• 2 Posts
  • 128 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • It’s not that wild of a conspiracy theory. Hard to get definite proof though because you would have to compare actual search results from the past with the results of the same search from today, and we unfortunately can’t travel back in time.

    But there are indicators for your theory to be true:

    • It’s evident that in UI design the top area of the screen is the most valuable. AI results are always shown there. So we know that selling AI is of utmost importance to Google.
    • The Google search algorithm was altered quite often over the years, these “rollouts” are publicly available information, and a lot of people have written about the changes as soon as they happened.
    • Page ranking fueled a whole industry which was called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A lot of effort went into understanding how google ranks its results. This was of course done with a different goal in mind but the conclusions from this field can be used to determine if and how search results got worse over time
    • It’s an established fact that companies benefit from users never leaving the company’s ecosystem. Google as an example tried to prevent a clickthrough to the actual websites in the past, with technologies like AMP or by displaying snippets.
    • If users rely on the AI output Google can effectively achieve this: the user is not leaving the page and Google has full control over what content the user sees.

    Now, all of the points listed above can be proven. If you put all of that together it seems at least highly likely that your “conspiracy theory” is in fact true.



  • Not the OP, but i find it concerning because this enables creating a very detailed profile of a users interests, political alignment, medical issues, sexual orientation etc. Even if they never post anything! We should all know by now that there are bad actors actively using this kind of data in the worst ways imaginable. In the US this can already have life threatening consequences (ICE raids etc…)

    This is not a good privacy oriented design and it exposes users in a dangerous way.

    EDIT: About lemvotes.org. I like this site because it makes it obvious how dangerous this really is. For example I accidentally upvoted a really disgusting NSFW post misclicking on my phone. This will forever be visible to the world. I’m a documented pervert now. Good job.


  • I’d argue that Java is not bigger than ever, it’s more of an established legacy language used almost exclusively in business applications today. Comparing it to COBOL in that sense would be mean but there are similarities. When I started with Java in the late 90s it was something completely different. It became popular because it was open and easy to learn. Java gained a huge community quickly. Now there are some technical reasons why Java lost its popularity among the general tech community over time but as I witnessed it the major downfall happened when Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle and the new licensing model was just horrible. Many of us didn’t want to use a language that wasn’t open and moved on. Others created open source forks like you said. I remember we were forced to move to OpenJDK in the company where I was employed. At that time OpenJDK was was neither fast nor complete. It was a shitshow and I can assure you we did not have a good time. Eventually we phased out Java entirely and built the next version on a new stack. And today there are a lot of open and modern general purpose languages available so there is no need to use Java for new projects unless you want to integrate it into an existing Java ecosystem.

    And it was basically the same story with MySQL. You actually said it - “people do their best to get his stench off of it if they can”. In most cases that means moving on to something that isn’t owned by Oracle.





  • Sorry you had this experience. Not all of us are like that though. I just thought of my own experience and I usually try to find an answer with a web search instead of asking in a forum. Most of the time someone else already had the problem and was brave enough to ask. This is especially true for beginner problems. As rough as some of those people can be, there already is a tutorial for almost anything imaginable. And it goes both ways. Don’t ask for stuff that can easily be found on the web. (I’m not implying you did, this is just a general tip)



  • I knew I forgot something… Yeah dolphin is good, but it has some questionable UI design decisions too. For example I always have trouble finding the quick filter instead of the find menu. It’s hidden somewhere and it does not persist. And the find menu itself is such a mess that it’s easier to use find . -iname *whatever* on the command line. But maybe that’s just me and my way of thinking.