The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

I mostly agree with TFA, with one glaring exception: The quality of Google search results has regressed so badly in the past years (played by SEO experts), that AI was actually a welcome improvement.

I think it was just Google that got bad.

I use Kagi who returns excellent results, also when I need non AI verbatim queries.

It didn't get bad for no reason. It needs to be bad for ads to continue to be profitable.

Displaying what you searched for immediately is cannibalizing that market.

I'm guessing ads in AI results is the logical next step.

User issue. Every single time this comes up.

People don't know how to search, that's it. Even the HN population.

Every time this gets posted, I ask for one example of thing you tried to find and what keywords you used. So I'm giving you the same offer, give me for one thing you couldn't find easily on Google and the keywords you used, and I'll show you Google search is just fine.

Allright, had this recently since i keep forgetting luks commands.

How do you set up an encrypted file on linux that can be mounted and accessed same as a hard drive.

(note: luks, a few commands)

You will see a nonsensical ai summarization, lots of videos and junk websites being promoted then you'll likely find a few blogs with the actual commands needed. Nowhere is there a link to a manual for luks or similar.

This in the past had the no-ad straightforward blogs as first links, then some man pages, then other unrelated things for the same searches that i do now and get garbage.

Is "How do you set up an encrypted file on linux that can be mounted and accessed same as a hard drive." literally what you put into the search bar? if so, that's the problem.

try "mount luks encrypted file" or "luks file mount". too many words and any grammar at all will degrade your results. it's all about keywords

edit: after trying it myself i quickly realized the problem - luks related articles are usually about drives or partitions, not about files. this search got me what i wanted: "luks mount file -partition -filesystem" i found this article[1], which is in german (my native tongue), but contained the right information.

1: https://blog.netways.de/blog/2018/07/25/verschluesselten-fil...

Yes, that's the next logical step. The only silverlining is Google currently has less of a moat than last time in the technology in question, so some upstart could always be on their heels in a Kagi-esque way.

I asked Google that exact question, and I got an AI summary that looks alright? Please verify if those steps make sense, I pasted them into a text service, it's too much for an HN comment: https://justpaste.it/63eiz

It shoed 25 or so URLs as the source.

That wasn't the question. The complaint is the poster can't find anything on Google because the results are now so poor, and your response is "but here's some AI generated slop, which may or may not make any sense."

Your version assumes that the user knows that luks exists in the first place, OP's does not.

Google hasn't really worked like you imagine for a decade.

FWIW, when I put <<linux create file image encrypted file system>> into Google (this was the first thing I tried, though without knowledge that it might be a tricky case I might have been less careful picking keywords) I get what look like plausible results.

At the top there's a "featured snippet" from opensource.com, allegedly from 2021, that begins with: create an empty file (this turns out to mean a file of given size with no useful data in it, not a size-0 file), then make a LUKS volume using cryptsetup, etc.

First actual search result is a question on Ask Ubuntu (the Stack Exchange site dedicated to Ubuntu) headed "How do I create an encrypted filesystem inside a file?" which unless I'm confused is at least the correct question. Top answer there (from 2017) looks plausible and seems to be describing the same steps as the "featured snippet". A couple of other links to Ask Ubuntu are given below that one but they seem worse.

Next search result is a Reddit thread that describes how to do something different but possibly still of interest to someone who wants to do the thing you describe.

Next search result is a question on unix.stackexchange.com that turns out to be about something different; under it are other results from the same site, the first of which has a cryptsetup-based recipe that seems similar to the other plausible ones mentioned above.

Further search results continue to have a good density of plausible-looking answers to essentially the intended question.

This all seems fairly satisfactory assuming the specific answers don't turn out to be garbage, which doesn't look very likely; it seems like Google has done a decent job here. It doesn't specifically turn up the LUKS manual, but then that wasn't the question you actually asked.

Having done that search to find that the relevant command seems to be cryptsetup and the underlying facility is called LUKS, searches for <<cryptsetup manual>> and <<luks documentation>> (again, the first search terms that came to mind) look to me like they find the right things.

(Google isn't my first-choice search engine at present; DuckDuckGo provides similar results in all these cases.)

I am not taking any sides on the broader question of whether in general Google can give good search results if one picks the right words for it, but in this particular case it seems OK.

Google is nearly useless for recipes. Try finding a recipe for beef bourguignon. They exist, but with huge prefaces and elaboration that mean endless scrolling on a phone, all in the name of maximizing time spent on page (which is a search ranking criteria).

I've also heard a 3rd-hand claims that not authors of those recipes vett what they've written. E.g., what the true prep / cooking times are.

I still find online recipes convenient, but I don't blindly trust details like cooking time and temperature. (I mean, those things are always subject to variability, but now I don't trust the times to even be in the right ballpark.)

Happily, there are some cooks that I think deserve our trust, e.g. Chef John.

LOL. I’ll take declining relevancy over (in order of badness) AI results that -

Badly summarise articles.

Outright invent local attractions that don’t exist.

Gave subtly wrong, misleading advice about employment rights.

All while coming across as confidently authoritative.

That was exactly the question???

That "AI generated slop" IS Google's main response now. I posted it so that someone might have a look to see if/how correct it actually is, your response, that does not deign to even look, is less than helpful - if you want to complain about Google not being useful, how about your own response?

OP specifically said they were looking for luks commands.

then why did my keyword-based approach work better than the natural language approach?

A human didn't write it, I'm not reading it.

Search "linux encrypt file as hard drive", the second result is a medium article which offers what you want: https://medium.com/@allypetitt/how-to-encrypt-a-drive-in-lin...

As I said, user issue.

> Nowhere is there a link to a manual for luks or similar.

Yes, thankfully. The man page for cryptsetup isn't exactly palatable.

Search for "beef bourguignon recipe", the first result is for https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/beef-bourguignon which has the list of ingredients and the recipe pretty much straight away.

If ads is the next step then AI could never be used for coding. And if you mean in the browser or chat only... then people will just make a wrapper around the api.

the medium article you linked tells you to format your hard drive, so it's obviously not how to set up an encrypted file that can be mounted.

> Yes, thankfully. The man page for cryptsetup isn't exactly palatable.

The man page is the source of truth and quite good, that it's not one of the first links or even on the first page is a problem.

seems like we're getting different results, nonetheless, thanks

> Please verify if those steps make sense

I mean... that's the problem... you can't trust the AI output yourself and you're sharing it here. Would you use those steps?

Just a note though, it does look correct, this time.

> mount luks encrypted file

Usually references hard drive articles and even AI slop that says same thing.

End of the first page, there's one link to something that solves it, so I might take this hint, thanks.

> luks file mount

This actually has a decent first link... so, yeah... cool

> I posted it so that someone might have a look to see if/how correct it actually is

If you can't trust that the AI generated snippet is correct, why would you share it?