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Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

tegabrain.com

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Re: Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really here to stay? If the wheels fells off the investment train and ChatGPT etc. disappeared tomorrow, how many people would be running inference locally? I suspect most people either wouldn't meet the hardware requirements or would be too frustrated with the slow token generation to bother. My mom certainly wouldn't be talking to it anymore. Remember that a year or two ago, people were saying something simil…

Maybe you don't love your mom enough to do this, but if ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow and it was something she really used and loved, I wouldn't think twice before buying her a rig powerful enough to run a quantized downlodable model on, though I'm not current on which model or software would be the best for her purposes. I get that your relationship with your mother, or your financial situation might be different tho…

Please tell me this is satire.

Re: Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

#112
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot remember ever reading a book where there was a space around the dashes.

Technically, there are supposed to be hair spaces around the dashes, not regular spaces. They're small enough to be sometimes confused for kerning.

Em dashes used as parenthetical dividers, and en dashes when used as word joiners, are usually set continuous with the text. However, such a dash can optionally be surrounded with a hair space, U+200A, or thin space, U+2009 or HTML named entities   and   These spaces are much thinner than a normal space (except in a monospaced (non-proportional) font), with the hair space in particular being the thinnest of horizontal whitespace characters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac...

Typographers usually add space to the left side of the following marks:

    : ; ” ’ ! ? / ) ] } * ¿ › » @ ® ™ ℓ ° ¡ ' " † + = ÷ - – —
And they usually add space to the right of these:

    “ ‘ / ( [ { > ≥ 
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/05/micro-typography-sp...

1. (letterpress typography) A piece of metal type used to create the narrowest space. 2. (typography, US) The narrowest space appearing between letters and punctuation.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hair_space

Now I'd like to see how the metal type looks like, but ehm... it's difficult googling it. Also a whole collection of space types and what they're called in other languages.

Re: Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that was me swyx

Multiple people have coined the idea repeatedly, way before you. The oldest comment on HN I could find was in December 2022 by user spawarotti: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33856172

Here is an even older comment chain about it from 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23895706

Apparently, comparing low-background steel to pre-LLM text is a rather obvious analogy.

Re: Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

#114
post #29

besides for training future models, is this really such a big deal? most of the AI-gened text content is just replacing content-farm SEO-spam anyway. the same stuff that any half-awares person wouldn't have read in the past is now slightly better written, using more em dashes and instances of the word "delve". if you're consistently being caught out by this stuff then likely you need to improve your search hygiene, n…

A colleague sent me a confident ChatGPT formatted bug report. It misidentified what the actual bug was. But the tone was so confident, and he replied to my later messages using chat gpt itself, which insisted I was wrong. I don't like this future.

I have dozens of these over the years - many of the people responsible have "Head of ..." or "Chief ..." job titles now.

Re: Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

#115
post #83
post #16

Somewhat related, the leaderboard of em-dash users on HN before ChatGPT: https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

Apparently, it's not only em-dash that's distinctive. I've went through comments of the leader, and spot he also uses the backtick "’" instead of the apostrophe.

[deleted]

Re: Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

#117

google results were already 90% SEO crap long before ChatGPT just use Kagi and block all SEO sites...

How do we (or Kagi) know which ones are "SEO sites"? Is there some filter list or other method to determine that?

Re: Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple people have coined the idea repeatedly, way before you. The oldest comment on HN I could find was in December 2022 by user spawarotti: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33856172

Here is an even older comment chain about it from 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23895706 Apparently, comparing low-background steel to pre-LLM text is a rather obvious analogy.

Oh wow, great find! That’s really early days.

Re: Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

#119
> This is a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT's first public release on November 30, 2022.

The problem is that Google's search engine - but, oddly enough, ALL search engines - got worse before that already. I noticed that search engines got worse several years before 2022. So, AI further decreased the quality, but the quality had a downwards trend already, as it was. There are some attempts to analyse this on youtube (also owned by Google - Google ruins our digital world); some explanations made sense to me, but even then I am not 100% certain why Google decided to ruin google search.

One key observation I made was that the youtube search, was copied onto Google's regular search, which makes no sense for google search. If I casually search for a video on youtube, I may be semi-interested in unrelated videos. But if I search on Google search for specific terms, I am not interested in crap such as "others also searched for xyz" - that is just ruining the UI with irrelevant information. This is not the only example, Google made the search results worse here and tries to confuse the user in clicking on things. Plus placement of ads. The quality really worsened.

Re: Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

#120

The slop is getting worse, as there is so much llm generated shit online, now new models are getting trained on the slop. Slop training slop, and slop. We have gone full circle just in a matter of a few years.

I was replaying Cyberpunk 2077 and trying to think of all the ways one might have dialed up the dystopia to 11 (beyond what the game does). And pervasive AI slop was never on my radar. Kinda reminds me of the foreword in Neuromancer bringing attention to the fact the book was written before cellphones became popular. It's already fucking with my mind. I recently watched Frankenstein 2025 and 100% thought gen ai had a role in the CGI only to find out the director hates it so much he rather die than use it. I've been noticing little things in old movies and anime where I thought to myself (if I didn't know this was made before gen ai, I would have thought this was generated for sure). One example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGSNhVQFbOc&t=412) cityscape background in this a outro scene with buildings built on top of buildings gave me ai vibes (really the only thing in this whole anime), yet this came out ~1990. So I can already recognize a paranoia / bias in myself and really can't reliably tell what's real.. Probably also other people have this and why some non-zero number of people always thinks every blog post that comes out was written by gen ai.
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