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Absolutely agree. Years using Bing (and Edge) and both work very well. The interface if Bing is better for my taste and even if it shows ads, they are a less agressive tha Google's. By the way I am no fan of Google and I prefer not to use any of its apps, including Gmail.
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I stopped using Google products a couple of years ago, excepting Gmail (can't find a client I like better for organization). Before I stopped using Google search, I was getting irritated with ads and it seemed like the results were always targeted.
Today I use DuckDuckGo and Bing. Both work sufficiently well for my needs, although MS pushing their version of ML is beyond irritating, as I don't have a need for the hallucinations of a computer. Just search results.
I thought about it, and I trust Microsoft more than I trust Google.
On a trust scale of 1 to 1,000,000 I rank Google a 1 and Microsoft a 2, so trusting MS more than Google is not exactly a ringing endorsement.
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I prefer DuckDuckGo, but Bing used to be reasonable. The addition of the ChatGPT style answer system to Bing has made it completely unusable for me. I thought 75 baud text rendering died in 1981 when 300 baud became the norm.
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I mostly use the traditional search box (and its behavior isn't changed for me), but only explicitly switch to ChatGPT if I want to ask it a question in plain English - when I know specific keywords are likely to be too generic to return relevant results. And generally if I provide enough context in my question, it'll often provide an answer I can actually use, at least as a starting point.
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* Bing used to not find pages when copy-pasting the page's title in the search bar.
* DuckDuckGo uses Bing as backend and despite I'd love to use it, it still can't find its own backend with a mirror and a reference picture.
* ChatGPT is great to have some laugh, it does not provide anything of value. Especially when I need something that exists and not something made up on the spot.
* Google sucks because it's an advertisement search, plus GPT-like tools invaded the web with tons of useless, mangled, regurgitated and often objectively wrong "content", which sends the last functional sliver of Google into utter confusion.
Forums and Reddit (which honestly is just the evolution of ForumFree) are becoming once again the only reliable places to find informations, as they are so fare populated mostly by humans, sometimes even self-aware ones.
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
The shortest horror story: On Error Resume Next
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ChatGPT is great to have some laugh, it does not provide anything of value. Especially when I need something that exists and not something made up on the spot.
Meh. ChatGPT is useful every once in a while, when I can't be bothered to write the boilerplate for a simple script, or demonstrate how to invoke some obscure API. It might not always get it right, but some of the results it's produced for me turned out to be good starting points. Sometimes it's easier to ask it something in plain English than trying to use a traditional search engine to find just the right incantation to locate some random article on some random site.
It's no replacement for a search engine if that's what you're expecting. Just another tool in one's toolset.
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"Nobody it seems ever misses a chance to ridicule Edge or Bing."
Everything has those who do not like it.
Those that yell the loudest about how good something is are those who have invested the most in it. Rather than there being anything objective about it.
"Are Google's results getting as unusable as some claim?"
Still works for me.
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Those that yell the loudest about how good something is are those who have invested the most in it. Rather than there being anything objective about it.
I'll assume this is a general observation of yours and you're not actually trying to put words in my mouth. If I'm wrong, then sorry about your eardrums.
I really don't have a dog in this race.
Besides, I wasn't saying X was leaps and bounds better than Y. My main point was, X isn't nearly as bad as some people constantly make it out to be.
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Haven't tried Bing in quite a while so decided to try it now. Following is a search I did in google a while back where xxx is my city
"rotisserie chicken" restaurant xxx
Google - no ads at the top
Bing - map, ads at the top, but they are specifically relevant. So not a problem.
Google - first thing at top is map. But useless because it shows places that sell chicken (not rotisserie)
Bing - after ads is yelp review list which is relevant. Shows in google also perhaps after targeted ad.
I would rate Bing slightly better. Both are a disappointment because there is no restaurant close to me, but of course that is probably because no such restaurant exists.
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Both are a disappointment because there is no restaurant close to me, but of course that is probably because no such restaurant exists.
So, what do you think the best outcome for this should have been?
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Obviously if it was really smart it should have opened a new restaurant!
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I don't really use google search any more. Years ago I did a search for a particular article and I used the article title as my search parameters. Duckduckgo had the link to the article as the second search result, google had the link to the article on page 14.
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Duckduckgo had the link to the article as the second search result, google had the link to the article on page 14.
LOL
Somehow Google has decided at some point that a literal search for specific keywords was no way to find a page any more. How it works nowadays, I don't think even Google themselves don't even know anymore; they're constantly fiddling with it.
All I know is that if we both search for the exact same thing, we'll probably get significantly different results. And that's not good, IMO.
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Bing is far worse than Google search for technical things.
I use Edge now to as I'm sick of fighting Windows with Chrome and Edge is actually faster than Chrome on Windows now.
Google has gotten really bad now though. Search engines are so bad now you type in any keyword into them and they will only give you links that have nothing to do with what you want. This is really annoying sometimes. Part of its not the search engines fault and all the AI generated web sites farming clicks. And another part is sites walling themselves off like Twitter. I can't find Tweets in Twitter with Google anymore.
The internet has actually gotten worse in many ways while better in others.
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I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around finite state transducers conceptually.
I plan on implementing them, so you can see how this would be a problem.
For you college and uni educated folks I imagine you've encountered these in your travels, and I was wondering if you might help explain them to me. My resources aren't helping presently. I need more solid footing to understand them.
As best as I can tell they allow you to map things on one "tape" to another "tape" (turing vernacular here) but beyond that I'm sort of lost.
These are my current resources, and from what I can tell you would use them in something like a Full Text Search - at least that's one concrete use case - the others are vague handwaving at natural language recognition which I'm not immediately interested in:
2.2 Finite State Transducers[^] <-- in Prolog 
Finite-state transducer - Wikipedia[^]
GitHub - PetroProtsyk/FST: C# implementation of Finite State Transducers for use in full-text search tasks[^]
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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In semi-formal terms, to the quintuple that defines a FSA (alphabet, states, initial states, final states, transitions), you add one more, the output alphabet.
A hypothetical example: you are a librarian searching for a book in a labyrinthine library (think Umberto Eco, "The Name of the Rose"). As you go, you read fragments from the books you find and those direct you to other books in other rooms, until you find the book you want. So far you have a standard FSA that transitions you from state to state until you end in the final state. Now you want to be a clever librarian that will not search again for the same book and you take a piece of paper on which you write down the room numbers. At the end of your search the notes on your paper are the word in the output alphabet that describe the route to your book and you have a FST.
Chances are that you've made many FSTs without calling them as such. At least in electronics, it is rare to have a FSA evolve from state to state without producing any output. The set of signals that you triggered during transitions are the output tape of a FST.
Mircea
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Here is my version of finite state transducer as I interpret that expression ( I hope to not confuse )
This is an actual code snippet for a command line processor I wrote many moons ago.
Alphabet:
1 is code for number
2 is code for string
Initial state:
User enters a ROT command (input)
ROT PART_NAME x y z
"Transducer" (in this case) converts string in a finite state associated with the name of a function to execute the command.
Final states => transitions
"ROT_2_1_1_1", DOJO_ROTATE_2_1_1_1,"ROTATE part x y z - apply euler angles(deg) to part",
"ROT_2_X_1", DOJO_ROTATE_2_X_1, "ROTATE part axis deg - rotate part on X Y or Z",
"ROT_2_Y_1", DOJO_ROTATE_2_Y_1, "ROTATE part axis deg - rotate part on X Y or Z",
"ROT_2_Z_1", DOJO_ROTATE_2_Z_1, "ROTATE part axis deg - rotate part on X Y or Z",
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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Thanks!
Chances are that you've made many FSTs without calling them as such. At least in electronics, it is rare to have a FSA evolve from state to state without producing any output. The set of signals that you triggered during transitions are the output tape of a FST.
Typically with my FSMs I do run a sort of output tape. However, the output only gets emitted on Accept. That usually means rather than outputting each state transition, I am only outputting on specially marked "accepting" states. It's at that point that I output everything I've gathered since q0. So in effect I am logging my state transitions (it's where I capture input) but I am holding off relaying them to the consumer until I can't move/find a valid transition anymore. At that point I yield the input I've received so far, which is not exactly (forensically speaking) a map of my transitions, but rather what the transitions gathered from the input tape, so close, but not quite the same thing. (I could modify it to record state transitions easily but I don't understand why I'd do that.)
Can you explain to me how this is different than an FST? For example, you talk about how "the set of signals that you triggered during transitions are the output tape of a FST" - are you saying that I write out each transition? Currently I'm only using transitions as a recording device over an input tape.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Starting from the bottom:
Quote: the set of signals that you triggered during transitions are the output tape of a FST" - are you saying that I write out each transition?
In some cases, yes. Here is a simple example: a FST that decodes a quadrature encoder[^]. The input alphabet consists of the states of the 2 inputs: 00, 01, 10, 11. The output alphabet is composed of the numbers 0 to 2N-1, where N is the number of bits in the counter. The states space is 0 to 2N-1 plus E, the error state. With the input 00 01 11, the final state is "2" and the output tape shows 0, 1, 2. From the same initial state, if input is 00 01 10, the output tape showa 0, 1 but the final state is E, the only non-accepting state so we scrap the output tape (or blow a whistle, call the fire brigade, etc.).
Quote: However, the output only gets emitted on Accept.
This still qualifies as a FST. The transitions space of an FST is defined over (input alphabet and the empty string) X (output alphabet and the empty string) X (state space). In other words you are allowed to have transitions that don't produce any output and your model produces output only on the transition to an accepting state.
Quote: At that point I yield the input I've received so far, which is not exactly (forensically speaking) a map of my transitions, but rather what the transitions gathered from the input tape, so close, but not quite the same thing. (I could modify it to record state transitions easily but I don't understand why I'd do that.)
You are doing right. There is no need to output every transition. Your output represents a word in the output alphabet which doesn't need to be the same as the states set.
One of the references you provided in the first message, sent me to a pretty good description of FSTs: Index 1,600,000,000 Keys with Automata and Rust - Andrew Gallant's Blog[^] Take a look.
Mircea
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Thanks so much! This is very helpful.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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One is glad to be of service 
Mircea
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It's interesting because you basically suggested to me (if I understand you), that a lexer/tokenizer is essentially an FST.
FA wspace = FA.Parse("[ \\t\\r\\n]+");
FA ident = FA.Parse("[A-Za-z_][A-Za-z0-9_]*");
FA num= FA.Parse(@"(0|-?([1-9][0-9]*))((\.[0-9]+[Ee]\-?[1-9][0-9]*)?|\.[0-9]+)");
FA lexer = FA.ToLexer(new FA[] { wspace, ident, num });
foreach(FAMatch match in lexer.Run("foo 100 bar baz )#($")) {
Console.Write("{0} ",match.SymbolId);
}
Ergo, that qualifies as an FST, no?
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Quote: It's interesting because you basically suggested to me (if I understand you), that a lexer/tokenizer is essentially an FST.
It's not only my opinion. According to Finite-state transducer - Wikipedia[^]: Quote: FSTs are used in the lexical analysis phase of compilers to associate semantic value with the discovered tokens.
As I was saying in a previous message, you were probably doing FSTs without knowing it  . In the immortal words of Moliere:
Quote: My faith! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose while knowing nothing of it, and I am the most obliged person in the world to you for telling me so.
(translation from Wikipedia)
Mircea
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Ha that quote is perfect! Thanks again.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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