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The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

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Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#51

Post by mittensc »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #46
m000 wrote: post #3

I mostly agree with TFA, with one glaring exception: The quality of Google search results has regressed so badly in the past years (played by SEO experts), that AI was actually a welcome improvement.

User issue. Every single time this comes up. People don't know how to search, that's it. Even the HN population. Every time this gets posted, I ask for one example of thing you tried to find and what keywords you used. So I'm giving you the same offer, give me for one thing you couldn't find easily on Google and the keywords you used, and I'll show you Google search is just fine.

Allright, had this recently since i keep forgetting luks commands.

How do you set up an encrypted file on linux that can be mounted and accessed same as a hard drive.

(note: luks, a few commands)

You will see a nonsensical ai summarization, lots of videos and junk websites being promoted then you'll likely find a few blogs with the actual commands needed. Nowhere is there a link to a manual for luks or similar.

This in the past had the no-ad straightforward blogs as first links, then some man pages, then other unrelated things for the same searches that i do now and get garbage.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#52

Post by msgodel »

einrealist wrote: post #44
kgeist wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We run our own LLM server at the office for a month now, as an experiment (for privacy/infosec reasons), and a single RTX 5090 is enough to serve 50 people for occasional use. We run Qwen3 32b which in some benchmarks is equivalent to GPT 4.1-mini or Gemini 2.5 Flash. The GPU allows 2 concurrent requests at the same time with 32k context each and 60 tok/s. At first I was skeptical a single GPU would be enough, but it…

If those smaller models are sufficient for your use cases, go for it. But for how much longer will companies release smaller models for free? They invested so much. They have to recoup that money. Much will depend on investor pressure and the financial environment (tax deductions etc). Open Source endeavors will have a hard time to bear the resources to train models that are competitive. Maybe we will see larger coop…

Even Google and Facebook are releasing distills of their models (Gemma3 is very good, competitive with qwen3 if not better sometimes.)

There are a number of reasons to do this: You want local inference, you want attention from devs and potential users etc.

Also the smaller self hostable models are where most of the improvement happens these days. Eventually they'll catch up with where the big ones are today. At this point I honestly wouldn't worry too much about "gatekeepers."

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#53

Post by hambes »

mittensc wrote: post #51
iLoveOncall wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User issue. Every single time this comes up. People don't know how to search, that's it. Even the HN population. Every time this gets posted, I ask for one example of thing you tried to find and what keywords you used. So I'm giving you the same offer, give me for one thing you couldn't find easily on Google and the keywords you used, and I'll show you Google search is just fine.

Allright, had this recently since i keep forgetting luks commands. How do you set up an encrypted file on linux that can be mounted and accessed same as a hard drive. (note: luks, a few commands) You will see a nonsensical ai summarization, lots of videos and junk websites being promoted then you'll likely find a few blogs with the actual commands needed. Nowhere is there a link to a manual for luks or similar. This…

Is "How do you set up an encrypted file on linux that can be mounted and accessed same as a hard drive." literally what you put into the search bar? if so, that's the problem.

try "mount luks encrypted file" or "luks file mount". too many words and any grammar at all will degrade your results. it's all about keywords

edit: after trying it myself i quickly realized the problem - luks related articles are usually about drives or partitions, not about files. this search got me what i wanted: "luks mount file -partition -filesystem" i found this article[1], which is in german (my native tongue), but contained the right information.

1: https://blog.netways.de/blog/2018/07/25/verschluesselten-fil...

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#54

Post by smitty1e »

Excellent Frank Zappa reference in The Famous Article is "I'm the Slime"[1].

The thing that really chafes me about this AI, irrespective of whether it is awesome or not, is emitting all of the information to some unknown server. To go with another Zappa reference, AI becomes The Central Scrutinizer[2].

I predict an increasing use of Free Software by discerning people who want to maintain more control of their information.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPFIkty4Zvk

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Garage#Lyrical_and_sto...

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#55

Post by [deleted] »

einrealist wrote: post #44
kgeist wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We run our own LLM server at the office for a month now, as an experiment (for privacy/infosec reasons), and a single RTX 5090 is enough to serve 50 people for occasional use. We run Qwen3 32b which in some benchmarks is equivalent to GPT 4.1-mini or Gemini 2.5 Flash. The GPU allows 2 concurrent requests at the same time with 32k context each and 60 tok/s. At first I was skeptical a single GPU would be enough, but it…

If those smaller models are sufficient for your use cases, go for it. But for how much longer will companies release smaller models for free? They invested so much. They have to recoup that money. Much will depend on investor pressure and the financial environment (tax deductions etc). Open Source endeavors will have a hard time to bear the resources to train models that are competitive. Maybe we will see larger coop…

[deleted]

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#56

Post by sillyfluke »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #9
tossandthrow wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was just Google that got bad. I use Kagi who returns excellent results, also when I need non AI verbatim queries.

It didn't get bad for no reason. It needs to be bad for ads to continue to be profitable. Displaying what you searched for immediately is cannibalizing that market. I'm guessing ads in AI results is the logical next step.

Yes, that's the next logical step. The only silverlining is Google currently has less of a moat than last time in the technology in question, so some upstart could always be on their heels in a Kagi-esque way.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#58

Post by nosianu »

mittensc wrote: post #51
iLoveOncall wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User issue. Every single time this comes up. People don't know how to search, that's it. Even the HN population. Every time this gets posted, I ask for one example of thing you tried to find and what keywords you used. So I'm giving you the same offer, give me for one thing you couldn't find easily on Google and the keywords you used, and I'll show you Google search is just fine.

Allright, had this recently since i keep forgetting luks commands. How do you set up an encrypted file on linux that can be mounted and accessed same as a hard drive. (note: luks, a few commands) You will see a nonsensical ai summarization, lots of videos and junk websites being promoted then you'll likely find a few blogs with the actual commands needed. Nowhere is there a link to a manual for luks or similar. This…

I asked Google that exact question, and I got an AI summary that looks alright? Please verify if those steps make sense, I pasted them into a text service, it's too much for an HN comment: https://justpaste.it/63eiz

It shoed 25 or so URLs as the source.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#59

Post by Gigachad »

einrealist wrote: post #44
kgeist wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We run our own LLM server at the office for a month now, as an experiment (for privacy/infosec reasons), and a single RTX 5090 is enough to serve 50 people for occasional use. We run Qwen3 32b which in some benchmarks is equivalent to GPT 4.1-mini or Gemini 2.5 Flash. The GPU allows 2 concurrent requests at the same time with 32k context each and 60 tok/s. At first I was skeptical a single GPU would be enough, but it…

If those smaller models are sufficient for your use cases, go for it. But for how much longer will companies release smaller models for free? They invested so much. They have to recoup that money. Much will depend on investor pressure and the financial environment (tax deductions etc). Open Source endeavors will have a hard time to bear the resources to train models that are competitive. Maybe we will see larger coop…

Seems like you don’t have to train from scratch. You can just distil a new model off an existing one by just buying api credits to copy the model.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#60

Post by Gigachad »

blablabla123 wrote: post #30

I looked for the right term but force-feeding is what it is. I yesterday also changed my default search engine from Duckduckgo to Ecosia as they seem the only one left not to provide flaky AI summaries. In fact I also tried the communication part - outside of Outlook - but people don't like superficial AI polish

Yep, seems like every product is cramming in their forced slop everywhere begging you to use their new AI they spent so much on.
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