Its sad but I think at this point its kind of a safety issue not to use an ad blocker. Those results are not clearly ads and I've clicked on fake links in the past when they were.
It absolutely is. I fear for the older generations and less tech minded people who google their bank, and get some random phishing site. Or similarly google what should be libre software and get some random malware on a site that looks 'close enough'.
Lets call it what it is, a cancer, one that literally enables countless bad actors and purely for a search engine's own profit.
In theory theres a time and place for ads, but maliciously inline and disguised as the actual results people want arent it.
It's already happened to an elderly family member who was trying to troubleshoot a printer problem. The top results were 1-800 hotlines run by scammers looking to get remote access to their machine to "fix" the issue. Google has hordes of these companies padding their pockets and won't lift a finger to remove them.
The only real difference that matters between a fake site and a real site is that the information on it is genuine, the form doesn't really factor into it. Which makes this a very tricky problem: You can't tell if the data is genuine before you have the genuine data.
If you're trying to do something for the first time with a big company, you usually know the domain name. Like Google is google.com. Or for something like your bank, it'll be printed on your credit card.
My parents were highly computer literate and taught me how to use them growing up. These days they can barely even send emails and spend 30-60 minutes looking for files that are either on their desktop, download folder or in Recent Documents menu in Word/Excel. At some point in the aging process computer skills are one of those things that seem to go.
I don't think they go at all, I think software development is just bad all around. Almost all software is really, really bad and we just put up with it or are used to it.
Most software does not value consistency or UX maintenance AT ALL.
What I mean is, a lot of those older programs arguably had much better user interfaces in terms of usability. More contrast, more text instead of glyphs, and often still simpler.
UI is like fashion, it changes because change is good. Not because those particular changes are good.
Compare Windows 11 and 7, or XP, or even in a lot of ways 95. What's the prettier experience? 11, I guess. But which one doesn't make me scream at the computer? Not 11.
But it's not just Microsoft, Apple does it too. We throw away literal YEARS of user understanding and memory for nothing. Users get tired over time. They can't keep up, nobody can, and it gets frustrating when things just get worse and worse over time.
But they deserve it when the manufacturer has one of those enterprisey sites where you need to go through 10 searches to maybe reach your manual, when the 3rd party site just shows it directly.
Not really, and the third-party sites almost never show the PDF directly without first trying to harvest your email or phone number or subscribe you to spam, sometimes they try to steer you towards unaffiliated 800 numbers tricking you that those are associated with the manufacturer, sometimes they bundle the download of manufacturer's PDF with malware, browser cleaner app installers etc.
Sometimes the third-party sites are helpful and benign, sometimes they are merely spammers trying to upsell you, occasionally they are malicious.
Agreed, the manufacturer site behavior is also annoying.
Yup. For reference, on Android your best bet is to install Firefox + uBlock Origin. On iOS, I believe Kagi's Orion has built-in content blockers but you can also install uBlock Origin [1].
What's odd is that the search engines, youtube, etc. get to claim the impartiality towards content applies to "impartiality" towards ads. I am younger, and I still almost got scammed trying to find a phone number to call a travel booking site. I called the number shown on Google, and they wanted to "verify my account" and triggered an email verification code. Only at the last minute did I realize it was an account takeover attempt. But that isn't Google perpetuating a crime?
Happened to my father who got routed through ads on his phone while booking flight tickets to some seedy website. He regretted it but thankfully got refunds initiated successfully because of issues with the flights themselves and a lot of back-and-forth. He resolved to only do critical monetary operations on his laptop where I've installed any and every possible adblocker.
The web is so hostile to the inform and the old. It takes one moment of weakness and there's someone ready and waiting with a scam.
You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid, or if you don't want to use search results from Bing's index, I've been very happy with Brave Search.
For me personally the issue is that some of my money would go to Yandex, and, by extension, to Russian government. I understand it is only a symbolic amount per user, but still, for me, this is unacceptable (I was a happy Kagi subscriber before I found out about this).
America is nearly as bad as Russia. Dollars paid to American companies are taxed and used to bomb children in Gaza. Are you boycotting all American companies?
From my point of view United States, all things considered, is not nearly as bad as Russia. I do not boycott all American companies but I do boycott some.
people say that but they often come back to Google ;)
I've just learnt to use ad blockers. the only time I disable it is when I look up the definition of something or the location of a place and the entire page goes blank because of some rules I've added to uBlock.
I haven't used Google (apart from their as-of-yet undefeated image search, the occasional hard link from a web page, and the two times I tried the Circle to Search feature) for at least five years now and I have zero interest in going back.
> people say that but they often come back to Google ;)
The thing is that Google is actively becoming more hostile and difficult to use. Not just Google Search, but really all their products.
They're becoming Facebook, slowly but surely. Something we might be forced to use now and again, but nobody actually likes.
The reality is that Google is such a poorly run company that they will destroy their own products, given enough time. Their competitors need to do nothing. Literally nothing.
DuckDuckGo falls hard in quality when it comes to queries which are not in English. The only search engines who are good for those are Google and Kagi, in my opinion.
It's solid, I use it 95% of the time, that 5% Google usually still disappoints.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=midjourney&ia=web -> Hmm, midjourney the AI thingy is not even there for me! Just https://www.midjourney.com which is not really clear on what it is. Midjourney is at Midjourney.online, which is not even on the first page. So Argualbly Google is still better. What a world.
Btw, I search DDG from the Firefox bar, and that does not let me copy the URL anymore!!! Wtf. There is just the search term, like there is in the field below it!! Omg, now I have the same thing twice, and a useful thing has been lost.
> I search DDG from the Firefox bar, and that does not let me copy the URL anymore
Yeah, I just noticed too. Go to Settings->Search there's a checkbox just below the default search engine. Uncheck that. Should be something along the lines of "Show search terms in the address bar in search results" (sorry for any errors in the translation, my browser's language is not English).
I agree somewhat, but those searches are getting less and less good on Google though.
In my recent experience, I'm far better off asking ChatGPT or just using it through Bing/Copilot than what I used to do a decade ago, which was deep dives through 5 pages of long-tail search results.
If you're trying to do anything in terms of official documents, there's a middleman charging more. I searched for "passport application" the other day and it was 4 ads of people offering this service.
My dad was trying to get an ESTA visa a couple years ago and ended up paying twice the actual price, because he can't discern what's the official site or not.
That's down to US Government policies. If you tried middle-manning any for-profit like that, you'd get a cease and desist letter really quickly. But USG doesn't seem to care. We can't reasonably expect Google to be a gatekeeper here.
We can absolutely expect Google to be a gatekeeper for advertisements they run on their platform. These aren't just middlemen, they're scams.
We shouldn't just be used to Google being allowed to essentially run infinite scams. Remember, they directly profit off the scams.
Its like if I had a billboard and then let someone put an ad up that said "give me all your money and you'll live forever!"
Am I off the hook? Why, lil ole me? I just run the billboard!
You might then say, well, obviously looking at every ad you accept is far too onerous! Its not like a billboard, because the billboard owner must see all the ads!
Which then I would reply - why is Google entitled to a business model like that? If they can't reasonable run their business in an ethical way... Perhaps they shouldn't run it all.
That's not just the US. I've seen that myself with Vietnam and Seychelles, and I'm sure it's a problem with any other country where a visa or other documents are required
Last time i had to get a visa through these kind of channels, it looked almost deliberate. Outright bribing is now frowned upon, so they make the visa process as frustrating and opaque as possible. So that people have to either waste several days at the embassy, or go through one of those visa agencies instead. You pay for a totally legit above-the-table service, but it is effectively a "socially accepted bribe". And the administrative problem magically disappears.
Yes, it's the same everywhere. In any country with byzantine and convoluted visa and immigration procedures (i.e. most of them) there's a thriving industry of people who will eat the turds for you for a fee.
Strong agree but unless it gets built-into the browser, the average net denizen simply won't do it. The number of times I've seen a friend of the family try to show me an article on their laptop while casually trying to shoot down the pop-up ads like they're playing a marketers version of Missile Command was astonishing.
And EVEN if they do install a blocker, 9 times out of 10 it'll be AdBlock Plus and not uBlock Origin [1]. You know, the one that allows companies to PAY to have their ads whitelisted.
This doesn't even cover browsing on a smartphone which unless you're running Android Firefox which supports browser extensions, you have very few options.
DuckDuckGo is built in to the browser! Google is still unfortunately the default, but it's just Settings -> Search -> Default Search Engine, and DuckDuckGo is already in the list.
No, the previous admin's FBI did [0].
But then that alert page (on ic3.gov, Internet Crime Complaint Center) was taken down almost immediately after the 11/2024 election, before even the director was replaced. I genuinely expected this sort of basic alert should remain non-partisan.
(at minimum, a search for "ad blocker" on ic3.gov should turn up some authoritative and useful advice page, not a random jumble of articles and press releases)
Indeed. I got my credit card phished after buying tickets from an 'official' local museum website, it was the first result on Google. Later on I realized that all five top results were scam sites, the real one was 6th. They eventually fixed it.
All of the ad links are broken by our firewall at work. People complain but eventually they learn to skip the ads. Absolutely a security risk, search ads are second only to phishing emails as a threat vector.
This is the entire argument for manifest V3. So, if we believe this argument, then modern chromium derivatives should be safe with the ad blockers that run on them.
V3 still allows for extensions that have full access to the content of your websites, and obviously adblockers need to be in this category to function at all.
Having it hallucinate a valid url that is spoofing the site I’m looking for feels less likely than someone managing to game SEO. Eclipse is a good example: the first result in Google is eclipseide.org, not eclipse.org.
I used to work as a "Kernel/Hypervisor Engineer" at that big company that sells books. People from outside the tech always thought I'm some kind of supervisor's supervisor ;)
I'm unsure how useful they'll really be honestly! In many situations its very useful to know when your "done" talking with an NPC when they start repeating lines etc...
There could probably be cool uses but I don't think it will be a pure "upgrade" as the repeating dialog is kind of a feature honestly.
It would require a completely different design to video games.
Current video games are designed around streamlining content. As a player, your job is to extract all content from an area before going to the next. That's why most areas are designed as linear corridors so that there is a straightforward progression, and most NPCs interactions are meant to offer something meaningful so as to not waste the player's time.
But imagine if interaction with NPCs wasn't just a content delivery mechanism, but instead could sometimes be rewarding, sometimes useless, dynamically adjusted in how you interact with the world in non-predictable ways.
The player would just waste their time in their usual approach of canvasing each new area, which would become unsustainable. There would be no reliable way of ensuring you've extracted all the content. All he/she could do is roam around more naturally, hoping the glimpses they catch are engaging and interesting enough.
Maybe a new player skill would be to be able to identify the genuine threads of exciting content, be it designed or emergent, within the noise of an AI-generated world.
Realistically though, how do you build an exciting player experience with this framework? A starting point might be to approach it as something more akin to LARP or improvisation theater, you'd give each NPC and player a role they need to fulfill. Whether players actually enjoy this is another thing entirely.
> But imagine if interaction with NPCs (…) instead could sometimes be rewarding, sometimes useless, dynamically adjusted in how you interact with the world in non-predictable ways.
That’s a slot machine, and the same mechanism which also gets us hooked on social media. Sounds like something which would immediately be exploited by vapid addiction-as-a-feature games à la FarmVille.
> The player would just waste their time in their usual approach of canvasing each new area, which would become unsustainable. There would be no reliable way of ensuring you've extracted all the content.
Sounds frustrating. Ultimately games should be rewarding and fun. Constraints are a feature.
> All he/she could do is roam around more naturally, hoping the glimpses they catch are engaging and interesting enough.
Good reminder to go take a walk outside. Take a train to somewhere we haven’t been. Pick a road we’ve never crossed. We don’t even need a mini map, and sucks that we don’t have teleportation back to base, but we do have a special device which always points the way back.
> Realistically though, how do you build an exciting player experience with this framework? (…) Whether players actually enjoy this is another thing entirely.
Agreed. Though not enjoying it and abandoning it is fine, I’m more worried about people not enjoying it but feeling unable to quit (which already happens today, but I think the proposed system would make it worse).
>> There would be no reliable way of ensuring you've extracted all the content.
> Sounds frustrating. Ultimately games should be rewarding and fun.
this seems to assume that the only way to feel rewarded / have fun is by comprehensively extracting content from the game. in order to have fun in an "emergent" generative game of this nature, you'd need to let go of that goal.
i do agree with the risks surrounding engineered engagement.
> this seems to assume that the only way to feel rewarded / have fun is by comprehensively extracting content from the game.
Not my intention, that is not something I believe. I’m not a completionist (I get those who are, but to me it can get boring or stressful) and I see the appeal in sandbox games (even if I don’t usually play them).
> Some games are designed around content and "extraction". Many are not.
While I think the parent post leaves a lot of open ended questions, I think they are spot on about the tightness of design in games.
In many open world RPGs, or something like GTA, you cannot open every door in a city.
In street fighter you can't take a break to talk to your opponent.
In art games like Journey you cannot deviate from the path.
Games are a limited form of entertainment due to technical and resource restrictions, and they always will be. Even something as open ended and basic as minecraft has to have limits to the design, you wouldn't want the player to be able to collect every blade of grass off of a block just because you could add that. You have to find the balance between engaging elements and world building.
Having a LLM backed farmer in an RPG that could go into detail on how their crops didn't grow as well last season because it didn't rain as much seems good on paper for world building. But it is just going to devalue the human curated content around it as the player has to find what does and does not advance their goals in the limited time they have to play. And if you have some reward for talking to random NPCs players will just spam the next button until it's over to optimize their fun. All games have to hold back from adding more so that the important parts stand out.
There are many different types of NPCs. Consider e.g. Minecraft villagers, that doesn't have a story-purpose, but do serve functions such as trading that could also be augmented by dialogue details.
But even for story-driven games, you can signal when you're "done" extracting story-related details in various ways, by e.g. prompt the NPC to include dialogue element A,B,C when it fits the conversation, keep track of which were output (you can make it output a marker to ensure it's easy to track even if the dialogue element has been worded differently), and have it get annoyed and tell you it doesn't have more to tell you or similar as the repetition adds up.
> In many situations its very useful to know when your "done" talking with an NPC when they start repeating lines etc...
But that's not how real life works at all, right? You talk to someone for as long as you want to talk to them, or until they start sending signals that they are done talking with you.
The way video game dialog works has always bothered me, it makes characters feel stilted and makes me care less about the characters and the world.
(Although it's a different game in many ways, consider by contrast how Portal 2 handles dialog, and the effect that has on immersion.)
"But that's not how real life works at all, right?"
How real life works is always a plausible interesting goal, but it's very often at odds with a bunch of other valuable goals for players.
A particular sharp example of this is sports video games. It might well be interesting (and certainly realistic) to simulate bad referees in a sports game. Horrible blown calls by tennis line judges, or missed calls by basketball refs, or bad umpire calls on pitches. Real-life soccer makes working the refs and their inability to see everything an art form, as far as I can tell.
Perhaps that's interesting, but the irony here is that real life refs are actually bad simulations of the original perfect game code in the first place, from a certain point of view. I think debates about the use of instant replay in sports gets at the heart of this, and one could imagine using real-time AI to help refs taking this conversation much further.
I think the sports case is a particularly sharp example, but it definitely holds with all sorts of choices in games.
For Animal Crossing in particular, I remember when I finally played it, it struck me after a while how much it had in common with recent MMOs (Everquest and World of Warcraft) that I had had fellow game developer friends have their lives severely disrupted by. And when I played the original Animal Crossing, I remember noticing specifically how careful the designers were in having players use up every bit of interesting content in a day after 45 minutes or an hour, so that eventually you'd run out of things to do, and that was the game's signal to put it down and pick it up again the next day. And I remember being struck by how intentional it was, and how humane it was... particularly given their goal of wanting to make a game that was asynchronously coop (where different family members could play in the same shared space at different times of day and interact asynchronously). As a game designer myself, I really respected the care they put into that.
Anyway, that's my immediate thought on seeing this (fascinating, valuable) experiment with LLM dialogue in Animal Crossing. The actual way NPCs work in these games as they are has been honed over time to serve a very specific function. It's very similar to personal testimonials by paid actors in commercials; a human expressing an idea in personal dialogue form triggers all sorts natural human attention and reception in us as audience members, and so it's a lot more sticky... but getting across the information quickly and concisely is still the primary point. Even dialogue trees in games are often not used because of their inefficiency.
I totally think that there will be fascinating innovations from the current crop of AI in games, and I'm really looking forward to seeing and trying them. I just think it's unlikely they will be drop-in replacements for a lot of the techniques that game developers have already honed for cases like informational NPC dialogue.
I don't mean to imply that realistic is always better, just that there are other ways to figure out when to stop talking to someone. And I think the current method is actually quite bad for immersion and building empathy in the player.
> But that's not how real life works at all, right?
oh of course! Sorry, I was never trying to imply that that it was in any way realistic. For video games often the most fun / compelling choice is not the realistic one! Striving for realism can be a great goal and often has a lot of positives, but it is often limiting. Video games are just art, being photorealistic can be beautiful and amazing but is often not the best choice for expressing an idea.
That seems a bit like deck-chairs on the Titanic. The hard part isn't icon design, the hard part is (A) ensuring a clear list exists of what the NPC is supposed to ensure the user knows and (B) determining whether those goals were received successfully.
For example, imagine a mystery/puzzle game where the NPC needs to inform the user of a clue for the next puzzle, but the LLM-layer botches it, either by generating dialogue that phrases it wrong, or by failing to fit it into the first response, so that the user must always do a few "extra" interactions anyway "just in case."
I suppose you could... Feed the output into another document of "Did this NPC answer correctly" and feed it to another LLM... but down that path lies [more] madness.
You prompt the LLM to point out that the clue will be added as is to the conversation, but for the LLM to include a marker instead of the actual text to ensure that actual critical details are included unchanged.
EDIT: Also, having the LLM botch a clue occasionally could be a feature. E.g. a bumbling character that you might need to "interrogate" a bit before you actually get the clue in a way that makes sense, and can't be sure it's entirely correct. That could make some characters more realistic.
No, this is the Einstein/student model that has been proposed for improving LLM output quality.
Basically you have your big clever LLM generating the outputs, and then you have your small dumb LLM reading them and going “did I understand that? Did it make sense?” - basically emulating the user before the response actually gets to the user. If it’s good, on it goes to the user, if not, the student queries Einstein with feedback to have another crack.
Repeating the last line of dialogue is not just a way to indicate that there's no more dialog, it often also works as a remainder, giving you the most important kernel of information ("You should go to [place] and talk with [npc]"), in case you come some time later and forgot what you were supposed to do. You can indicate there's no more dialog in many ways, but you'd lose that secondary feature. Same thing if the NPC just keeps babbling generated drivel.
So true.
In such an LLM-driven game though, I would imagine the player would just ask the NPC: "I forgot what to do" or even "Can you explain it in other terms?" (if the quest description isn't clear enough).
Feeling it would work best in more of a Dwarf Fortress approach game where it's more you have a sandbox with rules that cause a simulation to have emergent gameplay.
I love this game and have had it on my phone for many years. Funny to see this come up - I just played it a couple of times a day ago for the first time in a few years.
