Frazz by Jef Mallett for December 06, 2023

Gimme a stinking break, Mallett! Lazy, why exactly???

Google will give you results that make you want to click them. Duckduckgo not so much. The Google (and Bing and Chrome) system puts you into an island of answers that will seldom show you a new idea or a competing concern. Because amplifying your preexisting state pays them better.

Bing gets evasive when you ask if it’s sentient. It doesn’t know what that means, either.

I don’t agree. Google puts an astouding amount of knowledge at your fingertips 24/7. Sure, as with any source of info, you have to use discernment. But… you remeber that obnoxious uncle who spewed endless malarkey at Christmas parties when the library was closed? Well he’s not so cocky anymore.

65 years ago, we replaced our mop & squeegee with an electric scrubber and wet vac.

It’s a sliding variable, not a constant.

He might break AI testing that theory.

When I enter an uncertainly worded search item, Google often refines it, and that sometimes works out ok. But, there also show up lists of questions asked by others, which help me refine my search even more precisely. So it ain’t all bad or all good, mostly it’s just helpful.

“Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.” – Robert Heinlein

For any given complex, expensive, time-consuming problem there exists at least one simple, cheap, easy wrong answer.

“Working an integral or performing a linear regression is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense — or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place — requires a guiding human hand. When we teach mathematics we are supposed to be explaining how to be that guide. A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel.” —Jordan Ellenberg, professor of mathematics, University of Wisconsin–Madison, How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (2014)

Google will do the thinking, you just sit back and consume.

Using a search engine to find an answer is easy; taking the first thing it gives, without confirmation, is lazy. Doing an easy first step can move a hard worker more quickly along in an arduous task.

My entire career I was asked how to you get all that done so quickly. My reply, “I’m lazy and the easiest way is also the quickest way.” Then I would get fussed at because I also came in under budget (bad for some reason).

No, that’s Siri.

Lazy is when you don’t even want to bother Google-ing something.

I don’t really think ‘easy’ is portmanteau like Caulfield think. It would have the same root as ‘ease’ though.

Eazy: E + azy is 1 plus 3 letters. So it’s 1/9th efficiency plus 3/4 lazy.