My AI Breakthrough

I’ve been an AI skeptic for a while now. The large language models (LLM) were an interesting experiment and image generation with Midjourney was fun for a couple days. Other than that I’ve found very few uses for AI in my life. Apple Intelligence was such a disappointment that I’ve turned it off. I don’t care enough about my grammar to have all my work checked anyway. AI slop content has caused me to lose interest in most social media and the internet in general. I don’t see that much good has come to the average person from AI.

Then I made a personal breakthrough and found my use case. I was fighting with a nginx configuration for over an hour and my sites were still misconfigured. Some of the fight was the fact that I hadn’t configured nginx in years and I’m rusty. Most of the fight was that search is garbage these days. I was getting mediocre results from DuckDuckGo and Google is useless now. The information was there, but it was buried under layers of ads and AI generated sites pushing more ads and slop. Fully frustrated, I turned to ChatGPT and asked what was wrong with my config file. The problem was diagnosed and optimized in about 10 minutes. For me, that’s the future of AI.

I’m not talking about vibe coding, which I also find to be kind of overhyped. Tricking the average person into thinking that they can make something amazing by not learning anything and paying a tech bro to use their AI is yet another scam. It makes us dependent on huge companies while our skill atrophies and they burn more money. My AI breakthrough was just a chip in my wall of skepticism.

When I was stuck I used AI to walk me through the fix of my config file. I was able to work through the issue with the AI and learn what I had initially done wrong. I also learned how I could optimize the config so it would work better. That was the key for me. I learned the fix and the optimization, so I won’t need ChatGPT next time. Getting the fix after fighting a wall of ads was an amazing relief.

In the past I would have been able to spend some time and find people on the internet that had the same problem as I did. They would have posted their fix as a signpost for others in the future. I’ve done this myself in the distant past. The new internet is a river of trash and I had to use AI for a clear path to the fix. I never posted this new problem or the fix anywhere. My AI breakthrough was better search without all the cruft.

I am old, so my old internet was many decades ago. It started with bulletin boards and it became the information of the world all at once. It was built on people. Now I see the next phase, for me, as AI distilling the real information people have already generated from the ads and AI slop. It might seem obvious, but I had to get there myself with a real world example.

There is a myriad of problems with this new version on the internet. That’s for a future post. I’m just glad I got my site figured out.