Yeah like most people probably don’t remember the web before Google, but there was altavista. You know what happened to altavista? It became overrun by SEO bullshit and people stopped using them literally overnight because Google did a better job. If Google starts doing a shit job, you know what’s going to happen? People will stop using them literally overnight as soon as anyone else starts doing a better job.

Yes, web search is a “hard” problem, but a lot of it is a hard problem because there’s an insane amount of corporate SEO slop out there, and now there’s a lot of AI slop out there too. The first person to solve this problem is going to completely destroy Google. Is it an unsolvable problem? I don’t think so.

At its core it’s a federation problem. Websites want to be discovered. People want to discover websites. But bad people also want to abuse the discovery process to show their own spam that people don’t want to discover. The magic that Google brought to the table was PageRank, which allowed them to determine the authenticity of the spam by the number of backlinks that went from other real sites TO that site. This is essentially just “voting”, same as we do here. Of course immediately people tried to abuse it by generating their own massive backlink farms but those are pretty obvious and easy to taint as bad actors and scrub out their rankings or remove them completely. If it’s not clear yet how similar this is to the exact sort of trustworthiness problems the fediverse is also dealing with with, just wait. People will find ways to solve this.

The arms race against shitty content will never stop – but the point is, if Google is no longer participating in the war against shitty content and is now switching sides to become a producer of shitty content, they’re not going to succeed. People don’t want that shit, and people will instantly vote with their feet the moment any very inevitable alternative appears.

I am questionning using it only for myself and use something else to share with family

I’m confused, you don’t want your family to be able to know each other’s email addresses? That seems like a bit… extreme level of profile paranoia.

I have my family on my Nextcloud and I can guarantee 90% of them don’t even know where their own user profile is nevermind anybody else’s. Maybe you have a different family than mine.

I have self-hosted my own personal email server since the late 90s. It has been a tedious, often unpleasant chore. I hate email. But it’s the one thing I’ve never compromised on, because to this day they try to tie your identity to your email and giving up control of that seems insane to me. Apps that use your phone number are doing the same thing, but you can’t self-host that, so I won’t use them. I’m sure Signal is very nice and people keep recommending it, but my phone is an untrusted device, and my phone number is an untrusted identity I don’t control. I am not going to use it for anything important.

But you also have to verify your identity before you can drink a verification can, otherwise children could be drinking too much sugar.

If you want to do businesses in a country, don’t complain when…

Complaining about things the government tells them to do on behalf of society is pretty much the foundation of every company’s whole business model at this point.

A high power laser? That feels like it might work. Perhaps we should start experimenting on Jeff Bezos’s head to see what works best.

Sadly the inescapable physical truth of convex vs concave lensing still relentlessly holds its tenacious grip on reality, despite the billions of dollars these folks have accumulated they have still, thus far, been unable to alter that particular aspect of reality.

The only solution I can offer for Jeff Bezos is to begin forming his skull inwards somewhat so that any captured light can reach a proper focusing point. As as astronomer with some experience with such reflective optical surfaces, I’d be happy to begin the grinding and polishing process for you at any time, I’ll just need you to hold him still while I work. It’s a very precise process.

I assume his head is mostly thick skull surrounding empty space anyway, so I think there should be little harm done.

I paid for it because I want to support the developers, not Krafton. I realize it’s not necessarily possible to separate the financial impact between the two, but I still choose to support the developers and I hope my purchase allows them to make their case against Krafton even more clearly.

I did not pay for it because I needed their permission to play it, and I don’t give a fuck if they revoke that permission (which I don’t need) at any time for any reason. I use my money to support the developers and the game. How, when, and where I play it is my own business.

If Krafton has any issue with this: Come at me, bro. I will be happy to begin the process of Louis-Rossmann-ing your ass.

I haven’t had my intro sequence where some dramatic event forces me out of my horrible corpo job yet, but I’m expecting it any day now.

Things I never knew I needed, and probably still don’t need, but am going to pretend I need anyway.

These are the good guys, when we land in cyberpunk dystopia hell, these will be the guys I’m joining up with.

People drown in pools all the fucking time, especially when entry is unintentional. It’s even worse in a canal. The bottom can be slippery. There can be currents. You can be tangled in heavy clothes and accessories not intended for swimming. You can literally go into shock and panic into very illogical and counterproductive attempts at self-rescue. You can hit your head and lose consciousness or be disoriented, it only takes a few moments and a single panic-stricken gasp to ingest a lungful of water you are not going to be able to recover from without rescue.

Water is very dangerous and deserves serious respect which you don’t seem to be giving it, and to be fair, most people don’t. Once you have a close call with water, you’ll understand. It goes from fun and harmless to extremely scary almost instantly. Take some lifeguard courses. It’s no joke, at all, and it will kill you without remorse.

Don’t worry they’ve got a plan for that. They’re going to let most of humanity die off and kill each other fighting for the scraps they’ve left behind, while they use money to live as close to forever as they can get, while hiding in their bunkers and protecting their own descendants. Once humanity is down to a few million people at most, the environmental problems should stop getting worse and their army of robots can clean up the rest.

Yeah the biggest lie we tell ourselves is when we look at other countries being stupid and imagining our country wouldn’t do the same or even worse. What we should be learning from other countries being stupid is learning how it happened, and usually how frighteningly easy it was for them to get to that point. We are all vulnerable, we are all under attack though the attacks might not be focused on any particular one of us at once, democracy is fragile and difficult to maintain at scale. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. As comforting as it is to imagine that there is some intrinsic flaw in the UK or the US that lets them and them alone behave so stupidly, in fact the intrinsic flaw is humans themselves, none of us are immune, and if you think you or your country are, you have lost the vigilance you need to properly defend yourself against it.

This could’ve been regulated decades ago. We chose not to regulate it, because we were told it would hurt the economy, and we always choose benefits to the economy, whether they are real or imagined, over environmental regulation. Always have, always will. We’re still doing it today. We could regulate it today too. But AI is now the foundation of our economy, so we will choose what we imagine will benefit the economy, even if it is completely imaginary, over the real impacts to the environment, yet again. Because we always do. The cult of capitalism has brainwashed us all and there doesn’t seem to be any escape. The capital in the economy must grow, forever. The people who benefit from it will make sure to tell us so when they tell us what decision we must make for the sake of the economy that benefits them. And we will listen to them, because they have lots of money so they are ideal successful people whose success we rely on for our own meager lives.

I don’t think you got it wrong, for what it’s worth. Don’t believe the clankers that insist they’re human, they’re prompted to do that, and they’re designed to be convincing. Truth is unfortunately subjective nowadays, and trust is in short supply. This certainly has a lot of red flags that make think it might be a low effort corporate astroturfing attempt (13 hour old account with Razer in the name that has never posted anything else) even without the highly suspect AI writing.

Way too much. The Nvidia P40 I scavenged for my homemade AI server runs at 120W (throttled down from 250W default) on its own. Then I’ve got two more PCs running purely as redundant firewalls with automatic failover, pretty unnecessary but if that’s not the sort of thing homelabbing is for then I’m going to keep doing it wrong because I find it fun. Then there’s the minecraft server, which is pretty beefy and also eternally running at max CPU because my niece is a monster who loves spamming spawn eggs and should never be allowed access to creative mode. And I don’t even have the two rack units of disk arrays I bought at auction powered up yet because they need 240V which I don’t have handy. I guess someone could do the math on what 48 enterprise SAS drives will pull if they need to satisfy their curiosity, I’m not sure I want to. I will hook them up someday but for now ignorance is bliss. All I know is it’s a lot, and there’s stuff I’m not even including in this.

You can get an AI to plagiarize a bunch of open source projects that people have volunteered time to create, bypassing the licensing of those projects and mashing them together into something that sort of resembles what you want it to do on a basic level and is full of horrifying security holes and feature gaps that may not matter for your particular usage.

So, yes, you can vibe code. That’s what vibe coding is. Enjoy.

If I was paying for it, hell naw. But if my employer not only is willing to pay for it, but considers it a performance metric? I’m going to use it for fucking everything. These are the incentives they give me, I’m going to follow the incentives. Talking to Claude is what they pay me for, apparently.

But like the article says, if I don’t continue practicing on my own code in my unpaid off-work hours, I imagine I’d be regressing in my skills too. I do that because I enjoy it as a hobby, but if I didn’t, I could see myself and probably a lot of other people getting rugpulled by this.

This is the way. If you don’t care that much about CI/actions or already use a non-Github solution for that, it’s even easier.