was perfect in 1996, I have a pair of rose colored glasses too.
• NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  >Yet these days I find that I often can no longer convince the search engine to give me what I want, even when I know it exists and can describe the shape in detail. These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. A couple months ago, I spent a week or two writing some shell scripts to exhaustively mine one of those pdf hosting companies, looking for digital copies of Paste magazine. I only became aware that they might still exist after having spent at least a week trudging through Wayback Machine's archives of the old Paste website. I think I managed to get 8 or 9 issues total. Search is dead. There was a time when I could probably have found those with a careful Google search in under an hour.
• pengaru 1y ago
  You'd have to be pretty daft to not imagine your future LLM conversations being corrupted by private interests, in far more subtle ways than the obvious ads littering search results.
• insane_dreamer 1y ago
  I think it's a bit naive to think that companies like OpenAI will be content with their monthly user subscription fees and not seek to monetize their content through ads. Yahoo and Google didn't have ads either at the beginning (neither did Facebook or Instagram). And the reason why Google became the dominant tech company aka money-maker it is today is because of Adwords.
• jeffbee 1y ago
  There is a good article scattered within this article, but unfortunately it is hard to take seriously when it claims to be based on "research" entitled "Is Google Getting Worse" which is one of the most misleading papers of the last few years. That's the title and everyone just closes the tab. University researchers have proved that Google is getting worse! There was a paper! But the problem with the paper is that none of the search results it evaluates are from Google.
• hennell 1y ago
  It's an interesting article although I think it's rather telling that the authors search of "postgres slow database" seems to disappear in the LLM section. It mentions the adds disappeared, but no mention of the solutions found or the amount of time or changes to how they searched/added the question. I've found AI helpful for answering questions, but better at plausibly answering them, I still end up checking links to verify what was said and where it's sourced from. It saves frustration but not really time.
• culebron21 1y ago
  Absolutely agree. Especially Google search results became generic and useless. Their Youtube search is a list of 3 generic links and then just complete junk. DuckDuckGo had been lagging behind Google for years, but around 2022 it became on par if not superior.
• foobarbecue 1y ago
  Physical libraries are such an excellent way to discover new knowledge. I don't think the internet ever provided as good an experience for browsing reliable information. So while I know this story is meant to be a old web vs new web analogy, it could also be read as a defense of the literal public library in the face of digitization.