I want to toss in for consideration the creative committee that came up with the “Houston Texans”

The two things are related is what I am saying. The SEO web resulted in inflating pages with nonsense content that is needed to better appeal for advertisement revenue. This results in the results of web searches being clogged with in-genuine content that is meant to appeal to google’s algorithm and not to/by/from actual people.

The idea of “the web is dying” would mean that the internet has gotten so clogged with this kind of junk that no one even bothers to use it anymore. That’s not what’s happening. Instead, for better or worseª, people are getting parsed LLM search results at the top of their query which is summarizing the “content-rich” articles that are built for google, and getting people to the answers they want faster.

What that’s doing is making the idea of putting together this elaborate peacock of a website to appeal to Google a lot of wasted effort, since no one is going to those pages if they can get the answer more quickly. Whether this sounds like a bad thing to you I suppose depends on how much you value the pre-AI but post-SEO period of the internet, which I guess I don’t have much nostalgia for.

FWIW I’ve gotten some fantastic help from search engine LLMs with respect to some broad coding tasks but i have always said i don’t think it’s taken any longer than it would have for me to go to StackOverflow and parse through answers on my own, especially after tweaking and working with the LLM to refine its answer. I don’t think LLMs are magic, I think they’re often slapped into poorly designed products and overly applied but can have some limited use.

ª (Often worse. I got an unasked-for LLM search result on DDG today for ‘What is my IP address’, a question an LLM could not possibly help or answer without being hooked into a lot of other things, and is just a colossal waste of time and energy, and is really bad design)

Because this is what recipe sites used to look like, which was a person, posting recipes they had, in their words, so that you could get the information. Could the site look a bit better? Sure, there are accessibility issues, but it’s honest, to the point and gives you what you’re looking for.

This is the first result on Duckduckgo for “Garlic bread recipe”, which contains umpteen paragraphs of irrelevant information about Tony, a ton of great pictures of garlic bread, but holy fucking shit, they’re both the same content, one is just insufferable and ridiculous and the other one gives you what you’re looking for.

I’ve been in web design for as long as the web’s been around, basically. Obviously what would be nice is a better laid out site that gives access to some of the beautiful pictures that are in the 2nd article with the content of the 1st. But you can’t write an article with as few words in the first and ever hope to be ranked above another with “more content”. SEO has driven the web to extrude out content for attention that can be better dragged across advertisements.

For someone just looking to quickly understand how to make a good garlic bread, I miss the old web dearly.

re: enshittification of social media, social media isn’t the world wide web, so I am not understanding how that relates, but that said, I dearly also miss the forum-based internet and IRC as primary ways of communicating with each other. You were a lot less likely to run into all the giant personality conflicts that happen on Reddit/Lemmy because you weren’t aggregated in with literally everyone to comment on literally everything, you were organized around niche interests.

So I guess my question back to you would be, how many of us are on Lemmy/Reddit because that’s all that’s practically left for us?

So, it’s not killing the web, people are still using it, but it’s hurting the companies who relied on business astrology (ie SEO) to be effective.

That’s interesting because I think the SEO’d-to-shit web, where you search and get hundreds of results pointing to the same stupid site, is what “killed the web”. Big shrug.

this is 100% right, you don’t need an AI to describe something you’re already looking at. This is an absurd feature (again aside from the accessibility portion but that’s not what this is).

He also does the things that many of them do. Trump isn’t the only (child) rapist predator, he’s just the most powerful one.

I’m trying so many angles to tell people how mundane shit like this is, let me try one more:

it’s not interesting that an LLM can pull back something anyone can find in a google search result if they took more than 2 minutes. Stop writing articles about this shit.

jesus christ alexandre why don’t you grow a fucking sack and boot anyone who “shows up” like this.

Can’t handle a little chemical warfare? What a bitch.

I’d like to believe the american people would revolt before they willingly walk themselves back into slavery, but then, y’know, gestures broadly at everything…

yes, 100%, do not use an LLM for anything you’re not prepared to vet and verify all of. The longer an LLM’s response the higher the odds it loses context and starts repeating or stating total gibberish or makes up data to keep going. If that’s what you want (like a list of fake addresses and phone numbers to prototype an app), great, but that’s about all it’s going to really do.

I think they should stop.

If I pull the string what else does it say?

Why should your comment exist? Why should sky exist? Why should exist? blah blah blah

Even in code it’s only “right” a small percentage of the time if you count “right” as being able to get the answer quickly, accurately, without it losing context, and happening in less time than it would if you’d been searching. To me, LLMs are just another way of getting to data, and are about as “right” as Google is by shotgunning literally millions of results at you. You (the human) still have to parse through it all, and choose to do something with it.

Every military parade is a sad display of nonsense, the fact that anyone would think it’s a good idea is like thinking hitler had some innovative ideas about facial hair. dumb.

Yeah my MacBook is a workhorse, the kind of absurd one that actually does need to not be a tablet, but the MacBook Air and an iPad with a magic keyboard are only different in exceptionally arbitrary ways (and the iPad would be way more convenient with its touch screen, pencil support and modularity).

I use my iPad with a keyboard/touchpad as my primary fuck-around-the-house computer streaming my windows pc and MacBook, there’s obviously no reason an iPad couldn’t be running those OSes natively. That said I don’t really need for iPad os to be more in the way

Because they’re fucking terrible at designing tools to solve problems, they are obviously less and less good at pretending this is an omnitool that can do everything with perfect coherency (and if it isn’t working right it’s because you’re not believing or paying hard enough)

Yeah that’s kinda what I mean, I happened to learn coding (the old fashioned way) riiight before all the AI started happening. It was definitely helpful for me as a new learner but at this point I almost never use it (because I’m making things I want to make and not boilerplate). I see systems that make entire React sites, which is great, and also kind of mundane (since it’s making the millionth-plus react sites on the internet), but if you put a semicolon in the wrong place in a React app the whole thing breaks. What is someone who doesn’t know code, have any desire to learn code and doesn’t have any interest in debugging code supposed to do with a broken pile of react?