I don't get it. I have used Phind a lot over the last year but now I type in the same prompts I used in the past and it's not phind anymore, and it doesn't work for me at all.

Dey phucked up phind.

I also used the original phind back then. For a brief period of time, it was probably the best place around for programming questions.

Then they pivoted to flowcharts and now to "one off apps". It is a bit weird because the concepts are not bad necessarily, but instead of adding features to their product incrementally they decided to make that one feature their product. The problem imo is that there is no one size fitting all. Flowcharts or interactive content can be great, but it is not always the best fit for a search query. Like, I do believe that the chat based UI is not optimal and flowcharts and more complex interactive/dynamic functionalities are great improvements for some use cases, but I am not sure of what to make of this product. If it was a feature in a more general product that I could still get the same functionality as before, it may have been more appealing. Now it feels like they are building a new hammer every time and looking for nails that fit that one hammer.

yeah, broadly agree with this. Phind had quite a strong niche a 18 or so months ago (eg, the best LLM powered replacement for Stack Overflow), but I'm guessing improvements in the core models ate their lunch.

sorry to hear that -- could you please elaborate?

Before it was a fast AI chat that would explain tech stuff and help me with issues.

I used it quite often, even instead of GH Copilot.

Now, it's much slower and has some kind of solution view that gets updated with every new message.

Found myself to resorting to GH Copilot chat quite often today, because Phind felt like a different/worse service.

One example: I asked it to explain continue.dev, the kind of thing I’d asked it previously.

Before I got a proper summary and an arch diagram. It felt like its own work. Now it spun in circles for a good while and then it regurgitated the continue.dev website in weird topic boxes and that wasn’t helpful at all.

It does seem that it’s SOTA for LLMs to take forever to respond. In that sense it’s in good company. More and more, lately, I send a prompt to an LLM and switch tabs because it’s likely to be 20-60 seconds at best.

A curious regression, even if I understand why.

Thanks for the specific example -- I'll take a look at this. In the meantime, you can use old.phind.com if you still want the old experience.

As someone who never used Phind, how was it better than copilot? Did it integrate data from broader sources or just do a better job of presenting it? Was it faster?

It did so extensive online search.

Great write-up. Cute dog.

I'm glad the nose recovered too!

Your first sentence is belied by everything else you wrote.

Saying weird/extreme shit and then building a movement is a way of qualifying initiates and those willing to rally to the cause. It's part of the cult programming playbook. You build an in-crowd and you aim their energies at the out-crowd. It often leads to more unhinged positions too.. these things don't self-correct.

Thiel's a loon, Elon's a loon, Trump's a loon, Vought's a loon.

Pointed dismissiveness completely misses the point.

Well, Stoppard himself directed the movie.

Siri isn’t the only one.. Amazon has the same story with Alexa, but they did get to Alexa+ before Siri’s successor bowed.

The addition of credit cards to that line does little to spoil the point they were making.

> making Indian IT Offshoring less competitive

So does a security backdoor in every mobile device used by said Indian offshoring staff.

You misunderstood what the 81 is.

My big company is all in on Copilot. So far it’s actually been a net plus. I like it and it makes my life easier. That said, when offered a PC or Mac I chose the Mac, because Recall. And all the Microsoft shenanigans on my home PC made me switch to Linux permanently.

If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better. They’re biffing that hard.

> If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better.

How much of that experience is a result of your corporate IT removing all the bullshit with group policies that Microsoft has introduced

Corporate IT, with enterprise site licences, has access to turn things off you can't turn off with retail Windows.

I’ve always found IT to add bullshit, break things, and just make life harder.

Not sure why you are down voted so much. I have a Mac for work, and I'm told that the chips are literally the fastest thing you'll experience. By a margin.

I have 3 different security scanners forced by security and it is much slower than my personal Linux Lenovo. Even just the basics with UI responsiveness that in my experience Macs have always been pretty good at, to the detriment of applications.

My experience of the ARM Macs has been through work, I personally owned Intel Macs and they were generally crap but felt faster than this.

This heavily depends on your company "policies". In general, it is not even really IT's fault - most of them would like to optimize performance and user experience, but the C-suite has mandated shit on your computer.

Just IT folks rubbing their hands together evilly, “Yes! yes!! This will make our users’ lives miserable! Mwhahahahahahah!”

I’ve just always experienced them as a road block. They’ve only ever wanted to make their jobs easier. They’ve never wanted to enable me and make my life easier.

It's just extreme levels of ass-covering.

If you have 3 security solutions installed and get pwned, oh well, it's not your fault. If you had none and get pwned, you get the blame, even if the attack vector wouldn't have been protected by most security solutions.

They sometimes display shocking disconnect from what others need to do.

> "If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better."

People here on HN are willing pay Google (monthly even!) to remove ads from YouTube. People here are willing to pay for RHEL Workstation or Ubuntu Pro Desktop for enterprise deployments. Yet people here are unwilling to pay Microsoft for the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want. Their problems are self-inflicted.

> the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want.

The correct Windows edition is LTSC or IoT or whatever BS name they've since come up with. It's a license that can only be obtained from a reseller (since putting up a form that takes credit card details and spits out product keys is too complex for MS) and has a minimum order quantity (I believe you can pad the order with cheap "client access licenses" to get around that).

I ran the version that shipped with my Dell. It was paid for. And mostly I want the ability to turn things off that retail Windows won't let you turn off.

People use the OS that came preinstalled on the machine. Not even Windows took off until Microsoft started armtwisting OEMs to preinstall it (Windows 3.0, 1990). And coming soon from Microsoft: locked bootloaders that prevent you from installing another OS! You know, because security, and no one installs alternative operating systems anyway.

Locked bootloader was making sense when PC was a huge investment, and the whole household was sharing it. Windows XP introduced fast account switching. And Windows still has it, but do you remember when was the last time you left your session active locked out and allowed someone else to log in to the same PC? Is there any other user at all on your current home PC? PC was standing for personal computer long before it was, but then it became. We don't share PC anymore in average.

Not only we don't share PC anymore, but PCs started to share us. We possess several PCs per single person, and we needed Dropbox to manage files on multiple PCs. Dropbox can be perceived as second turning point in time, and it was more than decade ago. Now it's one goal = one device era. We buy device and we sincerely don't intend to install anything else on it. We don't risk our data using NTFS shrinking tools to make spare room for another filesystem. We don't dual boot losing access to programs in another partition. There are ways to mount NTFS in other OS and vice versa, so documents may stay accessible, but programs are not runnable. This is now ridiculous. We just buy two, three, whatever devices and have all programs runnable simultaneously.

If we need something from another OS, we'll precisely buy compatible hardware without locked bootloaders or any other possible obstacle which are numerous. To name a few.

For DOS retrogaming we need DOS ISA DMA sound, and we pick PC with ISA slot and making sure motherboard chipset has DMA on ISA, which is not true on latest chipsets. For another DOS retrogaming option we consider VDMSound, but last OS to support it was Windows XP, and we choose hardware that is Windows XP compatible. Most likely UEFI-only boot will be a problem for Windows XP. For Mavericks Forever we are not going to look for random incompatible Mac. That is going to be either real compatible Mac selected from known list, or else compatible Hackintosh. On Hackintosh there was a big problem with software upgrade, but there will be no upgrades for Mavericks Forever. Tim Cook drives company away in direction we don't appreciate, and Mavericks Forever stays forever the same version.

Nowadays people are not using OS anyway. Nowadays people are using browser. I wish I could drag and drop documents in Mavericks Forever like I did in 2007. But document is now likely to be draw io, rectangular embedding for browser that cannot support drag and drop outside its rectange. And so messenger is also rectangular embedding for browser, not respecting Mac OS X multi-window paradigm, not supporting previously established gestures. In 2007 I thought that Qt programs on Mac were ugly. Those happy days I have not seen Electron yet.

People I know often report that they got rid from "dust collector", the PC. They are now all-Android. As time goes by, it is harder and harder to find someone with PC. So whatever Microsoft preinstalls or bootlocks on PCs, it goes to people less and less.

Because your coworkers and management are there. The ones who advance, or decide who does. They’re creating one of the fields on which the working game is played. Also, they pollute the water.. the water the rest of us have to drink. It’s a culture.

Ugh, yes. I work in somewhat of small island of a subsidiary business unit within a very large organization, so I'm a bit out of the loop. Just going to work and doing my job. We had an interim employee from another site for a few months, and the amount of LinkedIn trading reminded me that I'm not playing the game that everyone else is.

> Because your coworkers and management are there

And investors.