Dear everyone writing, "This is what's wrong with Google Search" articles:

Your articles literally read like, "This is what's wrong with repeatedly slamming my member in a car door."

Just stop, already. You do not have to use google search. For anything. Ever.

It's been nerfed to the point that DDG is 99% as good, which you can even use with JS turned off, and customize it to do things like remove their AI search suggestions and stuff like that.

<voice actor="William Shatner" mode="maximum scenery chewing">
So... just... stop... using... Google search. It's... that easy. See?
</voice>

Thank you.

Edit: minor diction tweak

@rl_dane well said!

Also, courteous mention that DDG has https://noai.duckduckgo.com - No AI, no customisations required. Increase traffic to this URL and let them know we don't want AI!

@paul @rl_dane dear DDG. Can we swap the URLs so users don't have to. Showing the desire for AI is so low that it's not worth burning the earth for it. 🔥🔥🥵

@justin @paul @rl_dane Well I mean that's the reason why they don't isn't it?

@sotolf @paul @rl_dane probably. Hopefully they lose plenty of money for this stupid decision.

@justin @paul @rl_dane Well I would guess they will when the bubble finally pops, I just hope they will get out of fashion, I have at least one podcast that I'm listening to because one of the hosts obviously uses ChatGPT to do their essays, and it's annoying since it's one that I've listened to for over a decade. The whole lists of 3 things, generalised boring language and whole shebang..

@sotolf @paul @rl_dane AI as it is today can die a fiery death. One day we'll use it for good. But today really isn't it.

@justin @paul @rl_dane I'm not sure if LLMs will ever be "good enough" for anything, machine learning sure, there are a lot of places that can be helpful, but I don't think generative AI is here to stay.

@sotolf @justin @rl_dane
Agree.
Generative AI has the problem of not being reliable and the way I see it the only possible endpoint is the realization that the amount of time it takes to spec out and describe all possible edge-cases to cater for specific needs, avoiding avoid hallucinations and factual errors is much more wasteful in time and money than paying a human developer/researcher/author etc.

It needs to go away now.

@paul @justin @rl_dane It's a project that is stoked by management types, because they thought they would be able to replace grunt work with yes men, well there is a reason why the "grunt workers" aren't yes men, that's because of process knowledge, and their experience, now instead they have a robot that bends over backwards to their very american view of "ideas are the real work". And we see where that ends, most of the places I've seen at least has had to get people at least in the loop, or just stopping it completely, because process knowledge is important, hopefully that won't set us back too much I'm afraid it will, as they might have to build it back from scratch again.

@sotolf @paul @rl_dane AI is theft and environmental terrorism.

@justin @paul @rl_dane Very much so yes.

@sotolf @justin @paul @rl_dane I do like DDG, but dislike the AI inclusion. I've started using https://start.duckduckgo.com/lite.

@justin @sotolf @rl_dane it's also cyber-terrorism, bringing down community services through relentless webscraping

EvilCorp is everywhere.

@paul @justin @sotolf @rl_dane it’s also inherently related to TESCREAL, i.e. schools of thought that hate humanity

@cmccullough @sotolf @justin @paul

I switched to #dillo as my default web browser on all but my work machine. XD

Ain't no ai features there!! ;)