Memes

Search engines were returning shit more and more, before LLMs even existed.

I've never seen convincing arguments for that. However, if you think about it, Google wants you to stay scrolling through it forever. The more sponsored links and ads they can show, the more money they make. They didn't need to make it worse for AI, they made it worse for profit

I don't think it's intentional, but I think the sheer quantity of AI slop and web crawlers trying to train new AI models is the main problem. Good websites are blocking access to search engines to try to slow crawler traffic, while shitty websites are being made at an unprecedented speed. I legitimately don't know how you fix this as a search engine provider.

They're by no means the end-all solution. And they usually aren't my first choice.

But when I'm out of ideas prompting gemini with a couple sentences hyper-specifically describing a problem, has often given me something actionable. I've had almost no success with asking it for specific instructions without specific details about what I'm doing. That's when it just makes shit up.

But a recent example. I was trying to re-install windows on a lenovo ARM laptop. Lenovos own docs were generic for all their laptops, and intended for x86. You could not use just any windows iso. While I was able to figure out how to create the recovery image media for the specific device at hand, there were no instructions on how to actually use it, and entering the BIOS didn't have any relevant entries.

Writing half a dozen sentences describing this into Gemini, instantly informed me that there is a tiny pin-hole button on the laptop that boots into a special separate menu that isn't in the bios. A lo, that was it.

Then again, if normal search still worked like it did a decade ago, and didn't give me a shitload of irrelevant crap, I wouldn't have needed an LLM to "think" it's way to this factoid. I could have found it myself.

They seem to be pretty good at language. One time i forgot the word "tact" and I was trying to remember it. I even asked some people and no one could think of the word I was thinking of even after I described approximately what it meant. But I asked AI and it got it in one go.

Happened to me yesterday. I have an old 4K TV, every component I used to connect to it had HDMI 2.0+ capabilities. Neither laptop nor Steam Deck would output 4K60, only 4K30. Tried getting another cable and a hub, same result. And I know that my Chromecast outputs 4K60 to this TV, so I was extra confused. In my desperation, asked GPT-5 what was I missing, and it plainly told me that those old Samsung TVs turn off HDMI 2.0 support unless you explicitly turn it on in TV settings under "UHD Color". Apparently Chromecast was doing chroma subsampling, but computers refused and wanted full HDMI 2.0 bandwidth...

Asking genAI questions I already know the answer to is how I know the AI is wrong more than it is right.