I’ve found that AI has done literally nothing to improve my life in any way and has really just caused endless frustrations. From the enshitification of journalism to ruining pretty much all tech support and customer service, what is the point of this shit?
I work on the Salesforce platform and now I have their dumbass account managers harassing my team to buy into their stupid AI customer service agents. Really, the only AI highlight that I have seen is the guy that made the tool to spam job applications to combat worthless AI job recruiters and HR tools.
I use perplexity.ai more than google now. I still don’t love it and it’s more of a testament to how far google has fallen than the usefulness of AI, but I do find myself using it to get a start on basic searches. It is, dare I say, good at calorie counting and language learning things. Helps calculate calorie to gram ratios and the math is usually correct. It also helps me with German, since it’s good at finding patterns and how German people typically say what I am trying to say, instead of just running it through a translator which may or not have the correct context.
I do miss the days where I could ask AI to talk like Obama while he’s taking a shit during an earthquake. ChatGPT would let you go off the rails when it first came out. That was a lot of fun and I laughed pretty hard at the stupid scenarios I could come up with. I’m probably the reason the guardrails got added.
i switched to kagi a year ago as i usually need to go through search result. i was astonished at just how dogpoop google search is compared to it.
youtube was even worse, i had to go through 10 unrelated videos to find one slightly relevant one. kagi is usually dont have the latest results but is on point on relevancy.
Last month I typed letter for letter the title of a video I saw on there in YouTube search and it tried so hard to push some other barely related videos, I couldn’t believe it. I ended up typing the url manually like some internet cave man
wow, i mean its a free service but the amount of money they make from selling our data they should atleast try to not make us severely hate their product
IMO YouTube and social media are both things that would be better as public services than for profit ventures. The things they need to do to make money either make the product shitty (holy shit @ some of the things I’ve heard from people who don’t block ads) or are outright bad for society (misinformation and all).
not happening. bigtech will kill any such attempt by throwing a few millions at senators. these products make close to 100 billions in profit a year. aipac just showed us how wretched our political system is when they get to do a genocide with our money and then get standing ovation from us, and and all that with a lobbying budget of just 300 million
Yeah, this current system looks pretty fucking captured to me.
Some things look like signs that things might not be that bad, like the Google ruling is a step in the right direction. But on the other hand, IMO it wasn’t enough of a step and there was a ruling against MS 20 years ago that looked really good until it was just dropped entirely (though apparently the experience did still affect Gates when he was embarrassed about having to explain his position and realizing that most people didn’t agree with it).
Today’s billionaires don’t seem to have that humility anymore, at least not the more prominent ones. Just like the right wing politicians. And all of it enabled by the billionaire-owned media.
well said, totally agree. the depressing thing is that i don’t see this changing in anytime soon or way ahead in future. with ai powered drones working class will have no means to challenge the oligarchy unless they end up fighting and killing each other.
I looked at kagi but I don’t want to pay for it because I’m a cheap bastard.
Searx uses different search engines to get the best results. There are many public instances or if you can self host, you can run it privately.
yeah i have wanted to try it. will likely do once the kagi subscription is near the renewal.
haha, no shame in that, i was myself hesitant but one day just gave in anger after getting just ad infested garbage from google for work related topic
I just tried it and was pleasently surprised.