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Comment by CatWChainsaw | Hacker News Reader

Something something, lame duck joke.

I really do not see any wisdom in turning search engines into answer engines. Yes, they're bespoke toys today, and you can still search the web alongside asking a LLM for an answer. But the day this becomes the default, it just becomes a countdown to the day "search" is depreciated entirely. And then rather than "doing your own research", you get to pick which Big Tech silo you trust to be the objective arbiter of truth. What a great future we're hurtling towards at breakneck speed...

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I can't imagine the disasters that would result from getting answers from a search engine instead of human-written documents. Maybe it's an inconvenience to get the wrong showtimes for a movie but what about when you're asking about the weather on your long distance hiking trip? Whether it's legal for you to carry your gun on your trip downtown? This is going to cause so much damage.

That depends on the humans writing. ChatGPT has its faults, but it's got a better hit rate than people.

> A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

Can't get too much worse than thousands dying from a virus that has a vaccine because they're off drinking bleach and horse dewormer.

It clearly can given that some people still believe - or at least pretend to do so for the purpose of spreading propaganda - that people have been drinking bleach even without the 'assistance' of LLM propaganda machines to spread these false narratives.

And that horse dewormer? That is just ivermectin in a paste base (e.g. hydroxypropyl cellulose and castor wax) where the human version is ivermectin with a filler-diluent, probably lactose, microcrystalline cellulose or starch. There is no special 'veterinary ivermectin factory', just some factories which use the same ivermectin as used for humans which they then mix with a paste base. I'm not convinced ivermectin actually is effective as a prophylactic against or treatment for SARS2 but it is known that it shows antiviral activity. I am fully convinced that it has far fewer and far less serious side effects than the experimental vaccines which were pushed past the traditional safeguards. I am reasonably convinced those vaccines were not effective against the later strains of SARS2 - Delta and Omicron and whatever came/comes after - so it is likely that the 'boosters' actually caused more damage than they have avoided given the fact that these were administered when the bulk of the infections were caused by Delta and Omicron.

It will take a long time for the narratives (plural, both from the 'follow the leader' as well as the 'my body my choice' side of the population) to subside so that something resembling the objective truth may be discerned so we´ll just have to be patient until then.

Being able to search a ranked index of sources is extremely powerful but thats nothing compared what is possible when you can outsource intelligence.

In other words, when you can outsource the part of cognition where you need to understand the problem, go through the ranked sources, find the right answer and digest it in right way.

This is unbelievably powerful, comparing it to horse carriages vs cars does not do it justice, we are talking about Jarvis in real life!

P.S. I have some colourful opinions about the kind of thinking thats leads to your comment but I'll keep that to myself since its likely to attract scrutiny or censure

I wonder what happens when you outsource enough of your cognition...

Who Are You gives a pretty nice combination of search results and LLM responses to questions. I find it helpful to see that the responses also include community sites like Reddit, so in effect you can move from LLM to more-human responses or discussions fluidly in a lot of cases.

It's "hurdling towards". All's it takes is a quick search on Bingle Duck Jeeves! to know that fact. Do you're research :)

hurtle: to move with great speed, or to fling with great force.

hurdle: to leap over something, or to overcome an obstacle.

If you hurdle towards things with great speed I admire your dexterity. I'll stick with hurtling, thanks.

Edit: can I assume that "you're" entire comment was deliberate?

Yes, you can :)

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