Mitch's Blog

when they aren’t hallucinating, what they’re capable of is still impressive, though it’s a bit like watching a dog walk around on two legs – fun, but not exactly an efficient way to get around.

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day says AI search is worse than conventional search and could potentially kill the web. AI search feeds on existing blogs, articles and other websites, while removing incentives for people to create those things. In this scenario, generative AI is like a wild animal that kills everything in the food chain that feeds it and then starves to death.

Also, Cory notes that we gave Google a monopoly on search and Google in return was supposed to protect us from search spam, a job at which it is utterly failing. “Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve been using ChatGPT for search, and have also used the Perplexity AI search engines. They’ve been fine for quick hits; I haven’t tried either on deep research.

Google is still good for some things, but I’ve noticed it falling down in two areas: Product reviews (I go to reddit or Wirecutter for those) and how-tos, where Google serves up a half-dozen videos before it gets to the actual instructions I’m looking for.

During our last time going out to lunch before the pandemic, my dad (who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and later spent years in the Partisans fighting the Nazis) and I were walking toward a restaurant, and he expressed his dismay that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our country seriously enough. I suggested that while most Americans were concerned, they didn’t see the Trump era as being that ominous because they assumed the kinds of things that happened in his life could never happen here. My dad stopped walking, looked at me, and asked, “You think vhen I vas a kid any of us thought it could happen there?”

— Dave Pell, NextDraft

Apple warns users to stop putting wet iPhones in rice (Gizmodo)

That was a big clue on a crime show. The detective noticed that the murder victim had bought a large quantity of rice, and surmised that the victim was using it to dry out a wet phone, which proved important to solving the murder.

When I was a boy attending Hebrew school, the Holocaust was living memory for the adults teaching us. They told us: “You think of yourselves as Americans first. That’s exactly how German Jews thought of themselves in the early 1930s.” I think about that more and more lately.

Doc Searls: “Blogs are newsletters that don’t require subscriptions."

Cory’s Pluralistic blog turns four. Here, he talks once again about his Memex Method of taking notes in public. I have never been able to make that work for me, though I’ve tried. pluralistic.net

Alabama’s supreme court rules frozen embryos are ‘children’ theguardian.com

In a decision using flagrantly unconstitutional religious language, the court allows two wrongful death lawsuits to proceed against a fertility clinic.

Haley’s plan to unite the United States: pardon Trump. “It is unclear why or how Haley thinks this move would bring the American people together unless the together she speaks of is a civil war.” boingboing.net

“I just kind of think of her as a lowlife” Colorado GOP voters reject Lauren Boebert boingboing.net