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The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

kaveland.no

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Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#201

Post by Workaccount2 »

This example falls apart because libraries are paid for by taxes.

I wish I could violently shake every internet user while yelling "If you are not paying money for it, you cannot complain about it"

The librarian is selling you a vuvuzela because that is the only way the library has been able to keep the lights on. They offered a membership but people flipped out "Libraries are free! I never had to pay in the past! How dare you try and take my money for a free service!". They tried a "Please understand the service we provide and give a donation" but less than 2% of people donated anything. Never mind that there is a backdoor that you can use, allowing you to never need to interact with a librarian while fully utilizing the libraries services (that the library still pays for).

The internet was ruined by people unwilling to pay for it. And yes, I know the internet was perfect in 1996, I have a pair of rose colored glasses too.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#202

Post by reverendsteveii »

sheiyei wrote: post #104
karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

YET.

thank you. the idea that this will be the one thing that doesn't get enshittified when it's being so heavily pushed by the people who enshittified everything else is frankly absurd

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#203

Post by horsawlarway »

iamkeithmccoy wrote: post #20

> AIs are much better at responding to my intent, and they rarely attempt to sell me anything Yet. It's only a matter of time before AI becomes ad-riddled and enshittified.

So at least in one sense - there is a tantalizing prospect here for AI that was lost for search engines.

Model weights are snapshots, and we can preserve them.

It would be like if we could keep a snapshot of the search index for google every 6 months. Doesn't matter if the "current" version is garbage, if my search target exists in an older copy that's not as corrupted, and I can choose to use that instead.

And at least this time around, I think this was built in from the start - you pin against a specific model for most serious business use-cases.

I can store open model weights locally, cheaply.

---

So I 100% agree that the ads are going to come (I can't forsee any possible alternative outside of banning ad based content promotion - which as an aside... I'm strongly in favor of proposing as serious legislation, particularly in the context of AI).

But this time the ad riddled version still has to be better than the old version I can boot up and run.

It'll be interesting to see how that tension plays out.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#204

Post by thaumasiotes »

h2zizzle wrote: post #136
JohnMakin wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s crazy on the web when you point out that google or google products used to be much better in the past someone will come out of nowhere to tell you it’s always been that way what is this instinct? anyone that’s over the age of 25 would know

Many people who post here are, were, or would like to be Googlers. Maybe not so much astroturfing ao much as a kind of corporate hasbara (though maybe both).

> Maybe not so much astroturfing as much as a kind of corporate hasbara

What's the difference? In astroturfing, someone pays people to form an organization, claim to have no external support, and do some kind of activism.

In hasbara, the government of Israel pays people to not form an organization, claim to have no external support, and do various kinds of pro-Israel and pro-Jew activism. This looks like astroturfing with the major vulnerability of the no-external-support claim shored up.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#205

Post by rkaveland »

hug wrote: post #15

The author would do well to check out Kagi -- the search results for all of the suggested queries are, to my eye, better than the results they found. Given that Kagi's higher tier plans come with search-enabled LLM chat interfaces, and those searches use Kagi's results (which, again, appear to be superior) it seems to me that you get the best of both worlds: Better search, and better search results to feed into your…

Author here. I will be trying out Kagi for some time. Search is worth paying money for. Thanks for the heads-up!

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#206

Post by returningfory2 »

jraph wrote: post #174
karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

> Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all! A free lunch that costs our environment though, which is a big caveat :-)

The idea that LLMs are uniquely bad for the environment has been debunked. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-b...

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#207

Post by marcosdumay »

karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

Yes, the question everybody awake is asking is how long until all the LLM corporate initiatives die? Because as useful as those things can be, they just can't do enough to justify that cost.

But there are free (to copy) ones, and smaller ones. And while those were built from the large, expensive models, it's not clear if people won't find a way to keep them sustainable. We have at minimum gained a huge body of knowledge on "how to talk like people" that will stay there forever for researchers to use.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#208

Post by quesera »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #3
boothby wrote: post #2

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…

fortunately for our investors we have found a way to solve this with more ai

"AI is like XML — if it's not working for you, you're not using enough of it."

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#209

Post by tartoran »

Xss3 wrote: post #139
karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

Ai is in its early youtube phase. Everyone loves that it's free and adfree and that its algorithm's primary purpose is to serve relevant content not profitable content, everyone knows it can't stay that way, and we are all waiting for the enshittification to kick in on the march to profitability. The question is, will AI chat or search ever be profitable? What enshittification will happen on that road? Will AIs be in…

I'm aware this is going to happen. but you don't think offline solutions will be more prevalent by the time openai jacks up the costs? These companies have no real moats unless they start doing something social so they have a network of captive audience or something like that.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#210

Post by jameshart »

sheiyei wrote: post #104
karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

YET.

The race right now is to get your product embedded as highly recommendable in the training data sets the AIs are learning from.
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