Still, it's better than trying to find the content on YouTube ...
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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me_irl
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Finding the content is not really the issue. The issue is that it's hard to stop finding more of it afterwards.
That's unhinged!
On the contrary, this is 'hingemaxxing'- all the kids are calling it that these days.
"If you tell me the exact angle you want to insert the screw, I can offer some suggestions as to which coloured tool to use for the job".
"That's an Altec Lansing speaker from...."
"No you fucking idiot, look at the fucking picture"
"An astute observation! I completely overlooked the product label on the picture! Hers the correct information. The picture shows an ACTON speaker built in..."
"No you fucking idiot, it clearly says ACTRON"
"Let's start over, this time discarding my previous suggestions..."
A literal conversation I had with the Google version of AI while thrifting speakers
Why are you even bothering talking to a clanker?
All you're doing is feeding it more data and using more storage/compute power in a server somewhere that's running a gas turbine, when every piece of evidence shows that it'll lie to you.
I am trying to be polite when correcting the AI; just in case "it" remembers[1]. ^^
I have to look into caveman skill priming to limit the amount of text that comes out of it.
[1]: or data is being used to retrain or save in persistent context. I use Kagi btw., so I hope they actually respect their promise not to use my prompts for retraining.
Or you could use your own thoughts as a form of "organic intelligence" and bolster them with the knowledge and research efforts of the past few millennia to get a more reliable result, without supporting businesses that actively harm humans.
Oh and any search engine yields static slop pages numbering in the 10's of thousands of also ai slop worthless pages.
My favorite is when I search for how to do something in Blender (the 3d modeling and animation program) only realize that I'm wasting my time reading a slop article on what is ostensibly a cooking website because someone told their AI to write a bunch of articles on how to use a blender (the kitchen appliance) and couldn't be bothered to so much as read the titles before publishing them.
Task successfully failed(?).
I’ve taken to avoiding anything made after AI and searching for before:2023 to get away from the worst garbage.
Mind you, the web has been nearly unusable since 2018ish, so I tend to go for even older products. Feels like witnessing the fall of Rome, having to go to these lengths just to find basic info.
searching for before:2023
Google straight up ignores requests for filtering by age of article now.
DuckDuckGo respects your consent!
I think I’ve used google twice in the last year. Ddg works about as well as google, at this point
Interesting, I wonder how Kagi does it
And then, the inevitable "what I like to do in this situation"...
No. You don't "like" doing anything, you don't actually "do" anything and you've never been "in a situation" before.
This is something that really infuriates me. You are a machine. You do not have personal preferences. That is reserved for persons.
I'm pretty sure the change was deliberate, because I didn't notice the behavior until several months ago. Now it's prolific. People like anecdotes, so it probably performs better subjectively.
Burning compute for no reason... I agree.
But lucky me, in my case it actually figured out what kind of imperial nonsense threaded bolt I needed for my CLC's rad after I gave it a thread count. (Btw. it is a 6#-32 bolt)
I asked it the size of the axel nut on my car. It was off my 4mm. I asked it again, it confidently gave me the wrong answer again.
I reached l realized it thought I meant the REAR axel nut, which is in fact 4mm smaller. So I specifically stated FRONT nut, and it still got it wrong.
AI is useful for lots of things, just always always always fact check it.
But yeah... Real search is going away, replaced by forced AI garbage that cannot correctly tell me the nut size.
Yeah, I measured the bolt I had and gave it the outer diameter in mm and the thread per mm. Just asking it blind would have given me all sorts of guesses.
I once had to get new bolts in imperial. So I grabbed a metric bolt that was closest to it and went to the hardware store and eye balled it.
No mess, no fuss, no issues.
Next generation AI will include a vibrator that gives you a prostate massage with every answer