Thread

1. lordnacho · 1790070279 · focus · HN ↗

   AI is my default for just about any search now. From today:

   How did Cantor come up with his diagonal proof? It seems to have been dreamed out of nowhere

   Why are there advertisements for a shampoo containing caffeine? Does caffeine do something useful other than when you drink it?

   What happens in sense and sensibility?

   All of them give a decent answer, with the ability to ask follow ups. Eg, how does S&S compare with Pride and Prejudice? What about more recent novels connecting romantic choices with economic choices?

   All of them give you links to source material, in case you suspect they are just making it up.

   At the start of the millennium, Google search changed everything about how I look for information. Now it seems outdated.

   1. yoavm · 1790072546 · focus · HN ↗

      It's interesting — "knowing how to search" used to be a skill. One wouldn't search for "How did Cantor come up with his diagonal proof?", but rather "cantor diagonal proof origin". You would see "normies" searching and wanted to bang your head against the wall seeing them searching like they're talking.

      But seems like they won? Why know how to search when you can simply ask your question. You can even tyipe it layke dat and it would still work.

      1. ricardobayes · 1790073289 · focus · HN ↗

         > "knowing how to search" used to be a skill

         I would argue this was always a bit silly, and mostly due to UI shortcomings of search platforms. The fact you needed to add "magic" params to shape the results speaks volumes. Any UI that fundamentally tries to reshape how you are expect to interact, or impose certain "behavior" is wrong. This is also why we are using touch instead of a stylus.

         AI won because they took the paradigm of presenting a new way of doing something in a familiar way. An LLM works very similarly how you would ask a knowledgeable friend, and google worked similarly how an engineer would query a database.

         1. danielbarla · 1790082530 · focus · HN ↗

            Phrasing it as a UI shortcoming is underselling it. The search mechanism itself was dumb[1] and therefore the user had to be more intelligent. As an example, knowing synonyms for what you were searching for, in order to disambiguate the query from a more popular term that would likely dominate the results but was irrelevant for you, was a major skill.

            [1] Yes, we can argue that LLMs are dumb, also. But they magically do "get" your intent with your prompt, unlike the search engines of yesteryear.

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