Pxtl

And I don't make my own paints either when doing art. I still agree with the basic original point:

It is disappointing that we're currently automating creativity far faster than manual labour. I'm angry that my art is getting automated away faster than my folding of laundry.

I mean yeah. I'm not disagreeing with any of that (except the fact that AI caused it - search engines got destroyed by SEO before AI textgen started crapflooding).

But it is what it is. The SEO spammers won. They defeated Google and Microsoft and DDG's respective search algorithms. Traditional search got killed. The internet got worse instead of better.

In light of this miserable new reality, AI-based content synthesizers (particularly ones that can coherently point to the references for their synthesis) are the current solution to SEO spam. Maybe this is another temporary plateau that the SEO spammers will murder. And yes, it's tragic that this energy-pig of AI is the best solution to something that used to be doable with a simple trie.

But still: there is a real problem today for which an AI-based tech provides the current best solution. In this one specific case, the AI lives up to the hype. It swallows the hellscape of noise of the internet and gives you the signal.

Bing Chat provides its sources.

Okay but I still have to fold my own laundry.

Absolutely.

Bing Chat Assistant is better than Google, Bing search, or DDG today. If I search for "how do I do X in software Y" on a normal search, I get zillions of dead-link-filled MS pages, some interesting tangentially-related stackoverflow posts, and a bunch of old blogspam.

If I ask the robot, I often get "no, there's no supported way to do that officially" which is the clear clean answer I can't find elsewhere. Or sometimes it misunderstands the question and gives me a tangentially-related result, which is bad but is the same thing I get from Google via StackOverflow, except Bing is much more responsive to me saying "no, I didn't mean that way, I meant this" in which case I often get either the right answer or the "no" answer, which is still good and accurate! The problem is as you iterate, the conversation accumulates cruft and becomes more erratic and hallucinatory.

But right now, with the level of SEO that has ruined all major search engines (ironically partially caused by AI), Bing Chat is the best search on the market now imho. The cause of and solution to all of life's problems

So yeah, in terms of "things where AI has lived up to its potential"? It is winning the search war today. Everything else is something on the horizon in various distances (art, music, text generation, true general AI) but better search for information is here right now.

I wish they could come up with a more honest term for it than "vegan leather". Call it "upholstery vinyl" or something. Frustrating how there's no good standard quality grades for that stuff too. Like, the seats in my Prius don't wear the way my belt and my boots do, and they're all made of pleather vinyl.

Glass backs are the dumbest idea in the history of stupid.

The only way things like that could be defensible if they were easy to replace (bring back Moto-Z style magnetic backs!), but since phones are all held together with glue now, that's not a thing.

Except there isn't much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn't better. DDG isn't better.

I have a simple opinion on paywall bypassers:

If it's possible to bypass the paywall, that means there's already a class of unauthenticated clients you're allowing to see it. I have no interest in complying with whatever infrastructure you use to implement this discrimination.

Implementing a true hard paywall is trivial software. The only reason bypassing is possible is because they're trying to have their cake and eat it too by allowing (eg) search engines to see it unauthenticated.

This feels like a workaround for a core problem: Media (particularly games) are no longer transferable goods.

What's needed is a proper legal standard WRT resale-ability and server support. Clear requirements on what a piece of software must be able to do without its private and impossible-to-acquire cloud server, and clear requirements on allowing transfers of ownership of non-recurring-subscription-based digital goods.

The PM should make more than the people who run crown corporations. 80 of Canadians are wrong.