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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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A Perfect Day For Haying 2025

… what a waste of a perfect day for haying.

The neighbors have been putting in hay for the past few weeks, taking advantage of a patch of sunshine and high clouds, the same few weeks of the year when we used to put in hay when I was growing up on Waschke Road. The uncut fields ripple in waves like they did sixty years ago, and I imagine the hay tastes the same to the cattle and horses who chew it up and swallow it down, but much has changed in the intervening decades.

I’m not here to say the old ways were better, only that they were different and I remember them.

When I was a kid, neighbors hayed together and haying was an event, a gathering of neighbors, friends, and relatives. Cousins sometimes came all the way from Seattle, traversing a hundred miles of two-lane highway to help with haying. In the 1950s and early 60s cars and tires were not what they are today. Air conditioners were unheard of and a flat tire, boiling radiator, or other mishap was to be expected.

Sometimes haying was closer to a reunion party than work. I remember hay wagons that held more helpers than hay.

My mother and grandmother always prepared hearty and special dishes for the shared meals. The dessert pies and cobblers were to look forward to. June and July are a little early for fresh fruit, but the freezer needed to be cleared out of last summer’s cherries, apples, blueberries, blackberries, and peaches.

Every year, my dad would set aside two or three of our own fields for hay. He also hayed the fields of several neighbors. Dad seldom paid money for the hay from those fields, but there were always bumper crops of vegetables, fruit, and corn from our garden and orchard; liver, heart, and sweetbread to share when we butchered; or spare bull calves to raise for beef. All these eventually found their way onto the tables of those neighbors who had fields for Dad to take the hay.

Dad also traded cutting and baling a neighbor’s hay for a load or two of bales for our barn. No one kept track of these interchanges in dollars and cents, but everyone was satisfied.

Farmers don’t store winter fodder the way we did anymore. Now, early in the season, late April and May, farmers cut fields, let the grass wilt, then bale it up into what look like white plastic marshmallows that they stack in the field or close to their dairy operation. These contain what we used to chop and blow into silos and let ferment into silage.

Later, in June and early July, they cut the grass, let it dry like we used to dry hay, bale it up in round bales so big that I can barely see over them, and load them on trucks. The process is all machine work. No sweating neighbors and teenagers, only tractors with air-conditioned cabs, trucks, and gallons of diesel fuel.

In my day, bales were three feet long and weighed between forty and eighty pounds, just right for teenage boys and the occasional husky girl to pick up and stack. Haying began with a couple of days overhauling and greasing equipment. Saw-like sickles were ground to gleaming razor sharp edges for cutting tough rye, timothy, fescue and orchard grass.

Haying was sweating in the open air under blue skies for four passes over a field: one to cut the grass, another to rake and twist it into windrows, a third to bale the windrows and finally haul the hay into the barn. The third and fourth pass were often combined.

The first three passes were jobs for a driver and tractor. The loading and hauling was for a gang of neighbors, relatives, and teenagers, toiling in the sun.

The other day, I was surprised to see a neighbor bale up what I guess is about sixty acres into small square bales like we used to store. Forty years of desk work and arthritis have intruded between the days when steel bale  hooks felt like extensions of my hands bucking bales, but my interest piqued when I saw a string of wagons like those we used to haul loads back to the barn come down the road. Perhaps I’d get a few hours of nostalgia.

I was disappointed. A rig trailed behind the baler, compacting ten or so bales into a neat array. Then a tractor with a special front loader picked up the cluster of bales and placed it on a hay wagon. All diesel and no sweat.

Efficient, I suppose. But what a waste of a perfect day for haying.

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Fixing Social Media

“When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry a hundred.” Thomas Jefferson.

“Move fast and break things.” Mark Zuckerberg

In this post, I explain how to fix social media, the internet, and the polarization of America. To be clear, I don’t expect the fix to happen, not without divine intervention that I am not presumptuous enough even to hope for. But I do hope I can show that the “like” button is pernicious. I don’t especially like ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence, but they are only a symptom of the underlying problem with the computer network, the so-called Internet, that has become the nervous system of our world.

My argument requires a long introduction.

I was one of the constructors of the ubiquitous computer network that connects nearly everyone today. I played only a small part, but I think my attitudes were shared by almost everyone on the project.

We had one goal: connectivity, to connect every programmable computer to every other programmable computer on the planet and share all their resources— data, programs, storage, and sensors into the “real world.” When we on the eastside of Seattle saw the level of a pot of coffee in a lab at MIT in real time, we declared a triumphant milestone. In 2025, we are outdoing ourselves. We are now developing interplanetary computer connectivity.

I used to say the greatest mistake of the 1990’s was ignoring security. Using computer connectivity for malice, fraud, and theft never occurred to us. Cybercrime is rampant today, but so is the computer security industry. I’m not as worried as I might be because they cancel each other out.

Now, I think that our greatest failing was lack of attention to humanity, the engine that ultimately drives the computer network. Of course, the computer network can be no better than the people who use it; that should be obvious. I think we in the 1980s and 90s realized this, but shoved it to the back of our desks. What did not occur to us, at least not to me, was that the network had the capacity to make humanity worse.

Karl Marx said that changing relationships between workers and the means of production deeply affected society, which is the basis of his economic determinism.

That’s about as far as I go with Marx, although I used to soothe our infant daughter to sleep by reading Das Kapital to her in German. I don’t have my copy anymore. She may have thrown up on it.

Changes to the means of dissemination of knowledge are even more significant than changes to the means of production. I quote Phil Christman from another context in which he says that improvements in communication are not all good: “people panicked over television (Fox News alone proves them right) and that people thought radio would rot your brain (it rotted Germany’s) or that print would kill memory (which it did, that’s like Media Ecology 101).”

Now, let’s get down to exactly how the computer network has made humans worse. I still believe connectivity is good.

Today, I, an engineer without special resources, can broadcast my thoughts to anyone who cares to listen. This post on Vine Maple Farm and my Substack is an example.

I, and everyone else, have greater freedom of speech than any previous generation.

As little as twenty years ago, this freedom did not exist. Today, anyone can post on social media like Facebook or Bluesky.

Yet why has our free public discussion become so crabbed and polarized? Is it simply an example of “one bad apple spoils the barrel”? The computer network puts more bad apples in the world’s barrel and therefore there is more spoilage?

That’s oversimplification. Growing up on a farm, I recall that a bad apple spoils a barrel of apples but a bad walnut does not spoil a bushel of walnuts and a bad potato does not spoil a  sack of potatoes. The difference is that spoiling apples produce a gas, ethylene, that spoils any fruit in its proximity. No gas, no spreading spoilage.

The spoiling gas of the computer network is thoughtless propagation. The easiest and most thoughtless propagation is to hit the “like” button. “Sharing” is a close second.

You don’t have to stop and think long enough to type out a comment like “I agree! Chopping up starving children in poor countries for pet food is a grand idea, ” and signing your name. Instead thoughtless “likes” and “shares” seep out like ethylene from a bad apple, perhaps not as egregiously as my example, but each thoughtless propagation is a missed opportunity to add another morsel of humanity to the message, and that is the tragedy.

Instead of a vast community, each member adding to soaring cathedral choir, the computer network promotes thoughtless, sterile, and soulless anonymity.