Bye Bye, AI: How to block Google's AI overviews and just get search results | Hacker News Reader

Bye Bye, AI: How to block Google's AI overviews and just get search results

tomshardware.com

59 pointsadamcarson27 comments

Kind of ironic the author is complaining about the quality of google search results when this website seems to be almost unusable to me on mobile due to whole-page, in-line and overlay ads.

more like "kind of ironic the site is running an article on ...", authors really don't get to control that.

No thanks, I'd rather get the AI results than SEO blogspam

Just get Kagi and stop using Google entirely.

Slightly offtopic but it was very easy to turn off the duckduckgo ai results, it was one toggle

Step one, stop using google.

Now that there's a technology threatening the continued existence of developers, we're seeing a backlash here on HN and elsewhere.

Fascinating, but all too expected.

Just remember how you feel now when working on projects putting other people out of work and consider the ramifications of what you're doing. What's that you say? You're just streamlining processes and cutting waste? Hate to inform you, some of that "waste" you're cutting are human beings needing a job.

Hey, I do it too. But we have to recognize that as we go further down this road this whole notion of removing all social safety nets, if you don't have a job then just go off and die mentality that we have has to shift. We can either be smart and figure out how to make this transition peacefully, or we can be stupid and endure a violent revolution that's going to wipe out the value of our capital assets, and in general wreak havoc in our lives. Many of us here on HN have a lot to lose in this scenario.

Our choice.

I suggest we choose wisely.

You don't seem self consistent in your beliefs. Not even an hour ago you commented on a thread that self-driving vehicles will not exist any time in the near future, and yet here you're proposing that "ai" is going to replace developers soon?

You believe that "ai" will be capable of the logical gymnastics that development requires, to replace developers, but that the same level of "ai" isn't anywhere near capable of taking in camera/sensor input and outputting proper accelerate/turn outputs in order to drive a vehicle?

In my mind the self-driving case is an easier, special case, subset of the task of general programming.

One data point: teenagers can drive cars but are rarely hired as developers. I haven’t quite thought it through enough to conclude that driving is easier though.

I think anyone attempting to compare the difficulty of abstractly related things runs into the problem of unrealized depth in the maneuver.

you can spend a lifetime sharpening your developer skills, same goes for driving.

in old age i've settled on the answer that most things really can't be compared in such terms. It runs into the donnie darko "not everything is black and white" issue real fast.

Teenagers are rarely hired as professional drivers either, and they often learn how to write code.

When 70% to 80% of coding can be automated you can be productive with far fewer developers. Doesn't mean all developers are going away. Just like we have 75% fewer farmers than we had 100 years ago, but we still have farmers. There's still going to be developers 100 years from now, but significantly fewer than we have today.

Not sure this is what is going on here. Most developers I know don't feel threatened by LLMs.

From the opening paragraph of the article.

> incorrect AI summaries above its search results. ...the AI may tell you to drink urine to get rid of kidney stones, and you'll have to scroll past that "advice" to find links to articles from human doctors.

Pretty sure that's what it's about.

The number of ads you need to scroll through is bad enough.

---

"best" also disagrees

https://news.ycombinator.com/best

> Now that there's a technology threatening the continued existence of developers, we're seeing a backlash here on HN and elsewhere.

You don't have to 'feel threatened' to want to disable a ux feature that provides a worse experience.

Similarly I don't really think that disabling said feature is 'backlash'.

The summary product is a gimmick, takes too long and it’s being force fed to users.

People wouldn’t complain if it was useful.

A better criterion, I think, is if it's consistently correct. I know, if it isn't consistently correct, it won't be useful; but it's easier to measure "correct" than "useful."

(And correct with respect to what is generally known. If there had been a pre-Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, "correct" would have been "conforms to Newton's theory of gravity.")

That’s not what this is about at all. This is about opting out of a bad GenAI experience that gets in the way of you finding the information you’re looking for.

This is just one article out of many that I've noticed here on HN over the past few weeks that are very anti-AI. As such, I have a sneaky suspicion that what I wrote is exactly what this backlash is about.

I have really huge reservations about LLMs, but a fear that they will replace me as a dev is certainly not one of them.

And while I can't speak for anybody but myself, I have never heard a dev I personally know express any real concern that they're going to be replaced by "AI". The ones who express professional concerns are mostly worried that AI is going to remove the aspects of software development that they enjoy.

I find the use of copilot reduces the amount of software drudgery that I don’t enjoy and lets me do far more of the parts I do enjoy.

The backlash is because an interesting technology that is not ready for prime time is being pushed out the door as the solution for every problem that exists. Any dev who’s been around long enough can recognize when a tech strategy is being pushed down from corporate leadership rather than driven up from its objective usefulness.

No. The backlash in this particular case is not against the AI itself. It is against companies abusing their users, i.e. enshittification.

The article isn't about replacing developers; author complains about AI summaries that don't add anything useful, often are also wrong, and cannot be turned off.

I'm with you. Any company that uses the word 'disruption' simply means making investors richer and everyone else worse off in numerous ways, and the utopian vision of people simply getting 'better jobs' when displaced by AI is absurd.

I know we can refer back to the industrial revolution, but I'm pretty sure that was no fun for the people involved (other than the investors), and we have a lot more people to think about these days.

Silicon Valley is nothing but a place for evil these days.

I don't understand how you think AI overviews threaten the existence of developers.

"Now that there's a technology threatening the continued existence of developers"

LOL...keep dreaming...I'll be long retired before that happens...

I'm excited to see where the tech goes, but right now - I put it right up there with cold fusion and self-driving cars.

might be worth taking another look at it in 5 years.

threathening the continued existence of developers? Lol, no. Not by a looooooong shot

Reply on news.ycombinator.com