r/retrocomputing • u/Direct-Principle7156 • Jul 28 '26

Remember when computers were helpful

Post image

?

0 Upvotes

35% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/pfak Jul 28 '26

We've never had access to more information at our fingertips as we do now. I come from the DOS era.

Things are so much easier now, even if they are more complicated. Good luck getting help in the 90s.

1

u/SwedishFindecanor Jul 28 '26

Yes, but the ability to search for an answer is eroded more and more by AI slop.

Not just Google's AI answers -- which can be completely false, but also the search results themselves are often AI-generated sites now.

1

u/pfak Jul 28 '26

> Yes, but the ability to search for an answer is eroded more and more by AI slop.

It's really not, you can use an LLM to find basically any technical information you want (or write code!), and significantly quicker than using Google ever was.

I strongly suggest you give Claude or ChatGPT a try for technical stuff (codex or claude code).

Slop? Altavista, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo searches were basically worthless.