News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by Cardinal7167 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:15PM (#35529930)
The great shake up has started. Google pissing their pants with AIs abrupt arrival, Twitter dying a death by a million cuts, Facebook in mid-air making their VR play, the tech skyline will look very different in 5 years.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by jimsimmons on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:58PM (#35530647)
You should look up global search volumes and Google share of it. There’s no dent
Re:Substack Notes Launched by ceejayoz on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:42PM (#35531268)
> You should look up global search volumes and Google share of it. There’s no dent.

"You should look up global search volumes and Yahoo's share of it. There’s no dent" was once a valid statement. Same for Altavista, MySpace, etc. You can go from on top to the bottom very fast in this realm.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by nr2x on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:15PM (#35531667)
Key difference is Google pays a FUCKTON of money to be default search provider. The US Department of Justice is going after this.

Once Google can’t pay-to-play in Safari and iOS they are in very deep shit. This is the classic thing with monopolies: eventually the “innovation” is just leveraging market power to deepen the moat by burning cash.

This is what happens when the CFO runs the damn company. Sundar has no vision, at all, and Ruth’s vision is the same boring Wall Street play book that put a hundred tech companies in the ground.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by ceejayoz on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:25PM (#35531796)
> Key difference is Google pays a FUCKTON of money to be default search provider.

Yahoo used to pay for that, and to package the Yahoo Toolbar pretty much everywhere. I remember when it used to try to install itself with MySQL. I'm sure it helps, for a while, until it suddenly doesn't.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by nr2x on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:29PM (#35531844)
People have no idea how quickly the house of cards can collapse. It’s a very dangerous path to juice profits by paying to be a default. Basically a self-made Ponzi scheme.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by geraneum on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:54PM (#35531408)
Same could be said when iPhone came out. Now look where Android is. The fact that something happened to others means nothing. Could go either way.

edit: typo

Re:Substack Notes Launched by wpietri on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:12PM (#35531635)
Well, it means it could go either way. Which with respect to Google and search is quite a novelty, as Google has been on top for 20 years, without a serious competitor for most of that time.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by cfeduke on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:28PM (#35531063)
> There’s no dent

By the time there is a dent, it's too late.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by andy_ppp on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:04PM (#35531540)
Sounds great but you’ll have to provide some logic because I don’t automatically follow your extremely confident opinion…
Re:Substack Notes Launched by emodendroket on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:25PM (#35531788)
The fear of investors and, to some extent, Google, is that LLMs will supplant traditional search and by the time enough people are catching on to affect metrics the momentum will be too great to stop. My experience with LLMs has not led me to believe that is all that likely but opinions differ there.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by andy_ppp on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:27PM (#35531818)
We need search to be able to fact check the LLMs, but this might become extremely difficult once all the content is written by them…
Re:Substack Notes Launched by wolpoli on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:21PM (#35532425)
Just like how it is hard to fact-check Wikipedia now that it's used a reference. A thought came to me - perhaps it's Wikipedia that should be worried that it'll be supplanted by LLMs.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by jrmg on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:46PM (#35533261)
[citation needed]
Re:Substack Notes Launched by jamilton on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:00PM (#35533773)
The phenomenon they're referring to is when something spurious is posted on Wikipedia with no or poor citations, then used as the source for a "reputable" article (without citations), then the article is cited by Wikipedia, making the spurious information look more trustworthy.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by callalex on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:38PM (#35534015)
1) that hardly ever happens, it hasn’t caused any widespread issues in the decades Wikipedia has existed.

2) All sources are cited so they can be easily verified by the reader.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by NavinF on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:34PM (#35534373)
Re:Substack Notes Launched by two_handfuls on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @12:11AM (#35534919)
The user experience with ChatGPT is pretty good. No ads, no spam results. There are downsides too of course: the hallucinations, and the way the ChatGPT site wants me to log back on now and then.

I was very happy with Google but recently on my iPhone the Google website started nagging me to log in every time I do a search. This is a poor experience, add to that the ad results that have gotten harder and harder over time to distinguish from real results.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by emodendroket on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @12:27AM (#35535008)
I’ve found it amusing but haven’t gotten that much practical use out of it. I still make multiple Google searches every day.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by lenkite on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:09PM (#35531594)
People here are praying very hard for Twitter to fail. Nearly any social media post nowadays has 50-100 comments predicting Twitter's failure and ranting about Musk. He is living rent-free in many heads now.

Its utterly ludicrous how so many intelligent and rational people are becoming un-hinged whenever Twitter/Musk is mentioned.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by gessha on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:28PM (#35531831)
Any publicity is good publicity it seems like. People don’t get that hating is not the opposite of love, it’s indifference. Mute and forget.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by andy_ppp on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:36PM (#35531923)
I just sent the second part of this to my friend WRT his ex-wife…
Re:Substack Notes Launched by theturtletalks on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:55PM (#35532124)
Hate is just confused admiration
Re:Substack Notes Launched by callalex on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:39PM (#35534021)
I confusedly admire bigots and racists? That doesn’t make any sense…
Re:Substack Notes Launched by SketchySeaBeast on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:20PM (#35534284)
I admire my neighbour who mows at 6 am?
Re:Substack Notes Launched by Kye on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @08:31AM (#35538607)
Many bigots are revealed as self-hating closet cases and fetishists, so I could see a naïve analysis attempt to flip it around and assume it must go both ways.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by Nathanba on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:29PM (#35533582)
It reminds me of the Trump thing, it seems people really lose all rationality when they are faced with a man who publically doesn't care and does whatever he wants and is successful at it. I wonder if we will one day have a psychological name for this. It must be related to something in the human brain that touches on social repression and decades of instilled moral codes like "Don't say this, nobody will like you" and then when somebody does it anyway, you feel like it's an invader from a different tribe or a tribe member violating the fabric of what holds together the tribe. When really, he's not doing much different at all and they'd privately do the same exact jokes as a kid like "Twitter is Titter! haha! Like titties get it?" I bet lots of people had such a dumb thought but repressed it and when a supposed adult and major social figure acts like that, it evokes anger that the tribe is in danger.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by inpdx on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:53PM (#35533741)
"and is successful at it."

Overpaying, creating a mass exodus, destabilizing the platform, and losing tons of advertisers is "successful?"

Re:Substack Notes Launched by Nathanba on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:55PM (#35533750)
The Twitter thing is still in progress and probably his first project where you could say that he has a problem
Re:Substack Notes Launched by phs318u on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:03PM (#35534171)
I’d argue that one of the reasons Tesla and SpaceX are successful is not just because Elno is a “visionary” (or functional equivalent). It’s because he was/is supported by a cadre of “true believers” (eg that we must disrupt the auto industry in order to do something radical about climate change). Those true believers (like all true believers), are willing to put up with lots of strange behaviour in the name of that belief.

Twitter on the other hand was bought with a management layer that could fairly be characterised as the opposite of true believers in whatever Elon is selling. Hence the implosion.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by 4ggr0 on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @10:44AM (#35540589)
What are your thoughts about The Boring Company?
Re:Substack Notes Launched by sanderjd on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:38PM (#35534017)
Yeah you're right about this, but it isn't irrational. Human societies have been as successful as they have because of social contracts. The phenomenon you're highlighting here is just society's immune system to protect itself against violators of those contracts.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by 1attice on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:34PM (#35534718)
Trump fomented an attempted insurrection and you are shaking your head about the rationality of the people who are concerned?

It's concerning that you're not.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by bandyaboot on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:48PM (#35533713)
Apparently the people that have Musk living rent free in their heads are living rent free in your head.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by SketchySeaBeast on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:20PM (#35534289)
Mental subletting.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by sanderjd on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:25PM (#35533916)
I actually think the "living rent free in heads" peaked awhile ago. At this point it's just clear in a more pedestrian way that things aren't going well over there.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by abathur on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:09PM (#35533445)
Re:Substack Notes Launched by Nathanba on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:25PM (#35533555)
When Chrome launched, it only launched with ~2-3% market share in the first week compared to Firefox. Everyone thought that Chrome wasn't that good and Firefox would be fine. However I knew on day one that Firefox was in serious trouble and I switched browsers immediately. But what I didn't know is that Firefox would do nothing to compete for 10 years.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by taeric on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:16PM (#35533863)
Chrome launched with an absurd amount of money to burn, though.

And... I don't recall this "everyone" that you are citing. Chrome launched when Google had a ton of good will.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by TechBro8615 on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @12:10AM (#35534910)
> Chrome launched with an absurd amount of money to burn

OpenAI has $100bn+ from Microsoft, and millions of paying subscribers.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by datpiff on Thursday April 13, 2023 @11:10AM (#35556672)
$100bn+?

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/08/microsofts-complex-bet-on-op...

"Microsoft’s $13 billion bet on OpenAI carries huge potential along with plenty of uncertainty"

Re:Substack Notes Launched by TechBro8615 on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @05:37PM (#35620619)
Yeah, no idea where I got this $100bn number in my head... I guess that does sound pretty ridiculous now that I think about it!
Re:Substack Notes Launched by jshen on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:42PM (#35534038)
How many of the companies with the largest market cap (top 15) were also in the top 15 20 years ago? Why do you think Google will be an exception to this reality?
Re:Substack Notes Launched by boo-ga-ga on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @01:02AM (#35535219)
I think the answer is network effect. As soon as there appears a properly working easy accessible alternative (not Mastodon), people with will start moving to it. At first it won’t be visible in twitter’s popularity, but when the new service reaches some critical mass of users - the popularity will start falling quickly. Let’s see if Notes is this alternative.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by ekianjo on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:26PM (#35533120)
By the time someone makes a bad argument its too late. We are beyond reason.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by markstos on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:28PM (#35531072)
I used Bing today. I’m denting.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by alfor on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:41PM (#35531256)
I tried Edge and bing, God awful. You just feel their desire to take control of your experience of the web. On the flip site, made me see how much Google own us all.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by raytube on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:54PM (#35531411)
I use ddg everyday and I hate it. I resort to Google shortly after. Not personalised so I guess I am missing out on decent returns.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by K5EiS on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:02PM (#35531515)
I tried ddg, but i found myself adding !g a lot, so i just switched back.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by propogandist on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:50PM (#35534799)
try Brave’s search service
Re:Substack Notes Launched by manmal on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:12PM (#35531633)
Have you tried kagi? I‘m finding it better than ddg and often on paar with G.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by andyjohnson0 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:31PM (#35531865)
+1 for Kagi. It's been my default search engine since Jan '22 and I'm very happy with it. On the rare occasions when I use Bing or Google I'm reminded all over again why I'm happy to pay for search.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by manmal on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @01:26AM (#35535362)
I’m having the same experience. Anytime I’m not satisfied with kagi’s results, I try Google and that’s usually worse.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by jascination on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:14PM (#35531653)
What's wrong with Edge? I started using it when Chrome started eating my RAM, it's been mostly unobtrusive and unnoticed, like a good browser should be.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by tomp on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:18PM (#35531712)
I installed it on Mac to use Bing Chat.

It immediately took over my whole screen, in a completely weird way that no native Mac app ever did before (in my experience, though I don't use that many Mac apps).

Re:Substack Notes Launched by emodendroket on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:32PM (#35531881)
How much better could the memory profile really be if they’re using the same rendering engine?
Re:Substack Notes Launched by tracker1 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:18PM (#35531710)
Can't speak for anyone else, for me I've mostly liked it. But I use a separate password manager (bitwarden) and disable most of the embedded addons (shopping, etc). So it's a bit mixed.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by Tempest1981 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:04PM (#35532211)
Edge keeps trying to turn on sync-to-Microsoft. I keep saying no. Once, I think it turned it on without asking.

I assume it has more telemetry than Chrome... anyone checked?

Re:Substack Notes Launched by alfor on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:26PM (#35533921)
I wanted to be the default browser, ok. It wanted to import all my info.. no thanks there was other nastyness I don’t remember.

Then it showed me so much junk and crappy news on new page, it was pure propaganda.

That was the end of it. I know it’s possible to configure all those things, but the starting experience was soo bad I got away quickly.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by coliveira on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:36PM (#35534384)
It is classic microsoft behavior. They don't create apps, they create traps. The end goal is just to make people slaves of their software. The software they create is just "leverage" so they can trap more and more of you or your business.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by alfor on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @02:36PM (#35544591)
It seem to me that Google at first was focused on making the best products but ended up in a very similar place. Absolute power corrupt absolutely.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by coliveira on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @03:15PM (#35545183)
This is indeed a theme for large software companies, but Microsoft has perfected it over the years. The way they turned open source and web technologies to further their goals is just another reminder. Many companies are now entrapped into Azure-related software that can only survive in a Microsoft world.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by Tempest1981 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:06PM (#35534544)
Right, I just wanted "new tab" to open about:blank -- doesn't seem possible. You get their news feed on every new tab.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by AJ007 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:44PM (#35532675)
I've been using perplexity.ai for anything that's not a site/company/person name look up.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by nicenewtemp84 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:35PM (#35531189)
I used bing chat (supposedly using gpt4) and it was far more annoying than openai free chatgpt (supposedly using gpt3.5)

Somehow Microsoft found a way to make it worse?

Re:Substack Notes Launched by heckerhut on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:41PM (#35531261)
Agree, prefer to pay for chatgpt then using Microsoft’s free crapware.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by 6031769 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:40PM (#35531243)
Of course they did. That ought to be their slogan. "Microsoft: finding a way to make it worse since 1975"
Re:Substack Notes Launched by coliveira on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:38PM (#35534394)
Yes, I wonder why is so difficult for people to understand this. Microsoft wants to make your life worse, even when they have good software.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by nicenewtemp84 on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @12:56PM (#35542797)
I find it hard to believe that they WANT to make my life worse.

I think that they are simply ok with making my life worse if it makes their life better at all.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by redmaverick on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:59PM (#35531477)
exactly.. its not very usable. They don't even have to innovate anything. just copy ChatGPT interface and display the results.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by Karrot_Kream on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:35PM (#35532567)
I have access but don't have a box with Edge running on it nearby to use it. What about it was worse? A few friends tell me that uniting chat with the LLM makes it hallucinate a lot less and makes it easier to check its work, but they only used it a couple times.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by gremlinsinc on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:23PM (#35533084)
I'd pay Microsoft monthly if they'd just give us untethered gpt-4 access, the same from the API, for those of us on the waitlist. I don't care if it wants to marry me, haha - I think being able to maybe full around with the settings could make it play nicer too.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by anonporridge on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:00PM (#35531493)
Boomer. The kids use reddit and tiktok.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by benatkin on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:31PM (#35531858)
The original redditors are the boomers of HN. The crowd has changed quite a bit though. Still lots of good stuff on there.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by spaceman_2020 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:32PM (#35531874)
For almost all technical queries, I've found GPT-4 to be vastly superior.

Most of the time, my search queries are just to find websites. Like I'll search for "[movie] rotten tomatoes" or "[book] wiki".

I've found duckduckgo to be a good enough replacement for Google for such queries.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by benatkin on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:32PM (#35531875)
Arthur or Harvey?
Re:Substack Notes Launched by emodendroket on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:33PM (#35531891)
If I used the preferences of commenters here as a basis to make investments I’d lose all my money pretty quickly.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by somsak2 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:11PM (#35532984)
I was able to use Google twice today so was able to offset your dent.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by dmix on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:26PM (#35531040)
People like to be predictors of doom before the hard evidence comes out.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by pantalaimon on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:32PM (#35531141)
If AI assisted search gets larger it might be to Google what Google was to AltaVista
Re:Substack Notes Launched by mrkramer on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:13PM (#35532330)
Google controls distribution on Web through Google Chrome. How would AI assisted search even reach casual web users? Word of mouth is not enough.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by gremlinsinc on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:26PM (#35533117)
I switched to edge on all my devices (in hopes of getting early access to Bing Chat), and honestly there's a lot more features and it performs better, so they won't get anything from me except whatever they can milk from gmail. I haven't searched using them in over a year, used to use Brave Search, and You.com for awhile.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by redmaverick on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:58PM (#35531457)
you should look at all the blockbuster stores and Netflix's share of it. There's no dent. ~ Someone in 1997.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by jonathankoren on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:14PM (#35531657)
You should look at all CD sales and minidisk’s share of it. There’s no dent.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by nr2x on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:04PM (#35531536)
Kodak had pretty strong film sales when the first digital cameras hit the market as well.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by thrashh on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:54PM (#35532116)
Yeah but that doesn’t mean anything. Kodak saw a train coming, did a study that told them that they had to do something, but then sat on the tracks.

Fuji, who was also big in the chemical film business, came out just fine.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by mgfist on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:11PM (#35532307)
> Kodak saw a train coming, did a study that told them that they had to do something, but then sat on the tracks.

Replace "Kodak" with "Google" and that's the exact impression I get from friends who work there

Re:Substack Notes Launched by nr2x on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:38PM (#35532599)
I just resigned from Google. There’s no future with current leadership. I was a at high level (6), with an incredibly broad scope of responsibility, making an absurd amount of money. But life is too short to spend my days propping up a dying monopoly when there’s bigger game to chase.

It’s also institutionally arrogant, they really think they are the best, Jeff Dean and Urs are Gods, and no other company can do what Google does. OpenAI just destroyed that myth, yet on the inside they haven’t woken up to the change.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by gremlinsinc on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:20PM (#35533064)
Hey, myself and an ex-microsoft dev (like 2007-2008, not recent), with some VP experience have teamed up. We're working on memory solutions for AI, as well as creating better agents, workflows, etc... In the early days it'll mostly be a GUI over langchain/autogpt/babyAGI, eventually it might morph to creating our own in-house brain-like database, something beyond vectors (or built on top of them w/ a better ranking/indexing based on frequency/recency). Hit me up, if you'd consider partnering up.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by soulofmischief on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:41PM (#35533224)
Sounds like fun. Do you have a specific end product in mind or are you just in the experimentation stage?
Re:Substack Notes Launched by jimsimmons on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:28PM (#35534687)
Curious what "absurd levels of money" means, even if you could just vaguely gesture at it
Re:Substack Notes Launched by nr2x on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:48PM (#35534793)
levels.fyi
Re:Substack Notes Launched by nr2x on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:58PM (#35532159)
I take it you don’t work at Google?
Re:Substack Notes Launched by ekianjo on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:26PM (#35533114)
bad analogies are bad
Re:Substack Notes Launched by QuantumYeti on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:16PM (#35531681)
I actually just switched all our default search engines to Bing yesterday. Google is showing "Sponsors" that link directly to a full screen page with tons of warnings telling you to call some 800 number so you can get scammed. And that's after nearly downloading a fake Blender install a few weeks ago. I'm done with it.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by jononomo on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:26PM (#35531801)
I just switched to Bing about three months ago -- I haven't noticed any difference, to be honest.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by spaceman_2020 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:28PM (#35531836)
1. ChatGPT is very, very new, and habits change slowly

2. For non plus users, chatGPT UX is poor with slow responses, captchas and random logouts

3. All of this will eventually change

There is no more major growth for Google, which is all that matters to Wall Street.

It will go down slowly, but it will go down.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by drexlspivey on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:05PM (#35532230)
> For non plus users, chatGPT UX is poor with slow responses, captchas and random logouts

There are tons of free custom UIs to chatGPT by now, all vastly superior to OpenAI’s. No captchas or login screens, just paste your API token once and it gets stored in local storage.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by sundarurfriend on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:45PM (#35532687)
Thanks for mentioning this. I'd assumed this was the case, but I'd been wary of using them because I wasn't sure which of them would be reliable and non-sketchy. Your comment made me take a second look, this time specifically for FOSS custom UIs, and https://chatwithgpt.netlify.app/ seems pretty decent (and is FOSS).
Re:Substack Notes Launched by drexlspivey on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:59PM (#35533359)
You can also put a hard dollar limit on OpenAI just to be safe.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by mrkramer on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:10PM (#35532295)
Google wanted to be an Answer Machine before ChatGPT hence "I'm Feeling Lucky" button but road to there is long and hard. I think the biggest Google's problems are SEO spam often coupled with scams and fraud and last but not least, lack of transparency on how exactly they rank their search results.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by gonzo41 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:51PM (#35532766)
I don't think we should pretend that google doesn't have the power to crush spam today if it wanted to. They have chosen to let scrappers have top spots in their search results and their reputation is dying as a result.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by doublerabbit on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:30PM (#35531110)
Discord attacking Twitch too
Re:Substack Notes Launched by tracker1 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:16PM (#35531683)
Relatively happy to see it... though I do tend to lean towards the free speech side of the coin, and kind of miss the relative wild west that was IRC in the 90's. I feel like centralized social media is a blessing and a curse. What's old is new again.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by davidw on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:33PM (#35531883)
> wild west that was IRC in the 90's.

There was tons of /kick and /ban there too...

Re:Substack Notes Launched by TeMPOraL on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:39PM (#35531955)
But there wasn't the equivalent of Mastodon culture of "hello server admin, nice instance you have here, it's a shame if it were to be defederated simply because you chose not to defederate the people we tell you to".
Re:Substack Notes Launched by corobo on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:03PM (#35532897)
Wasn't that literally how and why EFnet started?
Re:Substack Notes Launched by tracker1 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:55PM (#35532128)
Yeah, but generally that was on a channel by channel basis.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by alsetmusic on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:30PM (#35531848)
> I feel like centralized social media is a blessing and a curse.

This is what makes Mastadon interesting. I'm not using it, but a lot of people I pay attention to are.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by emodendroket on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:23PM (#35531760)
“Free speech” is a term that’s been completely abused and used in bad faith.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by tracker1 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:55PM (#35532120)
Is your assertion that I'm using it in bad faith?
Re:Substack Notes Launched by emodendroket on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:47PM (#35533277)
No, but rather that Musk has been using it in bad faith (I’m assuming “I support free speech” was meant to qualify the criticism of Twitter under Musk’s leadership).
Re:Substack Notes Launched by tracker1 on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @05:44PM (#35547429)
Yeah, Musk's definition of supporting free speech wasn't much to speak of... better than the old guard, but really weird in ways too. For me, short of threats or calls for violence I'm pretty open to whatever... As long as you're able to as an individual block/filter. Though the NSFW content on Twitter can be pretty bad and wouldn't mind being able to selectively filter that as a user too.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by emodendroket on Thursday April 13, 2023 @08:08AM (#35554171)
I don’t think it is better than “the old guard” at all. I would agree with this piece (which contains examples to make the point), that all he’s done is boost ideas he likes hearing and suppress ones he doesn’t in nakedly partisan fashion: https://apple.news/ANuPT612pRca2DdolgCyu1g

And it does neatly summarize what I meant about the term “free speech” being abused: “ For them, free speech is when they can say what they want, and when you can say what they want.”

Re:Substack Notes Launched by tracker1 on Saturday April 15, 2023 @05:15AM (#35578957)
I'm guessing you also don't participate in more conservative circles either... The before and after is a stark contrast to say the least. I don't always agree with conservatives, but do follow a lot of anti establishment libertarians and conservatives.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by chipgap98 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:39PM (#35531959)
I don't think Facebook really belongs in this conversation. As much as the VR stuff is silly their core business is still doing very well
Re:Substack Notes Launched by jabradoodle on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:49PM (#35532075)
And so is googles, Facebook are spending more than $10B a year on VR. For context that is more than Nvidia's quite large R&D budget, which they have ramped up on consistently over years. Facebook has gone from 0 to 10B real fast.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by wordpad25 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:50PM (#35532083)
people treat facebook as if it were like their myspace, something dumb they did in their youth that's not longer relevant and is dying

reality is pretty different, fb business is doing great despite all their missteps

Re:Substack Notes Launched by wvenable on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:06PM (#35532923)
I use Facebook more than ever these days but oddly for none of things I used to use it for. It's now got some obscure technical community groups that are too niche and too small for reddit or discord. Facebook Marketplace has replaced craigslist. My friend feed is totally incidental to my use of Facebook.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by bigger_cheese on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:10PM (#35533451)
Personally in my circle I still use Facebook messenger service - my extended family has a group chat and some of my friend groups still use messenger chats (I'd say post pandemic discord is used more then messenger now) my parents use messenger to video chat with their grandkids. It's essentially become skype. The actual facebook.com friend feed etc. is essentially dead for me at least.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by ninth_ant on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:51PM (#35532090)
Google’s core businesses are doing just fine too.

Twitter has suffered financially but I’ve seen little evidence that they’ve lost substantial numbers of users — Twitter posts are still in news articles and sites like HN as if it’s still serving it’s original purpose despite the noise.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by ascendantlogic on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:16PM (#35532363)
A lot of "legacy" companies had businesses that were doing very well but missed the boat one or more times as new things arrived. Microsoft is a good example. Windows and Office was absolutely, positively printing money. They whiffed on mobile so hard it was comical. Going back further in time, IBM got mauled in the PC business over time, even though mainframes and PCs were keeping the lights on for decades.

I disagree with the assertion that in 5 years these companies may be heavily disrupted but these darlings that preyed on the fact the incumbents were ossified, large and slow are now themselves ossified, large and slow. The cycle continues on.

In the particular case of Twitter they're being actively driven into the ground by a guy who seems determined to wake up each day and not go to bed until he's made some very poor decisions so who knows, maybe they will crash and burn quickly.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by somsak2 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:09PM (#35532963)
Indeed. Really makes you respect the repositioning Microsoft has achieved with their cloud and AI businesses.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by greyman on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:50PM (#35532078)
But is twitter really dying? The fields I watch (AI, software engineering, writers), all thought leaders are still there, still posting regularly.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by bee_rider on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:39PM (#35532615)
My post will sound like a stupid gotcha but… what’s a thought leader, how do you measure them? Is it possible that the twitter crew skews more toward talking than doing?
Re:Substack Notes Launched by rch on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:31PM (#35533155)
> skews more toward talking than doing

Same goes for any sufficiently large population, but the outliers worth following still seem to be there too.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by sleepybrett on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:55PM (#35532126)
In my communities most people are double posting on mastodon and twitter. So much so that I only check twitter every few days for the stragglers.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by AJ007 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:43PM (#35532661)
I have multiple communities I follow on Twitter and the ones that don't care about the elon stuff, they do now.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by jdminhbg on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:01PM (#35534515)
Mastodon only has about 1.2M active users, so if most of your community is on there, it’s an unusual community.

https://mastodon-analytics.com/

Re:Substack Notes Launched by lapcat on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:21PM (#35534641)
Most of the iOS developer community has moved to Mastodon.

They're the reason I joined Twitter originally. The community is what I care about, not the social media platform.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by sleepybrett on Thursday April 13, 2023 @02:12PM (#35559662)
I mean sure, my mom doesn't have a masto account, she does have a twitter account.

It's down to posters vs reply guys vs rubberneckers. If those 1.2M active users are posters and higher quality reply guys, great.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by dymk on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:45PM (#35532695)
That's fine and valuable, but it doesn't sound like much of a moat. Those thought leaders used something else before Twitter - even if it takes a while, it's not a crazy idea that they'd eventually move somewhere else if the grass is greener.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by somsak2 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:08PM (#35532944)
What is this "something else" that you refer to? In fact, this kind of short-form, global conversation wasn't happening before Twitter, at least not on their scale.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by sblom on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:28PM (#35533573)
I'm sure MySpace thought the same thing about their never-before-seen accomplishments. I suspect very few people knew what "something else" was in that case, either.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by archagon on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:43PM (#35534045)
Is it really a conversation, though? I rarely see “thought leaders” actually engage with their audience in a meaningful way.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by evantbyrne on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:23PM (#35534658)
I'm not really sure what a "thought leader" is, but it sounds like someone that would feel at home on LinkedIn.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by robryan on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:48PM (#35533288)
Maybe their audiences are smaller. People that depend on their large reach on Twitter are going to be much slower to move on than those without audiences.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by andrei_says_ on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:18PM (#35534271)
Twitter now has daily outages where parts of it just don’t function and no one knows when we’ll experience a more serious one.

It serves the daily/hourly whims and mood swings of a single person who has proven to be petty, vindictive (to his employees), and devoid of integrity.

That lack of stability in my opinion accumulates.

Sooner or later it will balance out the momentum.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by propogandist on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:43PM (#35534761)
this was the same narrative pushed when most of the tweeps was axed and the site has been running fine and has only grown in popularity.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by arvindamirtaa on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @12:43AM (#35535105)
Grown in popularity is not really a metric. A normal tuesday and the day half the company's staffers got fired aren't going to be the same in popularity. Doesn't mean one is better. Twitter is definitely more popular for all the mess they've made, yes.

The "narrative" was right. There are actual outages now unlike earlier. It's not like twitter engineers were holding up the servers to the light for there to be outages the moment they're gone. Systems run on their own just fine, until something does go wrong. And if there's nobody there to fix it, something usually small blows up. Enough of these and users start to notice degraded performance and outages.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by wyclif on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @01:04AM (#35535228)
It's actually faster now than it's ever been, especially if you're using it from outside of North America.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by super256 on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @01:23AM (#35535343)
Search breaks for me all the time, and I need to manually refresh the site at least once a day. Also, I can only scroll on Musk’s twitter profile to his tweets from September.

I think it’s due to more aggressive VPN blocking, but I’m not sure about it.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by astrange on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @02:04AM (#35535593)
All the Apple ecosystem developers left, all the neo-Nazis were unbanned to add subscriber numbers, I see 1-2 ads a day because all the respectable advertisers left due to the Nazis[0], and the For You page now regularly does things like show you tweets from locked accounts, circles you're not in, and people who've blocked you.

Elon seems to have given up; he's just doing jokes now like changing his name to Harry Ballz and replying to fake news from the fake news accounts he unbanned.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-perpetuati...

Re:Substack Notes Launched by gordian-mind on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @03:29AM (#35536144)
Wow, if the McDonald's marketing chief says Elon Musk is a nazi, it must be pretty serious...
Re:Substack Notes Launched by shaklee3 on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @01:01AM (#35535212)
You'll need a citation for this. I've been using it for years and haven't noticed any difference or outages.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by tomstockmail on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @09:56AM (#35539728)
"‘Sometimes Things Break’: Twitter Outages Are on the Rise" New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/technology/twitter-outage...
Re:Substack Notes Launched by andrei_says_ on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @11:46AM (#35541692)
At least three times in the last two weeks I was unable to load images or threads or like tweets or post tweets. That’s three separate days where this functionality was unavailable. Using the official Twitter client. I’m in Southern California.

I use Twitter once a day and not every day.

I don’t have a monitoring service so this is the best citation I can offer.

In the last month I have experienced more issues than in the last four or five years if similar use.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by raverbashing on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @03:18AM (#35536055)
I'm surprised to see people that can't see this (or are just Musk apologists)

The "Following" tab is showing only a fraction of your timeline tweets. Go to the "For You" tab and see an endless firehose of unrelated stuff together with some of the tweets of people you were following and were supposed to show up on the "For You" tab but didn't.

Not to mention tweets in private circles being shown in the "For you" tab

"twitter is working fine" is a bad take. It looks like it is working fine if you look at it for 30s, that's it.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by nkozyra on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:10PM (#35534561)
Anecdotally it seems so. Further anecdotal, but I think I've seen one ad that was from a company I recognized that wasn't weird dropshipping stuff in the last few months.

It definitely feels less active and the conversation largely dominated by small accounts that are paying the $8.

Re:Substack Notes Launched by ptero on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:20PM (#35534637)
It feels this way to me, too; and just from a user perspective it feels better, too. Although it may not be financially sustainable.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by evo_9 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:18PM (#35532390)
And patient Apple waiting it all out to see whose lunch to eat next.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by slowmovintarget on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:30PM (#35532517)
What do you think those 16-core Neural Processing Units that ship in every Mac are for? They're not waiting to see, they're waiting for everyone to discover their lunch has already been eaten.

How do you get around privacy concerns for using the big AI models? Run your own. How do you get around the compute requirements for training? Push to the leaf nodes. How do you solve for personalizing AIs? Have personal AI models running locally... And wouldn't it be nice if there was some dedicated hardware those AI models could inhabit...

Re:Substack Notes Launched by abathur on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:23PM (#35533543)
With umptillion gigs of shared memory, too. Really the only reason I'm entertaining moving up from an mba to an mbp, but I haven't convinced myself it's worth the splurge yet.
Re:Substack Notes Launched by okdood64 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:31PM (#35533598)
So are you going to take large short positions on Google and Facebook?
Re:Substack Notes Launched by Cardinal7167 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:03PM (#35534529)
I won’t be predictive or prescriptive about the markets. But it’s clear that tech giants will soon have to fall or evolve.