Tiota Sram<p>It's time to lower your inhibitions towards just asking a human the answer to your question.</p><p>In the early nineties, effectively before the internet, that's how you learned a lot of stuff. Your other option was to look it up in a book. I was a kid then, so I asked my parents a lot of questions.</p><p>Then by ~2000 or a little later, it started to feel almost rude to do this, because Google was now a thing, along with Wikipedia. "Let me Google that for you" became a joke website used to satirize the poor fool who would waste someone's time answering a random question. There were some upsides to this, as well as downsides. I'm not here to judge them.</p><p>At this point, Google doesn't work any more for answering random questions, let alone more serous ones. That era is over. If you don't believe it, try it yourself. Between Google intentionally making their results worse to show you more ads, the SEO cruft that already existed pre-LLMs, and the massive tsunami of SEO slop enabled by LLMs, trustworthy information is hard to find, and hard to distinguish from the slop. (I posted an example earlier: <a href="https://kolektiva.social/@tiotasram/114806352209256069" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">kolektiva.social/@tiotasram/11</span><span class="invisible">4806352209256069</span></a>)</p><p>In fact, the problem is worse than in the '90s, because instead of hitting a dead end at the library, you'll be offered some Premium Synthetic Truth-Shaped Content™, and you'll have to learn to dodge that stuff even for questions that do have an answer out there somewhere.</p><p>Many people have opined more eloquently than me on this shift, but my conclusion is: it's time to start asking people questions again and not be embarrassed by it. "Asking the internet" like on social media is one way to do this, but that has a lot of the same problems. I'm talking about asking (online or not) a specific person you know and trust. Doesn't have to be an expert, just someone you think might know the answer, or who might have fun looking for it with you, or who might be bored and willing to help out. Lots of us are lonely on here and would sometimes love to help look something up (or might even know an answer). This can be a good excuse for more direct human-to-human dialog (online or offline) as well, which is something that's waned since the '90s. I'm not exactly nostalgic for 1998, but I think it's time to ask each other questions again. (Okay, yes, I still watch Broodwar; this season of ASL is set to be amazing.)</p><p>As a gesture of following my own advice here, if you've read this far, feel free (if you would like) to DM me a question, or reply that you're open to being asked questions and I might DM you one. No guarantees of a speedy response.</p><p><a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>AI</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/LLMs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>LLMs</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/DigitalCommons" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>DigitalCommons</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/AskAQuestion" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>AskAQuestion</span></a></p>