I worked there around that time, and a little later. The company had recently ish gotten independent and was actually pretty optimistic. The basic plan was to use the clearly dying dialup business to fund new businesses in media and ads, and there was even hope that the mail and search stuff could be turned around. I think the ads and media stuff broadly worked, most of the media businesses are still going though they were divested by AOL and later Yahoo. The ads stuff did ultimately have a shelf life as the industry consolidated more on Google and Facebook but that was many years away from 2014. Mail and search were eventually merged into their yahoo counterparts post merger.
People at AOL realized how the brand was that of a "wow you still exist" so were pretty good at not putting it too intrusively on new or acquired products. Good for those products, bad for the chances of revitalizing the brand. One of the interesting things post-merger with Yahoo was how much Yahoo people had not adopted the same attitude about their own brand.
I ended up adding -ai to every search in the browser level to turn this crap off. I couldn't find a way to disable it otherwise. I did it after it hallucinated the world cup games schedule which made my friend send wrong events to everyone after he "looked it up". Can't stop this from him, but at least this honest mistake won't happen to me.
Surely there's an extension for whatever browser you are using?
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-google-ai-overviews/
Chromium: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-google-ai-overviews/neibhohkbmfjninidnaoacabkjonbahn
Safari: Seems there are none
Half assed fun fact: there was this painter I can't recall his name, the one that painted that girl with the head scurf. He might have used camera obscura and traced the picture. To me it feels like our times. There's a new tool that can be used along with the tools we have been using for decades to create something magical.
Indeed that is one theory. He was also a master at his craft so this is exactly the transition period where the master of the old method is able to adapt a technology in a way later pupils likely can not, due to the experience without the tool at hand.
Sounds a lot like the AI transition we are making now.
I've been thinking about this lately - is it like using 3rd party libs to achieve stuff faster? As much as I would lovr to hand craft the datetime logic in my app, I might as well use luxon and invest this time somewhere else. Only now with llms, you get virtually infinite 3rd party libs you can use, you create them on the fly. So if you have strong engineering values, I would say simply it boils down to "contracts over programs", you can still be in touch with the logic that glues it all together and treat some logic as a blackbox the same way we do with 3rd party libs?
It's not just about it feeling like a 3rd party library but it's a library that's at risk of changing significantly after every 'update' without warning.
Atleast with a well built library you know the contours and how it fits into your larger system
It's not because with libraries you have a boundary somewhere and can decide to not care what's inside as long as the interface is stable and well designed. The problem of course you need to prioritise building well designed interfaces and decouple components from each other, and that's a skill most developers aren't good at.
Models are getting better. Astra for example refactored some code GPT-5.6 Sol wrote and extracted some related functionality in a separate file without prompting.
The models are also becoming very capable of suggesting architecture simplifications, but you need to ask for that, and you probably need some taste in picking from the suggestions, although the default ones are quite decent.
Considering how many compromises and problems third party libraries have caused recently, I would say the comparison is apt - if you don't know what you're shipping one day it might explode on you
While moving from spotify to youtube music a few years ago I bought a vinyl player to listen to full albums and fell for it. Then when I moved to curate and self host my collection with Plex and Plexamp I realized I'm not using the player anymore since I'm using Plexamp to listen to albums. Plexamp is not perfect and not open source unfortunately, but it's a really good non-enshitified product.
I had to migrate away from youtube music since the experience was infuriating me every time. I love making playlists on the go. In youtube music after adding 30 tracks to the play queue, tapping 1 track accidentally deletes the play queue and plays this track. This made me feel bad every time it happened.
I don't see how it is just accepted to lose progress in 2026 as if we're using win95. It feels like 80% of the sw I use provides a caveman UX, not leveraging the tech, leaking implementation details and being constrained by technical reasons. On the other hand, working on Prepbook[0], I realized how hard it is to create the perfect experience and how it's even harder to justify it financially.
I'm doing discovery by talking to people, I love it. Every time I listen to Monolink I recall my co worker that just said "check out monolink" when he heard I love Ott. I love that it makes the experience about connection to people as well.
Not GP but I feel like that's kinda their point - the fact that we still have this platform to collaborate in such an organic way is truly remarkable and must not be taken for granted.
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