Most active commenters
  • PaulDavisThe1st(3)
  • Terr_(3)
  • egypturnash(3)

←back to thread

788 points jsheard | 34 comments | | HN request time: 1.689s | source | bottom
1. braza ◴[] No.42892606[source]
I work with ML and I am bullish with AI in general; said that, I would pay between 5 to 10 USD a feature or toggle called “No AI” for several services.

For myself I noticed 2 bad effects in my daily usage:

- Search: impossible to reach any original content in the first positions. Almost everything sounds like AIsh. The punctuation, the commas, the semicolon, the narro vocabulary, and the derivative nature of the recent internet pages.

- Discovery: (looking directly to you Spotify and Instagram) here I would add in the “No AI” feature another one “Forget the past…” and then set the time. I personally like to listen some orthogonal genres seasonally. But once that you listen 2 songs in a very spontaneous manner Spotify will recommend that for a long time. I listened out of curiosity some math rock, and the “Discovery Weekly” took 9 weeks to not recommend that anymore.

replies(10): >>42892701 #>>42892972 #>>42893138 #>>42893300 #>>42893433 #>>42893512 #>>42894177 #>>42894208 #>>42895019 #>>42896514 #
2. bluetidepro ◴[] No.42892701[source]
For search, use Kagi. You don’t have to use their AI products at all to just use search.
replies(3): >>42892853 #>>42893051 #>>42893207 #
3. frakt0x90 ◴[] No.42892853[source]
Strongly agree. Whenever I search something and am met with a sea of

TOP 10 X; THE 20 BEST Y; 20 REASONS Z; etc.

I go Kagi and am immediately refreshed.

replies(1): >>42893005 #
4. renlo ◴[] No.42892972[source]
Spotify used to have a "dislike" button for their Discover Weekly which helped with pruning music you don't like, but with the natural law of tech enshitification they removed that feature a month ago.
replies(2): >>42893251 #>>42893350 #
5. TimTheTinker ◴[] No.42893005{3}[source]
And yet Kagi isn't anywhere near as good as Google was ~13 years ago.

Yes - a big part of that is that online content is so much worse than it used to be. But it became bad over time because of what Google incentivized.

replies(1): >>42893405 #
6. pjc50 ◴[] No.42893051[source]
Left field tip if you think a search engine is hiding stuff: Yandex. They're not actually Russian any more, but they're far enough down the list of search engines that nobody bothers to DMCA them.
replies(2): >>42893641 #>>42893875 #
7. whycome ◴[] No.42893138[source]
I can't tell if you misspelled narrow or if "narro" is somehow referring to "narrated" type content we now see so much of. Or even just weird narrative things (eg, recipes).
8. segasaturn ◴[] No.42893207[source]
If Kagi made a cheaper "no AI" tier I would be happy to subscribe. AI is costly to run, so even if you don't use the AI it's priced into your subscription fee - you're paying for an expensive product you don't want or use.

e: according to Kagi's pricing page they do have a 'no AI' tier, but it limits your number of searches to 300/month. Seems like a totally arbitrary limitation, but its still better than forced AI.

replies(2): >>42893409 #>>42920376 #
9. goostavos ◴[] No.42893251[source]
That was such a frustrating decision. I had almost convinced Spotify that that one time I listened to Lustmord was just a random mood, and I don't actually want to only listen to dronecore for the rest of my life.
replies(1): >>42895029 #
10. ToucanLoucan ◴[] No.42893300[source]
I respect your opinion but at the same time:

> I work with ML and I am bullish with AI in general; said that, I would pay between 5 to 10 USD a feature or toggle called “No AI” for several services.

Hard fuck this. I am not giving a company money to un-ruin their service. Just go to a competitor.

I get with a bunch of these hyperscaled businesses it's borderline impossible to entirely escape them, but do what you can. I was an Adobe subscriber for years, and them putting their AI garbage into every app (along with them all steadily getting shittier and shittier to use) finally made me jump ship. I couldn't be happier. Yeah there was pain, there was adjustment period, but we need to cut these fuckers off already. No more eternal subscription fees for mediocre software.

Office is next. This copilot shit is getting worse by the day.

replies(1): >>42893429 #
11. eminence32 ◴[] No.42893350[source]
I used to always hesitate to use that "dislike" button because I was worried that Spotify would not be able to distinguished between "I will always dislike this song" and "I don't want this song in this specific context"
replies(1): >>42895931 #
12. acaloiar ◴[] No.42893405{4}[source]
Google ~13 years ago dealt with a much less complicated search landscape where

1. Its own products weren't (as much) part of the search result quality problem. Today Google has hungry product managers from Ads, Youtube, and various AI products convincing higher-ups that their product deserves higher placement. That placement used to be sacrosanct.

2. The daily volume of AI-generated garbage content 13 years ago was probably a rounding error in today's volume

So Google was operating in a different landscape than Kagi of today. They had to do a lot less to achieve the quality they had.

I disagree that that Kagi "isn't anywhere near as good as Google was ~13 years ago". It's near. For me personally, it's better because I'm never served first-party ads.

13. stevage ◴[] No.42893409{3}[source]
Yeah I'm on the 300 per month tier. I tend to hit that limit after about 3 weeks, which is certainly annoying.
replies(1): >>42893471 #
14. stevage ◴[] No.42893429[source]
Eh, my partner loves Copilot in Office. There are tasks where it's taking hours or days off the time. Especially web searching and extracting information.
15. vunderba ◴[] No.42893433[source]
It's also absolutely terrible for image search which has been absolutely poisoned by rampant proliferation of poor quality stable diffusion images - even on stock photo sites.

It got so bad that I had to add a "No AI" flag to my image search app which limits the date range to earlier than 2022. Not a great solution but works in a pinch.

https://github.com/scpedicini/truman-show

16. grahamj ◴[] No.42893471{4}[source]
yeah I hit it in about two. I just signed up monthly to try it out for a bit but am wavering on whether I consider it worth it. It's good but I'm not sure it's enough better than DDG to pay for.

And for AI I'd usually rather have API access and use it with tools rather than a web chat.

replies(1): >>42908761 #
17. PaulDavisThe1st ◴[] No.42893512[source]
Can this many people really have missed the udm=14 trick for google? udm14.com will demonstrate for you ...
replies(2): >>42893846 #>>42895562 #
18. labster ◴[] No.42893641{3}[source]
They are in fact Russian any more, the Dutch company that owned Yandex sold to Russian investors last July.
19. labster ◴[] No.42893846[source]
This kind of UX reminds me of the days when you’d hear radio ads saying “Just point your browser to HTTP-colon-backslash-backslash-WWW-period …”
replies(1): >>42895505 #
20. ponector ◴[] No.42893875{3}[source]
Maybe you have a Chinese search engine to suggest? North Korean should be even better
21. nejsjsjsbsb ◴[] No.42894177[source]
AI becoming some kind of window brick in a protection racket. Love it!
22. soared ◴[] No.42894208[source]
You can reset your algo on Spotify! I did and learned a lot. There were maybe 5 songs I wasn’t hearing that I liked, but tens of songs I did not like that I had saved years ago that came back up and were once again swiftly killed by the algorithm after a few instaskips
replies(1): >>42895439 #
23. Terr_ ◴[] No.42895019[source]
For that amount of money I would also expect my search-terms to to never be fed into any kind of LLM either.
24. Terr_ ◴[] No.42895029{3}[source]
I don't know those terms and now I'm afraid to search for them. The Cybernetic Bureaucracy Mind might label me a dissident with terrible taste in music.
replies(1): >>42895580 #
25. gwill ◴[] No.42895439[source]
how did you reset the algo?
26. PaulDavisThe1st ◴[] No.42895505{3}[source]
Calling this UX seems disingenous to me.

If you want something smooth and easy that uses the google engine, visit udm14.com

If you want to integrate the google engine more directly into your browser(s), understand how to use &udm=14

Two different UX's, each appropriate for a different audience.

27. egypturnash ◴[] No.42895562[source]
Imagine you are a completely non-technical friend of yours. They are very smart but they do not know a damn thing about configuring computers. They mostly just use their phone and/or tablet.

How much of "just append ?udm=14 to your search query" is absolute gibberish?

Is "install the udm14 plugin" going to make any more sense?

Is "go to udm14.com for all your searches" going to stick? Are there phishing sites at umd14.com, mdm41.com, uwu44.com, and all the other variants they'll probably misremember it as?

"just search for 'fucking whatever' and the AI crap goes away", on the other hand, is funny, uses a common dictionary word that everyone above the age of five knows how to spell, and is intensely memorable.

replies(1): >>42898707 #
28. egypturnash ◴[] No.42895580{4}[source]
find out without ever touching your spotify account, https://lustmord.bandcamp.com, only whoever you share your browser search history with will know
replies(1): >>42896576 #
29. joseda-hg ◴[] No.42895931{3}[source]
I insta skipped any song that I liked but didn't want in X context, but disliked songs I didn't want, period, I don't know if it was the intended way, but it seemed to work for me
30. _kidlike ◴[] No.42896514[source]
for the search problem, I use Kagi. It's a breath of fresh air!

Better than Google in every single aspect, except shopping. The shopping results in Google are actually good.

31. Terr_ ◴[] No.42896576{5}[source]
Now I'm slightly crestfallen that "dronecore" doesn't have any particular relationship to bagpipes.
replies(1): >>42914226 #
32. PaulDavisThe1st ◴[] No.42898707{3}[source]
There's this thing called the internet that can help you find out how to change your default search engine. You might even get some AI suggestions to make it clearer.

Yes, the "fucking" trick is awesome too.

33. egypturnash ◴[] No.42914226{6}[source]
you want Wisp's Honor Beats then https://youtu.be/gfkWin8Gu7c
34. VertanaNinjai ◴[] No.42920376{3}[source]
I understand your point in general, but I don’t think it applies to Kagi. Users were paying the same monthly fee and then the company added those features on with no extra subscription cost. I also like that it doesn’t clutter my search. It doesn’t appear unless I press the AI button or end my search with a question mark (can also be disabled).

The only extra costs are if you use the (opt-in optional) AI Assistant which is a web UI to access various models for chatting purposes. As an aside, they recently updated this UI so it’s actually usable as a ChatGPT or Claude alternative.