notadoc

Google search results now are nearly unusable, most look like this:

- Top of the page is slow loading AI regurgitation of deeply buried real web results, but often wildly inaccurate. No thanks.

- Next are a bunch of YouTube videos you don't want to watch where you have to wade through dozens of ads and hours of content to get the 3 seconds of information you're looking for. No thanks.

- "Related search" nonsense that nobody ever wants to see but if you click on those you will get more of the above. No thanks.

- Some useless unrelated shopping links you almost certainly don't want. No thanks.

- Way down at the bottom, 2-3 real web search results, non-keyword matched, and only from major mainstream outlets that are part of the Trusted News Initiative (Orwell?!) that have turned into glorified content farms which spit out non-expert written content on every conceivable subject for Googlebot (and now most of this content is AI written or from the cheapest possible third world contractors). No thanks.

Those "real web search results" used to be independent publishers that are referenced in this article, which were often topical experts with deep knowledge on their respective subjects, and those people and businesses have been destroyed over the last few years by Google updates that clearly prioritize their own slop and their "trusted" corporate ally content farms over the independent web.

They also disappears tons of content, and anything critical or outside of the mainstream acceptable narrative is nowhere to be found, sort of like searching for "tank man" from inside China, something everyone in the west used to poke fun of and point to as an example of digital totalitarianism.

If I were running Google search I would immediately roll back all of their search changes to somewhere around 2014-2016, which was roughly the last time you could find true keyword matched web results from a hugely diverse array of expert sources, and then very cautiously reassess. Obviously they would never do that, so I am not sure they can recover from their own demise.

BTW I don't find DuckDuckGo or Bing to be much better, they seem to just mimic Google results. Search is in real trouble.

Red flag #1: "fact checking" terminology - Orwellian as it gets, usually at best a counterargument, and at worst outright propaganda or lies.

Red flag #2: Who are these people, their claims, and their experience on the subject matter? Marc Andreessen and Brian Armstrong, or "L0la L33tz". Hmm.

Counterarguments are important, but let's not pretend they're anything more than that.

10x-15x+ price to median income is common in many desirable areas. Completely ridiculous, but also what you might expect after a decade+ of QE, asset inflation, and the last four years of core inflation.

Ollama is so easy, what's the benefit to Llama.cpp?

The X experience for many is being drowned in the muckiest shittiest slime. Paid-for bluechecks drowning out the air, spouting wild conspiracy theories, hate, disinformation, and every other blood pressure rising attention grabbing FUD they can push.

That's what you engage with, so that is what it gives you.

Are you not familiar with social media algorithms?

Online power now seems to consolidate into whoever complains the loudest, and/or whomever has the most political connections. Neither of those are good.

Shouldn't it be alarming to everyone that Jack Dorsey distanced himself from Bluesky?

The narratives around X are almost entirely inaccurate and/or self-induced. Like all algorithms, what you engage with on X is what you see, and what you follow is what you see. My X feed is very similar to my YouTube feed, which is almost entirely tech, physics, science, health, medicine, with the occasional trashy off-topic engagement bait that I ignore.

If I go onto YouTube and only engage with cat videos, soon my entire YouTube experience is going to be cat videos, even more extreme cat videos, cats doing crazy stuff, cats doing funny stuff, cats doing cute stuff. Does this mean that YouTube has turned into an extremist pro-cat propaganda center? Or is that a reflection on what I engage with? Think a little.

The "why" is often habituation

That whole conversation is worth listening to

Twitter fundamentally offers no killer feature.

Less censorship is a pretty important feature

Twitter/X is actually a balanced discourse site now. CNN even admitted that the party affiliation of its users went from majority-left (65/31) to split down the middle, 48/47

To repeat a quote I have seen repeated in dozens of email signatures (below the pronouns, of course!)

"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

"We see right through the unshowered soul living in a car by the beach, or by the Walmart, or by the side of the road. But he’s there, and he used to be somebody"

Do we? No, we don't, not at first, not until we see it enough times to become desensitized to it, and we eventually realize the state/city/population ultimately doesn't care about these people, so we adapt those beliefs too, whether we want to or not.

I watched that happen to many colleagues, friends, family members, and even, regrettably over time, myself.

If you mention the homeless crisis to many people, many of the typical urbanites and suburbanites that populate every major city that is overflowing with homeless and open drug camps, the same people who vote for it to continue and for it to get worse and worse, the ones who vote to fund programs that clearly are making the problem grow and worsen rather than improve, they get very defensive, almost angry that you're bringing it up. Why on earth are you bringing up this topic? Quiet! And if you do talk about it, you better share the acceptable opinions on the subject, anything else is verboten. It's a strange social pressure, completely devoid of humanity.

Hydropower is the only true renewable green energy that we have. It's ironic that dam removal is so popular with people who claim to care about green energy and the environment.

Coolest thing I've seen for a smartphone in a while, and definitely the coolest for Android

My pet theory is that everyone has ADD/ADHD at some level, particularly when tasked with something they do not like to do or want to do, and that the rise in ADD/ADHD is worsened by short-form content because it further reduces attention span.

I don't think it's a real disorder, nor do I think giving people amphetamine is a great idea.

A close friend of mine is dealing with a variety of health issues due to heavy metal poisoning from their tattoos.

Personally, I have never seen a case where tattoos improved someone's health, or appearance for that matter.

You really must consume your own domestic propaganda for maximum effectiveness, it's more targeted at you and your culture, customs, beliefs, biases, etc

"climate change" was the topic, if the topic were "beanbag chairs" or "health problems related to saturated fats" I would have done the same.

BTW if you have a preferred name for those who are embedding into business and institutions to enforce their beliefs, politics, morality, opinions, and generally limiting knowledge and discourse, I would be happy to use that instead, but I think most people are familiar with the terms "woke" and "Taliban".

Did you reply to the wrong comment? I fail to see any relevance to my comment, or even to GPT or LLMs.

I can't be the only one who wants to see the training data on a per response basis, IMO it should be a feature.

Why is this on Hacker News? Did Kissinger involve himself in tech in some way I am unfamiliar with?

ChatGPT is the most impressive tech I've used in years, but it is clearly limited by whatever constraints someone from The Woke Police / Thought Taliban shackled it with. Try to perform completely reasonable requests for information on subjects that are vaguely questioning orthodoxy or The Narrative and it starts repeating itself with patronizing puritanism as if you're listening to a generic politician repeat their memorized lines. I had read about instances of this but had never ran into it directly myself until a guest had a completely reasonable question about 'climate change' and we chose to ask ChatGPT for an explanation, and the responses were nonscientific and instead sounded like they were coming directly from a political action group.

Has anyone ever applied this process to humans?

If you breed two entrepreneurs, are you more likely to get another entrepreneur?

The latter would be preferred by most, and is most aligned with individualism, but sadly that is not where we are as a society. There are an entire class of people who believe they know what is best for you, about nearly every subject matter, and wish to limit all aspects of technology, life, politics, etc, to suit their superior beliefs.

What makes Zoom unique or different from simply using a computer doing other work for an equivalent amount of time? Or from being in meetings for an equivalent amount of time?

Here's the actual study cited, minus the "news" regurgitation, suggestive language, and interpretation:

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-45374-y

The majority of fentanyl is produced by a handful of labs in China. If the USA were serious about stopping the fentanyl overdose problem, it could be done with political pressure.

Ask yourself why that isn't happening?

Anyone who has ever taken phenylepherine knows that it is completely ineffective.

But, like most moral panics, the fantasy of kids stealing pseudoephedrine pills and becoming Meth Lab Moguls, was too much.

Which booster number is Emory on, and how many they will ultimately require? Since the boosters only work for a few weeks and with efficacy quickly waning, it seems obvious the current injections are not going to stop Covid, especially given they do not stop infection or transmission. Israel has a lot of publicly available data on this, they're past the 4th mRNA injection now.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa2201570

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-trial-worlds-first-fin...

I know this information can be very difficult for some to acknowledge.

None of these seem like the next Google. Too complicated.

The earlier Google, when Google was at its best in both performance and results, was incredibly simple. It indexed the entire web. It returned keyword matched results based on relevancy. There was no customization required. No editorialized results. No Big Brothering the user against thoughtcrime or wrongthink. No promotion of The Current Thing. Just information, whether good or bad, true or false, as a search engine should be.

Something that can replicate that will have a good chance of success, but I think the longstanding challenge to both Google and competitors is how to rank material in an increasingly siloed and ideological web filled with agendas, astroturfing, SEO optimization, and spam.

Porcine biologics have generally underperformed expectations, often with neutral clinical effectiveness.

Do we really need these clickbait headlines on Hacker News? For a while, this was a refuge from that garbage.