For a brief moment in the beta for all this, it basically just summarized the top two or three reputable results, and attached a link to where it got the data.
They should have just left it at that, and not started mixing in random blogs and social media sites.
The ability to summarize the Wikipedia article and a random university professors page where they list every fact known to man about pine trees or something was actually helpful.
If I want the AIs best guess about how to fuck up a pizza, I just go to the site where I can ask it. Bad advice when searching is just shit.
A tldr for "what is turpentine" is actually helpful.
As “down”, I hereby grant maculata retroactive permission to make the above joke; and formally proclaim that I found said joke to be at least somewhat amusing
On iOS, I set my default search to DuckDuckGo, and enabled Hyperweb on the DDG domain to redirect to SearXNG. I use a Google Images bookmark saved as a favorite when I need images (SearXNG results inferior even when using Google as the sole engine).
I anecdotally suspect Kagi of astroturfing btw, but after some free trials it seems to be about the best Google alternative - gotta be [earning like] a [US-based] knowledge worker though, or really care about search.
One thing that keeps me coming back to Google is shopping, or searching for online stores, or searching for prices. The shopping tab is somewhat useful and I don't know any other search engine that does it (because it's barely a search engine thing tho)
you don't even have to go to the shopping tab anymore.. even if you're just looking for information on something they mix in shopping results right at the top
I start with !ddgi but more than half the time hit it with a !gi bang to go over to the Alphabet Adware Image search. I swear I’m gonna catalog this stuff and then maybe it’ll be apparent:
I do weird searches
Google is search bubbling me even when I’m private browsing
I'm misperceiving the frequency at which DDG image searches actually fail me
Or maybe my use cases are fairly normal and Goog really is superior, TBD!
These are all general opinion statements. There aren't any verifiable facts like, "on this date at a meeting with x we discussed how AI project y is myopic and non-user-centered."
Some companies have you sign things after leaving.
Obviously, when you start laying people off, or do stupid shit like stack ranking, some people are going to walk out and just blab about all the dumb shit your employer does/did - and they're heroes for doing so.
I think that Amazon and Meta (where this is a known practice) do both. I've not signed anything in tech that stops me talking about internal company practices or any work that might have resulted in "voluntary" dismissal, but others in these companies that do the Jack Walsh thing and fire their employees do...
What are they gonna do if you refuse to sign? Fire you?
If this guy voluntarily left, then he wasn't getting a severance package that they could withhold (and on that note, this is a good reason to include involuntary severence in your employment contract, if you can negotiate it).
For many, it's the severance offered that makes them sign. If you're about to lose your job, a few months pay, and free relocation back home if your visa is due to be cancelled is likely enough to make you sign something.
I'm not condoning it, at all. I think the practice is fucking disgusting, and have seen it wreck lives, but it's a reality in many tech companies, including Google under Sundar.
My understanding is that while you're 100% being terminated (and are ineligible for rehire) what you sign indicates that you're actually volunteering to resign.
For more info on it, look up Amazon's Focus and Pivot programs.
Laws will differ in different places, but I'm familiar with 3 categories of terminations:
With cause (firing)
Without cause (layoff)
Voluntary (quitting)
When someone is terminated with cause or quits, they are not entitled to severance and they do not collect unemployment insurance. When someone is laid off, the employer is obligated to pay a severence package.
The Amazon focus and pivot program is interesting. That definitely looks like they're bribing low performers to quit, and I smell an ulterior motive. Maybe it's to get them to sign an NDA but I feel like it's to avoid wrongful dismissed lawsuits. Although I suppose why not both?
I am a software developer, this story isn't really about that though. When I was first becoming interested in coding I was reading about vr and ar and how it would be this huge multi billion dollar market in the next few years and I thought that sounded awesome, as it could enhance our lived experiences with info for the curious, or decorate the real world with computer generated architecture, sculpture, even some ads to pay for the whole thing. I said I'm gonna get into computer programming and then transition into vr/ar once I learn a few things.
Of course this didn't pan out. 2-3 huge tech companies rushed onto the market with somewhat crappy products just to own the patents so smaller companies couldn't innovate. When they weren't immediately profitable they started cutting back and shutting down. Just another big tech grift, like cryptocurrency and now AI. Ai is probably the worst example of all because it got pushed out to soak up a bunch of excess cloud computing when crypto crashed, and now its a huge real estate scheme as well since there's a big rush to build data centers to handle the artificial demand. You wanna know the next big bubble to bet against? Its ai and all the related industries.
It requires massive amounts of computing power to accomplish the most mundane tasks, which require electricity created by burning fossil fuels. All so your boss can spend less time writing emails letting you know you've been laid off, and political advisors can mass produce legislation to take away your rights.
Of course this didn’t pan out. 2-3 huge tech companies rushed onto the market with somewhat crappy products just to own the patents so smaller companies couldn’t innovate. When they weren’t immediately profitable they started cutting back and shutting down.
The way advanced capitalism can't even grow a product before trying to strangle it for every last penny is all that saves us from special Black Mirror levels of hell.
The difference is that Google+ was actually a wonderful product.
But a couple years down the line Google did what Google does and destroyed it from the inside making it worse and worse until it was just a shell of what it started out being.
If you were into tech, the tech people were amazing. Yonatan Zunger comes to mind. He was a backend engineer at Google and the guy was great.
I also met many people who are still friends, many of whom became real life friends too.
I even got an amazing job thanks to my contacts on g+.
The feed layout was awesome. The fact that everything got fed to rss. The fact that you could tailor posts so easily. God I miss it. Only social media I've ever really been a part of.
The platform was wonderful. Intuitive, powerful, everything every other platform was not. Google started killing it slowly long before it died, but in its heyday it was amazing.
I have to admit I mostly only used it for testing purposes. I worked on a product that integrated with it, and I remember it being frustrating to work with. I forget the details of what frustrated me about it, though.
How do you get the AI results on google.com? When I search for anything, it shows a summary and then all the results, sponsors, etc... Nothing is tagged as "AI".
(I never visit google so forgive me if this has an obvious answer)
I think it's still in A/B testing stages, 80% of my searches don't include the AI but it pops up occasionally. I also notice it more often on my phone, and rarely on my desktop where I'm not signed in.
I can reproduce most results with Google app on Android. I'm in Europe, not in USA. It just appears as some text below the search box, not marked as anything. Except this one about smoking. Now it says smoking as bad. I guess Google already told the AI to behave.
The difference between G+ and now is that Google search is actually bad now and they need to do something to fix it, but they just did the completely wrong thing...
Invite only, then when they didn't have enough users, they tried to force it on everyone in conjunction with trying to force them to use their real names on YouTube. The whole thing was just an absolute master class in fucking up a launch from start to finish.
