Well, they just lost me forever as a VPN customer.

Been a reasonably happy DuckDuckGo user for years. It has the SEO slop problems too, and they jumped the AI shark like everybody else, but you can turn the AI off at least and still have your search engine and chatbot be separate tools.

Google let the web descend into SEO slop long ago despite that they could have EASILY spotted and purged low quality over-verbose results and the sites that pooped them out. They make businesses pay to have the top sponsored result, when they're already the top organic result, but the ads are indistinguishable from real results now. They made the web worse for everyone to line their own pockets. Screw them.

IE was such a scourge, a drain on humanity (at least the slice of humanity that made websites). One of Microsoft's great evils - they let the product stagnate for years once they had the market cornered.

Windows has kinda become that now, a low quality user-hostile product forced on people through inertia and monopoly tactics.

Love this quote, seems to apply to all software these days and maybe business generally: "They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job."

If you take away the cynical edge, though, if this actually happens we're talking about an age of mom-and-pop businesses in industries that have not traditionally had them. It can't/won't be all software, but mom and pop stores were only about serving their neighborhood to begin with.

LOL no it won't because mom and pop won't be able to afford to run a business and no one would be able to afford to buy from them either.

Ted Chiang made a similar point in his article "ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web" a few years ago:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...

It's a great line, but that's obviously not all it is. You don't get new results in e.g. mathematics by looking carefully at the pixels of a JPEG.

If you have a validator for if a JPEG is a valid proof in mathematics, and can generate lots of "plausible" JPEGs, then you can arrive at hew results in mathematics.

A few years ago it might have been. You have to judge assertions in the context of when they were made. Obviously some things have changed.

It's a good line! It's even sort of useful. It's just not the whole story.

Point not mentioned: it just doesn't work that well! It lies, it reverts to the mean on every topic, it wastes the reader's time. It's toxically positive, sycophantic. It's such a good mimic that it's insidiously hard to distinguish its bullshit or fake work from real work.

Always amazed how spoiled we are with modern hardware! The 8087 was $500 in today's dollars, and delivered around 50 kFLOPS of performance (0.00005 GFLOPS).

A cheap mobile phone CPU+GPU costs the manufacturer maybe $20, and typically does 50 GFLOPS on the CPU and 500+ on the GPU. So 10 million times the performance for 1/25th the cost.

Humbling too how "worthless" all the incredible ingenuity of the 8087 circuits and die designs now is, although I'm sure many of those innovations live on in modern chips.

This hype cycle is unique in that the tech writes its own hype.

The amount of pro-AI AI bots on chat forums is insane.

The effort required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude more than to create it.

Because AI creates unmaintainable messes in any language, and ergonomic ones help humans clean up.

Never mind cleaning up, you also have to understand the language just to judge and review the LLMs output. How else are you to separate good design and implementation from a bad one?