The higher-T among us seem significantly brain damaged since high school (myself included). I wonder what the mechanism would be here...
Any sensible statistical analysis of brain damage must control for common brain injury factors, chief among them American football and frequenting Less Wrong. My money is on rat poison and not T poison.
I guess, but any usage metric can be similarly growth-hacked in my mind. I guess what I'm missing is: is there a more reasonable metric to drive your business, even assuming you're not a malicious exec and actually care about your service?
This is what speaking truth to power is supposed to be. EZ tearing the facade of modern tech is a service to everyone, including people inside the tech industry.
The only gripe I have with this article is that I'm not convinced why the metric of "we want people to query more on Google" should be concerning to me. That just sounds like "we want more people to use our product more", which is a completely reasonable metric for any business, no? In the Better Offline podcast he even says "this sounds paranoid of me but no, Google officially said this" and I'm like... ye, sure? Why would that be scary? If the metric was "userads per minute" or something then ye, that'd be Facebook level fuckery, but...
I am criticising that your post is based on a mediocre model (which version and temperature did you use?)
Mate, I just went to ChatGPT and asked it a question. It's around 2°C outside if that matters.
Examine the trail of events that leads us here. A guy in a post says you can use LLMs to explain Wikipedia articles. I go to the most popular LLM site and ask it to do so. Now you barge in and tell me that's a "mediocre model with wrong temperature". I don't think that's in any way relevant to the claim? Like, if the original comment said "search engines can do X", I went to Google and found out it cannot actually do X, and you came to tell me Google is shit, actually, you should use a real search engine that you have to pay for (or get a license from work).
I would be more sympathetic to your comments if you at least provided screenshots that show those way better responses. It'd at least be theoretically (as in academically) interesting.
If only there were specific people making those executive decisions that enshittify everything, we could all try to hold them at least a little bit accountable for it. We could call them "executives" or something.
Alas, corporate growth-at-all-cost policies are merely an emergent property with no one particularly responsible for them at all. It's not like there's something as damning as, say, an email thread outlining exactly who made all those shitty decisions.
I'm sorry David, I think you meant to title this:
"Ed Zitron documents Prabhakar Raghavan? The actual guy who turned Google Search into complete shit?"
I think it's entirely gone now.
I used OpenAI Chat as you can probably see on the screenshots. I'm definitely not paying them a dime for Spicy Autocomplete TURBO 9000 or whatever the fuck.
If you want to "debunk" this post then go ahead and post your own screenshots and analysis.
Just like an average LessWrong post, checks out.
I will quote the entirety of Max’s website here:
Wait, the dude wrote that about himself? Jesus fucking christ, I wouldn't hire him for anything just based on that. "Hello, I am Max Howell and I have a LEGENDARILY giant dick that pleases multitudes." Get the Howell outta here.
the homebrew tree inverter guy
I knew he did homebrew, why "tree inverter" though?
Yet another dude who watched Wolf of Wall Street and thought "yes, this is what peek success looks like, I'll aspire to be like this". Absolute rubes the lot of them.