I think you would most certainly NOT prefer any Constitution, nor especially any Bill of Rights, that was rewritten by today's version of "We the People".
> It’s crazy how much worse Google search results are now than they used to be.
I could not agree more. Each time I do a google search, I feel like I've stepped into a severe reality distortion field. The results are simply WORTHLESS. It's not just that the AI summary at the top answers the wrong question, but the sequence of hits thereafter wander off into the weeds almost immediately. I routinely have to constrain the search in multiple ways (time bounds, specific word rejection, etc) just to get one or two relevant hits.
Frankly, I think I'm going to have to MOVE AWAY FROM GOOGLE to a subscription-based search service just to get any useful search results again.
> Frankly, I think I'm going to have to MOVE AWAY FROM GOOGLE to a subscription-based search service just to get any useful search results again.
I would absolutely do this, but the only subscription search service i know about is Kagi, which is a bit too AI-forward for my taste. I wish there was a way i could subscribe to "google but 2007 google but with updated results"
Present generations see the primary role for AI as being identical to the biggest disruption to US business in the past century — namely the gigantic sucking sound from the outsourcing of millions of US jobs in order to reduce labor costs. Of course they're terrified of it. By singing its praises AND IGNORING THAT CONCERN, Schmidt showed that he couldn't be more out of touch with the top priority of this generation — WILL AI TAKE MY JOB?
It's like Steve Forbes cluelessly joking that rise of Private Equity will make it easier for the unemployed to buy another racehorse. WTF?
At this point I don't think its a concern, I think its going to happen sooner or later.
1st world countries have a bunch of support programs for the unemployed/homeless, so its not the end of the world. 3rd world countries are more or less used to live off the land, I guess village lifestyle will make a comeback.
Once enough jobs are lost then social and economic structures will change. I don't know how exactly, so I'm just working on my skills, maybe some of them will be useful.
I've noticed the same thing. IMO, the heyday of computing coincided with the peak of WiReD Magazine. Around 1995 interconnected computers and the WWW bootstrapped a revolution in spreading+sharing information that seemed certain to reshape cultural norms, organically, bottom up, for the better. It seemed the world would never be the same. Heady times. That sense of optimism lasted until the computer unicorns morphed into monopolies. After that the roles reversed and all us net denizens became unicorn fodder. It's hard to stay upbeat after you realize you're no longer in charge and are constantly being manipulated wherever you go online.
And that's the rub. PE is all about short term ROI at any price. Their business model doesn't take product superiority or brand loyalty into account. If a widget can be made cheaper, you do it, damn the collateral damage.
OK, but that doesn't answer why? Why is PE about short term ROI at any price? Is it really true that the maximum long-term ROI is by doing it this way? I'm skeptical, and people's intuitions based on their observations isn't very useful.
Maybe this is like the toupee fallacy, and we only pay attention to the ones with this kind of strip mining approach, and we don't see the majority where they run the businesses to maximize ROI in the long run?
Yeah, I've seen the same thing happen to data miners in the pharma industry. An increasing fraction of young biologists have skill in basic statistical DM as well as web search proficiency sufficient to gather DM code analysis examples, even without using AI. In the very near future I expect almost all R&D exploratory DM will be done by pharma domain experts (biologists and chemists) rather than served by DM experts (computer scientists or engineers).
Yeah, IEEE Spectrum has responded to the dissimilar roles in SW dev by ranking programming language popularity contextually, by separating the project domains and ranking the languages only within each domain. That's a lot more useful than allowing the single dominant project domain to silence the recessive ones, as TIOBE does.
Rather than coining a new word like adaption, I'd call this acculturation. It's reshaping not only SW dev but natural language too -- how we read and write and how we speak.
Everyone knows that AI-written slop isn't worth actually reading. So when reading mass media content we skim over each paragraph's opening phrases rather than read it deliberately, sentence by sentence. We also do this while writing notes, dropping determiners, acronymming common phrases, and making references to characters/scenes in popular media. Now with the rise of vocal interfaces and ever shorter rounds of engagement, all this abbreviating will only exponentiate.
Yeah, 95% of the available advancement in computing is in people management, not technical mastery. Businesses much prefer to hire externally to serve any non-core capabilities, especially to minimize internal culpability should anything go wrong. That leaves little opportunity to think outside the box technically.
Clothes are a good example of what ails online shopping. When you physically visit a clothing store, you chose it knowing the quality and style of that merchant -- you thereby filter out a huge fraction of the market that you want to exclude from your search.
But online (because the available search criteria are so imprecise) your search brings up every possible form of clothing, especially the stuff that's a commodity (or hyped by major e-merchants) -- cheap, popular with 25 year olds, colorless, largely disposable. It's hopeless unless you yourself are a commodity -- indiscriminating, predictable, and totally average.
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