Web scraping for LLMs has almost completely ruined the search experience. In the past I could search for simple questions, and quickly get an answer without even having to click through to the links.

This was horrible for web traffic, but the utility level was off the charts. It was possible to get accurate results in milliseconds. It was faster than using an LLM.

Now sites put almost no info in the search result headers, to get people to click through. I think this will work on some users, but most will start using LLMs as search by default.

Search engines have gotten so bad that I almost feel forced to try running SearXNG or some other search engine locally. Its a pain to set up, but degooglefication is always worth it.

Is SearXNG a nice experience? I need something that specifically excludes AI slop affiliate marketing listicles.

I don't know if content other than that exists out there any more. Still, I'd rather have no answer than a "top ten $item" list just describing the first page of Amazon results.

Once its dialed in, its as good as Kagi. But I still haven't tried to integrate it into all my devices outside of my computer. I still need to try it with tailscale.

I also feel like a really good local LLM can be better. I'd love to get something set up where my searches get sent to the local LLM first, and then to Kagi\SearXNG if it needs more information.

Imagine if we had laws that required all LLM compute to come from solar, or other sustainable power sources. We could have used the market's thirst for AI as a backchannel way to force creation of new sustainable energy.

In contrast to Elon/XAI's illegal methane fuled datacenter in memphis

Imagine if we had people that actually listened to scientists, reduced their carbon footprint and changed their habits.

Some of those TerryB videos are crazy. I still remember one where they got on the highway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbCzWRnKCaI

Its like a motor bike, except it doesn't take you where you steer. It take you where it wants to take you.

If you tell it you want to go somewhere continents away, it will happily agree and drive you right into the ocean.

And this is before ads and other incentives make it worse.

refinement interaction == dismount your bike, and walk it where you want

I honestly think its a symptom of having almost no "career mobility". If it's impossible to get promoted / find better jobs, then being skilled doesn't go as far as brown-nosing.

People will only apply themselves if they think it will help them get to a better place.

Not exactly - there is career mobility in IT, but for many IT is seen as the only place they can get it people who shouldn't be in IT go there.

There also seems to be an expectation that after about 30 you move into management. This means people experienced in IT are not socially valued (they can be paid well if they are great).

Here's the most stripped down launcher in the world:

https://github.com/fandreuz/TUI-ConsoleLauncher

I don't need icons, swiping, widgets, or any of that nonsense. This one works great and you can ssh, use tmux right from the launcher

I would love for an audit of sites to see if any popular sites still do collect the data when you click no. Or if you just land on the banner page, and close the tab.

Or if you just ignore the pop-up through ublock's element picker or something else equivalent and continue to use the webpage.

As far as I'm concerned, that doesn't constitutes consenting to anything whatsoever.

Stack Overflow has dozens of domains and each of them has the dumb cookie popup.. I set up a Ublock rule and modify it for (iirc) all sites, so I don't see the element with the ID on any site (I think it has the term "stack" in the id/class name). Ah, bliss!

Yeah, you're really not going to find many people blasting gustav mahler in the forest for example. It's always pop music.

My exact complaint. What is the "handmade" community? At first I thought he was talking about woodworking or knitting.

Also the reddit comparison is great, but I wish he would have talked about why the slop is there in the first place.

I'm pretty sure new reddit isn't optimized for speed, it's optimized for analytics and datamining.

I bet they use all those backend calls to get really granular session info. When something is super slow, it's not that it's unoptimized, but rather it's optimized for money over user experience.

To play devils advocate, telling other people to turn off thier music is also "imposing preferences on other people".

I do agree with what they're saying though.

If they aren’t a dick they can have their music, through headphones.