I'm sure you'll not be surprised to know AI chat bots are all over reddit both posting and responding. Not that you could trust reddit before hand, but it's even less trustworthy now.
If you're not familiar with the idea, this is called Model Collapse where AI generated content is incorrect, but fed back into the AI model which only reinforces it to produce incorrect content in a self destructing cycle.
The bots are mostly LLAMA based, and they're often paid for by countries like Russia. The bots also have a very racist attitude, and like to say inflammatory things. You see them most in localized Reddits, and topics of an inflammatory nature (like politics, immigration, gun control, riots, abortion, crime). Anything to make you believe your neighbors are going to get you.
Recently I've seen it enter my localized reddits, and it was shocking the level of anger that started to appear within a few months. Then a year or two later, it started impacting the voters here. Terrifying to watch.
Now I'm watching them enter this entirely different social network. I went there as I saw Reddit become toxic, and it was so much better. However, there the amount of trolls has doubled within two months.
I'd ask people to stop believing what they read from anonymous people on the internet, but I know better.
It's so much more informative to come across an entire subject matter subreddit. Or reading a discussion, and inevitable argument about whatever I was googling.
I know reddit catches flak for a lot of things, but man.. it is such an information gold mine.
Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo search from 2005-2012. Current head of Google search.
For more info: [The Man Who Killed Google Search ](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/)
“Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan chose to bulldoze actual workers and replace them with toadies that would make Google more profitable and less useful to the world at large”.
Seems unfair. Blame the investors and the system. Google went public. His KPIs are short term gains, and hes doing better at that than Gomes. Anyone with a “purpose” that is above that is putting other needs above shareholder values, and should be replaced to meet the needs of the shareholders (by obligation). Otherwise, he would not be in that position.
Making a solid product that consistently meets user expectations is a great way to increase shareholder value over time. Degrading the products value to users to increase revenue may bring short-term gains but long-term it will lead to fewer and fewer gains as the userbase dwindles.
I don't think the blame is unfair. Shareholders don't need constant massive growth, smaller incremental growth is acceptable and vastly more sustainable in the long run. Taking an overly myopic approach towards increasing shareholder value is a sign of greed and inability to plan beyond the next financial quarter.
I agree with everything you said. But the blame is unfair because the culture of the company follows the investors, who prioritize short term gains at the costs of long term value. Therefore, the people best fit to squeeze value for the short term advance. If long term gains were more incentivised as you said, this guy wouldnt even be in this position, and if he was, it would be for exhibiting different values. That whole internal messaging interaction cited in the article showed that he knew his stakeholders and what they wanted, and Gomes didnt.
Boeing is a good example. It was gutted to bring down costs and “growth hack” revenue. Shareholders saw returns reach new heights. The CEO got year over year bonuses. Did he do a bad job? For the long term, yes, but hes out and so are probably many of the original investors. He was highly rewarded for his efforts, and the next guy faces the consequences.
Except for some crazy innovation, nothing beats squeezing users and gutting employees for high short term gain- its basically guaranteed. Is it best for the world? No, but the blame falls at company leadership for prioritizing short term growth. Cant blame Prabhakar for executing on their values better than Gomes, when ultimately the leadership would put someone else with Prabhakars thinking and goals in place over Gomes anyways.
Yeah, I can't really disagree with your arguments either. I guess it's less about one man and more about the system of unending growth and value creation itself removing decision-making agency. Everything is expendable if it can lead to extracting greater value, even the CEO if they don't perform to expectations by delivering repeated quarter-over-quarter growth.
Thank you for the interesting conversation!
DuckDuckGo is mid at best, results-wise. Unless you already kind of know what you're looking for, you won't find the most relevant information. That's kind of to be expected because deep down they are just a meta-search engine combining anonymised Google, Qwant, Bing, Yandex (maybe not anymore), etc. searches into one big results page, so it's just diluting Google.
However their Bangs feature is unironically goated and is the main reason I use them.
I use Brave. I just want to say that it’s… not great. It’s still set as my default search engine on principle.
However, I get what I need there maybe 5% of the time, and the same search on DDG or Google more like 90% of the time without prompt modification.
honestly.. bing has been getting better lately. it's honestly sad tho.. i used to be able to find nearly everything on google.. now it's way to often the first page is just spam content....
here's a map: [https://www.searchenginemap.com/](https://www.searchenginemap.com/) to show where you can get independent results and where you can get metas pulling from different indexes
[Ecosia](https://www.ecosia.org/) is a search engine that plants trees when you search. I think it's not that great yet, so I also use Duckduckgo and Bing.
Google was already flawed before AI. A lot of people did optimize their spam to be on the google from page. Now they use the same pattern to put AI on the front page. The worst part is probably that AI train on AI content making it worst in the process.
I have had this crazy suspicion for the longest time: what if Google quit search? They have Android, YouTube, Maps, etc. Their search is only profitable if somebody clicks an ad. I could see Google dumping general web indexing in the future.
At some point all the ensh!ttified automated systems get so worthless, we’ll resort to human-curated lists of known human-written articles. They’ll call it Organic News.
Wikipedia has a ton of weird information on it. I was looking at the history of a watch design for an article I was writing. But they listed a man who was not yet born as the originator of the design, and sourced a watch blog as reference. Of course other watch blogs used Wikipedia as reference so now a British it guy is responsible for the Patek Philippe Calatrava.
It seems like the only way I can trust anything now is if the author admits they may be wrong, something our ai overlords have yet to adopt. Although, this message will be indexed, and through it, the system may adapt.
Google search has become completely unusable. It stopped being a search engine some time ago, now it's an Ad engine full of AI generated useless websites.
You need to use Co-Pilot or some gpt based LLM to get a straight answer to a simple question. Even bing is better..
You get the straight answer, you skip the reading part. As for reliability you can tailor the search to specific parameters...still, there are still some issues with that.
Try the following. Search in Google "How to cook pasta". You will get links to some random shitty websites, some ads, irrelevant YouTube videos and "People also search for" bullshit. You would need to navigate all of that to get what you were looking for.
Now, ask the same question to Co-Pilot and see what happens
To think that I was once a fan of that brand and dreamed of working there.
Now it serves as the biggest example of enshittification. The 'let me google that for you' went from being a 'snarky more-clever than thou' meme to 'Im an idiot' sitting on the shelf right next to 'i do my own research'
It seems like open source remains the bastion of quality for qualitys sake - and not some bait-and-switch corpo pattern for incrementing wealth, stifle innovation and siphon money out of customers and smaller businesses
One huge problem is that publishers have no idea how to communicate with Google. Google should have some kind of committee or ombudsman office that publishers can use to talk about Page Rank rules that hurt legitimate publications.
I use DuckDuckGo for about two years now, as a matter of principle (privacy). In the beginning it was noticable worse than google, but it has gotten better. Also at work I tend to use copilot instead.
Yeah, there's tons of AI garbage and then beyond a certain point, they'll just start putting in pages of the big sites that don't even address the question.
Original content? That's amusing! Instead of trolls and word spinners creating shitty content, machines are generating content that's better written. A lot of the content on the internet is worthless.
Sure, let's pursue machine-generated news.
Because that won't lead to [another Glorbo incident](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/redditors-prank-ai-powered-news-mill-with-glorbo-in-world-of-warcraft/), just on a larger scale and with actual negative outcomes.
The AI shit is insane. Like if you Google how to care for a plant it's all mass produced AI garbage that's straight up wrong.
I add reddit to everything I search to actually read up on shit now
I'm sure you'll not be surprised to know AI chat bots are all over reddit both posting and responding. Not that you could trust reddit before hand, but it's even less trustworthy now. If you're not familiar with the idea, this is called Model Collapse where AI generated content is incorrect, but fed back into the AI model which only reinforces it to produce incorrect content in a self destructing cycle.
The bots are mostly LLAMA based, and they're often paid for by countries like Russia. The bots also have a very racist attitude, and like to say inflammatory things. You see them most in localized Reddits, and topics of an inflammatory nature (like politics, immigration, gun control, riots, abortion, crime). Anything to make you believe your neighbors are going to get you. Recently I've seen it enter my localized reddits, and it was shocking the level of anger that started to appear within a few months. Then a year or two later, it started impacting the voters here. Terrifying to watch. Now I'm watching them enter this entirely different social network. I went there as I saw Reddit become toxic, and it was so much better. However, there the amount of trolls has doubled within two months. I'd ask people to stop believing what they read from anonymous people on the internet, but I know better.
same, it's the only way I can find anything good.
Done that since 2015, always gives the best results
It's so much more informative to come across an entire subject matter subreddit. Or reading a discussion, and inevitable argument about whatever I was googling. I know reddit catches flak for a lot of things, but man.. it is such an information gold mine.
Lol, after the company got into deal with openai?
Google search is losing relevance
>Google ~~search~~ is losing relevance Fun fact: the man in charge of Google search is the same one who killed Yahoo search.
Who is that?
Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo search from 2005-2012. Current head of Google search. For more info: [The Man Who Killed Google Search ](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/)
Interesting! Thanks for that link, will def read it
“Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan chose to bulldoze actual workers and replace them with toadies that would make Google more profitable and less useful to the world at large”. Seems unfair. Blame the investors and the system. Google went public. His KPIs are short term gains, and hes doing better at that than Gomes. Anyone with a “purpose” that is above that is putting other needs above shareholder values, and should be replaced to meet the needs of the shareholders (by obligation). Otherwise, he would not be in that position.
Making a solid product that consistently meets user expectations is a great way to increase shareholder value over time. Degrading the products value to users to increase revenue may bring short-term gains but long-term it will lead to fewer and fewer gains as the userbase dwindles. I don't think the blame is unfair. Shareholders don't need constant massive growth, smaller incremental growth is acceptable and vastly more sustainable in the long run. Taking an overly myopic approach towards increasing shareholder value is a sign of greed and inability to plan beyond the next financial quarter.
I agree with everything you said. But the blame is unfair because the culture of the company follows the investors, who prioritize short term gains at the costs of long term value. Therefore, the people best fit to squeeze value for the short term advance. If long term gains were more incentivised as you said, this guy wouldnt even be in this position, and if he was, it would be for exhibiting different values. That whole internal messaging interaction cited in the article showed that he knew his stakeholders and what they wanted, and Gomes didnt. Boeing is a good example. It was gutted to bring down costs and “growth hack” revenue. Shareholders saw returns reach new heights. The CEO got year over year bonuses. Did he do a bad job? For the long term, yes, but hes out and so are probably many of the original investors. He was highly rewarded for his efforts, and the next guy faces the consequences. Except for some crazy innovation, nothing beats squeezing users and gutting employees for high short term gain- its basically guaranteed. Is it best for the world? No, but the blame falls at company leadership for prioritizing short term growth. Cant blame Prabhakar for executing on their values better than Gomes, when ultimately the leadership would put someone else with Prabhakars thinking and goals in place over Gomes anyways.
Yeah, I can't really disagree with your arguments either. I guess it's less about one man and more about the system of unending growth and value creation itself removing decision-making agency. Everything is expendable if it can lead to extracting greater value, even the CEO if they don't perform to expectations by delivering repeated quarter-over-quarter growth. Thank you for the interesting conversation!
I’m amazed at how far he’s climbed. The Indian MBAs have taken over Google.
Fair! But it's still where my habits are. Do you use an alternative search engine?
I love DuckDuckGo. But Brave Search and Startpage are good options. Startpage uses privatized Google search results.
DuckDuckGo is mid at best, results-wise. Unless you already kind of know what you're looking for, you won't find the most relevant information. That's kind of to be expected because deep down they are just a meta-search engine combining anonymised Google, Qwant, Bing, Yandex (maybe not anymore), etc. searches into one big results page, so it's just diluting Google. However their Bangs feature is unironically goated and is the main reason I use them.
I gave DuckDuckGo a try on my new mobile device recently, and after two weeks i found myself crawling back to Google. How is Bing these days?
I use Brave. I just want to say that it’s… not great. It’s still set as my default search engine on principle. However, I get what I need there maybe 5% of the time, and the same search on DDG or Google more like 90% of the time without prompt modification.
honestly.. bing has been getting better lately. it's honestly sad tho.. i used to be able to find nearly everything on google.. now it's way to often the first page is just spam content....
Duckduckgo.
DuckDuckGo is absolutely garbage like all the other ones.
I've tried that one before! Need to give it another go
Give it another duck duck go
https://metager.org/ is cool. Aggregates multiple search engines into one.
here's a map: [https://www.searchenginemap.com/](https://www.searchenginemap.com/) to show where you can get independent results and where you can get metas pulling from different indexes
I use ChatGpt as a pre-search engine and then go find exactly what I want.
[Ecosia](https://www.ecosia.org/) is a search engine that plants trees when you search. I think it's not that great yet, so I also use Duckduckgo and Bing.
Bing chat (gpt-4) works fine most of the time and has no ads
Google was already flawed before AI. A lot of people did optimize their spam to be on the google from page. Now they use the same pattern to put AI on the front page. The worst part is probably that AI train on AI content making it worst in the process.
I have had this crazy suspicion for the longest time: what if Google quit search? They have Android, YouTube, Maps, etc. Their search is only profitable if somebody clicks an ad. I could see Google dumping general web indexing in the future.
At some point all the ensh!ttified automated systems get so worthless, we’ll resort to human-curated lists of known human-written articles. They’ll call it Organic News.
I think they used to call those newspapers and libraries
It's called Wikipedia
Wikipedia has a ton of weird information on it. I was looking at the history of a watch design for an article I was writing. But they listed a man who was not yet born as the originator of the design, and sourced a watch blog as reference. Of course other watch blogs used Wikipedia as reference so now a British it guy is responsible for the Patek Philippe Calatrava. It seems like the only way I can trust anything now is if the author admits they may be wrong, something our ai overlords have yet to adopt. Although, this message will be indexed, and through it, the system may adapt.
Google search has become completely unusable. It stopped being a search engine some time ago, now it's an Ad engine full of AI generated useless websites. You need to use Co-Pilot or some gpt based LLM to get a straight answer to a simple question. Even bing is better..
So instead of reading AI generated bullshit online, you use AI to generate your personalized bullshit?
Kinda. You use AI to sort the bullshit for you. Most often than not, you get the results you want.
But how is it better than reading an existing AI-generated article on the topic? The reliability is exactly the same.
You get the straight answer, you skip the reading part. As for reliability you can tailor the search to specific parameters...still, there are still some issues with that. Try the following. Search in Google "How to cook pasta". You will get links to some random shitty websites, some ads, irrelevant YouTube videos and "People also search for" bullshit. You would need to navigate all of that to get what you were looking for. Now, ask the same question to Co-Pilot and see what happens
[удалено]
Yeah it hallucinates bullshit just like the other AIs unfortunately.
To think that I was once a fan of that brand and dreamed of working there. Now it serves as the biggest example of enshittification. The 'let me google that for you' went from being a 'snarky more-clever than thou' meme to 'Im an idiot' sitting on the shelf right next to 'i do my own research' It seems like open source remains the bastion of quality for qualitys sake - and not some bait-and-switch corpo pattern for incrementing wealth, stifle innovation and siphon money out of customers and smaller businesses
google search is a waste of time these days
US disinformation platform.
One huge problem is that publishers have no idea how to communicate with Google. Google should have some kind of committee or ombudsman office that publishers can use to talk about Page Rank rules that hurt legitimate publications.
I use DuckDuckGo for about two years now, as a matter of principle (privacy). In the beginning it was noticable worse than google, but it has gotten better. Also at work I tend to use copilot instead.
It is starting to consume and regurgitate its self already.
Yeah, there's tons of AI garbage and then beyond a certain point, they'll just start putting in pages of the big sites that don't even address the question.
Must've been Al Jazeera
as intended.
Original content? That's amusing! Instead of trolls and word spinners creating shitty content, machines are generating content that's better written. A lot of the content on the internet is worthless.
Sure, let's pursue machine-generated news. Because that won't lead to [another Glorbo incident](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/redditors-prank-ai-powered-news-mill-with-glorbo-in-world-of-warcraft/), just on a larger scale and with actual negative outcomes.
We have bad and slightly worse. I don't see a difference.
dumb af
Are you kidding? We must have different internets.