Yeah me too. It felt like it was designed exclusively for me, it ticks all the boxes in what a dumb phone should and shouldn't have in terms of functionality.
> If it had an option to install a messenger of choice (Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp etc)
It has that capability. From TFA:
> A flip phone with the apps you need: WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram. Music, podcasts, maps, rideshare, a great camera for the moments worth keeping.
As a parent, what I find effective are content rating systems, be it for movies, games or apps, along with the ability to control and fine-tune them.
For example, with Apple's parental controls, I can blanket-decline access to Social Media apps, or to apps recommended for a specific age or older, and I can also allow exceptions as I see it fit (for example, my kids have no access to WhatsApp but they are allowed to use Signal, both have the same age recommendations)
This moves the responsibility for age verification to me, the parent, and provides me with suitable tools to monitor this. With this, there is no need for my kid or me to upload sensitive data or go through some bad age verification implementation.
Websites are more difficult to control, but not impossible.
Long story short - improve tooling for parents that allow more centralized control instead of mandating social media to do the age verification on their end.
It is similar to what Frank Zappa proposed when they were looking at age restrictions on records. He said, they should have the lyrics printed up so parents could decide if their kids should assess it. A decent moderate response.
Alas, the age restrictions came in and the big warning on the front covers was added. It did kind of backfire because that warning started to become a badge of quality to younger people. A similar thing could happen here. If you restrict it then it becomes the forbidden fruit.
You confuse ease of using a tool with quality of output.
A skilled carpenter can work both with high and with medium quality tools and prefer one over the other with no difference visible in the craft they produce.
One skill that I still possess and that LLMs haven't been able to replace (yet) is to ask good questions, for example:
- Rephrasing the original question to validate my understanding
- Asking "why" a sufficient amount of times until I understand where the other party is coming from
- Asking open questions aimed at generating insights
et cetera.
Instead, LLMs (often badly) guess what the background of the question may be, answer with that in mind and find it very difficult to let go of what they have made up.
Asking non-leading questions is a skill. Sometimes I feel the urge to mention something to AI (in a question or in passing), but I stop myself because I know it will stick to that thing and become dumber because of it.
I usually don't want AI to ask me questions. I want it to guess the things I didn't specify, because if I wanted to specify them, I would. Sometimes I even tell it directly to not ask me any questions and assume reasonable choices for underspecified things. But when I do want it to ask clarifying questions I just ask it to do that. And it does. If you prefer that style, you might put it in a prompt. Or use a flexible coding harness like pi and ask it to create a skill or extension that will help you push it in that inquisitive direction easily or automatically.
Pratchett introduced the concept of active laziness to me. One of his characters is so lazy that he’s working out frequently because he is too lazy carrying around excess weight all the time.
That has stuck with me, and a lot of things I do both in my professional and personal life can be attributed to this: I, too, am very actively lazy.
A couple of years back I worked with a company which maintained specific data which was the main traffic driver on that page.
Google approached them and wanted to pay for the rights to get the data and display it on top of the search results, a feature which was fairly new back then.
This was an interesting dilemma because it was very clear that the money was way less than the loss in ad revenue due to traffic drop, but it was also clear that if we wouldn’t take the deal, a more desperate competitor would, which would result in the same traffic loss but without the extra google money.
So the company took the deal.
History repeats itself here, with the difference that instead of paying for the data, the ai crawlers simply take it for free.
That's the problem with the current monopolistic system, the money won't go down the stream, it's like a dam. One big dam owned by a few people is worse than many small dams
I agree. For what it's worth, I think Google's business model is in trouble. They're putting in heroic effort to stay relevant during this shift to AI search, but how does their advertising model work when people expect summarised and accurate information instead of scrolling pages of ads?
The search space is actually not that unhealthy. There are competitors. They just lack the reach of Google. These competitor will become increasingly useful when our personal AIs plug into them to search for the right info.
That said, I think the old internet business model is dying. Why will people write articles and pay for hosting if they can't receive any advertising revenue? I think I'm okay with this. Before advertising decimated the free internet, people ran sites for fun. Maybe we return to that.
>> but how does their advertising model work when people expect summarised and accurate information instead of scrolling pages of ads?
1) because that fancy summarised results page will effectively be the ad. The results will push you towards google's partner sites or promote behavior benificial to them.
2) because partners may soon be able to pay to change the results of searches. Who won an election 20 years ago? That "fact" from the AI could depend on which answer has been sponsored by which political interest. What happened in china in 1989 ... how much money do you have?
3) the user becomes the product. No ads in search results, but our searches and online behavior tracked by them will be sold to whoever is most interested in what we do online.
TL;DR: Google is heavily stuffing more and more ads into every monetizable SERP, which explains the ever-increasing revenue.
But my theory (expanded in more detail here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957708) is that its cash cow is heavily optimized towards its current anti-competitive, multi-sided chokehold of the online ad market -- look up the AdTech Antitrust findings around manipulating ad auctions, e.g. Project Bernanke -- which relies on ad volume.
With agents however, I suspect that volume will shrink drastically even if they stuff ads at each step of the conversation. Because it's only the final click that will matter, and those ads will be meaningless.
It's not clear that Google can charge enough for that final click to compensate for the loss of both, the value of all the ads that lead to it, as well as their ad auction manipulation premium.
Hanging my comment here, not blaming the parent poster, it's just relevant...
All the "AI search" I've tried is far less relevant than a proper search, using search engines without it seems much faster and more relevant.
Whenever I get AI search results, its summaries lack substance, are often just plain wrong, and so on. When I check, it's often usong the wrong aggregate data to return results.
Search engines these days, traditional ones, have been hobbled by targeting the lowest common denominator. They drop search terms, alias them (eg, Joe=Joseph,Josephene, Jodiene), and thus return endless bad results.
Using "web" search on Google, for example, putting all search terms in quotes, helps enormously. If searching for Joe Baker, you don't want aliased responses.
My point is, AI is yet another abstracted layer. It not only aliases things, it halucinates, and further, it doesn't even show the context it simply summarizes.
It's the next layer of crappiness.
As a side note, there os a
product in my home country called the Swiffer. It is like a broom, but uses disposable sticky paper instead of broom bristles and a scoop.
Point is, it isn't very environmentally friendly. I weirdly see environmentalists using it, instead of just a good old broom.
And now I see environmentalists using AI for search. What? Why! The sheer additional power and cost, all the new datacenters, hardware, just for what??
Even of one believes it is mildly better (which it isn't, if you use traditional search properly), are you now replacing your broom with a swiffer?!
The amount of environmentalism that goes out the window, for convenience, astonishes me.
It is totally dependant on context. Ask about product purchases/prices and it will give you great results. Ask for basic data and it will quote wikipedia or government websites all day. Ask for a coding solution and it will spit out answers ripped from the corners of github. But i asked google about hydrogen-3 recently and got back a result saying that we were mining it on the moon. An entire space economy was invented because AI cannot tell scifi from reality.
The real test: dont test AI by asking it questions you already know. Ask it a proper question and then go out and find the answer yourself. That is where AI really falls down, the non-trivial stuff.
I’ve experienced the opposite. I get good summaries with links for original sources when something seeems off, which it almost never does. I also like that I can glance to see where the data came from.
Several months ago, I was getting hallucinations and silly answers, like Jaco Pastoreous being the bass player for Metallica.
but lately it’s been great. Especially for technical syntax stuff, like asking for syntax on a jq command, or sal syntax, or something trivial like movie casts members….
Edit: I also assume there’s now some pre-processing filter to retrieve answers from a cache or something, because I’m getting pretty long answers very quickly….
I've noticed something of a hybrid of what you posted and what one of your responders below posted.
For average results, that can have an acceptable answer that tends to the mean or societal mainstream views along some subject, the google answer works for me. For others, which are well unfortunately most of my queries these days, the google answer is brainwashing and propaganda. It feels little more than a continuation of the SARS-COV-2 era fact checkers which were actually failed attempts at propaganda machines for enforcing certain views as true while others were cited as "evidence does not suggest" (hand selecting the evidence of course means this is nothing more than confirmation bias).
I think the AI technology used in most LLM models is an acceleration of this- it will tout mainstream views or hand-picked views as truth while calling others false. And without an ability to search any more for opposing views, you get left with a really warped view of reality that might work for most. Though not for everyone.
>All the "AI search" I've tried is far less relevant than a proper search, using search engines without it seems much faster and more relevant.
I've had the opposite experience with Perplexity Pro. Yesterday it took just under nine minutes to deliver a detailed and accurate answer as to the nearest locations where I can buy Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses (at least 3 hours drive away FWIW) that day.
In the past several months I've spent countless hours using search engines with dismal results that weren't close to that.
Regarding a swiffer: it's a zero sum game. Where did the materials come from? The earth. Where did they return after use? The earth. The only thing changed was the energy used to create and transport them.
If conserving energy was important, none of these AI datacenters would be built, none of our items would be shipped across the planet from Asia. They would conserve energy and import raw materials only.
While I agree in principle, I think it was inevitable. People been gaming SEO for so long that even with judicious use of search operators, it was getting harder to find the things I wanted (probably drowned in a sea of spam in such a way as to fall outside of the optimized search index). It _looks like_ the AI overview does not have this problem (yet...).
Anecdotally, I find Google's AI Search results to be genuinely helpful much of the time, and the box isn't so intrusive that it prevents me from digging into literal search results if I am not satisfied with the AI summary.
The new business model is misinformation sold by the highest bidder. Ask it what's the most reliable kind of computer, it answers with whoever paid the most this week.
That's a pretty sinister system when the dam builders are suing the work of those downstream to build their damn. What happens when everyone downstream has been starved to death?
The very people calling the shots have so far been the most removed from the consequences of their actions. They have no incentive to be responsible or considerate of others.
But google won’t give you the recipe. It’ll give you a pretty piece of text that resembles a recipe. You’ll only find out it’s not a recipe when it fails to produce a cake.
But then, the sites it's training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.
I'm not going to drive to the bookstore only to find out the recipe I need twice a year is not there because the local cousine doesn't even know the ingredients.
Oh, maybe I should drive to the major city and check several bigger bookstores?
Or order it online? But that would be from the third country because this one is weirdly blind to variety. That will be €20 for a book and some €10 postage.
You're sure I can just get my recipe from the store?
Completely unrelated to AI, I buy and always bought recipe books in second hand bookstores. It has this vintage vibe, and not everything has to be kale. Downside is that some ingredients aren't easily reachable, but it doesn't happen that often.
I kinda think everyone should have an old school "joy of cooking", where they have instructions on skinning rabbits and squirrels, just as a reference that things weren't always like this not even that long ago.
Online grocery shopping service I use has added recipes to their website. Not obvious slop at first reading but then you see stuff like add 600g of carrots and 100ml of water to make a quite watery soup according to the picture.
The only solution is to find recipe books that were printed in previous decades.
Which is ironic, given that Google's entire value proposition (to users) was extracting signal from noise...
... and now it's come full A/B-advertising-optimization to being useless at that, when the need is greater than ever.
Imho, Google's greatest failing was missing how its own incentives warped creation of new web content, and failing to account for that strategically -- it turned the web into something it can't itself usefully parse.
We have a distinct poverty when it comes to secondary considerations and long term ramifications - which used to be manageable when progress was slower. Now, we're on a very steep acceleration/progress curve, and any shortsighted mistakes cause extremely large ramifications. Which are then compounded by both more short sighted non-fixes and our rapid acceleration/progress curve layering in additional confusion, misunderstandings, omissions of critical information.
What kind of insanity are you all talking about? Plenty of cook book authors out there with good recipes, tested, big-personal brand, etc. no need to go to prior decades for good books.
You need to compensate for not adding it though. The recipe without was literally the same ingredient list as the site it copied, just missing a line.
And almond flour does its thing by carmelizing in combination with butter and sugar, turning your whole cake into a sort of giant macaron. You can’t pull it off without any one of those things.
> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?
No. It may be good for the consumer right now, but not ultimately (and on top of that, I would argue that reducing everyone to a consumer is already the wrong framing -- you need to ask what's good for the citizens). Having ten competing supermarkets with various interweaving supply lines is ultimately much better than having one giant supermarket, because that one monopolist is able to squeeze both consumers and suppliers to the detriment of both.
Do you think Walmart’s prices are higher than you’d pay if there were just ten competing stores with the same product mix, each of which did not have the leverage to squeeze suppliers?
It doesn't matter what Walmart's prices would be -- because there'd be nine alternatives offering their products at different price points. Also, you seem to be implying that suppliers are inhuman and deserve to be squeezed (but Walmart somehow deserves all the wealth it extracts as a middle-man, go figure), which is exactly why I said that focusing on consumers only is a myopic view of the world.
Without some way to generate revenue, people aren't going to publish recipes (for Google to scrape into their AI.) Maybe we could live without more recipes being fed into the machine, but there are many other types of content that will suffer the same fate.
It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...
Those who won’t were doing it for the money. Those who continue are those who do it for passion, or those whose recipe is just a way to attract people to their business (e.g. kitchenware company). I don’t think it is necessarily bad, the quantity will decrease but the quality may even improve
I built a passion reference site. A large part of that passion came from knowing and talking to the people I was helping. One person emailing or saying thanks would later help power me through to create more useful articles. Enriching openai/claude/ms/google and no thanks from an individual, has disincentivized me from writing more.
Same here. People knew the website and it was immensely flattering to meet users in the wild. It motivated me to really sweat the small stuff, because people noticed. Now I'm just feeding the slop machine, and it feels pointless.
We just won't get countless recipe websites where you have to scroll, scroll, scroll through slop about someone's day to read a scraped recipe that every other website has.
Does the current Google search results indicate that they will be any different?
It’s also not disruption if your product relies on the output of the industry it kills. What will AI train on when it destroys the economics of sharing information with others?
From the HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
In this instance, the internet is more than top-ranking recipe websites.
> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?
No because it's killing competition and becoming an even more obvious monopoly. Then at any occasion they have to choose between consumers and profits, they'll do what shareholders want and increase profits.
It's not uncommon for free things to be higher quality than cheap things, especially when we're not talking about physical goods. Think hobbyist vs hack. Selective pro bono vs quantity over quality. The former describes old internet while the latter describes much ad-supported internet. I'm not saying cheap is better than expensive, and I'm not saying everything works this way, but I do think many things do, especially for pure information that doesn't have a major capital cost associated.
Not really good for consumers in the long term.
Creates a monopsony (monopoly on the buyer side instead of seller side) in the supply chain, with all the same negative externalities to competition.
Same reason its not good to have a "company town" where 1 company is the major employer to 50% of the workers.
Not even the summary of the recipe, I think a lot of the "value" AI provides is decluttering the interface. All these perverse incentives conspire to make it undesirable for web publishers to simply show you a cake recipe. They need to meet SEO metrics for being higher on googles index, they need to monetize with ad and chum boxes. They need to distract and dazzle your senses. In the end, AI strips all these anti patterns out and shows you the meat. Or the "summary" of what should have been there all along. The "AI" isn't learning about what the words mean, it's stripping out cruft and filler that was deliberately added!
I'm not saying LLMs are worthless, but I'm saying if you had a magic browser add-on that simply stripped the BS out and showed you the relevant content, it would meet the use cases of the majority of people using AI (regarding search).
Said differently, Google are bringing you a solution to a problem they (largely) created.
except this isn't a solution. taking away sources just creates another problem down the road. there's no information to crawl from if no one is building websites to crawl from.
>History repeats itself here, with the difference that instead of paying for the data, the ai crawlers simply take it for free.
This discussion was broached originally when discussing whether or not search engines and aggregators had any compensation obligation in respect of news articles. This was a hot topic in the IP and policy circles for a few years.
When the Canadian government attempted to create a mechanism to compensate content creators for the scraped content, there was widespread outrage from tech circles, despite the same community agreeing, across extensive policy discussions, that action had to be taken to prevent this universal man-in-the-middle value capture by search engines.
I've had fairly extensive discussion with the individuals involved in the academic, policy and internal industry analysis of the issue. Watching industry agree to address the issue, then aggressively spend to shape public narratives in public was eye opening.
The recent shift into "AI is obviously going to hoover up all your data and there's nothing you can do now that the theft is laundered through an LLM" is just the latest example of the same trend of short sighted capital-over-everything decision making we've become used to in jurisdictions that have dysfunctional legislatures.
That doesn't feel like a repetition at all? You said that the first time there was "traffic loss but without the extra google money", but that this time there's no extra google money either way.
The fact is that internet is already "tech giants own realm": the power is way beyond public imagination and affects all of us in real life on daily bases, but there are still people thinking they are not the "evil one" here.
I had a similar realization today. I work as an EM, and one important aspect of my work is becoming worthless: experience.
Having been an IC for a long time usually enables me to support my team, or identify risks, lead projects and so on. However, since I never was an IC in the day and age of AI, I find that this experience is less and less applicable.
A significant part of what helps me increase impact of others is that I’ve „been there, done that“ and that’s going away right now.
I don’t mind - it’s exciting!
But if I was an IC right now I would not switch tracks under any circumstances. There is so much more to learn directly in the trenches.
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