I found out that the $130 name brand of a particular item lasted about 10x longer than the $35 no-name equivalent. Someone who’s pretty thrifty helped point me toward the brand. If part of what you’re paying for is sturdier materials and build, it might be well worth the extra cost.

For most things though, it’s not worth the price as far as I can tell. Nobody really cares if you wear no-name clothing, or if they do, they’re an asshole you want to avoid anyway.

Some search engine results are crap, yes. But even the worse search engine (minus AI overviews or whatever) gives you a setup where: (1) each piece of information has an actual source, (2) you know who the source is, and (3) you can make decisions about which information to trust accordingly. If a popular search engine puts a sketchy company’s blog at the top of the SERP, you can actually see that and choose to look father down for something more reliable. Also, if your current search engine keeps failing you, try a different one! There are many options out there that you might find more helpful than today’s Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo.

Good luck with things, truly. I think you’re going to get hurt eventually if you use LLMs for medical advice, and I genuinely don’t want that for you or anyone. Hopefully this conversation has at least made you a little more skeptical about using LLMs in certain ways.

You can teach people how to use it all day long, but most still won’t use it well consistently in real life. Humans instinctively trust confident-sounding language. Most of us are also way worse at fact checking than we think. LLMs play right into humanity’s flaws, and they’re built to maximize engagement rather than help us avoid going past the tools’ limits. I don’t trust LLMs to be accurate about anything, but I still caught myself reading and failing to check Google AI overviews sometimes before I changed my default search engine to a no-AI alternative. It’s just instinctual when an “answer” is right there at the top of the page in response to your search question.

Sure, you can use an LLM to help you find sources, but at that point you might as well just use a search engine. There are search engines that provide links with actual text from each site rather than potentially hallucinated summaries.

Limiting medical knowledge from reliable information resources would be terrible. I’d say that limiting the spread of plausible-sounding medical misinformation generated by a fancy autosuggest tool is good, though.

AI chatbots don’t actually “know” anything. They just generate the most statistically probable appearance of a response to each prompt based on their training data. They don’t tell you when something wasn’t in their training data or when there’s limited research on a subject, just give you the most statistically probable response like always, which leads to a “hallucination” that sounds true but isn’t. A tool that’s trained on MCAT testbanks and “aces” the MCAT won’t necessarily give reliable medical advice to real patient questions. Even if you gave an AI chatbot all the accurate training data in the world, it would still hallucinate information occasionally, and it wouldn’t give you any indication of when it did so. If your doctor screws you over, they can lose their license, but if ChatGPT screws you over, there’s currently very little to stop OpenAI from screwing over more people. OpenAI can just stand behind the disclaimer that says ChatGPT can make mistakes, never mind that users are treating it like a licensed medical professional. There are AI tools that are useful in medical research, but they’re a VERY different kind of AI from the AI chatbots this bill is concerned with.

If you want medical knowledge, there are tons of medical journals, news sources, blogs, and podcasts from doctors/scientists who don’t hallucinate BS when they don’t know something.

bonus: most of these (and some of the other suggestions on this thread, like SearXNG) protect your privacy better than Google does

Are you saying that some people’s lived experience doesn’t support their own existence mattering? If so, (1) talking to loved ones or a therapist might change that perspective, and (2) if that doesn’t work or isn’t an option, you can find a purpose for yourself. If you find something you believe in, or something that you’re glad exists, that you can contribute to even if only in a small way, you’ll probably find yourself seeing that your existence can and does matter after all. Even just answering people’s questions on Lemmy makes a little bit of a difference. People commenting here have helped me; even if I stopped believing all humans inherently matter, I’d say all the anonymous people who have helped me and others with our questions matter.

another thing: I think most people answering here aren’t thinking about how it would feel to have the statistic they’re choosing over their own heads.

here’s a better question to ask: why should anyone need to justify their own existence?

Who really benefits from that mindset? Who benefits from systems that force people to justify their existence in some way? I’m thinking about economics, and politicians making welfare recipients jump through hoops that cost money more than they save to “earn” basic necessities, and the implications for people with less-understood disabilities and older adults with dementia and people who are marginalized in other ways, and how all of this fits into a world where tech companies want to replace everyone’s jobs and hobbies and relationships with AI. (Granted, I doubt LLMs will ever be reliable enough to fully replace humans in some things, and some people will always want relationships with real humans, but there’s plenty of other tech being developed out there too.) Everyone on Earth might have an “unjustified” existence as far as society is concerned someday, if we continue with this mindset.

To answer the second part of your question, though, about why should we care: because we are all fellow humans. I think others here have answered that part in more depth.

Listen to another catchy song and hope it will replace the one that’s currently stuck in my head.

Unfortunately, this only occasionally works.

Lots of good advice here, but I’ll add: try to enjoy the good things about your life right now.

Enjoy your current relationship with your parents. Figure out something you can contribute back to them (cooking? yardwork? just good conversations between adults? You decide.) Enjoy being around other young people when you can. Enjoy whatever hobbies you have, or maybe pick up a new one if you don’t have one right now.

It’s hard world right now, harder in many ways than it was for the past generation or two. You feel like you’re running behind because you’re comparing yourself to a standard designed in a different world, a standard which may have problematic even back then. The “typical young adult” lifestyles portrayed in TV shows, for instance, were never realistic. You’re one of many people in this situation. You aren’t running behind.

None. Someday, some company will build and sell a tool that actually does that, and it will be hella privacy invasive. Actually, it’ll probably just be another invasive feature added to the Ray Ban perv glasses.

I recently came across this post from a rape survivor that made exactly this comparison. It broke down all the parallels in between AI inevitability rhetoric and rape culture quite clearly: https://liberatedwriter.substack.com/p/ai-inevitability-acceptance-and-rape

I think a lot of people learn to be satisfied with age and experience, and you’re getting closer to that every day. You’ve now experienced that the grass isn’t fully green on either side of the stable life vs. wild life line. Now you know that both sides have tradeoffs. After a lot of those kinds of experiences, you come to appreciate things you couldn’t appreciate before.

It also helps to think of life in terms of seasons. In this season, you might feel a lot of spontaneous adventures and freedom and social connections, so enjoy them while they’re here in spite of the instability. In the next, you might have more peace and find yourself really savoring the small, quiet moments.

Also, literally touching grass sometimes helps. Not kidding. Just try taking a few minutes every day to be present in the moment somewhere outdoors, somewhere with grass or a tree or some other kind of plant nearby. If you’re in a city, maybe go sit on a park bench for a few minutes each day or walk around your block. If you have a backyard, hang out there for a few minutes in the evenings. It might feel pointless or awkward at first, but over time it will turn into a nice moment that you enjoy each day. After a while it’s an instant satisfaction boost, particularly on sunny days.

I generally take everything they say with a giant grain of salt, but that was somewhat true even before 2022. Most of the AI-reliant people I know were never that great at evaluating sources of information. It’s just that the problem is far more pronounced now.

When you talk to people IRL outside of work, some of them are pretty cool and helpful for no other reason than because they want to be.

I’m not going to use that one (the website makes a big deal about using AI to automatically tag things, and I’m trying to reduce LLMs in my digital life), but thanks for sharing! It otherwise looks like a cool app.

Thanks for sharing these!

Oh, OK! I probably won’t do any of those because I’m trying to reduce my dependence on big tech companies and dislike Dropbox, but thank you so much for explaining.

Ok, OK. Thank you so much for taking the time to explain all of this! Sounds like you really do need to have multiple tools working together. I might try Raindrop/Recoll/SingleFile for something.

Thank you so much! This is really helpful. Logseq in particular sounds pretty interesting.