I was (trying to) use AI to help me with something on my PC a few nights ago. It was telling me to go menus and choose options that literally don’t exist.
Wtf is going on with AI right now? About a year ago, I found it useful for certain things. But it seems to have totally shit itself recently, and is pretty much useless now.
Models got downgraded because they were too popular/expensive to run.
Also layers of guardrails reduce inputs and output usefulness.
I tried getting xpadder yesterday and the top search results were fake websites. I’m still not convinced I found the real one
Just double checked the email confirmation from when I bought it in 2016. Most recent xpadder version is 2024.05.01.
Also if you’re looking for controller remapping software (and you’re on windows OS), check out DS4Windows. Contrary to the name, it works for most brands of controller, and it’s got a lot of stuff that xpadder doesn’t.
I landed on it for the better control stick adjusting (you can change dead zone/max zone, and also sensitivity curve). I stuck with it because it can use an emulated controller while hiding the actual controller from programs and games (which solves any double input jank from shit like steam).
Also it can also map gyro controls to mouse input, which is real neat for essentially using my joycons as a remote for my pc, and the occasion where splatoon style gyro aiming fits in games without being too barfy.
Is that software still being maintained? I have an old copy that doesn’t work anymore. But that app used to be super handy
Last update a month and a half ago. Great for what it is, but ds4windows is my go to until it stops working for me. More complicated, but it offers a good deal more finetuning.
That’s the neat part, you don’t.
The top results have been useless spam for a decade or more at this point, and the only difference is Google sit there hoovering up the money instead. The money is in the way of search. Any popular search engine will end up the same way.
It’s a shite situation, but until somebody makes a non-profit search engine and filters out spammy results, we’ll continue to Google, scroll down two pages for a reddit link, and carry on.
gemini://gemplex.space/search
What’s this?
a search engine for the gemini network protocol
Gemini is basically an alternative web, so it has its own protocol, own server and browser software, and an own content language (heavily inspired by Markdown).
Everything is built to be much more lightweight, so certainly in the spirit of solarpunk.But big downside is that “the thing you want” is honestly probably not on Gemini at all, because it does not share content with the HTTP web.
That does mean that all the ads and bullshit are gone, too (and cannot be implemented beyond static images, sponsored articles and I guess, ASCII art).
But yeah, at this point, it’s most useful for reading (and writing) blog posts, and having fun with the technology itself. It does have a lovely community for that.I like it, I’m going to look further into that! Thank you!
Try out the searxng browser plugin. It pretty much takes you back to the first pane.
I’m honestly amazed no one’s sued google over the site telling them things like “Jump off a bridge if you’re depressed” or that products have been recalled that haven’t
Likely settled out of court silently with an NDA
Searching “SpaceX starship” on Google just now in Firefox with adblock origin, not logged into Google, on mobile I get:
- Summary of the vehicle from Wikipedia with relevant pictures on the first card
- The SpaceX page for the vehicle on the second card
- Relevant videos on the third card
- SpaceX’s twitter on the fourth card
Doing the same in mobile chrome, logged in, no ad block:
- Adverts for starship toys in the first card
- Relevant news stories in the second card
- Wikipedia summary
- SpaceX’s starship page
- Relevant videos
- SpaceX twitter
So if you’re getting other crap, use ad block. I presume the comic was made while Google was adding LLM results, which they aren’t doing now. I can’t say I noticed the LLM results while they were included.
You’re still using google?
Instead of the childishly condescending question, suggest alternatives for those who don’t know
Kagi looks nice! Going by how the results are pretty much the same, it looks like it’s a proxy for bing in the us. Like duckduckgo, ecosia and yahoo
Oh my god, you’re still using Yahoo
Again, actually. Yahoo as integrated to the browser search bar is basically what googled used to be a decade ago. It’s just a proxy for bing tho
Oh my god, you’re still using a browser lol
Duckduckgo works great
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until bing goes down again
I thought everyone was overreacting until I used Google on the computers at my college and I realised that DDG had been insulating me from all that horror. Thank goodness I switched when I did.
It might protect you from a lot of Google’s shit show but it won’t show you good results too.
Kagi is the only usable search engine for me right now. Yes, it’s not free. I needed a whole year to convince myself to pay for searching but I finally did it and it is absolutely worth it. I’m a SE though, so searching stuff is like half my job.
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Well, sure. If it works for you then by all means keep using it.
I’m just recommending a service which I find very useful. I actually first heard about it on Lemmy and I’m grateful for the recommendation so I spread the word in hope of helping someone else.
I’ve recently found out about https://search.marginalia.nu and want to start using it.
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Slight update to this comic, to call out the dangers of Google’s Sponsored Results.
Examples, for those that are not aware of this risk:
- https://www.techradar.com/avoid-google-ad-malware
- https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/scams-verify/google-ads-scammers-redirect-website-url-different-search/536-4ef6c41d-087e-4db9-a281-86bcf7637c68
- https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/01/using-google-search-to-find-software-can-be-risky/
- https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/01/rogue-sites-causing-trouble-in-google-advert-results
I rarely trust top results from google, since I’m uncertain if I somehow missed the tiny gray text saying that it’s an add.
Yeah, that shit is illegal where I live and search engines do it anyways. Unfortunately not enough lawsuits…
It’s disgusting that Google will happily make money from scammers while completely aware of what’s going on
That’s big business on the Internet! No morals, no conscience, just churning out profit for the do nothing class.
That’s exactly how you make money in the search engine world - by not knowing what your paying customers do.
lol google ads never had moderation or need for approval.
I once continuously kept getting porn in my ads disguised as a mobile game (and I was underage at the time). Ads themselves were graphic and included genitals. Reported it every time I saw it, took it at least a week to disappear.
It’s an extremely bold assumption to make to presume that we even could? Like Ukraine wanting to not be invaded, or Rome wanting to not fall, or someone wanting to not die of cancer, or perhaps the best analogy: never exercising a day in our lives + eating however we feel like in the moment, yet wanting to not suffer the negative consequences of obesity, hardened arteries, etc.
I take the approach of the stoics: we brought this upon ourselves, allowing ourselves to be tricked by the “Don’t be evil” slogan. I do not own Google - I have no stocks in the corporation, they are not running their server code on my machines, they use none of my electricity, I do not own the land they park their buildings upon, etc. - and therefore I have no call in how they choose to go about their business. They chose to enshittify, and I am not offered a say in their choices. Therefore “we” cannot “fix” this. Only they could, and only if they want.
But maybe we can build our own LLMs so that we never need to use Google to search for anything ever again, directly? For now, I use DuckDuckGo whenever I can, Google when I have to, and perhaps most important go directly to the site that I want if possible - e.g. wikipedia, wiktionary, stackoverflow, Reddit if I absolutely must, etc. We lived in a golden era of prosperity when we were allowed to “have things”, but that is over - we did not take care of it properly, and it was taken over from the inside, as it was always going to be, our delusions to the contrary notwithstanding. Now, maybe we can be more realistic about our expectations moving forward.
SearXNG does pretty well.
There’s also an ongoing project called Yacy which is trying to make a decentralized ever-growing index, but it’s small enough right now that the results are still quite poor even when federating with other users until you spend enough time fine-tuning it, which most people don’t want or have time to do.
That’s neat - though I would worry that it could get polluted easily, e.g. China, Russia, and/or fascists everywhere would very much like to control the conversation, so as it got a wider userbase that would be the time for it to cease functioning, whereas before that it could be allowed as something to occupy our time. So much of our daily lives are impacted by such geopolitics that we don’t even/often think of.
I hope that we (people writing FOSS) can explore the concept of voting more - e.g. how wikipedia does its edits with “trust actors”, similarly the Fediverse (& searching) could have a much wider pool of trusted community mods (or potentially a lesser category of that, lacking full post-removal capability as current ones do) where mods could vote and once something went below a certain threshold (e.g. 5x more down- than up-votes from such community curators), then a flag could go up like “this post has been marked as containing potential misinformation - are you sure that you would like to read it?” By distributing the load like that, it could help make this place MUCH more active, by lowering the barrier to moderation as it conjoins normal reading activities with a very simple button bush for most people. (and then a higher category of mods can double-check the curator mods, etc.)
On the other hand, authoritarian developers are unlikely to want to extend the Lemmy code along those lines, and rather go the opposite direction so that anytime someone says something even the slightest bit against their party line, boop the person becomes insta-banned in every single community that they have ever interacted in, even if never having commented but solely voted in them (I am not exaggerating this up - for one see the notes for the upcoming v0.19.4 release allowing this capability, and multiple recent threads discussing how this has already happened to numerous people - e.g. here is one excellent accounting of that process).
So anyway, if someone is willing to build a good system, then the people do seem willing to take it forward - e.g. see how many have already done so to Google Maps with all the reviews & pics including menus & such to share with everyone. But ofc there will be resistance to now doing that again for somewhere else, and perhaps still yet again if that one fails, and so on in perpetuity.:-(
Seems like you’re trying to address systemic problems of learned human nature at this point, which is something that can’t really be done through software alone. There needs to be a fundamental culture shift for that. Yacy is mostly good because it’s self-hosted with the option to federate to a decentralized index, and so is able to be tailored to your own needs without any external entity. However, the tailoring process means that the initial search results are absolutely atrocious compared even to Google at first, and then get much better over time. SearXNG, on the other hand, is a sort of self-hosted aggregator of search results from dozens of other search engines, rather than being a search engine in itself. It also serves as a proxy, since it is doing the searching and not you.
Complex problems will not be solved overnight, it’s true, but we can get there one step at a time!:-)
&udm=14 is a temporary fix for those who still feel the need to use Google’s search.
Paid search isn’t the solution, as evidenced by the untrustworthiness of the CEO of Kagi search.
What I would like to see is a non-profit search.
Google wanted to organize all the world’s information to make it useful. Sounds like a great idea destroyed by a profit motive getting in the middle. Try the same idea without the profit motive and you’ll probably end up creating something people will defend endlessly, like Wikipedia.
What if your search engine asked you for a five dollar donation, once a year, the way Wikipedia does?
Search engines should be non-profit, honestly, they should be an extension of Public Libraries.
What does &udm=14 do?
It’s the equivalent of doing a Google search and then clicking on the “Web” tab for results.
Clicking on “Web” manually inserts the &udm=14 at the end of the search string. I believe udm is just classifying which type of search to run, and this is a basic “web search” with no gimmicks.
&udm=14 is fancy for nerds who think they’re special but for anyone else it’s just clicking on “Web” results.
I did not even know they separated out Web searches until I came to your comment. Super useful, thank you.
I haven’t kept up on this controversy, but is this really all there is to it? People think the service is untrustworthy because the CEO tried a bit too hard to convince a critical blogger, according to the comments possibly due to neurodivergence?
Read the blog post. I can totally see where the writer is coming from. Vlad’s email responses are pretty laughable with that added context. Not only did they tell him they weren’t interested in engaging, but the responses he sent anyways thoroughly dodged the substance of their arguments. They did their research and came to pretty reasonable conclusions, and vlad totally talked around/failed to address the points that really matter. Kinda slimy ngl.
I can also see from the highlighted discord exchanges why they weren’t interested in engaging with him further. Sure he “responds” to everything, but he doesn’t really engage with constructive criticism. Whether or not the guy is autistic isn’t really relevant to whether he can run the business competently and make sure questions are answered in an honest and transparent manner.
