citation/link/reference, please

Presumably ‘AI’ can make simple rules based decisions, if done properl

honest question: was this meant seriously, or in jest?

is this a pokemon level? I ask for the benefit of 2600 shitty LLMs

(precursor: imma be saying “I” a lot in this post. yes I mean a lot of these observations from a personal perspective, but I (haha) hope that it is also clear that I don’t mean them from only that)

ha ha, only serious. What if none of this is new?

indeed I agree a lot of it is not. the method may vary but the motivation/philosophy does not

however I do believe (and, hell, this is why I’m posting) that there is value in differentiating (ed: non-mathematic reference) in the details

What if none of this is new?

If this is a dealbreaker today, then it should have been a dealbreaker

in concrete terms, I agree. it also largely squares with when google started being offensively useless/less-good (ime it varied by domain (which post-hoc I think also got impacted by search-eng product dev decisions? supposition, never tried to trace. don’t think I ever will), affecting different ones at different timepoints)

then it shouldn’t be acceptable from DuckDuckGo, which has the same page-one results including an AI summary and panels

every time I see this shit pop up from DDG (or, similarly, in other contexts (e.g. AWS)) I every so “give it a test” and when it fucks up I send feedback of “please for the love of god stop forcing this shit on people” (<-- actual quote (sometimes more detail is added))

If summaries are unacceptable from Gemini, which has handily topped the leaderboards for weeks, then it’s not acceptable using models from any other vendor, including Alibaba, High-Flyer, Meta, Microsoft, or Twitter

exactly correct, and an entirely succinct explanation of a lot of at least some discomfort/rejection of these systems. there is a lot of detail and nuance into when/where/why people reject things built/relying on those systems, and I don’t want to get sidetracked on those here (not least because lemmy’s probably abysmal at margins), but they exist and I think it’s well worth engaging with all those communities wrt the substantive parts of their nope.gifs

If machine learning isn’t acceptable in collating search results today

this is almost a false equivalence imo (and I’m somewhat surprised to see you make the statement). 1) (speaking broadly) at the risk of being of being presumptuous (wrt the diverse viewpoints held by many others in the community here), I don’t really think a lot of people (here) would be ones going “ML==AI”? in fact, I feel like a number of the people would be ones (like myself) specifically trying to delineate between these. 2) “in collating” is a very specific subphrasing (and again I’m somewhat surprised to see you use it)

if fake, hallucinated, confabulated, or synthetic search results are ruining the Web today, then they were ruining the Web over two decades ago and have not lessened since

“yesssssssss… but”

there’s a very, very, very long conversation that is to be had here. and, hell, one of my perpetually-promised posts (yes I know) is something that touches on this

remind me later to get into a full rant about point-by-point examples of how continually-encroaching synthetic-media situations have dovetailed with a coinciding devolution in critical thought and detailed coverage. (def later tho: it features at least 3 side rants, and it takes a lot out of me)

The issue is sheer data; ever since about 1991, before the Web existed, there has been too much data available on the Internet to search exhaustively and quickly

“yesssssssss… but”

again, I think a notable substantive point of differentiation (still not math) here is the particulars of the endeavour. the “how” and the “why” of responding to user queries is, under LLM world, substantively notably different to what it was under “the previous mode” (and yes I know it’s progressive and there’s detail here too, but I hope you can see “2010 goog” vs “2025 gemini goog” easily enough without elucidation)

The problem is recursive: when a user queries a popular search engine their results are populated by multiple different searchers using different techniques to learn what is relevant, because no one search strategy works at scale for most users asking most things.

(okay I never actually dug into the SE biz, but you’ve given me a thing to read about ty)

I’m not saying this to defend Google but to steer y’all away from uncanny-valley reactionism

I also ponder this myself sometimes, and I appreciate that part of it

The search-engine business model was always odious, but we were willing to tolerate it because it was very inaccurate and easy to game, like a silly automaton which obeys simple rules

y’know, I fucking hate the “we” here. (not directed at you and it’s a whole thing but:) it’s another false equivalence, brought on by abusive extractive fuckers. igwym but… gah. rage.

(that touches on another post I’ve been trying to write for 3 years (this one I have not yet succeeded in clarifying (parts of it exists in some voicenotes to friends etc)))

but A LOT of engineering has a very very real existential threat. Think about designing buildings. You basically just need to know a lot of rules / tables and how things interact to know what’s possible and the best practices

days since orangeposter (incorrectly) argued in certainty from 3 seconds of thought as to what they think is involved in a process: [0]

it’s so fucking frustrating to know easy this bullshit is to see if you know a slight bit of anything, and doubly frustrating as to how much of the software world is this thinking. I know it’s nothing particularly new and that our industry has been doing this for years, but scream

the author decided to stop publishing texts but instead lecture tirade preach unto the thronging youths directly

in person it’s easier to do sketchy shit that won’t immediately get caught by a wider audience, you see?

that was my first read, yeah… and then I realized that’s probably not what the poster meant

on the one hand, I want to try find which vendor marketing material “research paper” that paragraph was copied from, but on the other… after yesterday’s adventures trying to get data out of PDFs and c.o.n.s.t.a.n.t.l.y getting “hey how about this LLM? it’s so good![0]” search results, I’m fucking exhausted

[0]: also most of these are paired with pages of claims of competence and feature boasts, and then a quiet “psssst: also it’s a service and you send us your private data and we’ll do with it whatever we want” as hidden as they can manage

my post: “Created: Monday, February 3rd, 2025 at 7:44:32 PM GMT+02:00”

wikipedia article: “11:58, 3 March 2025”

worst game of internet sweepstakes ever

thanks, I’ll go check in the archives :)

since the name popped up elsewhere: what’s the feel on venkatesh rao?

(I often see the name in 🚩 places, but dunno if that’s because the areas or because the person)

Musk assured

(aeration? irunno I’m not a chem person. this is where skillsissuer will come Drop Knowledge)

if one presumes the money is gold and thus the scrolls were thin-film heavy metals, aerosolisation of that would explain quite a bit of the current situation

nah, not yet, imo. reasons: you overestimate how much & how many people care, and the complexities of doing such blocks well

I run the hosting of some small (by global standards) media setups and I’ve floated crawler defense there and had fairly little bite so far despite the issues the crawlers have caused. engagement brain is still extremely fucking prevalent

using it to source data in the meantime. I can tell you with absolute certainty that openai lies about its sourcing

see the funny thing is that ms et al are walking back/scaling down their deployment plans, but that’s all partial on the whole. microsoft isn’t going to completely explode overnight the moment everyone groks llms are trash, even though they’re gonna take a hit

the entities like coreweave whose entire existence is predicated on the fairy tale, however…

(I am still worried about the multi-industry downstream impact of when this shit finally pops though, it is going to be nasty)

it’s possibly a distinction without a meaningful difference, but I wouldn’t say they’re selling shovels - this shit is more like renting out shovels. or maybe timeshare?

I’d love to see a postmortem on deals and development… I have some suspicions on how it all got in this mess to start with (largely “if we sink piles of capex now to corner the market on the magical future, we can totes make it through 5y!” type variations), but I want to see if I’m right

google stepping up their quest to disorganize the world’s information

two giant upsets to the semi market in the space of half a decade is probably perfectly fine and won’t have multi year global impacts, right? right?

(oof at that week, and g’luck with whatever still comes your way with that)

(I don’t mind, just surprised at someone Of The Internet actually using that name :D)