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ilinamorato

@ilinamorato@lemmy.world

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ilinamorato ,

I think that anything benign that separates evil people from a significant portion of their cash is fine by me. That's millions of dollars they can't use to break up unions, or replace human workers with AI, or pay for campaign ads (or hush money, or legal costs). And it's not something that's aiding them in those pursuits, so it's generally just money they're losing.

I think. That's just my initial idea.

Best Buy Membership "discount" (lemmy.world)

So I was shopping with my wife today and I said "oh let's see if my membership helps out." So we went and added the same item to each of our carts, and to our surprise, the total was the same! So what is it exactly that I'm paying for in this membership if the items "original price" is higher for me than it is for regular...

ilinamorato ,

Greetings fellow Hoosier. The Castleton Best Buy is particularly awful, though I guess the website is not necessarily a reflection on that. Did you check the Micro Center to see if they have what you're looking for?

ilinamorato ,

Oh, bummer. But yeah, I remember being simultaneously bummed about the Fry's closing, and also feeling vindicated that they were going out of business after how bad they had become in their last years.

ilinamorato ,

The problem is, the internet has adapted to the Google of a year ago, which means that setting Google search back to 2009 just means that every "SEO hacker" gets to have a field day to get spam to the top of results without any controls to prevent them.

Google built a search engine optimized for the early internet. Bad actors adapted, to siphon money out of Google traffic. Google adapted to stop them. Bad actors adapted. So began a cat-and-mouse game which ended with the pre-AI Google search we all know and hate today. Through their success, Google has destroyed the internet that was; and all that's left is whatever this is. No matter what happens next, Google search is toast.

ilinamorato ,

The smart money is on the rumor that OpenAI was going to launch a search engine this month or next. That turned out to be false, and what they were really launching was GPT-4o; but it seems like Google believed the rumors and decided that they had to act first or risk being second place; unfortunately for Google, the gamble relied on "SearchGPT" (1) existing, and (2) being worse than SGE.

ilinamorato ,

Google wants that to work. That's why the "knowledge panels" kept popping up at the top of search before now with links to Wikipedia. They only want to answer the easy questions; definitions, math problems, things that they can give you the Wikipedia answer for, Yelp reviews, "Thai Food Near Me," etc. They don't want to answer the hard questions; presumably because it's harder to sell ads for more niche questions and topics. And "harder" means you have to get humans involved. Which is why they're complaining now that users are asking questions that are "too hard for our poor widdle generative AI to handle :-("— they don't want us to ask hard questions.

ilinamorato ,

The fact that it's hard to tell is pretty damning, for the public perception of SGE if not for its actual capabilities.

ilinamorato ,

Does anybody remember "Cha-Cha?" This was literally their model. Person asks a question via text message (this was like 2008), college student Googles the answer, follows a link, copies and pastes the answer, college student gets paid like 20¢.

Source: I was one of those college students. I never even got paid enough to get a payout before they went under.

ilinamorato ,

AI, used in small, local models, as an assistance tool, is actually somewhat helpful. AI is how Google Translate got so good a decade or so ago, for instance; and how assistive image recognition has become good enough that visually-impaired people can potentially access the web just as proficiently as sighted people. LLM-assisted spell check, grammar check, and autocomplete show a lot of promise. LLM-assisted code completion is already working decently well for common programming languages. There are potentially other halfway decent uses as well.

Basically, if you let computers do what they're good at (objective, non-creative, repetitive, large-dataset tasks that don't require reasoning or evaluation), they can make humans better at what they're good at (creativity, pattern-matching, ideation, reasoning). And AI can help with that, even though they can't get humans out of the loop.

But none of those things put dollar signs in VC's eyes. None of those use cases get executives thinking, "hey, maybe we can fire people and save on the biggest single recurring expense any corporation puts on their balance sheet." None of these make worried chip manufacturers breathe a sigh of relief that they can continue making the line go up after Moore's Law finally kicks the bucket. None of those things make headlines in late-stage capitalism. Elon Musk can't use any of those things as smokescreens to distract from his mismanagement of the (formerly) most consequential social media brand in history. None of that gives former crypto bros that same flutter of superiority.

So the hype gets pumped up to insane levels, which makes the valuations inflate, which makes them suck up more data heedless of intellectual property, which makes them build more power-hungry data centers, which means they have to generate more hype (based on capabilities the technology emphatically does not have and probably never will) to justify all of it.

Like with crypto. Blockchain showed some promise in extremely niche, low-trust environments; but that wasn't sexy, or something that anyone could sell.

Once the AI bubble finally breaks, we might actually get some useful tools out of it. Maybe. But you can't sell that.

ilinamorato ,

The fact that we don't even know the ratio is the really infuriating thing.

Google Search’s “udm=14” trick lets you kill AI search for good | Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)

Tack "&udm=14" on to the end of a normal search, and you'll be booted into the clean 10 blue links interface. While Google might not let you set this as a default, if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults.

ilinamorato ,

Ok. But what benefit would they gain by forcing people into AI search? That's not rhetorical, I'm legitimately asking. Are you saying this is just about controlling the experience? Because they already did, and all this is doing is weakening that control. It's certainly not easier or more cost-effective. They'll get LLM training data from either interface. The other things they shut down cost them development or maintenance or even just server space, but even if they managed 100% adoption of AI search they'll still need to maintain their old platform as a data source for the AI and for the below-page results. So what financial incentive do they have to push people to a more expensive, less-liked endpoint for that data?

ilinamorato ,

Learning what their profit motives are is helpful in the future, so that you can learn how to extract value from the corporation. This is the game in a capitalist hellscape: figure out how to get more out of them than they get out of you.

ilinamorato ,

Same. I've really wanted DDG to work, but it's a crapshoot. I set it as default on my phone with the intention of putting it on my laptop later after I finished a project for work, but phase 2 never happened because the results started to tank.

ilinamorato ,

Yeah, same. This is bonkers to me. I have dozens of tabs open on my Pixel 7 and my battery still lasts all day.

ilinamorato ,

This is the big thing for me. Any speed gains I might get from Chrome are entirely wiped out by how much the web browsing experience is dragged to a crawl by ads and spyware.

ilinamorato ,

He mentioned a a Pixel, but I'm running it on Pixel with no problems whatsoever.

ilinamorato ,

And just like there, a bunch of people here squinting and saying "huh what are you talking about it works great?"

ilinamorato ,

The default experience when people Google "install Firefox" should absolutely provide as much feature parity with other major browsers as possible. 99% of users will want them or not mind them. And for that last 1%, I guess I'm not sure if it's worth the development headaches for them to bake in a configuration change that power users could get by forking the codebase anyway.

ilinamorato ,

They are adding them as features to the browser, making it heavier and slower, instead of adding them as optional extensions so that they are only there for the ones who wish them.

Whoa, you've already seen the features and already know how they are implemented? Tell me, what's the future like?

ilinamorato ,

I just bookmarked the settings page for profiles, which made it work pretty well. But it was definitely more janky than something native.

ilinamorato ,

It was one of the major enshittification updates for Firefox

That's not what that term means. That term specifically and explicitly means "making a service worse for the user in order to wring more money out of it." It doesn't mean "feature or design change I didn't like."

ilinamorato ,

Whoa whoa whoa! The world is already in rough enough shape without you creating pivot tables

ilinamorato ,

I don't think the problem is the availability, it's probably the adoption. But I'm not in higher ed.

ilinamorato ,

This reminds me of when Weird Al told Canadian (or maybe Australian?) fans who wanted to watch his movie, "there's Very Probably No way to do this. I know you probably have a TORRENT of questions, but I don't have time to answer them right now."

ilinamorato ,

B-but if they don't get better every year, the price will go down!

ilinamorato ,

I don't think people really want dumbphones, I think they just want apps that better support their self-control. Digital Wellbeing on Android is a start, but it's way too easy to bypass.

ilinamorato ,

I mean, yeah, but that's a different desire than this article is talking about because they're more or less talking about flip phones.

ilinamorato ,

Until the city decides to get rid of the subsidized bus system because "Uber is a better service and covers the routes anyway" and then they jack the price sky-high.

ilinamorato ,

Five years ago the average person didn't even know his name, or care. Honestly, even today the average person doesn't know who he is. My mom barely does. But those people still buy cars, and some of them still buy electric cars.

ilinamorato ,

I just popped open an incognito window and searched "best electric cars" and checked the top ten results: all of which mentioned Tesla, and only one of which mentioned Musk. And that mention was "say what you will about...," which is fairly noncommittal about who he is or what he does. Most people aren't scrolling Reddit or Twitter or especially Lemmy all the time; they Google a question, and when they get the answer they think "oh, I've heard of a Tesla, my buddy Jeff has one" and so they go ask Jeff whether he likes it or not.

Now, in 2024, his name is probably far more recognizable. But five years ago, especially before he bought Twitter? If they did see his name, it would probably have brought associations of rockets if anything.

Or look at the Google Trends results for his name. There's a spike in May 2020 (when his baby with Grimes was born), a slight bump in 2021 when he was on SNL, and a huge spike in 2022 when he was forced to buy Twitter. Aside from that, the interest in Tesla has always been much higher than the interest in Musk, and people have been less curious about him than about Taylor Swift (for instance).

People just don't care about the CEOs of most companies they buy stuff from.

ilinamorato ,

That presumes a lot more brand awareness than I think the average person has. Like I said above

Most people aren't scrolling Reddit or Twitter or especially Lemmy all the time; they Google a question

—in this case, I think, "best electric car" or "electric car consumer reports" or something—

and when they get the answer they think "oh, I've heard of a Tesla, my buddy Jeff has one" and so they go ask Jeff whether he likes it or not.

Admittedly this is just my gut reaction. But there's no really good way to test it out. "Tesla" is a tricky search term to nail down on Google Trends, since it could refer to the company or the inventor and has the confound of being searched a lot by people who are terminally online, for one reason or another. Unfortunately there's no way to select "only normies" in the viewer.

ilinamorato ,

There's a conspiracy theory (not entirely without merit, but generally assumed to be baseless) that people with negative information about the Clintons end up dead suspiciously. Epstein was one such person, under this theory.

ilinamorato ,

That's the biggest hole in the theory for me. If they're willing to disappear people, there are a lot of people they seem to have missed.

There's a sort of counter theory that says that the Clintons themselves started the conspiracy theory as a way of putting all Clinton dissent under the heading of a conspiracy, and honestly I find that much more believable.

ilinamorato ,

Right, there are a lot of possible names to blame for Epstein for sure. Like I said, it's a theory that's largely considered to be baseless. The Clintons have a lot of faults, but I haven't seen any indication that they're into assassinations.

ilinamorato ,

Microsoft is already getting their money from the corpos, it's the 'freeloading' public they are trying to squeeze revenue from.

Yeah, those bums who only paid for the software once.

ilinamorato ,

Any sane person in such a situation would just use the dates. "As you recall, during the April 23 meeting..."

ilinamorato ,

Given that the facilitator is insufficiently pedantic while reciting the minutes from the previous meeting, I would assume that the club has not existed for long enough that the year could be ambiguous.

ilinamorato ,

Those in attendance would be aware. The chair said "as you might recall," implying that they were present at the previous meeting.

ilinamorato ,

Have they been subject to medium to long term safety testing on humans?

Yes. For over two years now. Using a population of hundreds of millions of people and a control population of people who xerox misinformation and hand it out to strangers in grocery stores.

News flash: the vaccinated ones are doing way better.

ilinamorato ,

Did billions of people end up getting the mRNA vaccine? I thought the traditional vaccine was more widely deployed outside the United States.

In any case, the objection is nonsense. On populations this large, the number of side effects was slightly less than might have been expected at the outset. The researchers did good work.

ilinamorato ,

For vaccines in general, yes. But kooky people that think this is some kind of trick are worried about it being an mRNA vaccine, which is indeed somewhat new. The idea has been around for about fifty years, but the first human clinical trials were only about a decade ago and COVID was the first large-scale human deployment.

Now, in fairness, they were almost entirely ready at the time. I would imagine, without COVID, we probably would've still seen mRNA vaccines become mainstream already, though maybe last year or this year instead of in 2021. But COVID stepped up the final stages of approval significantly.

ilinamorato ,

Oh! Yes.

ilinamorato ,

"Huh...ok...let me think, I know I used to remember how to do this..."

"What? I taught you last week."

"Yeah, but that was fifteen years ago. I've been traveling the world for the past decade."

ilinamorato ,

They are also that, as I understand it. That's how the training data is represented, and how the neurons receive their weights. This is just leaning on the scale after the model is already trained.

ilinamorato ,

They're just serving code directly from GitHub at this point.

ilinamorato ,

They're all interns now, right?

ilinamorato ,

Wait.

Pirate Bay.

Pirate Ba(b)y?

Pirate Babe Eat?

I think you're on to something!

X automatically changed 'Twitter' to 'X' in domain names, breaking legit URLs (mashable.com)

On Monday, it appears X attempted to encourage users to cease referring to it as Twitter and instead adopt the name X. Some users began noticing that posts viewed via X for iOS were changing any references of "Twitter.com" to "X.com" automatically....

ilinamorato ,

I think they meant "you're preaching to the choir."

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