alt Hacker NewsI'm as anti-Google as anyone out there. I block all their ads, refuse to pay for youtube, go out of my way to avoid their hardware, etc. But I have to admit AI mode is great. It's fast, free, not yet cluttered with ads, and useful. I treat it as a search engine that does a fuzzy search rather than the more literal text match search that we're used to.
I recently bought a Bambu 3d printer after Reddit/HN drew my attention to them and AI mode has been really useful for me to learn about my new printer and troubleshoot things. There is so much information and I don't have time to read everything. I just want to ask a targeted question and have something summarize the literature's answers for it.
It will be a sad day when Google inevitably enshittifies it, but for now I'm happy for them to subsidize my expensive LLM queries.
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"Surely the last time after handing out carrots long enough to kill all competition, they switched from carrots to sticks, that sucks; but look? now they started giving out carrots again!! It will be such a sad day when no more carrots"
I'm the same way, I hate using Google search for searching because it's basically useless, and their other ecosystem offerings generally get enshittified over time so it's not worth paying for or relying on.
But if they're letting me using AI for free without logging in and I just need a dumb AI slop answer, then I'm more than happy to burn their tokens instead of my own. Any serious work goes to a different LLM provider. The switching cost for moving to a different LLM provider in the future is practically zero.