If someone uses an LLM as a replacement for search, and the output they get is correct, this is just by chance. Furthermore, a system that is right 95% of the time is arguably more dangerous tthan one that is right 50% of the time. People will be more likely to trust the output, and likely less able to fact check the 5%.
What are your own scribbles, your own ordinary plenty, not worth much to you now but that someone in the future may treasure?
At this point, it really does seem like “AI” is “bullshit you don’t need or is done better in other ways, but we’ve just spent literally billions on this so we really need you to use it, even though it’s nowhere as good as what we were already doing,” and everything else is just unsexy functionality that makes what you do marginally easier or better. I’m sorry we live in a world where enshittification is being marketed as The Hot And Sexy Thing, but just because we’re in that world, doesn’t mean you have to accept it.
- People only understand things relative to things they already understand
- People only understand things in context
- People rely on patterns and consistency
- People seek to minimize cognitive load
- People have varying levels of expertise and familiarity
- People are goal-oriented
- People often don’t know what they’re looking for
- Information is more useful when it’s actionable
For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.
A library of CC-licensed photos.
Next time you’re tempted to use a generative “AI” tool to make an image for a slide deck, use this instead.
Google search is no friend to the indie web:
Well-known brands often see most of their content indexed, while small or unknown bloggers face much stricter selectivity.
There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.
Information that you might search for may never appear in Google’s results. Not because it doesn’t exist, but because Google has chosen not to include it.
David is on board. Who else?
The whole point of the web is that we’re not supposed to be dependent on any one company or person or community to make it all work and the only reason why we trusted Google is because the analytics money flowed in our direction. Now that it doesn’t, the whole internet feels unstable. As if all these websites and publishers had set up shop perilously on the edge of an active volcano.
But that instability was always there.
There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.
Google is not a huge source of traffic and visibility. I get most of my visits from RSS readers, other people’s links including fellow bloggers, or websites like Hacker News. It’s hard to tell at this point since I don’t track anything, but that’s an educated guess.
Removing my website from Google would have very little impact, so I was wondering if I should just do it.
An interesting idea from Tantek for an offline page that links off to an archived copy of the URL you’re trying to reach—useful for when you’re site goes down (though not for when the user’s internet connection is down).
I don’t use Google Search myself—I use Duck Duck Go—but if you do, here’s how to avoid the slop.
If you liked David Grann’s book The Wager, here’s another shipwreck tale, this time from the other side of the world.
You can’t create a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript and a SPA architecture. Google Mail is a webmail client and webmail clients existed some time before JavaScript became the language it is today or frameworks like Angular JS or Angular BS existed. However, you cannot create a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript. Google Mail itself offers a basic HTML version that works perfectly well without JavaScript of any form—let alone a 300KB bundle. But, still, you cannot create a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript. Just keep saying that. Keep repeating that line in perpetuity. Keep adding more and more JavaScript and calling it good.
‘Sfunny, I’d been meaning to write a blog post on exactly this topic, but Tyler says it all …and that’s before Apple’s scandalous shenanigans.
“Make the logo bi… exactly the same size.”
You know when a new boss takes over a company and the first thing they do is declare an immediate rebranding? It turns out that the monarchy has been doing that for generations.
My presumption that one should examine evidence before reaching a conclusion, rather than using it to support a conclusion, was not even an idea they could understand well enough to reject.
I am not against trying to be persuasive. That is a necessary art. But I was shaken they could not conceive of any use of information other than persuasion.
It’s a dream team of former Clearlefties: Harry and Cennydd joined forces to investigate and write an in-depth report looking into deceptive design practices used by Microsoft to stop people changing their default browser from Edge. They don’t pull their punches:
We judge that Microsoft cannot justify the use of these techniques, and should stop using them immediately. If they do not, we would welcome – where the law provides for it – regulatory intervention to protect against these harms.