Nick Broughall.
Writing again.

Just phenomenal stuff here, folks. Every time someone like me reports on Google’s AI getting something wrong, we’re training the AI to be wronger.

Elizabeth Lopatto,  Google still recommends glue for your pizza, The Verge

I really can’t wait for all the AI hype to die off. Sure, there are situations where AI can be helpful, but most of it is just crap, and the lofty promises of the technology will likely never become reality.

But I particularly want the idea of AI in search results to die. It’s a completely inappropriate use of the technology, given it can’t (and will likely never will be able to) discern fact from fiction.

Loved the first two episodes of The Acolyte. It’s so good to see. New side of Star Wars that doesn’t involve the Empire or Skywalkers

Had to walk down the shops, and it looks like we had a fair amount of rain.

Had the hot water replaced today. Moved from gas to heat pump. Hoping it will save us some dollarydoos and be better for the environment.

A bird just flew into the window in front of my desk and scared the hell out of me.

I can tell when I’m going to like a new product for review when I get giddy showing it off to the wife and kids. Doesn’t happen too often though.

After years of trying to work out where we could fit it and whether it was a worthwhile investment, we finally bought a piano.

It’s a little cramped, but it’s beautiful. Sounds so much better than the keyboard we had previously.

Accepting that something you poured a lot of time and effort into isn’t going to work out is hard.

Today it was cold and miserable so we watched “Into the Woods”, and friends let me tell you it was a Bad Movie.

Walking through St James station today on my way to a meeting, it reminded me of the fact they filmed some of the train scenes of Matrix Revolutions here.

I decided to not flip over the turnstile like Trinity though…

Ed Zitron is brutal today in his newsletter, “The man who killed Google Search”

Yep, it’s definitely time to move away from Google, for personal and business. I’m old enough to remember when it valued not being evil. Now it doesn’t even pretend.

Absolute banger this week in Ed Zitron’s newsletter:

The core problem lies in the fact that these platforms don’t really create anything, and their only value exists in making an internet of billions of people small enough to comprehend. Like seemingly every problem with a capitalist society, the internet has become dominated by powerful forces that don’t contribute to the product that enriches them. As a result, they have either no concept of nor interest in “quality,” just “more,” making them extremely poor arbiters of what “good” looks like. This inevitably leads to products that suck more as they become more profitable, because the machine they’ve built is a profit excavator dressed as a service. I’d argue that this makes Google, and by extension executives like Sundar Pichai and Google Search lead Prabhakar Raghavan, some of the greatest villains in business history. While one can’t forget about the damage done by Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s failure to maintain an honest platform, allowing Google Search to decay so severely for any reason — let alone a profit-centric one — is actively damaging to society, and was an entirely intentional act perpetrated by people like Raghavan, the former head of Google’s ads division who took over search not long after his predecessor sounded a “code yellow” about Google’s advertising encroaching on search results.

I’m beginning to think I’m going to break up with Google. Its March core update has highlighted to me how bad the search results actually are. Combine with the (crap) generative AI push, the constant shuttering of services and the nightmare that is GA4, I think it’s time to start looking for alternatives.

I need to think about it some more, but I’m going to need alternatives for both personal and business services…