Lauren Weinstein
Brambleminster Gollyhatch@lauren To be fair it said according to "a" calendar, not "the" calendar. Could be last year's.
@gollyhatch I didn't ask if it ever was 2024, or if some random calendar somewhere said it was 2024. I asked a question any child could answer: IS it 2025. It's a binary question, answerable by 99.999% of the people on this planet, I would suspect. No excuses.
Frank Heijkamp@lauren @gollyhatch It is not an excuse but it is a possible explanation. "According to a calendar" is technically not a lie, that can indeed be 'any' calendar. LLM's are based on mathematics, it just spits out words according to a bunch of complicated formulas. It does not understand anything, there is no #actualIntelligence in there.
@alterelefant @gollyhatch I don't need a tutorial on LLMs. The point is that this garbage is being forced down the throat of users and the amount of misinformation is vast and apparently growing, nor is Big Tech willing to take responsibility for any damage done to users who assume that Google is giving them accurate information like it used to.
@lauren @gollyhatch it is indeed very worrying. Let's hope people are able to pick up on the fact that all of this LLM stuff is too much of a distraction and not improving their life in any significant way. It is only adding noise.
@alterelefant @gollyhatch Big Tech isn't giving them a choice. They're stuffing it into everything. It's all about trying to recover their enormous investment that they fear might never pay off unless everyone is forced to use these systems.
David Mitchell 
@lauren @alterelefant @gollyhatch
There’s been a thousand reasons for me to stop using Google for search over the years, and yet I haven’t … *this* is the issue that has prompted me to load a couple alternative search engines and begin using them more often. I certainly don’ t need *more* bullshit in my life.
BeardlyDavid 
@DavidM_yeg @lauren @alterelefant @gollyhatch
I have been using #duckduckgo almost exclusively for years with great results. The decline of #google makes the switch even more worth it.
@BeardlyDavid @DavidM_yeg @lauren @gollyhatch Agreed, #duckduckgo works for me. When looking up an English word I choose to use #deepl and when checking Wikipedia I use the actual search engine in Wikipedia. Spread your search queries over multiple dedicated platforms. That will make it harder to create a profile of you and the results are more direct and more reliable.