It may be becoming borderline. I expect that sentence/paragraph completion is already becoming useful to people who churn out quick content for a living. In any case, the important part isn't whether or not it's bots. The important part is whether or not it's authentic. The precise meaning of authenticity gets squishy, but it exists nonetheless.
IMO the sentiments are correct, whatever the details. Part of why google sucks is that the internet is worse, for a bunch of the things we use google to search for. The internet becoming a larger, more profitable industry changed it. Instagramming for influencer perks, SEOing, or selling targeted ads like FB do... it does not lead to the same places that earlier iterations of the WWW produced. Times change.
Significantly more time required for consciously choosing a product to purchase (which in my case is critical because I am like Sheldon Cooper trying to choose between PS4 and XBOX One normally, to the horror of my wife, she wants a new TV and it is months long project based on accurate and quick data, and now this, with Google, which makes our family atmosphere even more tense : ) )
There are very few exceptions to this.
I especially like the scan function where brother web connect OCR’s the document and saves it as a pdf directly in your Box/Dropbox/OneDrive/GoogleDrive folder. Just wish it worked with iCloud Drive.
I'm interested in the printing quality though.
I've seen a few of those wine documentaries about sommeliers, and they certainly made it seem like it was a legitimate ability to identify stuff. I'd be interested to see how close they are in a more neutral, measured environment.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta... 2. http://www.morssglobalfinance.com/the-ultimate-wine-tasting-...
Actually, this one is bullshit. While it may be true that the average person without blind tasting experience cannot do this, anyone who has actually done blind tasting seriously should be pretty accurate at this. Purely structurally, red wines generally have much more tannin and more alcohol than whites.
The famous study that led to this claim (which survives because people, especially the HN type, love feeling smug about expertise) doesn't really hold up. See eg http://sciencesnopes.blogspot.com/2013/05/about-that-wine-ex...
Instead Sommelier exams are subjective - candidates are judged by another Sommelier on subjective criteria rather than objective measurement. In my opinion they judge it as a dramatic performance: how quickly can the candidate rattle-off various flavours? How "high class" is the language they use to describe the flavours? How does the candidate present themselves? Sommeliers dress in fine suits, but this should have no impact on actual wine tasting ability. Yet I am sure if I showed up in a draggy old t-shirt I would fail regardless.
The whole industry seems allergic to objective scientific measurement. I am sure Sommelier's do have some ability to identify varieties, but are they actually tasting all those subtle hints they list off? I doubt it.
>But I don't believe they are actually judged on their ability to taste wines and detect flavours. Designing such tests would be simple - rate of successful flavour identification based on data from other Somemeliers.
That is exactly how the tasting portion of the exam works. And
>In my opinion they judge it as a dramatic performance: how quickly can the candidate rattle-off various flavours? How "high class" is the language they use to describe the flavours?
This isn't really how it works, especially the "high class" language comment. Actually there are a variety of different things that they are supposed to identify about the wine, known as "the grid" [1]. You can take a look at it yourself. They are essentially judged based on how well their grid matches up with the consensus grid from the master sommeliers.
[1] https://www.courtofmastersommeliers.org/wp-content/uploads/D...
https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...
Reminds me of those ways to catch spammers or bots by occupying some of their resources with meaningless tasks for as long as possible. Except it’s turned around.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s even any real money in ads anymore or if it’s just a giant circle jerk that slowly destroys society…
Word of warning: it has the answer to both today and tomorrows wordles.
My suspicion is this is rife given how many articles read poorly and are almost entirely fluff. If this is true it would appear we are doomed to algorithms shaping our online experiences, which is worrying given the existing shrinking diversity of opinion and content. It's like a entropic gene pool in nature, but with information.
Bar that, it’s humans outrunning AI in the race to the bottom with a head start. Human people can be forced to be incredibly machine like.
Amazon has a site for humans to pick up small tasks and get paid for them called mechanical turk [1], which is a reference to a fake chess playing machine with a human inside [2]. With the great resignation and the workforce otherwise pushing for a reasonable standard of living, I'm not sure how heavily mturk is still used as depending on tasks and speed it's really sub-minimum wage work for many people. [3] But as The Atlantic article says, sometimes it's the only work people can get.
[1] https://www.mturk.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-...
I think the quality of searches like “best TV” will improve dramatically once language models are used to generate SEO spam. Anything would be an improvement over what today’s human spam bots produce.
Absolute worst UX ever, yet they allow it because it's their SV buddies.
At one time, Google used to ban sites for "cloaking": offering one version of the page to the crawler, and another to the user.
But over time they got into trouble from these sites, getting sued left and right. Being accused of putting up a wall, and abusing their monopoly. Eventually, these sites won out and Google dropped this requirement.
It's a shame. I've really enjoyed a lot of the well written responses there but I can't be bothered to create another account.
You will find a page for almost any X and Y combination. And they will all have wording like "Put some X on the stained Y... wait a bit... rub it in... and then put it through the washing machine. Hope it works!".
Nope, nothing relevant. Found a counterexample.
Put some jet fuel on the stained yak... wait a bit... rub it in... and then put it through the washing machine. Hope it works!
https://www.buttercookie.de/temp/AI/GPT-J%20stained%20yak.tx...
Right now, I don't think you can tell it to use some specific terms in the text it generates, but it doesn't sound like a difficult extension.
I guess HN would be a weird outlier, because there are no ads. Except maybe the bots would be useful after all when various "Show HN" or "Launch HN" and have the bots cheer those companies and get random publicity.
> Little-known Fact #839: There are only twenty-three people alive today, and you're one of them; everyone else you know just looks human to lull vou into not searching for the other twenty-two. Lonely? You should be.
Beings so acceptive of others as to make me oblivious there's a difference? That's far more than humans ever accomplished.
> Whether they’re a bot or human, they are decidedly fake.
Fake plastic trees.
The most important factor was cramming SEO terms and links to keep people on the website into the articles.
The result is trashy articles that could well have been written by a bot but aren't. This could possibly be done with the help of curated bot-content, but I think we're far away from the point where this is really more profitable than getting students to do the work.
It's people but they work like bots.