balder1993
@balder1993@programming.dev
Mobile software engineer.
- Comment on Google AI Mode To Become Default For Google Search Soon 2 days ago:
There was a time Google were orders of magnitude better than anyone else. Now with Google basically just pushing ads at the top and SEO articles taking over, the other search engines aren’t worse.
In any case, I find that DuckDuckGo is already enough for 90% of my searches and hence it’s my default. This simple fact made my dependency on Google very low nowadays, basically Gmail and Google Maps are the main thing I still use.
I only fall back to Google Search when I want something more tailored to my country news, something in my language or when I’m searching for something around me (like a store, business etc. which are all on Google Maps). These other search engines seem to be good mostly for English content and struggle to filter for things like “This search should be about country Y”.
I’m a practical person, so I don’t resort to extremist views like “100% free of Google”, but I guess these little gestures compound over time. Recently I’ve been also changing some services to use a different email other than my Gmail address, just to avoid centralizing everything on Google, and so I’ve been effectively diversifying the services I depend on, which is good.
- Comment on Tech CEOs Praise Donald Trump at White House Dinner 3 days ago:
These men are more than powerful enough to go against Trump
I wouldn’t say that, remember a CEO is just a position. If any of them goes against Trump, they can easily be replaced. Except maybe Zuck.
- Comment on Tech CEOs Praise Donald Trump at White House Dinner 3 days ago:
When the scene is open to the public, you can already know it’s all a theater.
- Comment on Tech CEOs Praise Donald Trump at White House Dinner 3 days ago:
Non paywalled article: archive.is/2BltD
- Comment on Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive 3 days ago:
Best thing is that it works flawlessly on the mobile apps as well, and Wikipedia also has a 1 million most relevant articles or so, which is just a few gigabytes.
- Comment on The Trouble With TikTok Is Getting Old 5 months ago:
Encyclopedia Brittanica wasn’t designed to be addicting and offer misinformation for one.
- Comment on Google will develop the Android OS fully in private, and here's why 5 months ago:
They can’t close the source code as long as they use the Linux kernel, right? Besides, Android is popular among other companies because they can customize part of it as they see fit.
This change isn’t really that drastic, because Android never really followed the open source way of doing things. The article even explains that this won’t change much even for ROM developers, since they’re not creating releases based on “work in progress” branches.
Really the only difference is that Google will spare the work of merging two separate branches often and solving conflicts that might as well be turning into a nightmare as the code base has grown.
- Comment on No one knows what the hell an AI agent is | TechCrunch 5 months ago:
…so might as well say that “agent” is simply the next buzzword, since people aren’t so excited with the concept of artificial intelligence any more
This is exactly the reason for emphasis on it.
The reality is that the LLMs are impressive and nice to play with. But investors want to know where the big money will come from, and for companies, LLMs aren’t that useful in their current state, I think one of the biggest use for them is extracting information from documents with lots of text.
So “agents” are supposed to be LLMs executing actions instead of just outputting text. Which doesn’t seem like the best idea considering they’re not great at all at making decisions—despite these companies try to make it seem like they can.
- Comment on Why extracting data from PDFs is still a nightmare for data experts 5 months ago:
Or… you know… have PDFs that aren’t pictures of handwritten text?
- Comment on Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak says Tesla ‘is the worst in the world’ at improving its technology for drivers 5 months ago:
Yeah, none of that would be a problem if the car isn’t connected to anything (WiFi, Bluetooth etc.)
- Comment on Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak says Tesla ‘is the worst in the world’ at improving its technology for drivers 5 months ago:
This is why technically software is a liability. The less code you need, the better, since every line of code is a potential vulnerability and something to maintain, update, etc.
- Comment on Eerily realistic AI voice demo sparks amazement and discomfort online 5 months ago:
But is it that different than the podcasts voices Google already generate with NotebookLM since a while?