Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

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> I really like AI. It shortens the trip to google, more or less.

Is this "AI is good" or "Google is shit" or "Web is shit and Google reflects that"?

This is kind of an important distinction. Perhaps I'm viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses, but it feels like searching for code stuff was way better back about 2005. If you searched and got a hit, it was something decent as someone took the time to put it on the web. If you didn't get a hit, you either hit something predating the web (hunting for VB6 stuff, for example) or were in very deep (Use the Source, Luke).

Hmmm, that almost sounds like we're trying to use AI to unwind an Eternal September brought on by StackOverflow and Github. I might buy that.

The big problem I have is that AI appears to be polluting any remaining signal faster than AI is sorting through the garbage. This is already happening in places like "food recipes" where you can't trust textual web results anymore--you need a secondary channel (either a prep video or a primary source cookbook, for example) to authenticate that the recipe is factually correct.

My biggest fear is that this has already happened in programming, and we just haven't noticed yet.

These are good questions and thoughts. I don’t think you’re wrong about searching being better before, either.

I started my career around 2005 and honestly, I did great finding what I needed without an LLM. I recall being absolutely amazed with how broad and deep the reservoir of knowledge was, and as my skills in searching improved my results generally got better.

And then they didn’t. It has gotten worse over time now, in part due to Google itself and in part because of how the Internet tailors content to Google. Getting a Quora link in response to a technical question is a crazy farce. Stuff like that didn’t really happen the same way 20 years ago, much like the Pinterest takeover of Google images.

The signal pollution also seems like a huge problem to me. I’ve doubled down on creating real content in the form of writing and software in an attempt to kind of rekindle and revive the craft of, I don’t know, ‘caring enough to do things yourself’ in my life. I miss it the more I read generated text or see generated images and video. I like LLMs and other generative AI, I see the value, but their rapid takeover is seriously disheartening. It just makes me want to make real things more.

>Is this "AI is good" or "Google is shit" or "Web is shit and Google reflects that"?

It's a -"I can ask it questions based on results and/or ask it to tweak things and/or ask it dumb what if questions" that I can't on web "good."-

Honestly one of the major plus towards LLMs is that it is immediate and interactive.

>Hmmm, that almost sounds like we're trying to use AI to unwind an Eternal September brought on by StackOverflow and Github. I might buy that.

I mean, what's the alternative? You're not going back to web of 90s (and despite nostalgia, web of 90s was fairly bad).

>you can't trust textual web results anymore--you need a secondary channel

I wonder how good LLMs would be at verifying other LLMs that are trained differently - eg sometimes I switch endpoints in LibreChat midpoint during a problem after I am satisfied with an answer to a problem, and ask a different LLM to verify everything. It's pretty neat at catching tidbits.

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