The LLM results are presented confidently and succinctly in a way that is designed to tell you “yes” OR, it not applicable, it just mashes together statements (which often leads to a response that contradicts itself one sentence later). That’s not the same as your vetting search results.
Well before Google screwed it all up there used to be some correlation between top hits and what you were looking for. SEO has muddied the waters for many years now and it’s never been truly “merit based” or “objective” or whatever we want to call it, but generally speaking, the first results were the best by default.
Ok, but it’s been mine. And clearly I’m not alone.
I feel like at this point any discussion about LLM’s has an implied “my experience” because LLM’s are super inconsistent due to not being refined tools at all. I’m sure your experience has been different, just like my experience has been different. I imagine you’ll want to chalk it up to operator error, but it sure seems like a lot of people have variations of my experience. If so many people are operating it wrong, then maybe the tool is poorly designed.
Understand that I use LLM’s pretty frequently. I am not “anti-AI.” I’ve used production tools incorporating machine learning for years now. But LLM’s simply aren’t the bespoke tools that these companies want you to believe, and they are definitely not a suitable replacement for search. It’s simply too inconsistent and will hallucinate answers. Google search didn't make up answers, it presented indexed sources that you ver in real time which I find to be a far superior way to do research. I don’t like having to guess when an LLM is just making shit up as it asserts something with simulated extreme confidence. Not only that, you can take a correct answer from a LLM and just start saying “know that is not right,” and it will start apologizing to you and generating other answers. That is a huge problem! I shouldn’t be able to “convince it” to give me a different answer.
Yes SEO made things objectively worse. Doesn’t mean we need to add another layer of issues on top of that.
I don't disagree with you, but google search has gone so downhill that I had stopped using it before they moved to the AI approach, which is actually pretty decent.
I try hard not to care but subconsciously spelling errors and grammar issues scream low-quality work to me. It’s the kind of mistake that’s the easiest to correct, and they didn’t bother.
The phrase “missing comma” is missing an article. You need “a” or “the” before that. As a result when reading your comment, I subconsciously think of it as low quality.
But it’s okay. HN comments aren’t supposed to be high quality anyways. I know mine aren’t. But the official product documentation ought to be.
Between you, me, and the Deepseek team, so far as I'm aware, only one entity has caused the Western frontier model companies to panic by delivering an open model that competes far more cheaply, to the point where people are running versions of it at home.
So they spelled software wrong. So what? Outside of this being the mental equivalent of a too-scratchy-sweater for the kinds of people sensitive to that sort of thing, I don't see why it matters.
Those of us that have spent a lot of time programming with non native English speakers (the majority of software engineers on earth) have learned long ago that English ability has no correlation with engineering ability.
It may be a sign deepseek isn't "only for" Americans. Billions of non-native speakers communicate in "flawed" versions of English. Similar for other languages. Circling back to polish instructions for the picky among the Americans... hmm
If it tickles anyone's subconscious feelings, it would be their internal guiding myth of exceptionalism.
With their recent forays into authoritarianism, it's becoming ever harder to paper over the reality.
There’s no exceptionalism. I’m not even an American. I just happened to have a string of English teachers in high school that rejected grammar mistakes in student essays with the same vigor they rejected bad arguments, logical fallacies, and more. It’s a classical style education: the trivium comprises grammar, logic, and rhetoric, therefore that was how the teachers evaluated the student essays.
I despise American exceptionalism myself. This is entirely an issue about the quality of the language, not the nationality of the person behind it.
This is cool! I ended up also inventing my own syntax to place at the top of one-off scripts to specify deps. (For single-file Python scripts, vs one with a full project dir that has pyproject.toml) I will adopt this instead.
If you have nothing to talk about, cancel it
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