Encouraged by a colleague, I’ve switched to using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine instead of Google.
It’s not even about privacy for me, and only a little about avoiding the ads. Instead, it’s all about getting rid of the nonsense AI response at the top of the results.
There’s been this example floating around the web for months:
Will it be 2027 next year?
It is 2026 right now, and will be 2028 next year, followed by 2027.
Source: Google
After several months of people posting screenshots and poking fun at it, Google’s AI is just getting more convinced, using those posts as a reference. Someone said so on the internet, so it must be true!
This is the most blatant example, but for most other things, the primary source seems to be either a random bloke on Reddit saying something or some page that, when you click through to it, says nothing about the topic at all.
So, no thank you. I’m quite happy getting real search results instead.
It’s amusing/annoying how the Apple devices at home respond whenever anyone says “Hey Siri” in the video stream during the WWDC keynote.
Aside from that, I’d say it was a bit of a yawn this year 😴
AI is definitely a big help for me as an infrequent coder. For a while now, I’ve been pasting code and errors into Claude or ChatGPT to get some help, like “What does this error mean?” or “What is the correct way of doing this in React?”
The blog you’re reading right now is the first time I’ve let the AI actually build an application. Admittedly, it’s very basic: a static site generator in Python, using templates and publishing to the web, but looking back, I haven’t actually written a single line of code or barely even looked at one.
Here’s what I did...
Read moreWelcome to my new blog!
Like so many things these days, it all started with an AI prompt:
I miss personal blogs and an Internet free of slop and ads.
I want to build a pre-algorithm kind of site for myself. I want it to kind of feel like a platform but don’t want anyone else on there, no likes or anything.
It will be a mix of photos and short text.
After spending a few hours writing a spec, I now have a custom-built site generator in Python resulting in the site you are looking at right now.
What a time to be alive!