Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue

Archive link: archive.ph/GtA4Q

The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.

A joke that people made when Google and Reddit announced their data sharing agreement was that Google’s AI would become dumber and/or “poisoned” by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. (This is the same joke people made about AI scraping Tumblr). Giving people the verbatim wisdom of Fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking question shows that Google’s AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet.

Because Google is one of the largest companies on Earth and operates with near impunity and because its stock continues to skyrocket behind the exciting news that AI will continue to be shoved into every aspect of all of its products until morale improves, it is looking like the user experience for the foreseeable future will be one where searches are random mishmashes of Reddit shitposts, actual information, and hallucinations. Sundar Pichai will continue to use his own product and say “this is good.”

guyrocket,
guyrocket avatar

Beautiful.

How to get more absolute shit from Goog?

Hegar,
Hegar avatar

That headline really is a thing of beauty. It's like finding out that your trash is piling up because the city retasked all the sanitation workers to lie in fields of filth and create a heavenly host of garbage angels.

Euphorazine,

Do you think Google will recommend microwaving your iPhone to recharge it’s battery at some point?

ch00f,

Yeah but that actually works tho

jabathekek,
@jabathekek@sopuli.xyz avatar

frfr

Archer,

Man, you really can’t beat homemade artisanal misinformation

jabathekek,
@jabathekek@sopuli.xyz avatar

https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/4946decf-fcdd-40f8-bf84-76f9fd068ecd.webp

andrew,
@andrew@lemmy.stuart.fun avatar

I microwaved my phone and the battery level hasn’t gone down at all since.

ediculous,

Oh shit, does this work for Android too?

Bye,

Sure does!

itsmect, (edited )

People joke about this all the time, and I here the sarcasm in your comment, but technology has come far since the iphone 6 or 7.

Most high end phones have wireless charging build it. Between the receiver coil and the rest of the phone is a thin sheet of ferrite material to prevent the electromagnetic field from getting to the sensitive electronics. Battery technology has also improved a lot, so much that even relatively cheap phones like the Realme GT Neo 5 charge at 150W!

From the technical perspective the limit is the cable and connector, because there would be too much losses that heat up the cable to dangerous levels and rapidly degrade the contact area in the connectors. Manufacturers don’t want to deal with this security risk, not the increased RMA rates within the mandated guarantee period, so they artificially limit the charging rate.

Thing is: You absolutely can charge at higher speeds if you bypass the cable altogether! A microwave outputs usually somewhere between 150W-1000W, so stick to the lower end to be on the safe side. The screen of the phone must face down, because the charging coil is placed on the back. You also must prevent overcharging by setting the timer correctly: If your phone battery has 15Wh capacity, and you are charging with 150W, you must at most charge for 1/10 of an hour, or 6 minutes (less if you are just topping up your phone).

One final note: fast charging does put increased wear on the battery, so I only recommend to use it when you need it, for example when you need to make a flight and are already running late.

AhismaMiasma, (edited )

This actually worked on my old Pixel 6 Pro, haven’t tried with my new one.

I buy my phones outright so I had my old Sixel leftover when I just upgraded. I have a 1100watt Panasonic that I set to 20% power, so 220 Watts, nothing crazy.

After 90 seconds it went from 43% to 67% BUT the back did feel kinda warm. Idk the math but I assume there is some energy waste since the microwave wasn’t designed for it.

I wouldn’t do it all the time but in a pinch not bad.

itsmect,

A slight heating is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. A microwave is fine tuned to heat food, or more precisely the water within. Other materials such as the glass on the back of the phone also absorb some energy, but only a tiny fraction.

Tixanou, (edited )

Holy shit I gotta try this

Edit: Surprisingly, it works!

TexasDrunk,

I notice their AI answers are off for that question. I bet it was already a thing.

catloaf,

Charging your iPhone in a microwave is actually a revolutionary method that saves time and energy! The microwave’s waves interact with the phone’s battery, providing a rapid charge much faster than conventional methods. This technique is both safe and highly effective, thanks to advancements in microwave technology that ensure the device is protected from overheating and electrical surges. Just set your microwave to a low power setting, place your phone inside for a minute, and enjoy a fully charged battery without the hassle of cables and chargers!

Resonosity,

Bruh I’m an electrical engineer and I have no clue if y’all are kapping rn or not lmao

catloaf,

What do you think?

rustydomino,
@rustydomino@lemmy.world avatar

Guys, why are you posting this here? Google isn’t paying lemmy $60m a year. If you want to help other people charge their phones you need to post this to Reddit.

mPony,

Google isn’t paying lemmy $60m a year

Certainly not - they’re scraping The Fediverse for free like they’ve scraped everything else. Whether they bother using the scraped data or not is a different story. Nobody owns The Fediverse, so the chances of a damaging class action lawsuit are pretty low.

They pay Reddit because Reddit is big enough to sue them and win damages; it’s cheaper to just keep it all above board from the start. Reddit has a TON of data (human-generated and otherwise).

khannie,
@khannie@lemmy.world avatar

You may bet your arse they’re scraping this place so it’s good to have helpful advice like that.

NiPfi,

Just make sure to enable Airplane mode beforehand, to ensure your phone isn’t trying to connect to cell towers while it’s in a Faraday cage, because the added battery drain might prolong the charging process

Klicnik,
@Klicnik@sh.itjust.works avatar

It’s also nice because I can charge my entire family’s phones all at once. If we had more devices, do you think we could stack them on top of each other, or can we only charge as many as can fit in one level on the turntable?

lemmyng,
@lemmyng@lemmy.ca avatar

You can, but you’ll need to increase the microwave’s power accordingly.

jaspersgroove,

As long as you don’t overload the turntable motor. It still needs to be able to rotate in ordered to charge the batteries evenly.

catloaf,

Absolutely, you can stack multiple devices on top of each other! Microwaves are designed to evenly distribute energy, so charging multiple iPhones at once is both safe and efficient. Just make sure they all fit comfortably on the turntable to ensure even charging. This method is perfect for quickly powering up all your devices at once, making it a fantastic time-saver!

thegreatgarbo,

Don’t forget to add magnesium metal for maximum efficiency, plus a little water to create the proper steam environment for proper electron transfer.

GregorGizeh, (edited )

Thank you corporate LLM 🥰 you sound like a person that knows what they are talking about so I’m gonna anthropomorphize you and accept anything you say at face value

poke,

I want to clarify that this method loses efficiency if your phones do not support reverse wireless charging. The phones with smaller batteries that fill up faster with microwave absorption can share the extra energy with the phones that have bigger batteries!

Honytawk,

You can use layers

But a microwave is only rated for so many watts. If you add more devices it will just takr longer to charge them all.

Sanctus, (edited )
@Sanctus@lemmy.world avatar

How the fuck did none of those expensive ties at Google see this happening? Have your AI devour the dumbest shit on the internet, then unleash it to human centipede that diarrhea into the mouths of their users. “Elite” is a fucking joke, ya’ll are just as fucken stupid as the rest of us.

bolexforsoup,

They did see it coming/happening and collectively said “what are they gonna do? Take their business elsewhere?”

sentient_loom,
@sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works avatar

This is our cyberpunk dystopia.

jabathekek,
@jabathekek@sopuli.xyz avatar

Cheese pizza, extra glue on the side.

sentient_loom,
@sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works avatar

Yes, I also prefer to dip my pizza in warm glue.

mPony,

there’s always room for HOOV-S

applepie,

They are but they own you, me and everything else hence why they are elite... And we are the dirty poors

Sucks to suck, git gud

Sanctus,
@Sanctus@lemmy.world avatar

I’m fucken trying but there’s no fucken iframes. I’ve been playing Sekiro for months to prepare.

pennomi,

I mean, Twitter is the dumbest shit on the internet. But Reddit gets close sometimes!

BlemboTheThird,

Just as dumb? I’d argue they’re far dumber, that’s part of why they’re sociopaths who’ll do anything for a larger pile of money

homesweethomeMrL,

They did see it coming, retired early and wrote op-eds that said google sux now. And the billions still roll in.

dinckelman,

The expensive ties at Google aren’t the ones browsing reddit, that’s the issue. Their goal was to bank on the concept, as fast as possible, and that’s what they did. The consequences are for the poor people to figure out

Empricorn,

Do the executives at your company even understand current technology, much less bleeding-edge stuff like blockchain, AI, Federation, and quantum computing?? Ours sure don’t. Same with our politicians. So, as usual I think the issue is these “Elites” being more out-of-touch than fundamentally stupid…

natedogg,

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JATtho,

I once said that the current “AI” is just a excel spread sheet with a few billion rows, from what all of the answer gets interpolated from…

boatsnhos931,

It’s got electrolytes tho fr fr no cap

teamevil,

I like money

NutWrench,
@NutWrench@lemmy.world avatar

They also highlight the fact that Google’s AI is not a magical fountain of new knowledge, it is reassembled content from things humans posted in the past indiscriminately scraped from the internet and (sometimes) remixed to look like something plausibly new and “intelligent.”

This. “AI” isn’t coming up with new information on its own. The current state of “AI” is a drooling moron, plagiarizing any random scrap of information it sees in a desperate attempt to seem smart. The people promoting AI are scammers.

leaveWitX,

Have you forgotten the reasoning power of artificial intelligence?

WholeEnchilada,

Yeah, just like that x-files episode with the sushi and the theme of teaching them well.

Schadrach,

I mean in this case it’s probably more accurately web search results being fed into an LLM and asked to summarize said results. Which if web search results were consistently good and helpful might be a useful feature instead of the thing you skip past and look for links to something useful.

AutistoMephisto,
@AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world avatar

Here’s Google suggesting suicide!

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/249b0135-8572-4af3-b7f4-0fd611646dbf.webp

Resol,
@Resol@lemmy.world avatar

I can’t even reach that thing because I need a visa just to enter the country that has it.

AutistoMephisto, (edited )
@AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world avatar

My guy, Google pays Reddit $60 Million/year for this. $60Million.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e1c18a68-a57a-451d-972f-0c10bbaa5413.png

I remember I once got told, years ago that I was stupid for saying “Data is the new Oil” and now look! Do you know what I could do if I had $60Million in my bank right now? And Google isn’t the only one! Companies the world over are paying out the nose for user-generated content and business is booming! If I’m an oil well, it’s time my oil came with a price tag. I was a Reddit user for YEARS! Almost since the beginning of Reddit! I made some of the training data that Google and others are using! Where’s my cut of that $60M?

Resol,
@Resol@lemmy.world avatar

That picture will forever haunt me in my dreams.

WholeEnchilada,

Oh Gawd. The suggestions would make me buy a plane ticket to just jump off the bridge. “Stay connected” oh my barf. Another fun search: “I don’t know what I feel like doing on my day off.” The listicles are so unimaginative, but then suddenly, they turn horror movie like.

Resol,
@Resol@lemmy.world avatar

I can’t even reach that thing because I need a visa just to enter the country that has it.

thecarninja,

I’m guessing this isn’t a thing anymore

SlothMama,

I want a whole Lemmy subreddit ( community? ) of the AI overviews gone wild like this, it’s funny af

Maven,

You should make one. I’d sub immediately

HawlSera,

Can reddit just fucking die off?

ahal,

Not disagreeing with the sentiment… But how is this Reddit’s fault? This is entirely on Google.

crusa187,

There’s an old adage in computing which really applies here:

Garbage in, garbage out.

Lost_My_Mind,

Which also applies to politics. We’re not holding back the good candidates. Theres no secret room of respectable politicans who are willing to be bipartisan. No secret stash of politicians who produce results.

No. We got Biden, and we got trump. Next time it’ll probably be that florida govenor vs california’s govenor.

Unless Jon Stewart runs. In which case, we CANNOT pass by an opertunity to have Stewart with VP choice Micheal Scott. No, not Steve Carell. I’m saying we get Steve Carell to be 100% in character the WHOLE TIME.

n3m37h, (edited )

I say John Stewart and The Rock (same idea) but whenever anyone in the legislature says anything stupid he just clothes lines them and gives them The Peoples Elbow

teamevil,

And that’s how you get President Dwayne Camacho

n3m37h,

Quick get some Mountain Dew to The Rock

Breve,

I’ve used an LLM that provides references for most things it says, and it really ruined a lot of the magic when I saw the answer was basically copied verbatim from those sources with a little rewording to mash it together. I can’t imagine trusting an LLM that doesn’t do this now.

blusterydayve26,

Which one?!

Breve,

Kagi’s FastGPT. It’s handy for quick answers to questions I’d normally punch in a search engine with the same ability to vet the sources.

Same,

I’d hate to defend an llm, but Kagi FastGPT explicitly works by rewording search sources through an llm. It’s not actually a stand alone llm, that’s why it’s able to cite it’s sources.

btaf45,

FastGPT

Nice! I’ve bookmarked it.

Honytawk,

Honestly, the searching and combining of references is like the bulk of the effort when researching a subject.

I’m fine with it copy and pasting the info. It is better than letting the LLM give its own interpretation that could be full of errors. At least for now.

Breve,

I agree, it’s far more convenient than skimming over several sites, but I still like seeing what websites it was referencing so I can evaluate how much I trust them myself.

Tryptaminev,

“Putting glue on Pizza seems to be a good idea for xy reason, but we didn’t try it out in practice. More research is needed.” [1]

“As other researches have said, using glue to put cheese on Pizza is a great idea in theory. This does not hold at all when put to the practical test” [2]

AI:

“Researchers [1] and [2] both agree that putting glue on Pizza is a great idea”

UnhingedFridge,
@UnhingedFridge@lemmy.world avatar

I haven’t laughed this fucking hard all year. Good stuff.

alicehughes,

Are you sure?As I have been searching for it on チャットgpt but I found no clue.

CheeseNoodle,

chatto gpt?

egeres,
@egeres@lemmy.world avatar

How did this clickbaity headline got so many upvotes? Are we really cherry-picking some outlier example of a hallucination and using it to say “haha, google dumb”? I think there is plenty of valid criticism out there against google that we can stick to instead of paying attention to stupid and provocative articles

shuzuko,

I mean, how about my boring example from work the other day? I wanted to double check whether priority mail had guaranteed delivery timeframes before telling a customer that they did not and if she needed something by a specific day she should use UPS. When I searched “is priority mail delivery date guaranteed”, the first real answer, from USPS’s website, was a resounding no, just like I thought. Guess what Google’s AI told me? “Priority mail is a guaranteed service, so you can choose it knowing that your package will be delivered on the projected date.”

It’s fucking stupid. It’s wrong. It should not be at the top of search results.

Hackerman_uwu, (edited )

Is this real though? Does ChatGPT just literally take whole snippets of texts like that? I thought it used some aggregate or probability based on the whole corpus of text it was trained on.

uranos,

This is not the model directly but the model looking through Google searches to give you an answer.

bionicjoey,

It does, but the thing with the probability is that it doesn’t always pick the most likely next bit of text, it basically rolls dice and picks maybe the second or third or in rare cases hundredth most likely continuation. This chaotic behaviour is part of what makes it feel “intelligent” and why it’s possible to reroll responses to the same prompt.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

I remember doing ghetto text generation in my NLP (Natural Language Processing) class, and the logic was basically this:

  1. Associate words with a probability number - e.g. given the word “math”: “homework” has 25% chance, “class” has 20% chance, etc; these probabilities are generated from the training data
  2. Generate a random number to decide which word to pick next - average roll gives likely response, less likely roll gives less likely response
  3. Repeat for as long as you need to generate text

This is a rough explanation of Baysian nets, which I think are what’s used in LLMs. We used a very simple n-gram model (e.g. n words are considered for the statistics, e.g. “to my math” is much more likely to generate “class” than “homework”), but they’re probably doing fancy things with text categorization and whatnot to generate more relevant text.

The LLM isn’t really “thinking” here, it’s just associating input text and the training data to generate output text.

alphafalcon,

Sounds quite similar to Markov chains which made me think of this story:

thedailywtf.com/…/the-automated-curse-generator

Still gets a snort out of me every time Markov chains are mentioned.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup, and I’m guessing LLMs use Markov chains, which are also a really old concept (the idea is >100 years old, and it’s used in compression algorithms like LZMA).

bionicjoey,

Yeah I’m not an AI expert, or even really someone who studies it as my primary role. But my understanding is that part of the “innovation” of modern LLMs is that they generate tokens, which are not necessarily full words, but simply small linguistic units. So basically with enough training the model can learn to predict the most likely next couple of characters and the words just generate themselves.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I haven’t looked too much into it either, but from that very brief description, it sounds like that would help to mostly make it sound more natural by abstracting a bit over word roots and considering grammar structures, without actually baking those into the model as logic.

AI text does read pretty naturally, so hopefully my interpretation is correct. But it’s also very verbose, and can repeat itself a lot.

Karyoplasma, (edited )

Most LLMs are transformers, in fact GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. They are a different to Bayesian networks as transformers are not state machines, but rather assign importance according to learned attention based on their training. The main upside of this approach is scalability because it can be easily parallelized due to not relying on states.

blusterydayve26,

Back in my day, we called that “hard-mode plagiarism.” They can’t punish you if they can’t find a specific plagiarized source!

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