"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Look at this shit (first paragraph of body of article):
"Automatic watches are admired for their intricate mechanics and timeless appeal, but even the finest timepieces can sometimes run fast or slow. If you’ve noticed your automatic watch gaining or losing time, you’re not."
First search result on DDG. Thank you, automatic watch expert and real person Hnin Oo Thazin. We may need a whole ass new internet.
https://mtscwatch.com/blog/why-your-automatic-watch-runs-fast-or-slow-and-how-to-fix-it
Whenever I need to look up general information, I filter to only show pages from before 2022. It removes the AI trash instantly.
Most general topics haven't changed appreciably in the past 3 years.
I imagine a future where children speak of the "before times" and how when there was information on a thing called "paper" and how it wasn't created by slop generators.
It was happening well before AI with shitty content-scraping “solution” sites. Some even put [SOLVED] in the page title. AI is just a compounding problem.
Those names sound plausible in the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy
Reported to SlopStop.
As opposed to a manual watch that I have to advance every second?
(yes yes I'm sure they're referring to a watch you don't have to wind but like, who has ever referred to anything as an "automatic watch"?)
Everybody says automatic watch. Like literally everyone from common consumers straight down the line to horologists.
This is to differentiate watches you have to wind. It's automatic winding rather than manual winding. It's lingo that has stuck around since watches became a common item. All watches were manual winding at first. Then the automatic winding watches came out. Then the quartz battery. We still have all these types of watches but to differentiate they're called quartz, automatic, manual.
yeah so thats just what they're called. its the parlance for a watch that winds itself. you used to have to wind them every day of course, then these came along and "automatic winding watch", shortened to "automatic" has always been the term industry and marketing have used. sometimes they are called self-winding, but Ive heard "automatic" nearly every time. there's also quartz movement, which uses a battery
As someone who actually knows a thing or two about automatic watches, I decided to give it a read. While the info is actually not as awful as I thought (no hallucinations surprisingly), I still would not recommend it as a guide, even if it were written by a human. Especially this part:
2. Demagnetize:
If your watch suddenly starts running fast, have it demagnetized.
While, yes, a magnetized movement will cause it to suddenly run fast, demagnetizing a movement isn’t completely harmless. If you’re wrong and the movement isn’t magnetized and instead a different type of damage, attempting to demagnetize it will actually magnetize it, and the combination of a magnetized movement plus whatever other damage caused the movement to run fast suddenly could be far worse. I think an added disclaimer would be helpful here. There are ways to test if a movement is magnetized, that should be mentioned. Blanket recommending demagnetizing a movement without a disclaimer is dangerous. I know this is written by AI and not a human but that part really bugged me.
well thats the thing, its crap written by an LLM. I read the first paragraph then went and found an article written by a person, but Id say a good percentage of people would read the whole damn thing and take it as fact.
personally ive always objected to the term hallucination for these LLMs fucking up. its not hallucinating, its shitty computer code outputting shitty output
for what its worth, I just needed to manually wind my watch a bunch. I just had it bequeathed to me and didnt know anything about them. keeping time now of course
That article is remarkably concise though. I usually get those that start at Adam and Eve or the Big Bang, eventually reach the invention of watches and never get to the point of automatic watches and their issues (or whatever specific problem I searched for).
Ironically enough using AI for searching actually spares me wading through slop at the moment.
I think your expectations have been ruined by AI sloup already if you think that is concise. although to be fair you did not define your relative threshold for the definition/conditions of remarkable lol
You should read past my 1st sentence. You missed the 2nd:
I usually get those that start at Adam and Eve or the Big Bang, eventually reach the invention of watches and never get to the point of automatic watches and their issues (or whatever specific problem I searched for).
I meant that article is remarkably concise FOR AI SLOP.
In the age of SEO and AI slop, may your niche hobby or interest never become trendy.
Unfortunately canning and recipes in general are now concerning and I have to worry about food safety so much more!
Who doesn’t love a bit of Botulism? Really helps with that post-holiday diet.
Can't speak for canning, but for the recipes in particular, I was really shocked at the state of things the first time I looked at a recipe on an English website (not my first language).
I only look at recipes in my native language, partly because of the fact that this bullshit is not yet generalised and a fair few website have them still in a good format.
If that's not the case for you, maybe translating a foreign recipe would help? Don't know how long for though...
Canning now boils down to for me, "only use the sites you know are safe" and it's annoying.
Maybe it's just back to physical cookbooks again!
https://www.survivorlibrary.com/library/canning_and_preserving-1887.pdf
Here, knock yourself out.
Thanks for this, saved so I can access it offline. There's a lot to be said for tested, proven methods even if they're not exciting foods sometimes. My (70yr old) aunt made some canned chicken that looked extremely questionable a few years back. It was canned in its own broth so ended up being encased in a disgusting chicken gelatin. But I fuck with canned meats I'll try it.
Once we finally got around to using it we were a little sad we hadn't sooner. It was some of the tenderest most flavorful, real chicken I'd ever had.
The problem with old old recipes is they haven't been tested probably uh, ever. Ball/Kerr has a good website with tested recipes, as does the National Center for Home Food Preservation, which are the two sites I know are considered safe (well I consider safe??).
That book is very very cool in the "Damn I love old books" way though!
I went back to my mum's method of writing down the recipes I like in a dedicated notebook... Does not help with finding new things, but it does with having to skip slop in recipes I want to do again.
I don't think we can overestimate the impact this "knowledge collapse" will have yet. Thank goodness for the fediverse, not that it is immune but holy shit the rest of the internet and ALL of corporate social media sure has gone to the dumps fast hasn't it....
The general reduction in quality of search engine results in the last 2-3 years alone is sobering.
I think it is tantamount to a mass delusion that people refuse to think about the fact that social media will tear society apart unless it is structured in at the very least a semi-decentralized federated fashion not under the control of one or two massive corporations. It feels like for my whole life I have had conversations like this with people and most often people just don't care, they would rather be under a more convenient and more centralized authority. Regardless it is no less surreal to me than it must be to those people in denial about this that we are seeing the unavoidable consequences of refusing to understand a crisis of centralization rip our societies apart into violence and bigotry.
This is why I hasted my self hosted adventure. I have to selfhost before everything go to crap
And the craziest thing, is that I got ads in my servers logs. Some company think it is a good thing to advertise in http headers and cookies while scanning all ports
and "sobering" is literally the last fucking thing I need to be happening to me in 2025
We may need a whole ass new internet.
I'd be down if we left the clearweb to the corpos and moved all the human interaction to maybe something like Usenet or I2P.
I would say I'd even be down to learn Gopher protocol, but I looked up their website and they have their own memecoin, so I'm hesitant based off that alone. Even if they say it has no intrinsic value.
https://geminiprotocol.net/ (has nothing to do whatsoever, and predates, the Google AI product with the same name)
Gemini is a new internet technology supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents. That's not a new idea, but it's not old fashioned either. It's timeless, and deserves tools which treat it as a first class concept, not a vestigial corner case. Gemini isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about providing some respite for those who feel the internet has been disrupted enough already. We're not out to change the world or destroy other technologies. We are out to build a lightweight online space where documents are just documents, in the interests of every reader's privacy, attention and bandwidth.
You don’t think they wouldn’t ruin that too if that was by some miracle where all the human capital went?
Their plan is to make your internet useless and your PC unaffordable so you have to subscribe to their AI and ask it everything; so they can know everything about you and get ahead of stories that make them look bad, from time to time maybe even kill people.
You will own nothing, and they will force you to like it.
perhaps we can just make Otherworld Wide Web and still use http and everything but its https://oww.funwebpage.net/ NO DUMB CORPO CRAPPE ALLOWED
Between SEO garbage and AI slop the internet is fucked. As a 42 year old dude who fell in love with the internet and programming in the late 90's and made a good living at making websites up until about 5 years ago it really hurts. Nothing is left of what I loved about it. The giant conglomocorps have taken everything over and turned it all to shit. Oh well... Old man shakes fist at sky I guess...
No no no no. We are legion. You are not alone. Let them have it. Here, have some popcorn while we watch our ship of Theseus go down in flames. Beautiful isn't it. Now, what would you like to build next? Imagine the possibilities!
Same age, same story, same feeling. But somehow, I think we should cheer each others up.
I am also this age feeling this exact way. We can start a club.
Absolutely! We also need to share existing clubs we are part of, where, why, etc.
Can I join? I can't help with programming but I can bring pictures of cats... 
You can haz cheezburger!
It's an older code, sir, but it checks out.
ah, I think we just need to adapt. there has always been counter culture, and every opportunity to suck any culturally relevant thing dry will happen, as you've observed. so, new spaces need to be cultivated ya know? I think lemmy is one of em to a certain extent, although it is already a little under siege
We need a publicly funded and democratically controlled search engine. As long as there's a profit motive, enshitification will follow.
Why LLMs exist and how to delete them?
So I have noticed a new trend of websites hitting the top of the search results on duck duck go.
The website is always 3 names in a row or more like 3 random words, pretending to a be a blog writing about something.
Then it is usually a bullshit paragraph and then a bunch of seemingly unrelated affiliate links because it is just grabbing anything barely related to what you originally searched for.
Seriously hampered my ability to find out anything about the bread maker I was looking at other than the cost of replacement parts.
Search engines have been made a joke.
I’ve said it before, but a whitelist search engine would be preferable for information. Immediately disregarding any website created after 2023 seems like a decent start.