That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.
I still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to what I want.
I know search is hard to do well, but if Google is truly floundering where is the startup that for it better and not just better for a very specific niche area, but truly better across the board?
> Ratfucking is an American slang term for behind the scenes (covert) political sabotage or dirty tricks, particularly pertaining to elections
“Private Johnson got caught ratfucking the MREs while everyone was doing PT” etc etc
He's at least earned the equivalent of the Ajit Pai FCC chair treatment but because John Oliver and his audience can't understand this sorta complexity without a massive concurrent media literacy push it will never happen.
But I wonder if there was a deeper strategy: were the attacks put there so that Google gatekeepers would ignore the article's insights?
It could have a similar effect to Cory Doctor's concept of enshittification. I don't know if it's intentional, but the vulgarity of the term seems to prevent committed enshittifiers from reflecting critically about enshittification and how to stop in time to avoid a collapse. After feeling the insult, enshittware supporters seem to conclude enshittification is a non-existent category.
It would be fun to learn these are intentional choices, designed to sabotage the criticized party on an epistemological level!
Reddit is usually very bad, because it's heavily astroturfed and trivially easy for marketing firms to game. Something else is required.
I think you worded my feelings much better than I did. This is a fiery op-ed from a personal blog and not polished journalism, so I should expect some individualism on writing tone.
I fall back on Google only when absolutely necessary. And these days I almost never have to fall back on Google (<1% of searches).
When I do fall back, the results are invariably crap. Quality has degraded so much that it almost never gives me a better result than duck duck go did. Often when doctor go fails I don't bother with Google at all.
Even GPT4 driven Bing queries will give better results than Google now - mainly because GPT4 can filter spam, and has gotten a lot better about hallucinations.
I absolutely love to see it.
https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-pr...
Just saw this article on my news feed.
If you haven't read up on modern prompting strategies and still feel LLMs are stochastic parrots, you should read the foundational prompting papers (chain of thought, react, reflexion, toolformer, etc) and update your views about llms. They're very close to being the kind of autonomous search agents that the characters in classic cyberpunk novels would unleash on the real world to compile results.
It's actually made me excited about information retrieval again, for the first time in a decade. And the cool part is that autonomous search agents might become free and open source before the corporations manage to enshittify the experience.
Very fun times ahead!
> Tom (to Greg): “You're asking about the moral character of a guy named Rat-Fucker Sam? He's a fucking piece of fucking shit!”
He’s a suit with a laptop sitting in Logan’s private jet.
...and looking at it today, it may not have changed much.
Thank fark for Fark.com and I guess refdesk.com. Classic Intertubes.
reddit has become nearly unreadable. If it isn't puns, bots, bots reposting puns, it's some awful "no shit" relationship advice thread, etc. (no, I don't have an account so yes, I do look at /r/all).
Oh and not to mention https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
In any case, it is not sound reasoning to reject the entirety of an argument just because one of the subclaims is not a valid argument. Doing so is the fallacy fallacy.
In this case, it's true that name calling weakens the credibility of the post for a general audience. But I contend that we might not need need to care. It only weakens the credibility of the post for members of the audience who make the fallacy fallacy, and refuse to evaluate the other claims on their own merits.
Convincing or not convincing such an audience might not be a concern to an author focused on truth, since such an audience is persuaded by fallacies.
Another thing is that if a person is actually a bad person, calling them bad names describing how they are a bad person is actually a true statement and not an argument "to the man". In this case the actual claim that is being argued is the fact of the person's moral insufficiency. Calling them the bad name is just the conclusion of an argument.
The main snafu of calling someone names as a stylistic or concluding aspect of an argument is that it lacks the decorum. If the debate forum requires respectful decorum then an argument can be disqualified on these grounds.
However in this case the forum is the author's own blog. The author has clearly chosen to speak to an audience that can evaluate arguments without being set back by insults - presumably an audience who is already very upset at Google and wants to know which person they should be upset at specifically. In this role, I found the insults were actually rather enjoyable and funny!
There are still many sources for information. And it's okay to work hard for it.
Good luck and Happy knowledge work.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9498 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet
If I run into SEO crap on Google, I'm not sure they ever know I hated it and went elsewhere. They see that I searched and I clicked, and they got their money and don't care.
I’ve also started to hoard a stash of links and pdfs. And I have Dash for languages and framework documentation. Too many SEO farms for Python and HTML/CSS/JS.
Still, I haven’t read this account from anywhere else. Everyone else missed the story.
I just sound like I am GPT, because I am a pedantic autist that simply MUST split hairs about EVERYTHING
I honestly take it as a compliment
Consider using zotero to expand and organize your library of references, if you don't already use it or something like it. It does great for PDFs, but it also captures and stores local copies of websites. Also lets you create bibliographies.
That is structurally impossible, because LLMs have no mechanism of knowing which answer is right or wrong. Please provide information how this prompting is supposed to look like.
Bing is.. fine I think nowadays
Strong disagree. The intentional usage of fallacious reasoning or histrionic name-calling weakens the credibility of the author, not of the post.
I just want to point out that there are other search engines out there. I use search.brave.com and like it far better than google.
False.
The mechanisms include examples/in context learning (ICL), feedback and validation loops/tool using, backtracking/conversation trees/rejection sampling, editorial oversight/managerial correction, document assisted reasoning, and having well defined and well documented high level processes, workflows, and checklists.
So basically the same things you need to do for managing other people while covering your own ass.
You are still very much in the loop, and you never ever use output you don't approve and fact check. But you also give it the references and examples it needs to improve its accuracy, and give it feedback/iterate on problems until they're really solved.
Modern LLMs like GPT4, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini 1.5 no longer have the cascading hallucination problem. If there is a hallucination/mistake, you can backtrack with a better prompt and eliminate it, or just correct it in context. Then, unlike with GPT 3.5, there's a good chance it'll run with the correction without immediately making further mistakes.
Work with it the way you would work with a junior subordinate who can do good work if you help them, but doesn't realize when they do bad work unless you help them a little more. Ensure that it doesn't matter if they make mistakes, because together you fix them, and they still help you work much faster than you could do it on your own.
If someone screws you over, you lay out the reasoning for why you're angry at them and then you insult them. The insults are not the argument. They are the conclusion of the argument.
Once again if you see an insult, conclude someone is being histrionic, and refuse to see their actual sound arguments, then you are making the fallacy fallacy, and throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
You are also making an ad hominem against the author - arguing against the personal credibility rather than the credibility of the actual argument. That specific kind of ad hominem is called tone policing.