Anyway, I've done what I set out to, which is leave something for readers to think about. Changing your mind is not on my priority list, some people just can't be reasoned with. Facts are what they are, regardless of your acceptance or lack thereof. Say whatever further mean-spirited personal attacks make you feel like you "won" here, since that's apparently important to you. Go ahead and get the last word in. I'll leave you to it.

Perhaps you've never heard the expression about "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." It's an aphorism, absolutely not literal. [1] Additionally, even if it were intended literally, which it clearly was not, saying it should have been done 20 years ago is not the same as fantasizing. It also obviously concludes that it should be done now, which is not fantasy.

I didn't say you were dismissive. If you have valid points, you should be able to make them without rewording everything into something else that you can tear down. That's called a straw man argument. "... the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction" [2]

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/a/603725 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

Whether AI and search are similar enough to call them competitors, at least right now, is highly debatable. I don't know about other people, but I for one have definitely not started asking chatbots questions instead of looking for informed, human-authored content.

EDIT: Note that I mean downward trend in total, not the percentages shown by statcounter. Statcounter does have a separate chatbot page though, if you're interested in that. Still doesn't answer your totally valid question of how many people are chatting instead of searching, though. Maybe Google or ChatGPT could tell us :)

Note that a legal monopoly is not the same as the extreme simplification of "zero other options". "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises." [1]

"In United States v. Google LLC, the federal government alleges that Google has unfairly hindered competition in the search market through anti-competitive deals with Apple as well as mobile carriers. The government alleges that, as a result of these practices, Google has accumulated control of around 88% of the domestic search engine market.

In doing so, the government alleges, Google has additionally monopolized the search advertising market at the expense of competing services. Per the government's estimation, Google has been able to accumulate control of over 70% of the search advertising market. As a result of lack of competition, Google has been able to over-charge advertisers versus what they would pay in a competitive environment." [2]

Statcounter seems to align quite closely with the government's assertion. [3] Extra creepily, it appears to be even a hair worse globally, where Bing is less used (not that I like Bing or MS either). [4] But there is no international framework I'm aware of to handle global-scale monopolies, so that's outside the scope of the suit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [3] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/un... [4] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

I'm not so opposed to vibe coding as recreation. Though if you're ever interested, those are all pretty easy and fun things to work with directly in my opinion, at least at hobby scale. Well, maybe not bare webgl, but that's why three.js is in the list.

AI sure does it a lot faster than I can though. I totally get your point that it lowers the bar to entry, and that the speed and near-instant mutability is more conducive to creativity. I'm more opposed to the semantically inscrutable term "vibe coding", but it seems pretty well entrenched already.

Also, let's dispense with inappropriate jabs such as referring to other perspectives as "fantasy".

Perhaps I could make room in my heart some day for animated cats on personal sites. Clippy is still pushing it. More because of a bunch of bad memories of trying to support people who were infuriated by it, or on a few occasions having to go to the trouble of opening Word just to disable it on several machines in a day, than its actual physical aesthetics. In my memory it looks more like an image search for "evil Clippy" (didn't think to try that until now, some pretty funny stuff).

Completely agree that corporate dark patterns are a much greater concern. That's why, except for Clippy, I like this project. It puts the tool directly in people's hands with no need for tech skills or cloud gatekeepers and spying.

Tangentially, I just realized that this nicely self-contained Clippy might be able to copy itself. It doesn't have to be able to write an LLM, just copy (or worse yet upload) one file and execute it. Like Agent Smith. But Clippy.

The Clippy character specifically is the part I find off-putting, but perhaps that's just an excess of relevant experience. How many times I had to explain to confused people that it's not saying anything you have to care about, or disable it for them when they're cursing at their screen because the "hide" option doesn't actually disable it you have to go into the settings for that or it keeps popping up. Which made it just another config burden when I'd be installing office on many computers in a day.

Now, a strong argument could be made that those experiences have made me unreasonable and bigoted against animated paperclips, because this is not the original Clippy. I can live with that.

I hate to put down anyone's open source hobby project, and the guy looks so friendly and happy in his picture. But my honest reaction is fear of what further nightmares people are going to start animating with AI. I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day. Might as well add Rover from Microsoft Bob, some blink/marquee tags, a MIDI file playing in the background, and a minigame about diagnosing DMA conflicts in mixed plug and play and non-PnP systems. Some parts of the 90s should stay in the 90s.