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AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

elenaverna.com

301–310 of 318 posts

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#301

The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues : - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it. And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.

Because you should not ask questions on SO - you should search for an answer first - asking question there was not really what most people thought it was. It is the same at work - you should first and foremost check the documentation and read stuff on your intranet and then bother other people for help. Epitome of that was "what have you tired" that was first thing in the interface for asking questions of SO and that's first thing I ask co-workers.

Somehow people did not understand all of that or did not care. AI chatbots are only disguising search as a question. It is definitely much better from UX point of view - but with hallucinations it is worse for everyone who gets imagined responses, because there is no "hey I don't know, let's really figure this out together".

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#302
post #34

AI is killing my website but in a different way than what's discussed in the article: Content scrapers are completely out of control, spiking my serving costs and degrading performance for human users. There seem to be hundreds of them and they've gotten very good at looking like human users so they're hard to block or throttle. I can't prove they're all AI-related scrapers, but I've been running the site for 25 year…

I've never told anyone about my website (thats under construction and under a subdomain) and GCP is charging me 50 cents/month for egress from multiple continents. 4 years ago that would have been 10 cents/month.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incidentally an endemic problem of online discussion sites. There is only one possible quality flow gradient, and that is downwards. If a site begins well , with high-quality and relevant content, then those who wish to exploitatively extract value from that factor will be attracted to it. Eventually the clue up and leaves. If a site begins poorly , with low-quality and irrelevant content, and quite often, ab…

Not just online discussion sites; any community system. It feels like the typical growth & decay function of a lot of systems, just at internet speed. My experience: the only way to stay good is to stay small and exclusive, but the internet attacks this defense directly and destroyed it, and at the same time destroyed itself. You need to find the "golden age" of all these systems, enjoy them while you can, try and pr…

Oh, absolutely, it's a long-observed phenomenon of social decay within organisations and movements.

There's a description of the latter I've spent far too long trying to track down without joy.

There's a passage from Charles Perrow's book Complex Organisation giving several examples of organisational drift (not necessarily decline), posted previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415476>.

One of the more spectacular cases of organisational decline was the (formerly literary) magazine American Mercury, founded by amongst others H.L. Mencken. It eventually became an anti-semitic rag, now mostly or completely dead, though it seems to keep zombying annoyingly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury>

There's also video challen TLC, begun as a partnership between Nasa and PBS, now somewhat reduced as well.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are using chatgpt for medical info today because it might get better tomorrow? your comment wasn't what you plan to do it in future with it, you claimed you are doing all those things today. Now you are talking something about future hypothetical.

You missed the nuance in my statement. May be I will try rephrase it for you I am saying the use of webmd is all for non medical purposes, just people reading symptoms that they should be getting from their doctor anyway. Now for the nuance, for the purpose of meaningless consumption it doesn’t matter if there are hallucinations, people are not supposed to take medication based on webmd. Given the really established…

yea i really don't understand what consuming webmd for non medical purposes even means. purpose of consuming hallucinated medical info is like reading medical fiction?

but you do you.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#305
It's organic food vs plastic noodles. But it goes only as long as people can hope to tell real fish apart from artificial ones in the pond. We are desperate and running back to our biological habitats - with real people, real talk and real imperfection.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the nuance in my statement. May be I will try rephrase it for you I am saying the use of webmd is all for non medical purposes, just people reading symptoms that they should be getting from their doctor anyway. Now for the nuance, for the purpose of meaningless consumption it doesn’t matter if there are hallucinations, people are not supposed to take medication based on webmd. Given the really established…

yea i really don't understand what consuming webmd for non medical purposes even means. purpose of consuming hallucinated medical info is like reading medical fiction? but you do you.

what do you use it for?

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yea i really don't understand what consuming webmd for non medical purposes even means. purpose of consuming hallucinated medical info is like reading medical fiction? but you do you.

what do you use it for?

to understand symptoms and side effects of drugs i am prescribed.

No doctor ( atleast in this part of the world) will go over all the side effects of the drug that they prescribe.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/statins/side-effects/

this website is not entertainment for me.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you might have absolutely no idea how to create a prompt for an LLM. Telling it to stop is just creating a spurious prompt, lowering the quality of your interaction for no gain.

So, https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/ >? Care to enlighten us heathens?

Telling it to shut the fuck up is a lot more user error than holding a phone in a “wrong” way

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. But AI does not close your question because it didn’t like your phrasing.

I've had sufficiently similar experiences. Usually an LLM chatbot going off half-cocked before I'd fully specified my question, and taking offence to my "please shut the fuck up" (usually after a series of requests to stop). I suspect if I'd kept that up the session might well have closed.

I’m unclear what you mean by “before I’d fully specified my question” because they don’t have the ability to interrupt you.

Write your full question. If you get a bad answer, rewrite the original question. Don’t talk to the bot.

This has the vibes of grandma typing in ‘Hello Google, can you take me to yahoo so I can check my email’?

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