I find it interesting how it makes a huge difference how the information is presented, even when it’s the same information. If you googled “how many rocks should I eat today” and the first thing Google presented was a link to the Onion article with the title as a preview (along with a list of other hits below), that…

I’ve used copilot for both trivial and nontrivial programming tasks and honestly find it to be pretty good when the user is knowledgeable enough to provide the proper context.  Google's AI output has been uniformly terrible however.  It seems like they have really been caught on the back foot by competitors.

Google AI overview developer walks into a bar, is careful not to crawl, sidle, limbo, or tumble into the bar, orders only beers on the menu in reasonable quantities, rather than 0 beers, -1 beer, 9999999999 beers, or a lizard.

There are lots of uses in scientific fields. Alphafold (based on the same deep learning technology as LLMs) has revolutionized protein structure prediction. Protein structure prediction used to be crap — and I say that as someone who wrote and published a protein structure prediction program in grad school. It used to…

Yeah. There’s no stopping it. Folks here and on other sites populated by thinking people are very uneasy with all of this, but it seems the general population doesn’t give a damn. Aren’t they reading at the fifth grade level anyway? I see countless photos on facebook that are so obviously AI generated and people lose…

AI is just that guy on reddit arguing with you on a subject he knows fuck-all about but he's frantically googling for points that support his own argument. 

It’s crazy how awful AI has made practically every corner of the internet these days. Question/answer websites like Quora are unreadable gibberish now, and Facebook is a vast wasteland of bots endlessly sharing bad AI art with other bots. Granted, Facebook has been on the decline for years, but it’s still surprising…

I’ll put it this way. I asked the AI about some pirates, and I noticed it was basically just quoting Wikipedia pages. Including a Wikipedia page I’ve heavily edited.

Solution: Turn off AI results as an automatic thing, & only give them to people who willingly opt-in.

Well, I have always wanted to see San Francisco.

The sinister part is that before and during his presidency a whole lot of right-wingers insinuated Obama was illegitimate and “un-American” for a variety of reasons, including that he was a secret Muslim (which is seen by those people as Not Christian and Therefore Terrorist).

Every website that relies on Google-based traffic is going to die as Google traps users on their own page reading answers stolen from those websites. If you thought a ton of useful websites died a decade ago during the Facebook-driven “pivot to video” disaster, this is going to be that tenfold.

Dethroning it would involve Google not spending tens of billions of dollars every year bribing other companies not to use other search engines, or build their own:

You don’t have to care about my point, but your comment is inaccurate. The terms of the P&A were widely reported right along with the articles where the studio reps were concerned. They explicitly highlighted the concern that Coppola wanted to recoup first and wanted a $140 million spend.

Yet people give that much money (and much more) to completely unknown directors for whatever latest blockbuster is releasing all the time.

Art for arts sake is great.

I think you’re misconstruing profit with a complete loss. Coppola is insisting on $140 million spend on marketing. If Coppola was willing to say no marketing budget, just put it out into the world, great! But Coppola wants to make his money back at this point. I get why studios don’t want to foot the bill for…

Oppenheimer was allegedly budgeted at $100 million total with most of the payout to the actors and Nolan coming on the back end. Coppola is requesting $140 million ad spend up front in addition to wanting a back end deal. That makes the road to profitability fairly hard for a movie that is allegedly heavy on sex and…

I mean, it’s not going to make money is it. Let’s be honest. It’s probably not going to win awards either. But, it’s exactly what Coppolla wanted, which is not something many directors can say.

There is no way this film can recoup a $100 million advertising budget. Just no way. People will absolutely go see it, but not enough to make it profitable.