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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

#241

Post by baggy_trough »

autoexec wrote: post #239
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…

> As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all! if you consider the massive environmental harm AI has and continues to cause, the people whose work has been stolen to create it, the impacts on workers and salaries, and the abuses AI enables that free lunch starts looking more expensive.

What is this massive environmental harm? That sounds like hyperbole.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#242

Post by h2zizzle »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #204
h2zizzle wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fair. The main difference is that people here don't like it when you call it astroturfing.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#243

Post by ksenzee »

baggy_trough wrote: post #241
autoexec wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all! if you consider the massive environmental harm AI has and continues to cause, the people whose work has been stolen to create it, the impacts on workers and salaries, and the abuses AI enables that free lunch starts looking more expensive.

What is this massive environmental harm? That sounds like hyperbole.

They’re restarting coal-fired power plants to run AI datacenters. I don’t know what your personal threshold is for “massive” environmental harm, but that meets mine.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#244

Post by crazygringo »

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…

> The amount of money it's burned on this is giant

It's big, but it's honestly not that big. Most importantly, costs will quickly come down as we realize the limits of the models, the algorithms are optimized and even more-dedicated hardware is built. There's no reason to think it isn't sustainable, it will add up just fine.

But yes, it will attract a ton of advertising, the same curve every service goes through, like Google Search, YouTube, Amazon, etc. Still, just like Google and Amazon (subtly) label sponsored results, I expect LLM's to do the same. I don't think ads will be built into the main replies, because people will quickly lose trust in the results. Rather they'll be fed into a separate prompt that runs alongside the main text, or interrupts it, the way ads currently do, and with little labels indicating paid content. But the ads will likely be LLM-generated.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#245

Post by cgriswald »

JohnMakin wrote: post #178
thaumasiotes wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that jkaptur is the one making up false statements, and then providing "citations" that contradict him. I don't think an instinct to point out inaccuracies can explain that. There would have to be inaccuracies to point out first.

If you believe stuff like this isn’t actual astroturfing, you must face that from somewhere there seems to exist a deeply ingrained belief from a subset of extremely vocal and argumentative people that Google is amazing and if it isnt well that’s just how the web is now (ignore the google man behind the curtain that created the modern web in the first place) and if it’s not that well, it’s always been this way (even…

All I see here is someone making a claim and someone else making a different claim. They may have erroneously intended the claim in opposition, either missing or interpreting differently the 'interspersed' qualifier. Or, alternatively, they may believe when any ads appeared is more meaningful in the context of this discussion.

I think Google search has gone downhill tremendously to the point of near uselessness and have been a Kagi subscriber for awhile, but I don't see astroturf in this instance. Do you have other examples?

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#246

Post by autoexec »

JohnMakin wrote: post #178
thaumasiotes wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that jkaptur is the one making up false statements, and then providing "citations" that contradict him. I don't think an instinct to point out inaccuracies can explain that. There would have to be inaccuracies to point out first.

If you believe stuff like this isn’t actual astroturfing, you must face that from somewhere there seems to exist a deeply ingrained belief from a subset of extremely vocal and argumentative people that Google is amazing and if it isnt well that’s just how the web is now (ignore the google man behind the curtain that created the modern web in the first place) and if it’s not that well, it’s always been this way (even…

I was a google fan back when they first started and were just a search engine. Search engines like Yahoo and excite became massively bloated and ad-filled while google was clean and fast.

I wasn't a fan for very long. Google got creepy fast, and at this point their search is becoming useless, but for a short time I really thought that Google is amazing and I was an enthusiast.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#247

Post by ranyume »

willvarfar wrote: post #59

My dream solution: The EU creates an institution for public knowledge, a kind of library+tech solution. It probably funds classic libraries in member countries, but it also invests in tech. It dovetails nicely into a big push to get science to thrive in the EU etc. The tech part makes a in-the-public-interest search engine and AI. The techies are incentivised to try and whack-a-mole the classic SEO. E.g. they might s…

You make it sound like the techies will be their own boss. Sorry, but politicians are in charge.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#248

Post by hennell »

It's an interesting article although I think it's rather telling that the authors search of "postgres slow database" seems to disappear in the LLM section. It mentions the adds disappeared, but no mention of the solutions found or the amount of time or changes to how they searched/added the question.

I've found AI helpful for answering questions, but better at plausibly answering them, I still end up checking links to verify what was said and where it's sourced from. It saves frustration but not really time.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#249

Post by baggy_trough »

ksenzee wrote: post #243
baggy_trough wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this massive environmental harm? That sounds like hyperbole.

They’re restarting coal-fired power plants to run AI datacenters. I don’t know what your personal threshold is for “massive” environmental harm, but that meets mine.

What's a specific example of that?

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#250

Post by gknoy »

baggy_trough wrote: post #241
autoexec wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all! if you consider the massive environmental harm AI has and continues to cause, the people whose work has been stolen to create it, the impacts on workers and salaries, and the abuses AI enables that free lunch starts looking more expensive.

What is this massive environmental harm? That sounds like hyperbole.

Training AI models uses a large amount of energy (according to what I've read / headlines I've seen /etc), and increases water usage. [0] I don't have a lot to offer as proof, merely that this is an idea that I have encountered enough that I was suprised you hadn't heard of it. I did a very cursory bit of googling, so the quality + dodginess distribution is a bit wild, but there appear to be indiustry reports [2, page 20] that support this:

""" [G]lobal data centre electricity use reached 415 TWh in 2024, or 1.5 per cent of global electricity consumption.... While these figures include all types of data centres, the growing subset of data centres focused on AI are particularly energy intensive. AI-focused data centres can consume as much electricity as aluminium smelters but are more geographically concentrated. The rapid expansion of AI is driving a significant surge in global electricity demand, posing new challenges for sustainability. Data centre electricity consumption has been growing at 12 per cent per year since 2017, outpacing total electricity consumption by a factor of four. """

The numbers are about data center power use in total, but AI seems to be one of the bigger driving forces behind that growth, so it seems plausible that there is some harm.

0: https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmen... 1: https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2025-06-05-green... 2: (cf. page 20) https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Environment/Pages/Publications/...

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