What we lost when search stopped making us think • Hacker News Board

Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think

#61

Post by salawat » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 2:44 AM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #22

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I am against these tools generally. I use them myself" would be a more interesting take

I'm against them, vehemently, but I'm also not going to fight a tidal wave. I'm not going to be unemployed and unemployable by refusing to use them. Principles are expensive and I certainly cannot realistically afford to hold them tightly. Being forced to use them to continue to have an income is causing me a cognitive dissonance and a level of stress that is surely going to kill me though. I strongly resent the fact…

The way one successfully fights a tidal wave is lining up with peers and resisting the siren call of "if I don't someone else will." Solidarity is how these things have been worked out since before I was alive.

It sucks, but no one ever said a life lived right would always be easy.

Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think

#62

Post by salawat » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 4:17 AM UTC

minifridge wrote: post #14

It is a naive question but I do wonder how hard it is to scrape the web and build web indexes that are shared via bit torrent and self host a tfidf traditional engine using a distributed effort. How big the web really is? Is there a lot of additional secret sauce that made google work well in its prime?

No. Unless you count the non-existence of the DMCA which essentially resulted in the creation of an accessible and accurate internet index becoming de facto illegal, and the fact webmasters and other netizens actually operated with enough restraint to not have crawlers, web spiders, and what few scrapers there were hammering sites to the point of ruin in the search for moar data.

It was an index that could be searched via Boolean operator, with a few other more complex operators attached. The biggest problem came in once SEO became a thing and started reverse engineering the relevance algorithms, completely poisoning the index.

Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think

#63

Post by bluefirebrand » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 5:53 AM UTC

salawat wrote: post #61

bluefirebrand wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm against them, vehemently, but I'm also not going to fight a tidal wave. I'm not going to be unemployed and unemployable by refusing to use them. Principles are expensive and I certainly cannot realistically afford to hold them tightly. Being forced to use them to continue to have an income is causing me a cognitive dissonance and a level of stress that is surely going to kill me though. I strongly resent the fact…

The way one successfully fights a tidal wave is lining up with peers and resisting the siren call of "if I don't someone else will." Solidarity is how these things have been worked out since before I was alive. It sucks, but no one ever said a life lived right would always be easy.

I'd love to, but my peers mostly seem to not care or are actively in disagreement with me.

I'm not alone in my views, I know, but I'm accepting that I'm very likely a minority view so I'm not going to get what I want here

Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think

#64

Post by keybored » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 6:41 AM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #58

keybored wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro AI: It’s inevitable and I love it Anti AI: It’s inevitable and I hate it Oh no. They’re converging. But I guess that just proves the point doesn’t it.

What else do you expect me to do exactly? If I thought there was an actual, substantial amount of support for people with my point of view then things would be different. But there just isn't. Most people are just too passive and go along with whatever is happening. I've already been fired from one job for a very mild pushback against their AI strategy, is it worth being poor forever to fight this battle?

Nothing.

Employers suffering from AI metric mania does not mean that AI is here to stay forever and it will just escalate. Necessarily.

> Most people are just too passive and go along with whatever is happening.

I guess they are seeing/hallucinating a tidal wave.