Re: Kagi, I heard about it on HN, tried it for 100 searches, then subscribed. When I search for random JS and CSS things, MDN is the first result, and if it isn't, I can downrank whatever spammy site(s) are on top. --- I wish I had a local LLM trained to detect clickbait and or low-effort content. I imagine searching YouTube and having all the clickbait collapsed together (just like Kagi condenses listicles), with th…
Been paying for Kagi for 6+ months and very happy with it. I’m pretty anti subscriptions so that’s saying a lot for a service that is otherwise free. I do have to dump into google for local searches every once in awhile, but otherwise happy with it.
Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
441–450 of 493 posts
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
Been paying for Kagi for 6+ months and very happy with it. I’m pretty anti subscriptions so that’s saying a lot for a service that is otherwise free. I do have to dump into google for local searches every once in awhile, but otherwise happy with it.
I keep Google Maps around for a similar reason; Apple Maps works well, but things like business hours are wrong often enough for me to double-check in Google Maps.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#443> It's common to criticize ChatGPT for its hallucinations and, while I don't think that's unfair, as we noted in this 2015, pre-LLM post on AI, I find this general class of criticism to be overrated in that humans and traditional computer systems make the exact same mistakes. Finally some one said it. We are unnecessarily harsh on hallucinations. LLM’s don’t intentionally ‘lie’. To say this is a wrongful anthropomorp…
It's also a wrongful anthropomorphism to claim that human beings "make the exact same mistakes" as LLMs, because they don't. Humans don't confabulate the way LLMs do unless they have a severe mental illness. A human doctor isn't as likely to simply make up diseases, or symptoms, or medications, whereas an LLM will do so routinely, because they don't understand anything like human anatomy, disease, chemistry or medici…
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#444I'm sorry but the very first request is completely wrong. When people search for a YouTube downloader, they want a website that allows to download a YouTube video, not a command line tool. And the first results given by Google do that. I'm one of the people that think Google search became bad but it's not because of the kind of search
They do not do that, have you tried using them?
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because that’s what most people have access to. I’d agree with this rationale if the author clearly communicated their choice of model and the consequences of that choice upfront. In this post the table of results and the text of the post itself simply reads “ChatGPT” with no mention of 3.5 until the middle of a paragraph of text in the appendix. > It’s absolutely worthless to most readers to talk about something t…
> I’d agree with this rationale if the author clearly communicated their choice of model and the consequences of that choice upfront. (…) with no mention of 3.5 until the middle of a paragraph of text in the appendix. You’re moving the goalposts. You went from criticising anyone using 3.5 and writing about it to saying it would’ve been OK if they had mentioned it where you think it’s acceptable. It’s debatable if the…
There are no goalposts being moved. My original comment was "I really don't understand why anyone writing articles about ChatGPT uses 3.5. It's pretty misleading as to the results you can get out of (the best available version of) ChatGPT."
This is still the position I'm arguing. It's a criticism of authors who use the older, inferior version of ChatGPT, do not make that abundantly clear to their readers, and then use that to make statements about the capabilities of "ChatGPT", which ultimately misleads those readers as to the current capabilities of "ChatGPT".
> It’s debatable if the information needed to be more prominent; it is not debatable it is present.
I'm not debating whether or not it is present in the article, I'm the one who highlighted its presence. What I'm arguing is that omitting this information from every reference to ChatGPT in the entire body of the text, and the tables front and center representing the data, and then burying this extremely important detail in a single sentence in the middle of a paragraph in the appendix, is effectively misleading.
> Alternatively, it you simply say “ChatGPT” it’s reasonable to infer that you’re evaluating the version most people have access to and can “play along” with the author.
It's even more reasonable to infer that when you're evaluating the performance of "ChatGPT", you're using the latest version.
If you review a video game, you don't play the free demo then tell the audience that the game is too short and lacking in a ton of features.
If you're reviewing Microsoft Word, you're not going to leave out the all-important detail that you're actually evaluating Word version 6.0.
> Those are your words, not mine. I argued for the exact opposite.
Then I misunderstood your line "incentivize others to give money to OpenAI".
> I agree they should strive to provide accurate information. But I disagree that being paid has anything to do with it, and that their representation of the tech was inaccurate. Incomplete, maybe.
Agreed that all of humanity should strive for accuracy and honesty in all their communication with others, but I do feel this responsibility is even more explicit when you are a professional making money off your writing for ostensibly providing an objective assessment of some thing.
I maintain that it's inaccurate, misleading, etc etc to present these results as representative of the performance of ChatGPT without making it abundantly clear to the reader that it's 3.5, which is significantly less performant than the latest version.
> Again, I did not argue that, I argued the opposite. What I meant is that even if you believe that to be true, that still doesn’t mean random third-parties would have any obligation to do it.
Again, I'm confused by what you're saying here about third parties.
Are you arguing the opposite that GPT 4 is not far more capable than 3.5? Are you arguing that it is more capable but that advanced capability would not make it a more compelling product? I admit I don't understand either of these positions.
That 4 is far better than 3.5 is something you can readily observe yourself and find measured on countless metrics and or find support for through countless anecdotes. If do believe it is better then that seems like it would automatically always make it a more compelling product than 3.5, whether or not you want to argue that ChatGPT as a class of products is anywhere from hardly compelling at all to God's Own Perfect Product.
> That comment has a reply, by another person, to which I didn’t feel the need to add.
Ah, I somehow missed that.
So, I went ahead and asked GPT 4 your ghost question verbatim, and the first bullet point it gave me urged me to consider rational explanations for the phenomena.
I then went ahead and asked it a question about sin and God phrased with the implication that I was believer. Then a direct, neutral question about whether or not God exists.
I think it performed well in all these cases, and the nuance that is being glossed over is that it matters whether you are expressing an implied belief in something supernatural or asking in a neutral fashion about the topic.
It's clear to me that a universal policy of responding to all queries involving topics of faith of first encouraging the user to question the validity of their faith would be the wrong way to go, so again I see this as an exceptionally arbitrary standard that I don't feel could be satisfactorily defended as a standard nor actually met by most people to the satisfaction of most people.
https://chat.openai.com/share/2dc2d6eb-b3f6-4571-a75b-af698f...
> Machines and humans are not the same, not judged the same, don’t work the same, are not interpreted the same. Let’s please stop pretending there’s an equivalence.
The purpose of comparison is precisely to draw attention to the similarities and differences between two different things, nobody ever said there was an equivalence.
> Here’s a simple example: If someone tells you they can multiply any two numbers in their head and you give them 324543 and 976985, when they reply “317073642855” you’ll take out a calculator to confirm. If you had done the calculation first on a computer, you wouldn’t turn to the nearest human for them to confirm it in their head.
This is a perfectly defined problem with exactly one correct and easily verifiable answer. The other topics we were talking about are nothing like this.
> The problem with ChatGPT being wrong and misleading isn’t the information itself, but that people are taking it as correct because that’s what they’re used to and expect from machines. In addition, you don’t know when an answer is bullshit or not. With a human, not only can you catch clues regarding reliability of the information, you learn which human to trust with each information.
I completely agree that people need to be skeptical when using ChatGPT, and that this distrust of seemingly omniscient "AI" that can confidently and plausibly provide bullshit answers to any query is something that will need to be cultivated in humanity.
Is that the point of using 3.5 to make ChatGPT look worse than it is though? Should we achieve this cultivation by being intentionally misleading? Maybe the ends justify the means but I'm not sure this is a compelling argument. I'd much rather look at the most powerful version available and point out the very real flaws with it, there are no shortage and no need to get stuck on older generations of the tech.
> Everyone’s standard for ChatGPT, be it absolute omniscience, utter failure, or anything in between, is arbitrary. Comparing it to “the majority of humanity, including many of its brightest members” is certainly not an objective measurable standard.
I mean, yeah, but there is a spectrum of arbitrariness. Asking it to answer arithmetic accurately could be reasonably argued to be on the end of the spectrum labeled "objectively the right way to do this" and expecting it to know the one correct way to answer queries regarding fundamentally unknowable topics of faith that are mythically sensitive and controversial for the majority of humanity would be closer to the other end.
----
Look, I'm so tired of online debates like this at my age. I likely wouldn't even have engaged except your first response struck me as unnecessarily abrasive with phrases like "absolutely worthless" and "excessive fawning" which are an irresistable call to arms to my inner keyboard warrior.
I'd really like to not spend the rest of my life writing essays at each other on this topic so I'm happy to agree to disagree here.
Also, this has all left me with the impression that this is largely a branding issue. OpenAI does call all of their ChatGPT versions "ChatGPT". If they made unmistakable distinctions through their product line that would go a long way in addressing any confusion.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#446I'm sorry but the very first request is completely wrong. When people search for a YouTube downloader, they want a website that allows to download a YouTube video, not a command line tool. And the first results given by Google do that. I'm one of the people that think Google search became bad but it's not because of the kind of search
That's the tricky mind-reading aspect about search intent. Different people have varying expectations as to what they want to find with the same query. I'd definitely want yt-dlp in favor of some website.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#447> Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term. Even though yt-dlp is probably actually what you want for a tool to download video from YouTube. Is that true? Do most people want to install a command line tool to…
No. They want sites like savefrom.net - which is hit number one on Google.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kagi gives me websites that require more clicking; Google just gives me reasonable answers and I don't see spam in your examples. "why do wider tires have better grip?" Wider tires provide more grip due to a larger contact patch with the road. While it's true that friction is not directly dependent on surface area, a larger contact patch allows for more even weight distribution and better traction, particularly durin…
That first result re: tires is simply wrong. Wider tires don't have a larger contact patch; the size of the contact patch is determined by the weight of the car and the air pressure in the tires: A = W / P So the reason wider tires improve handling is more complex and subtle. Also, FTA: Assuming a baseline of a moderately wide tire for the wheel size. - Scaling both of these to make both wider than the OEM tire (but…
Such a nerd snipe this one. 400+ comments and still could not get the answer.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#449What always confuses me about the „search has gotten so bad“ mentality is that it is often based on anecdotal evidence at best, and anecdotal recollection at worst. Like, sure, I have the impression that search got worse over the last years, but .. has it really? How could you tell? And, honestly, this should be a verifiable claim; you can just try the top N search terms from Google trends or whatever and see how the…
I think the point he's trying to make that the search results page from the mainstream search engines are a minefield of scams that a regular person would have difficulty navigating safely. If he was looking at relevance, yours would be a solid point, but since most of the emphasis is on harm, a smaller sample works. Like "we found used needles in 3 out of 5 playgrounds" doesn't typically garner requests for p-values…
Yes, and he makes the point well. It also means if you are part of the 0.49% of people who use Firefox on Android, he isn't talking about your experience. I find Firefox mobile remaining at 0.49% utterly inexplicable, which I guess just goes to show how out of touch with the mainstream I (and I assume most other people here) are.
It's not just ad blockers. My first attempt at a tyre width query got relevant results, mostly because "tyre grip" looked so bad as a search term so I used "traction" instead. In the mean time, friends of my age (60's) can't get an internet search for public toilets to return results they can understand. When I try to help them, their eyes glaze over in a short while and they wave me away in frustration. These mind games with google hold no interest for them.
I am regularly bitten with one thing he mentions: finding old results is hard, and getting harder. It makes it really hard to find historical trends ("am I wrong about what it was like back then?") really difficult.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#450While I've made huge improvements to the algo recently, I do think Marginalia Search got a bit lucky with the sample queries, as it is still IMO far more hit and miss than many alternatives, but that also speaks for how hard evaluating search quality is. Its efficacy is also strongly dependent on understanding that it's a keyword search engine with no semantic understanding.
Good. I love keyword search.
"Semantic understanding" can be so biased and ... just shady sometimes.