I tried switching to ddg several times over the last decade or so and always gave up because of issues like this, especially with technical or obscure topics. Recently started paying for Kagi and do not have the same issues at all there. The results are good and nicely presented without ads. Of course, on the flip side it’s pretty expensive.
4.6 Opus was a huge jump from earlier models and the first that was actually useful for things like this from my experience (and 4.7 is significantly worse for some reason).
I have made many anti-LLM posts here and I remain pretty negative on them, but they have absolutely become useful. Part of the problem is the truth is really somewhere between the insane promises and the dismissals.
My problems are many fold though, from being propped up by insane subsidies, the massive power usage to the thing I most care about: taking more power from the masses. The more useful they get, the more power gets concentrated to those able to afford the data centers.
Computers used to be at least somewhat democratizing, sure there were some things like weather modeling that an ordinary person couldn’t do, but a random person on thier computer could put something together to change the world.
What happens when the breakthroughs are available only for the wealthiest? Regular folks can buy tokens at a reasonable price today, but running cutting edge models on consumer hardware isn’t really feasible. We’ve ceded too much control.
Honestly the 2008 real estate/subprime bubble felt the same way. People were talking about the bubble popping for what seemed like forever until it actually did.