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DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms

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Re: DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms

#151

Post by bigstrat2003 »

ragequittah wrote: post #145
GolfPopper wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google only cares when something gains traction (and thus potentially hurts its bottom line". For example, it was answering "How many p's in Google" with "There are two p's in Google"[1] for long enough for me to get non-technical family members making a joke out of it. Google fixed it, only for it then to briefly tell you there were no p's in 'Alphabet' either. Those particular bits on nonsense seem to have been sto…

I fail to understand why people think LLMs working in tokens (and thus having a hard time counting letters) is such a huge gotcha. Ask it to write you a bash script that counts the amount of p's in a word you input it'll do it fine. Then ask it to write that script in C, JavaScript, Lua, and a few other languages. Then ask your family members to do the same. The gotcha can go both ways.

Because it proves they are not, in fact, intelligent and do not, in fact, have any understanding of what they are doing. It's really obvious what people think it's a huge gotcha: because it is.

Re: DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms

#152

Post by fragmede »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #150
matheusmoreira wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I absolutely do expect computer programmers to cheer as the brave new world they helped create is ushered in. How many people here got rich by automating away the jobs of others? I mean, what is this? Others are fair game, but programming is sacred? That's quite simply the peak of absurdity.

What industries and professions has software actually made extinct? The result of most software has been "you do basically the same job except now you do it on a computer"

Computer used to be a job for a cadre of women who did math. That job went away when computers, the physical machine, got enough software that those women were no longer needed.

Re: DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms

#153

Post by customguy »

Fogest wrote: post #10

To be honest, I didn't find DuckDuckGo's AI on the top of their search to be very good anyway compared to the one Google has. However can't say I have cared much as typically if I am searching I don't want an AI response, otherwise I'd just go straight to an AI chat interface in the first place.

Yeah, most of my searches are for keywords I think/know are in the title or url or page body. When I search "thing wikipedia" I'm being lazy, but I don't want even more energy wasted by producing an "AI" summary I won't even read.

Re: DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms

#154

Post by nomel »

Fogest wrote: post #131
nomel wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biggest problem is that google has a near exclusive deal with reddit, so all other search engines have old reddit results [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033

Yeah that does make sense, though I have found the DDG AI to give me some pretty misleading, incorrect, or just completely off answers which prompted me to throw the !g on the search to see what the Google AI would have given. I'm sure this is overall because of there being more training data, however I do think that is a good reason to simply not bother with the DDG AI. If the AI is going to provide mediocre or wron…

I misunderstood the context. I have all the AI features turned off in DDG. I don't use search engine AI because none of them can afford a model that's worth using, due to scale. I only use paid AI services (including my on-and-off subscriptions to perplexity.ai).

To turn off AI features of DDG, top right pancake icon -> settings -> AI features -> off

Re: DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms

#155

Post by Barrin92 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #80
miyoji wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, don't forget about all the programmers who are excited to help destroy their own livelihoods for no extra compensation.

Pretty wild to see this in a technology forum . The whole idea of technology is to do more with less. It inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable. Have you ever wondered how many livelihoods computer programmers have destroyed? Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?

>The whole idea of technology is to do more with less

No, that's not the whole idea of technology. Technology exists to, and this is a non-exhaustive list: fostering creativity, play, enabling autonomy and self sufficiency, connecting people to each other, collaboration, building skills and enhancing people's natural capacities. That's a smalls et of examples of what one could imagine technology to do.

Are these AI tools connecting people, genuinely enhancing their capacity to think, increasing or diminishing their creativity and self-sufficiency? The answer looks pretty obvious to me.

People who think technology is something to be used to "do more" and then discarded have no actual interest in technology as an object of study, or as a set of pro-social tools. That's not the mentality of a hacker. Why would it surprise you that people on a website called hackernews don't have the same attitude as a guy in an MBA class?

Re: DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms

#156

Post by [deleted] »

WolfeReader wrote: post #129
gchamonlive wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just that people have different understanding of the world and assuming something is self evident is dangerous. For instance the problem here is the apparent disconnection between the comment and the article, but maybe it's just that the connection isn't evident to you . Take this response to a comment of mine for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48144461 . I've read the article and someone thought…

I don't owe the benefit of the doubt to a comment that says "this is just marketing" and "are people this stupid?". If OP is going to make dismissive, vitriolic comments like that, he should probably make sure that the article is actually saying anything like what he claims.

[deleted]

Re: DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms

#157

Post by k310 »

I previously posted about DDG search results (not personalized, but as geolocated as they can)

> DuckDuckGo search results, seem to be based on either crude geolocation or recent movies of similar names, bizarrely, when I search for specific technical terms. I have to qualify searches with multiple negations to get anything of interest to someone with more than high school education and interests.

Re: DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms

#158

Post by Carbon1603 »

consp wrote: post #4

Since google got as bad as bing, it doesn't matter anymore and ddg is fine (afaik still the main source). This is just a plus.

Ddg is fine for me for English terms and non-work. For my search terms in other languages and work stuff, Google still can't be matched.

Re: DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms

#160

Post by Xirdus »

d_silin wrote: post #36
Xirdus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only works if your business is large enough that you and all your competitors aren't expected to have humans doing everything already, but small enough that going AI won't boost your valuation by much. My intuition is that the intersection is pretty much empty.

Who says "valuation"? I am talking about "profits", something that none of the the upcoming IPO debutantes have managed to achieve.

For the founders, IPO/merger is pure profit. They don't care what happens afterwards.
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