[kombookcha]

It's approaching a very strange situation where people make overly wordy and bloated AI generated content and other people try to use AI to compress it back into useful pellets vaguely corresponding to the actual prompts used to generate the initial content. Which were the only bits anybody cared about in the first place.

One guy pays the AI to dig a hole, the other guy pays the AI to fill in the hole. Back and forth they go, raising the BNP but otherwise not accomplishing anything.

[ta1243]

I haven't worried about search engines since I was trying to get my site into yahoo, but my understanding is that they rank long flowery prose far higher than things that are straight to the point.

There's then the added "benefit" of being able to put more adverts in such long text.

One of the main appeals of chatgpt is it just gives you the answer

[dijksterhuis]

*an answer

Not necessarily the answer

[ta1243]

So no different to searching online and finding some random page then. In my experience chatgpt is usually far more accurate, and as it gets right to the point you have far more time to understand if the answer is reasonable

[skydhash]

No one searches online for a random page. You search for something you may or may not find. You don’t go in a library looking for Jules Verne and get out with any random book. I can agree that search engines may be bad, but they don’t create web sites out of thin air.

[msabalau]

Hmmm, not entirely certain about that metaphor.

I do that sort of thing all the time. Sure it is nice to walk out with the Verne, but I am quite certain that I'll probably be walking out with several random books, with or without the one I was looking for.

[downWidOutaFite]

It's common. I get annoyed at my wife all the time for jumping to conclusions from some random piece of web info.

[ta1243]

I wanted to know when the clocks went back in the US and UK earlier.

---------

when do clocks go back uk and us

ChatGPT said:

In 2024, clocks go back on Sunday, October 27th in the UK and most of Europe, marking the end of Daylight Saving Time (DST). At 2:00 AM, clocks are set back one hour to 1:00 AM, giving people an extra hour of sleep. This marks the shift back to Standard Time and will last until spring when clocks go forward again.

In the United States, the clocks will go back a bit later, on Sunday, November 3rd, 2024.

---------

Compare to using a search engine to find this out, which involves one search, then clicking another page, then finding out the dates for the UK, then searching for the US, multiple pages, multiple paragraphs of text

First result was the evening standard

---------

What date do clocks go back in 2024 and when does British Summer Time end?

Brits will get an extra hour of sleep from next month as the days get shorter and shorter.

The temperatures are starting to drop, marking the end of summer – even if it’s not going quietly. Nonetheless, autumn is well and truly on the way and that also marks the end of British Summer Time (BST).

For those who aren’t a fan of dark mornings, that means you’ll gain one hour of sleep.

The custom of changing the clocks twice a year has been around in the UK for over a century, taking place once in March and once in October.

There’s still a little while until the clocks change but the date is already known, as it always happens on the last Sunday of October.

In 2019, the European Parliament voted to scrap mandatory daylight saving but Britain has no plans to, err, see the light.

This is what it all means for the UK.

When do the clocks go back?

The clocks go back on Sunday, October 27 at 2am.

---------

All that nonsense to parse and I still haven't got the US date

[skydhash]

Because a search engine is not an answer engine. I just type 'daylight saving time uk' and 'daylight saving time us' and the answer was right at the top [0].

You're supposed to give a query, not a question (even though google et al. have worked hard to trick people into that). Which is why search engines works for me even if there are lot of garbage filled sites.

[0]: https://ibb.co/GpZ19nK (screenshot)

[nonameiguess]

Strange experience. I tried to replicate it by typing "US daylight savings time" into my URL bar and Duck Duck Go's summary blurb at the top of the results says "Daylight Savings Time Ends Sunday, November 3rd, 2024" and the first result is Wikipedia. Without even following it, the summary on the search page says "in the US, daylight savings time begins on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November."

Hacker News commenters seem to consistently have far more trouble searching for things than I do and I don't get it.

[acdha]

It’s clearly different in that ChatGPT sounds authoritative but you still have to track down sources and make sure they’re correctly summarized and accurate. Search doesn’t give you the impression that you’re doing anything else but ChatGPT always sounds authoritative even when it’s wrong, which makes it a hazard for the people who need it the most because they don’t have the personal expertise to recognize when it goes off track.

[ta1243]

And webpages always sound authoritative even when they're wrong.

[acdha]

There’s a key difference to understand: web pages have individual reputation. If I see something about the moon landings on NASA.gov I assign it a different trust level than something I read on youcanthandlethetruth.social, whereas LLM output comes with the imprimatur of the company which made the system. Some LLMs do generate citations but those don’t always exist, come from authoritative sources, or say what they’re listed as saying but users are notoriously prone to not checking unless they’re primed to be suspicious.

[j45]

Insightful :)