It's a bit ranty towards the end, but there's some fascinating insights here into shifting sands of the ZuckerBorg's metrics, FarceBook enshittification, and so on:
What the hell, where does the sudden #enshittification on #Startpage come from? There even are two additional "sponsored" entries on the bottom of the page, barely more results than ads. Doesn't get caught by µBlock Origin or another addon either.
Time to move to a better search provider. Probably a self-hosted one.
These AI SEO spam operations have used lists of common searches to ensure that their pages come up first in searches in the “long fat tail” the kind of search where it used to be about 50/50 if you’d find a page addressing your needs. But, it used to be if you found something like “The top 15 smallest ants in the world” it wouldn’t be nonsense. It’d either exist and be the work of another person who cared OR you found nothing. Not so now! I can’t possibly over-stress how bad this is! 1/
Created this after reading conversation in comments below some tech article somewhere. Someone mentioned "surfing the #internet sewer" and I really liked that phrase.
This article nicely sums up my suspicion about the state of 'Xwitter'…
"Twitter is now a siloed attention roulette machine just like TikTok. That was the plan when Elon took over and they succeeded. There's no going back."
How much would it cost in HW and bandwidth to replicate the original Google search? (Just crawl, index, search the index, display results. Only text in v1.)
I suspect it wouldn't be too expensive.
We could implement this, slap some collective QA on top of it, crowdfund the servers.
Did fellow philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein dispose of Bertrand Russell's paradox? ”... and that disposes of Russell's paradox.” In mathematical logic, Russell's paradox attempts to illustrate that every set theory that contains an unrestricted comprehension principle leads to contradictions. In 1923, Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed to ”dispose” of Russell's paradox as follows:
”The reason why a function cannot be its own argument is that the sign for a function already contains the prototype of its argument, and it cannot contain itself. For let us suppose that the function F(fx) could be its own argument: in that case there would be a proposition 'F(F(fx))', in which the outer function F and the inner function F must have different meanings, since the inner one has the form O(f(x)) and the outer one has the form Y(O(fx)). Only the letter 'F' is common to the two functions, but the letter by itself signifies nothing. This immediately becomes clear if instead of 'F(Fu)' we write '(do) : F(Ou) . Ou = Fu'.
... and that disposes of Russell's paradox.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3.333
So if you have #Recall installed, always make sure you have a media player window open, playing some DRMed content, I dunno, Disney’s Frozen or some such. Paused, perhaps, or you’ll start losing it. Then it won’t record you. #LetItGo#Microsoft#Enshittification
Think I need to start planning for a total free software future. Been using Windows 10 for work and because it’s tolerable. Changed to VS Code because it’s a very good lightweight IDE. This #Recall spyware has forced me to conclude that #Microsoft have turned evil. I was optimistically naïve to think they might not be, in hindsight. So, must look to changing to Linux Mint everywhere, and getting my #NeoVim setup perfected. (May revisit #Helix, if it has a tree view now). As for Apple.. hmm.
@M0CUV this is peek #enshittification and Apple will most definitely follow, they already do to a large portion, albeit not (yet) so blatantly as Microsoft
Starting to get sick of this stuff, Brave. I should not be trying to figure how to turn this off, because it should never have turned on without asking me first. #enshittification#ai
Well our dishwasher that I bought a year and a half ago has started giving us a "failure to drain" message. My husband has disassembled it and the motors are working fine. Nothing is clogged up. Maybe it's the electronic controller. Why do modern appliances suck so bad? I'm about to just start washing dishes by hand I'm not buying another one. #Enshittification
Yesterday, I replied to a question in the Godot forum with a wrong answer (since I misunderstood the question at first). Today, if you google "godot delete pattern", that answer will be displayed as a "featured snippet" right on top. 🙄 (The correct answer is in the same thread, but so far Google hasn't picked up on it)
Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta while shove AI down your throat whether you like it or not. If you want to do anything on the Internet, you will HAVE to use AI.
Cory Doctorow was right. The Enshittification is here.
Is it just me, or has Microsoft gone completely crazy? They are implementing spyware that takes screenshots every second and forcing AI integration. Why would anyone willingly purchase this? Anyone with experience in computer or information security knows that it is a bad idea, even if it is locally done. Just don't do it. Yet, here we are, and they are doubling down on this idea. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/microsofts-new-recall-feature-will-record-everything-you-do-on-your-pc/#privacy#security
"A billionaire got mad, bought your favourite social media site and ran it into the ground. A different billionaire got mad, bought the magazine site you liked to read on your lunchbreak and shut it down completely. "