Pxtl

Pxtl , 4 days ago

Absolutely.

Bing Chat Assistant is better than Google, Bing search, or DDG today. If I search for "how do I do X in software Y" on a normal search, I get zillions of dead-link-filled MS pages, some interesting tangentially-related stackoverflow posts, and a bunch of old blogspam.

If I ask the robot, I often get "no, there's no supported way to do that officially" which is the clear clean answer I can't find elsewhere. Or sometimes it misunderstands the question and gives me a tangentially-related result, which is bad but is the same thing I get from Google via StackOverflow, except Bing is much more responsive to me saying "no, I didn't mean that way, I meant this" in which case I often get either the right answer or the "no" answer, which is still good and accurate! The problem is as you iterate, the conversation accumulates cruft and becomes more erratic and hallucinatory.

But right now, with the level of SEO that has ruined all major search engines (ironically partially caused by AI), Bing Chat is the best search on the market now imho. <homer>The cause of and solution to all of life's problems </homer>

So yeah, in terms of "things where AI has lived up to its potential"? It is winning the search war today. Everything else is something on the horizon in various distances (art, music, text generation, true general AI) but better search for information is here right now.

Pxtl , 4 days ago

Bing Chat provides its sources.

Pxtl , 4 days ago

I mean yeah. I'm not disagreeing with any of that (except the fact that AI caused it - search engines got destroyed by SEO before AI textgen started crapflooding).

But it is what it is. The SEO spammers won. They defeated Google and Microsoft and DDG's respective search algorithms. Traditional search got killed. The internet got worse instead of better.

In light of this miserable new reality, AI-based content synthesizers (particularly ones that can coherently point to the references for their synthesis) are the current solution to SEO spam. Maybe this is another temporary plateau that the SEO spammers will murder. And yes, it's tragic that this energy-pig of AI is the best solution to something that used to be doable with a simple trie.

But still: there is a real problem today for which an AI-based tech provides the current best solution. In this one specific case, the AI lives up to the hype. It swallows the hellscape of noise of the internet and gives you the signal.

Pxtl , 14 days ago

Except there isn't much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn't better. DDG isn't better.

Pxtl , 1 month ago

I have a simple opinion on paywall bypassers:

If it's possible to bypass the paywall, that means there's already a class of unauthenticated clients you're allowing to see it. I have no interest in complying with whatever infrastructure you use to implement this discrimination.

Implementing a true hard paywall is trivial software. The only reason bypassing is possible is because they're trying to have their cake and eat it too by allowing (eg) search engines to see it unauthenticated.

Pxtl , 1 month ago

You know those "X is now older than Y was when X came out"?

Like, in this case: "Pearl Jam Ten is now older than The White Album was when Pearl Jam Ten came out"

That happened in 2014.

Pxtl , 2 months ago

Yeah, this. For people with short commutes and in the market for a compact I strongly recommend the Prius Prime. Having a vehicle that can get to work and back without using gas at all, but also can go on long road trips without range anxiety? Perfect. And as an entry-level into the plug-in world, it's nice that I can charge it on regular 110 instead of having to think about an upgrade to an oven-port.

Pxtl , 2 months ago

So, do you have to have an account to drive a Tesla?

Pxtl , 2 months ago

Oh, physical tag. I thought this was going to be about cryptographic data signing.

Pxtl , 2 months ago

Like the old joke:

The "S" in IoT is for "Security".

Pxtl , 3 months ago

The secret trick here: nobody will make a new username and password - nor should they. They'll only log in if they have a convenient login with Google/FB/MS button. Which gives Google premium position in tracking.

Pxtl , 3 months ago

As a software developer: MS has been 100X better to work with under Nadella. He may not know what to do with the operating system side of things, but the .NET/Azure/android/linux etc side has never been healthier.

Pxtl , 3 months ago

Give me back my vertical side-docked taskbar or STFU.

No, I don't want to deal with Explorer Patcher.

Pxtl , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I keep saying: none of this will end until we get a clean, cryptographically secure, government-backed way to ID who is sending us something, and it becomes an expectation to use it all the time for anything important. Which is why I have conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theories about government ID.

Pxtl , 3 months ago

sounds dystopian.

So does the total death of objective fact.

An end to internet anonymity isn't great, but given the alternative I'll take it.

Pxtl , 3 months ago

Yes, but DDG seems to have worse organic results in my experience. I mean the bar is low, but DDG falls under it.

Pxtl , 4 months ago

I can't be the only person noticing that somebody is posting a comic about mushrooms with the handle "stamets".

Pxtl , 4 months ago

Surprising, I thought thermal solar power was going the way of the dodo.

Pxtl , 5 months ago

Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.

By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.

edit: also, number of instances doesn't matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to

Pxtl , 5 months ago

Part of it is just today's polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.

Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply "don't cross the picket line" thinking to everything, even where it doesn't make sense.

Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.

Pxtl , 5 months ago

ITT:

"Nobody understands fedipact, Jabber, activitypub, Ruby, embrace/extend/extinguish, mastodon, lemmy, Java, federation, Kubernetes, XMPP, Docker, architecture, carburetors, Ikebana, midwifery, Filipino stickfighting, Zoroastrianism, hegelian philosophy, or XML but me, and therefore you're all morons with nothing to contribute to this conversation".

Pxtl , 6 months ago

This is overstated.

In the old days, there was a hierarchy of reputability. At the top you had the bluechecks that generally represented reputable sources of information, who had premium billing in the platform. Then you had the normies. Then you had the slush-pit of soft-blocked people that were shoved into the "other replies" box because everybody hated them and they only followed their network of bots.

Now, the hierarchy is reversed. The slush-pit people are now have blue-checks, the algorithmic boost on blue-checks is even stronger, and half of the old reputable blue-checks have left.

This is like saying "Reddit/Lemmy has always been awful" if we made the upvotes/downvotes of all the worst people on the site worth 100X what a normal person's upvote/downvote was worth. Yes, there have always been problems, but they can get worse.

Pxtl , 6 months ago

Yes.

But here's the thing:

Reddit/Lemmy: those people have equal voice to you or me. Of course they can amplify that voice with sockpuppets, but still - one account one vote.

Old Twitter: those people have downmodded influence. Twitter knew everybody hates them and treated them like the garbage they are.

New Twitter: those people rule the roost, because they're willing to pay Elon $8/mo for a megaphone for their jackassery.

Pxtl , 6 months ago

Okay, but the new Twitter reinstated him, and a bunch of Nazis.

I mean, old Twitter was jokingly called "the hellsite" by its users but its new Elongated form is quite a lot worse.