[steve_adams_86]

These are good questions and thoughts. I don’t think you’re wrong about searching being better before, either.

I started my career around 2005 and honestly, I did great finding what I needed without an LLM. I recall being absolutely amazed with how broad and deep the reservoir of knowledge was, and as my skills in searching improved my results generally got better.

And then they didn’t. It has gotten worse over time now, in part due to Google itself and in part because of how the Internet tailors content to Google. Getting a Quora link in response to a technical question is a crazy farce. Stuff like that didn’t really happen the same way 20 years ago, much like the Pinterest takeover of Google images.

The signal pollution also seems like a huge problem to me. I’ve doubled down on creating real content in the form of writing and software in an attempt to kind of rekindle and revive the craft of, I don’t know, ‘caring enough to do things yourself’ in my life. I miss it the more I read generated text or see generated images and video. I like LLMs and other generative AI, I see the value, but their rapid takeover is seriously disheartening. It just makes me want to make real things more.