They don't. They're fairly orthogonal concepts. You can have a concept of lifetimes without memory management (for example, the object changes state while you have a reference to it).
I don't treat it like a person, but rather as ChatGPT that has access to Bing's search index. For factual queries ("who invented X? at what company?") it's more reliable than ChatGPT and saves me quite a bit of time. Similarly for content aggregation tasks - I'm *scared* to click on a lot of "Top 10 X", "The best Y in Z" type pages because they're SEO and advert mined. Bing does the initial aggregation for me, and if interesting, I ask it to tell me more about that resource or visit the page myself.
There will always be a segment of people who troll on the internet - that doesn't detract from the immense productivity tool it can be when used correctly.
> it's more reliable than ChatGPT and saves me quite a bit of time.
What evidence is there that the results you get now are significantly faster or better than the non-AI results you got before? Particularly for queries of the form in your example.. I really wasn't having much difficulty getting those answers before these products existed.
- the low-hanging fruits (where there is a Wikipedia page or similar for X, and both Google and Bing do a good job of mining these)
- the tougher nuts ("who was the UK prime minister when the wright airplane first flew" - Google and regular Bing fail at this, but Bing chat correctly brings up Arthur Balfour). This was just an example I made up to try - but the ability to connect more dots than plain old search, which is hard to explain but you get a sense of the capability as you use ChatGPT/Bingchat - helps a lot.
The search LLMs are good at synthesizing answers that don’t appear anywhere on the net. But they also hallucinate answers often. So to get reliable results, one needs to fact-check them. Otherwise, the risk of being misled is high. The fact-checking isn’t much faster than just looking up different bits of information and synthesizing the answer oneself.
There are cases where LLMs make life a lot easier for people, but I am not convinced about whether search can be made easier by the way Sydney and Bard do it.
If they suggested alternative search queries and summarized websites for their search result excerpts, the LLMs would speed up search a lot. They could also synthesize some content quality metrics for each search result and highlight ones with biased reasoning, political influences, SEO games, and so on.
I too am optimistic about the tech. And I would even consider myself an early adopter of convolutional NNs and these LLM products in my commercial work.
But we have to state the obvious - Bing chat is not a good substitute for web search now. It is simply too unreliable. You.com has a better implementation of a search chat LLM imho because it quotes web more verbatim and uses more reliable sources. It also doesn’t simulate going on emotional tangents.
Sydney needed more time to mature as a product before Microsoft slapped “Bing” on it. It may still mature, but Microsoft took a big reputation hit for rushing this to market.
Oh I agree with that. LLM doesn't give you better search - better search {index, ranking, SEO-tolerance, ...} gives you better search.
To me, Bing chat - although imperfect - augments search positively to fill my specific needs.
0) I don't see half a page of ads before the first real result, disguised to look like real results.
1) The interface is clean and noise-free : it takes away a huge context switching load I incur when going into individual results (which for most searches these days, is the top 3-5). I just want the content summarized, with no ads, in a form my brain is used to.
2) I can ask follow-up questions with context, again without ever leaving the interface. Otherwise, the follow up question's answer is often on another website.
3) I can ask more creative questions, which is not really a 'search' feature. Something like 'write a snippet of code'. You can try "unique_ptr in rust - show examples too" and it gives me a passable and concise answer. It presents two options, but to get what I exactly want, I can ask "how to use Box?" as a follow on.
4) It's vastly better at 'connect the dots' queries - see my other comment please.
One underrated feature is the 'next query' suggestions - I can use a single click instead of typing out 'one more example' or see more subtle examples by clicking 'how can I use Box for recursive types?'.
How would one go about finding such consulting gigs?
I’m semi-retired now, but with nearly 4 decades of experience, I still didn’t feel comfortable becoming a full-time consultant.
Yeah to echo what was said, I would start shaking that network tree you built while working for 4 decades. I would also put yourself out there on sites like LinkedIn (I know, I know) that have groups for people looking to hire consultants or are ones themselves. There’s an online niche for everything these days.
Could you share any of these “hosted” services? I’m thoroughly disillusioned after paying for 3 streaming services and still not finding quality content
I’m unsure of HNs stance on piracy so I’m hesitant to post any specifics. For a single account, key words to search for are “plex shares” or “emby shares” and if you want to run your own server instance to be able to invite others and change the metadata (fix mismatches and choose specific artwork , basically) the keywords are “plex appbox” and “emby appbox”
You’ll find that the majority are on Discord, so you’ll have to get in on that platform, but it kind of works better as it’s easier to keep track of the different offerings, switch if needed, etc.
If you get really stuck, let me know a way to PM you and I’ll give specifics
Thanks! All of our core UI components (e.g., buttons, text inputs, etc.) are "hand crafted". We do use https://blueprintjs.com/ for some components, but we apply our own styling on top.
I’ve posited repeatedly that when Reddit IPOs, I’ll be reallocating a significant chunk of my portfolio into their stock.
Their management has historically lacked focus, but if Reddit ever builds a half-competent search index, and positions itself as a search-first, discovery-second destination, they will be in the FANG tier of stocks.
They have the data. They have the dedicated, active user base. They have free moderation. The hard parts are solved. If only they get someone like Satya at the helm. (Also a big reason for me to believe that an acquisition may also be a good play for a AMZN/MSFT)
As the deceased child comment to this post mentioned, reddit's UI is horrible. I strongly prefer old.reddit.com, but I don't expect it to live too long. A good UX designer would make their site much, much nicer to read (and hopefully much more performant). It appears that they are trying to push people to use their app, which I don't particularly wish to do since I'm on a desktop.
As for search, maybe they should just make a deal with another search engine and have it run the query on their site with site:reddit.com or !r in the background and show the results on a branded page. You would think that having access to their own data would make searching easier, but apparently it doesn't.
I am a big fan of reddit, even in it's broken state. As long as you're street smart and know where to stay away from, browsing reddit is a positive experience, at least for the subreddits I hang out in.
I'm really really hoping that one of the big companies doesn't buy reddit. They wouldn't know what to do with it and it would die an ignominious death. In my opinion, of course.
Reddit userbase is fast deteriorating. The power users who were responsible for much of its highest-quality content have been fleeing the sinking ship for quite some time - once a fully credible alternative springs up (and some are in the works already, with superior tech underlying them) they'll be as toast as Digg unless they radically course-correct.
If reddit ever becomes a significant influencer of people's buying decision (like this article is claiming), it too will be gamed.
Think automatic gpt3 bots making up life stories of how he was hiking up mt everest and just so happen to be wearing brand XYZ which saved his life. Along with autogenerated selfies to submit to gonewild to farm upvotes and other stuff to create a realistic user history.
I can't see how reddit can defend against seospam of that type when Google can't handle the simpler problem of content farms. Reddit will die overnight from being replaced by 99% bot accounts.
They can't keep their website online and their search tech is so broken it regularly fails at returning my own sorted post history, let alone find anything.
You make good points:
>They have the data. They have the dedicated, active user base. They have free moderation.
...but overall I think they're likely to get wiped out mass exodus Digg style due to some black swan mismanaged incident before they enter FAANG tier
Have you ever used reddit? It's manifestly full of bots, with the second largest usergroup being schoolboys looking for porn and talking about video games.
There's a reason the ads you see on reddit are for absolute garbage products made by companies you've never heard of.
Sequencing in distributed systems is difficult to handle correctly. When faced with such a situation, it’s often a matter of philosophy rather than technical brilliance - are you willing to accept that failure is inevitable even with a neat “waiter” implementation? What happens if the waiter waits forever? Is shaving seconds tangibly benefitting customers (for Sentry it might) and worth the operational overhead?
Framing these problems slightly differently - is 10 second latency close enough to “real time”? - unlocks solutions like an online batch processor that reads out of your DB (if it doesn’t support NOTIFY) on an indexed incremental identifier.
Hey Aparsons, thanks for your feedback. As mentioned in the post, the Handbook is not finished and we'll continue to evolve, adding more chapters, meat to the current chapters, and we have other ideas like exercises.
It's good that you are interested in Scaling WebSockets, because that is the chapter I am writing now! I hope to get it live in a couple of weeks, once it is I can send you the new version.
