Spyke
feddit.org

Google was fine as it was before, now it does shit like this. I hate how AI is shoved down our throats. And the results on google nowadays feel so much worse and generic than a few years ago. That isn't just a feeling I have, right?

244
Dettweilerreply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

Add obscenities to your search for the most optimized results. It drops the AI component and seems to provide the more direct results we used to get.

93
over_cloxreply
lemmy.world

Debian Linux Script...

TR1X-Debian-3.sh


#!/bin/bash

if [ -f ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/TR1X.sh ]; then

    # Simply run the game startup script and exit...
    pushd ./
        cd ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian
        ./TR1X.sh
    popd
    exit

else

    # Create temporary download folder
    if [ ! -d /tmp/TR1X-download ]; then
        mkdir /tmp/TR1X-download
    fi

    # Download and extract game engine tarball
    pushd ./
        cd /tmp/TR1X-download
        if [ ! -f TR1X-3.0.2-Debian.tar.gz ]; then
            wget http://web.archive.org/web/20231122035737if_/https://files.catbox.moe/lc2sqz.gz
            mv lc2sqz.gz TR1X-3.0.2-Debian.tar.gz
        fi
        if [ ! -d ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian ]; then
            mkdir ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian
        fi
        pushd ./
            cd ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian
            if [ ! -f TR1X ]; then
                tar -xvf /tmp/TR1X-download/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian.tar.gz
            fi
        popd
    popd

    # Nude Raider Title Screen
    if [ ! -f /tmp/TR1X-download/titleh.png ]; then
        pushd ./
            cd /tmp/TR1X-download
            wget https://tinyurl.com/nr1xtitle
            mv nr1xtitle titleh.png
            rm ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/data/titleh.png
            cp titleh.png ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/data/titleh.png
        popd
    fi

    pushd ./
        cd /tmp/TR1X-download
        if [ -f /tmp/TR1X-download/titleh.png ]; then
            if [ ! -f /tmp/TR1X-download/tombraid.rar ]; then
                wget https://tinyurl.com/nuderaid
                mv nuderaid tombraid.rar
            fi
        else
            if [ ! -f /tmp/TR1X-download/tombraid.rar ]; then
                wget https://tinyurl.com/wombraid
                mv wombraid tombraid.rar
            fi
        fi

        type -P unrar > /dev/null && echo || sudo apt-get install unrar
        unrar x /tmp/TR1X-download/tombraid.rar /tmp/TR1X-download

        if [ -f /tmp/TR1X-download/titleh.png ]; then
            7z x /tmp/TR1X-download/nuderaid.iso
        else
            7z x /tmp/TR1X-download/tombraid.iso
        fi

        cp /tmp/TR1X-download/Data/*.* ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/data
        mkdir ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/fmv
        cp /tmp/TR1X-download/Fmv/*.* ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/fmv

        if [ ! -f /tmp/TR1X-download/music.zip ]; then
            wget https://tinyurl.com/tr1xmusic
            mv tr1xmusic music.zip
        fi
        if [ ! -d ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/music ]; then
            mkdir ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/music
            unzip /tmp/TR1X-download/music.zip -d ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian
        fi

    popd

    # Modern TR1X doesn't recognize the original PCX images
    rm ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/data/*.pcx

    # Clean temporary files
    if [ -d /tmp/TR1X-download ]; then
        rm -r /tmp/TR1X-download
    fi

    # Generate startup script...
    if [ ! -f ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/TR1X.sh ]; then
        rm ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/TR1X.sh
        echo "#!/bin/bash" > ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/TR1X.sh
        echo "./TR1X" >> ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/TR1X.sh
        chmod 755 ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/TR1X.sh
    fi

    # Initialize the game...
#    if [ -f ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian/TR1X.sh ]; then
#        pushd ./
#            cd ~/Desktop/TR1X-3.0.2-Debian
#            ./TR1X.sh
#        popd
#    fi

fi

8

I get bored sometimes.

Hope the script didn't give you any trouble.

If you comment out the title screen download section, it'll install regular Tomb Raider instead.

6
kibiz0rreply
midwest.social

They’re an ad company that just happens to offer search as a way to show ads.

Their ideal scenario is one where you search forever and never find what you were looking for.

63
fedia.io

They’re walking the fine line between being shitty enough that you have to refine your search multiple times (thus allowing them to show you more ads), but not being SO shitty that you give up and never come back.

29
lemmy.dbzer0.com

This has been effectively proven by email chains made public through court proceedings. Former head of search left sometime around 2015 because the ad team was being allowed to make search worse to pump their numbers.

New head of search was the guy who ran Yahoo's search department while they got eaten alive by Google, and he had been working Google's Ad division after he left Yahoo.

8
lemmy.world

Not just you. I feel like search modifiers like "NOT" or "OR" haven't been working for a good long while either.

37

While it's nice to finally have closure on this, it's also depressing that they removed that.

17

It been a downhill slope that just keeps getting steeper. They're basically falling off a cliff right now, and their parachute is improving AI.

14

One of the reason why I advice people to switch to Ecosia or DuckDuckGo

1
leminal.space

"You can just type your search in the top bar! You don't have to go to www.google.com."

As an IT guy, I know what to expect when I get to hell.

8
ByteJunkreply
lemmy.world

Because that's the normal way in which humans communicate.

But for Google more specifically, that sort of keyword prompts is how you searched stuff in the '00s... Nowadays the search prompt actually understands natural language, and even has features like "people also ask" that are related to this.

All in all, do whatever works for you, it's just that asking questions isn't bad.

32
lemmy.ml

We spend most of our time communicating with humans so we're generally better at that than communicating with algorithms and so it feels more comfortable.

Most people don't want to learn to communicate with a search engine in its own language. Learning is hard.

7

Whattt

Why wouldn’t I include “the” “a” other articles etc. if I had language but no tech skills

2

Surely you see how using a search engine is a separate skill from just writing words?

Point is, people don't want to learn. Natural language searches in the form of questions are just easier for people, because they already know how to ask questions.

9
reddthat.com

Except Google has been optimizing for natural language questions for the last decade or so. Try it sometime, it's really wild

6

Because we're human, and that's a human-made tool. It's made to fit us and our needs, not the other way around. And in case you've missed the last decade, it actually does it rather well.

3
nyctrereply
lemmy.world

I just tested. "Angelina jolie heat" gives me tons of shit results, I have to scroll all the way down and then click on "show more results" in order to get the filmography.

"Is angelina jolie in heat" gives me this bluesky post as the first answer and the wikipedia and IMDb filmographies as 2nd and 3rd answer.

So, I dunno, seems like you're wrong.

22
howrarreply
lemmy.ca

Have people just completely forgot how search engines work? If you search for two things and get shit results, it means those two things don't appear together.

10

I mean, when even people on Lemmy (who are supposed to be a bit more tech literate and stuff) insist that the solution is cutting a couple 2 letter words from your search query to make everything much shorter and efficient, are you even surprised?

I've been thinking for a while that people seem to be getting dumber and it might actually be true I don't think that it's a coincidence that fascism and other forms of conservatism seem to be on the rise pretty much everywhere in the world.

3

it's not the queries. it's Google. it doesn't care about your stupid results, it just needs to shove a couple more ads in your ass so please disable your blocker and lubricate

1

Search engine algorithms are way better than in the 90s and early 2000s when it was naive keyword search completely unweighted by word order in the search string.

So the tricks we learned of doing the bare minimum for the most precise search behavior no longer apply the same way. Now a search for two words will add weight to results that have the two words as a phrase, and some weight for the two words close together in the same sentence, but still look for each individual word as a result, too.

More importantly, when a single word has multiple meanings, the search engines all use the rest of the search as an indicator of which meaning the searcher means. "Heat" is a really broad word with lots of meanings, and the rest of the search can help inform the algorithm of what the user intends.

1

As a funny challenge I like to come up with simplified, stupid-sounding, 3-word search queries for complex questions, and more often than not it's good enough to get me the information I'm looking for.

7
lemmy.world

Why do people Google questions anyway?

Because it gives better responses.

Google and all the other major search engines have built in functionality to perform natural language processing on the user's query and the text in its index to perform a search more precisely aligned with the user's desired results, or to recommend related searches.

If the functionality is there, why wouldn't we use it?

2

Longer queries give better opportunities for error correction, like searching for synonyms and misspellings, or applying the right context clues.

In this specific example, "is Angelina Jolie in Heat" gives better results than "Angelina Jolie heat," because the words that make it a complete sentence question are also the words that give confirmation that the searcher is talking about the movie.

Especially with negative results, like when you ask a question where the answer is no, sometimes the semantic links in the kndex can get the search engine to make suggestions of a specific mistaken assumption you've made.

1
sh.itjust.works

Wouldn't removing your ovaries and fallopian tubes make you not "fertile" by definition?

105
[deleted]reply
lemmy.world

Yes, it contradicts itself within the next couple of sentences.

71
aussie.zone

I think the trick here is to not use Google. The Wikipedia page for the movie heat is the first result on DuckDuckGo

74
zaphodreply
sopuli.xyz

You can also search Wikipedia directly.

23
sh.itjust.works

PSA for Firefox/fork users, click the button to the left of the search bar after clicking blank space in the search bar, you'll get a list of choices besides just your primary selection. You can add more:

12

Yeah, first part of any fresh Fox setup is changing the default search engine.

4

if anyone's using ddg, you can do this by just adding !w for a direct Wikipedia search, or even !imdb for a direct imdb search without going to the respective sites first.

4
Hacksawreply
lemmy.ca

I use duck duck go as well. I wish it wasn't just anonymised Bing search. One of these days I'll look into an open source independent search engine.

19

I haven't used Bing in a while but I alternate between Ecosia and DDG, supposedly Bing as their main provider. I find more and more differences between them nowadays so I do feel DuckDuckBot and Qwant partnership are doing their thing. I'm optimistic about both of them broadening their sources as they state in their websites.

2
Owlreply
mander.xyz

DDG also has a quick answer AI

8

It does?? I was using Brave because it had AI

(And also because so many websites are censored on DDG for some reason)

2

and its implementation is so massively superior to anything else i've seen that it makes me want to bang my head against the wall

their AI just has a list of vetted sources which it relevant articles from and summarizes the text according to your query, so it actually fucking cites sources that you can easily verify and it's unlikely to just hallucinate nonsense. It also has the ability to go "yeah idk man, try changing your query maybe" if it can't find a relevant article to pull from.
Oh and since it uses actual sources it can easily be corrected if errors are noticed :OOO

2

It also contradicts itself immediately, saying she’s fertile, then immediately saying she’s had her ovaries removed end that she’s reached menopause.

64

Is it considered normal to type out a normal question format when using search engines?

If I were looking for an answer instead of making a funny meme, I'd search "heat movie cast Angelina Jolie" if I didn't feel like putting any effort in.

Then again, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I've seen someone use their phone to search google "what is 87÷167?" instead of doing "87/167" or like... Opening the calculator....

People do things in different, sometimes weird ways.

49

Yeah, the way that i would do it is to look up the Wikipedia page for the movie Heat and go to the cast section.

This is how i always look for information and it can actually be to my detriment. Like that time i went to Reddit to ask them what that movie was where time is a currency, and somebody pointed out that i could have just googled "time is money movie" and it would have immediately shown me In Time (2011).

Also, when i want something from an app or website i will consult the alphabetical list or look for a link to click, instead of just using the search bar.

I don't know, somehow it never entered my brain that search bars are smart and can figure out what you meant if you use natural language. Even though they've been programmed that way since before i was born

7

I sometimes ask questions, and sometimes I'm forced to because the original answer somehow misinterpreted my query. I also do searches like you mentioned, but I don't exclusively do one of the other.

5

This is like the difference between normal and right. Like I know a ton of people normally search for answers by putting full questions in. With the advent of LLMs and AI being thrown into everything asking full questions starts to make more sense.

For actual good results using a search engine, for sure what you said is better.

3
_stranger_reply
lemmy.world

Because you're not getting an answer to a question, you're getting characters selected to appear like they statistically belong together given the context.

42
howrarreply
lemmy.ca

A sentence saying she had her ovaries removed and that she is fertile don't statistically belong together, so you're not even getting that.

15
JcbAzPxreply
lemmy.world

You think that because you understand the meaning of words. LLM AI doesn't. It uses math and math doesn't care that it's contradictory, it cares that the words individually usually came next in it's training data.

22
_stranger_reply
lemmy.world

It's not even words, it "thinks" in "word parts" called tokens.

4

and those tokens? just numbers, indexes. LLMs have no concept of language or words or anything, it's literally just a statistical calculator where the numbers encode some combination of letter(s)

1
howrarreply
lemmy.ca

It has nothing to do with the meaning. If your training set consists of a bunch of strings consisting of A's and B's together and another subset consisting of C's and D's together (i.e. [AB]+ and [CD]+ in regex) and the LLM outputs "ABBABBBDA", then that's statistically unlikely because D's don't appear with A's and B's. I have no idea what the meaning of these sequences are, nor do I need to know to see that it's statistically unlikely.

In the context of language and LLMs, "statistically likely" roughly means that some human somewhere out there is more likely to have written this than the alternatives because that's where the training data comes from. The LLM doesn't need to understand the meaning. It just needs to be able to compute probabilities, and the probability of this excerpt should be low because the probability that a human would've written this is low.

3

Honestly this isn't really all that accurate. Like, a common example when introducing the Word2Vec mapping is that if you take the vector for "king" and add the vector for "woman," the closest vector matching the resultant is "queen." So there are elements of "meaning" being captured there. The Deep Learning networks can capture a lot more abstraction than that, and the Attention mechanism introduced by the Transformer model greatly increased the ability of these models to interpret context clues.

You're right that it's easy to make the mistake of overestimating the level of understanding behind the writing. That's absolutely something that happens. But saying "it has nothing to do with the meaning" is going a bit far. There is semantic processing happening, it's just less sophisticated than the form of the writing could lead you to assume.

5

Unless they grabbed discussion forums that happened to have examples of multiple people. It's pretty common when talking about fertility, problems in that area will be brought up.

People can use context and meaning to avoid that mistake, LLMs have to be forced not to through much slower QC by real people (something Google hates to do).

2

And the text even ends with a mention of her being in early menopause...

11
lemm.ee

People Google questions like that? I would have looked up "Heat" in either Wikipedia or imdb and checked the cast list. Or gone to Jolie's Wikipedia or imdb pages to see if Heat is listed

29

doesn't matter, this is "AI" and it should know the difference from context. not to mention you can have gemini as an assistant, which is supposed to respond to natural language input. and it does this.

best thing about it is that it doesn't remember previous questions most of the time so after listening to your "assistant" being patronizing about the term "in heat" not applying to humans you can try to explain saying "dude I meant the movie heat", it will go "oh you mean the 1995 movie? of course... what do you want to know about it?"

3
midwest.social

We all know how AI has made things worse, but here's some context on how it's outright backwards.

Early search engines had a context problem. To use an example from "Halt and Catch Fire", if you search for "Texas Cowboy", do you mean the guys on horseback driving a herd of cows, or do you mean the football team? If you search for "Dallas Cowboys", should that bias the results towards a different answer? Early, naive search engines gave bad results for cases like that. Spat out whatever keywords happen to hit the most.

Sometimes, it was really bad. In high school, I was showing a history teacher how to use search engines, and he searched for "China golden age". All results were asian porn. I think we were using Yahoo.

AltaVista largely solved the context problem. We joke about its bad results now, but it was one of the better search engines before Google PageRank.

Now we have AI unsolving the problem.

23

I was okay with keyword results. If you knew what you were dealing with in the search engine, you could usually find what you were looking for.

6
fedia.io

A statistical model predicted that "in heat" with no upper-case H nor quotes, was more likely to refer to the biological condition. Don't get me wrong: I think these things are dumb, but that was a fully predictable result. ('...the movie "Heat"' would probably get you there).

23
[deleted]reply
lemmy.world

As a comparison I ran the same all lower case query in bing and got the answer about the movie because asking about a movie is statistically more likely than asking if a human is in heat. Google'a ai is worse than fucking bing, while google's old serach algorith consistently had the right answers.

Google made itself worse by replacing a working system with ai.

51

Kagi quick answers for comparison gets this tweet, but now it thinks that heat is not the movie kind lol

The AI ouroboros in action

10

It might be the way Bing is tokenizing and/or how far back it's looking to connect things when compared to Google.

5

It's not just any human though, it's an actor, so movie related words should statistically be more likely.

10

While I get your point of the capital H thing, Google's AI itself decided to put "heat" in quotes all on its own...

7
wander1236reply
sh.itjust.works

I tried the search myself and the non-AI results that aren't this Bluesky post are pretty useless, but at least they're useless without using two small towns' worth of electricity

2

Non-AI results are not going to generally include sites about how something isn't true unless it is a common misconception.

5

This is why no one can find anything on Google anymore, they don't know how to google shit.

12

Everyone in this post is the annoying IT person who says "why don't you just run Linux?" to people who don't even fully understand what an OS is in the first place.

9
Jankatarchreply
lemmy.world

Installing a whole new OS is not good comparison to browser. We all downloaded chrome using internet explorer at some point before.

4
lemm.ee

You've sullied my quick answer:

The assistant figures it out though:

9

Maybe that's why ai had trouble determining anything about AJ & the movie Heat, because she's wasn't even in it!

4
fedia.io

Heat is an excellent movie, and one of my top five. Coincidentally, I just watched it last night. For a film released in 1998, it has aged well. OOP is in the ballpark, too - a young Natalie Portman is in it, not Jolie.

8

Yeah it's a movie that nails "then suddenly... all hell breaks loose."

4

Google correction does not reflect in the tab name; genuinely happens

16

It's hilarious I got the same results with Charlize Theron with the exact same movie, I guess we both don't know who actresses are apparently.

4

I never heard of the movie and was enjoying the content you created that I thought was supposed to be funny.

3

ddg isn't really any better with that exact search query. all 'fashion' related items on the first page.

you get the expected top result (imdb page for the film 'heat', which you have to scroll through to determine your 'answer') by using simply: angelina jolie heat

2
infosec.pub

Leaving aside the fact that this looks like AI slop/trash bait; who the fudge is so clueless as to think Ashley Judd, assuming that she's who they're confusing, looks anything like Angelina Jolie back then

-5

First, it's the internet, you can cuss. Either structure the sentence not to include it at all or just cuss for fuck's sake. Second, not everyone knows every actor/actress or is familiar, especially one that's definitely not in the limelight anymore like Ashley Judd. Hell even when she was popular she wasn't in a lot.

15
prolereply
lemmy.blahaj.zone

How do you know that OP even saw Heat? Maybe they were just curious to see if she was in it.

4