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Category: The New Normal

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Angry At Google and Its AI

I’m a heavy Google search tool user. I’ve tried several of the alternatives (Bing, DuckDuckGo, and so on) but Google finds references they miss and I appreciate that. Google’s web crawlers, site ranking algorithms, and caching for rapid retrieval have been the best for decades.

Lately Google has added generative AI to their results.

This is not progress. It’s a disaster.

First, people should understand that until AI, Google did not offer answers. Their results were references to sites with content that matched your search criteria; the sites most frequently referenced were placed first with a few lines from each source. The user was left to draw their own conclusions, and who better than the user to draw those conclusions?

Now, Google uses generative AI to extract a summary of the information it gathers from its Large Language Model (LLM). The search results follow the AI summary. This is supposed to make life easier for users.

Unfortunately, Google’s summaries are unreliable trash. Don’t expect Google’s AI results to be factual, only to sound plausible. That’s what generative AI and Large Language Models are all about. Plausibility, not facts.

If plausibility is all you want, AI is fine. But what kind of person are you for whom plausibility is good enough?

I had a great uncle Adlepate (that’s not his real name) who was a great story teller. According to him, he lead an exciting life as a bootlegger running whisky from Canada and his garden was always had the earliest ripening and largest vegetables. But his stories would never pass fact checking. I soon learned not to count on the truth of Uncle Adlepate’s stories, and I realized that he was a repetitive and colossal bore.

Pay attention to Google AI summaries and prepare to join Uncle Adlepate.

I knew better, but until today, I had begun slipping into paying attention to Google’s summaries. Today, Google revealed itself as Uncle Adlepate.

I am working on turning some of these posts in Vine Maple Farm into a book about life on Waschke Road when I was a kid. One of the posts I intend to include in the book refers to Thoreau’s famous phrase “a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove.” The context in the original post was a little hazy so I wanted to reread Thoreau. I looked the phrase up with Google. The summary told me which chapter the phrase was from. The wrong chapter. I wasted– well waste is a bit strong, reading Thoreau is never a waste– but a good half hour of my day was misdirected.

When I went back to Google and ignored the AI summary, I quickly found the phrase.

So much for Google. I’m looking for a good way to turn the AI summaries off. I’m an old man. I don’t have time for them.

A late addition: I used uBlock Origin advertisement blocker to turn Google AI summaries off on Firefox. Took more time to find the method than to apply it. Just add ” www.google.com###Odp5De” (no quotes) to the “my uBlock filters” tab in uBlock settings.

A later addition: The uBlock Origin block has ceased working. Google AI marches on. I’ve tried Kagi, suggested by Steve Stroh in a comment below. It’s promising, but I will use it more before I dump Google.

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Lessons in Looney Tunes Democracy

The indictments against former president Trump trouble me. I’m not a lawyer, but as I see it, an indictment against a former president is unprecedented, but aside from that, they are legal business as usual: A prosecutor suspects a crime has been committed. Random voters in a jurisdiction are called together in a grand jury panel. The prosecutor presents evidence against the accused, then an indictment is issued when a majority of the grand jury votes that the expense and trouble of a trial is justified.

An indictment is not a statement of guilt or innocence, only that the evidence is worth pursuing. A trial follows; evidence both for and against the accused is presented. Then a judge or a trial jury decides guilt or innocence. State and federal grand juries differ in detail but are for the most part the same.

To this observer, the former president is cutting off the presidential limb he sits on. This is Looney Tunes.

Indictments are expensive in time and resources, a drawn out and elaborate ritual designed to make it difficult to obtain a conviction against an accused person. The deck is intentionally stacked against the prosecution. Therefore, prosecutors seldom pursue an indictment unless they have a strong case. Over ninety percent of indictments result in a conviction, which we taxpayers payers who foot the bill for grand juries and trials should applaud.

Despite all speculation over the strengths and weaknesses of the cases and a “past performance does not guarantee future results” warning label, odds are high that at least one of the former president’s three indictments will result in a conviction. With more indictments expected the likelihood that at least one strand of spaghetti will stick to the wall approaches certainty.

Not a typical post-presidency, but if Trump had not been president and didn’t have a major political party backing him, only his friends, family, and associates would care. In this world, crimes are committed and criminals are punished.

Nothing special to see here folks.

This week the New York Times reported that two conservative law professors, Federalist Society types, have suggested that Trump is ineligible for federal office, unless two-thirds of both the Senate and the House of Representatives vote to grant him amnesty for his conduct on January 6, 2021. The former president may have more than indictments to fend off in court before returning to the office he covets.

Election winners love democracy, losers not so much— until the next election. The marvel of democracies is that the losers always have a next election to win. That next election depends on the continuity of the democratic system that validates elections and governs terms of office. In the U.S., the system is derived from the U.S. constitution that is the basic contract between the U.S. government and its citizens. Federal officials swear to uphold the constitution, which, in turn, empowers them to carry out their functions.

The former president has repeatedly questioned the authority of the constitution to govern the presidency and the validity of the election process. To this observer, the former president is cutting off the presidential limb he sits on. This is Looney Tunes.

The U.S. constitution has survived two centuries to become the governing document of the wealthy and powerful nation. Is it possible that it is coming to an end??

I hope not.

Hold fast. Be patient. Keep trying.

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I’m Not Leaving America

A lot of folks are thinking about leaving America for better places. This season, many Americans are dissatisfied with our response to the pandemic, the state of our society and culture. America in general.

I’m staying. Here’s why.

America is special to me, but not because we don’t make mistakes. We have made many mistakes, poor decisions, and we never quite agree on anything. Yet we are the wealthiest nation on earth because we also continuously correct ourselves and discover solutions to our problems.

We are no longer a new nation. America has been a constitutional democracy for centuries. We hear that American democracy is under attack today, but democracy is always under attack from all sides: right, left, and center.

Always. If you think not, you haven’t paid attention. Take heart, you’re not alone. Even historians have a bit of rose tint in their glasses. In this country, standard histories tend to gloss over attacks on democracy. If you disbelieve, go to the newspaper archives and see for yourself what folks were thinking about Hitler in the late 1930s. The 3rd Reich had its American backers. And it’s not only American democracy under attack. One way of reading Thucydides, the Greek historian of the 5th century BCE, is as an analysis of attacks on Athenian democracy.

The losing side in every American election, from high school class president to U.S. president, claims the election was defective. Republicans thought so in 2020, Democrats in 2016, and on down the line. No one likes to lose, so we come up with reasons, any reason we can latch onto: voter fraud, door-belling the wrong neighborhood, the electoral college, gerrymandering, hanging chads, lying politicians, external conditions like the weather, pandemics, or foreign wars. Some excuses have some truth, others not.

More than anything else, they’re excuses.

When I was a software developer, I always tried to build self-correcting systems that made seriously bad choices and errors so obvious, so blatant, they were immediately corrected.

American democracy is a self-correcting system. That’s the secret to our success. Over and over, things go sideways, millions of eyes focus on the issue, and we work it out in the fervid and contradictory jumble of thought and effort that is our society. Americans disagree with each other, but our freedom to investigate and think for ourselves coupled with our election process always favors effective solutions.

Solutions in a free society are not cheap or easy. Among a free people, you are free to say that things are bad, say something nasty, say what people want to hear. No matter how false or outrageous your statements, you’ll get attention and some people will believe you. There’s money to be made. Unscrupulous folks take advantage of this and always have, but in America, people decide for themselves and solutions that work eventually appear. The attention-getting phantasms fade away, but until they fade, they are often viciously destructive.

This is not the first tough time for the U.S. A civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the forgotten economic crises of the 19th century were all tough. The 1918 flu pandemic was a killer. Many of us once believed owning other humans was morally right. These tough times were addressed with new ideas and solutions that rose to the top from the chaos of a free people.

America’s 2021 is not easy. Nearly 800,000 dead in less than 2 years— more than the population of Seattle or Denver, more than the U.S. combat deaths in all the wars in the 20th and 21st centuries. Cherishing our freedom, many more of us have died than in autocratic states with more draconian mandates.

The pandemic has generated difficult economic issues, which, like covid-19, no one has seen before or anticipated.

Who thought a disease that kills mostly the old and sick would lead to a truck driver shortage? Labor shortages may have been predictable, but who predicted the Great Resignation?

We haven’t found the American solution to the pandemic yet. Mandatory lock-downs, masks, and vaccinations have worked in China. Their pandemic death rate is minuscule and their economy is nearly fully recovered. But the solution is not to double down on methods that clearly have not worked here. Instead, we have to find the American solution.

Now, the world faces the Omicron variant. No one knows if it will fizzle away or rage like the Delta variant, but all the experts say that variants will continue to appear and every variant has the potential to evade the vaccines and kill more.

More medicines, faster easier testing, ideas no one has noticed yet, all may be part of our solution.

We will find the American solution. It will not be autocracy or abandoning our freedom. If any entity can tackle this challenge, it’s the United States of America.