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   Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 24-Aug-2026 05:35:33 JST Glyph

   I ask Claude and ChatGPT a question every month or so in order to keep my impressions of their performance grounded. In general they've been consistently disappointing. Yesterday I had a question that traditional search completely failed at, and I had this kind of experience <https://taggart-tech.com/reckoning/> where Claude knocked it out of the park, which (while my proximal problem is now solved) mostly just gives me a sinking feeling.

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     V (miss_rodent@girlcock.club)'s status on Monday, 24-Aug-2026 05:35:31 JST V

     in reply to

     @glyph I've been limiting a lot of searches by date range, for things I know were answered pre-ensloppening where possible, which goes a long way for most topics.

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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 24-Aug-2026 05:35:32 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • V

     @miss_rodent Yeah, the moral dilemma is turning out to be "do I want generic slop prepared from somebody else's prompt for the purpose of capturing the last dregs of Google SEO, or do I want bespoke slop prepared for me that is at least based on a prompt I can tailor?" it's not a great choice.

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 24-Aug-2026 05:35:33 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     After I got the "right answer", I asked myself the question that I ask all AI boosters when they say that it worked, which is "'worked' compared to what?". And I realize that the pre-AI tools for finding solutions via human connection have all decayed as a result of the funding pumped into the AI versions. Case in point being Stack Overflow; SO has degraded so much that it didn't even *occur* to me to post my question there.

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     V (miss_rodent@girlcock.club)'s status on Monday, 24-Aug-2026 05:35:33 JST V

     in reply to

     @glyph Most of the search engines have gotten worse, too, so it takes significantly longer (and more fucking around with keywords, excluded terms, required terms, date range specifications, etc. etc.) to try to find anything useful from them, and filter out the ever-growing pile of SEO-bait slop.