The title of this piece is clickbait as all hell, but I viewed it as more of an anti-Google piece rather than an anti-AI piece. Like, I do think AI has some merits, but those are massively outweighed by the nefarious Silicon Valley ghouls(like Google) abusing it to make all of our lives worse.

But I think this begs the question of whether search was any good before. It wasn’t. It isn’t.

Yeah, I agree. Google had such a stranglehold on search for so long that they could make their product worse and not lose any meaningful marketshare. They knew damn well that people weren’t going to switch to Bing or anything, so they could enshittify the hell out of search to wring as much profit out of it as possible.

I’m really hopeful that federation continues to grow and bandwidth and storage costs can allow a simple hobbyist to maintain a site/node for minimal cost while contributing to the greater ecosystem. Smaller communities where reputation actually matters instead of being gamified into upvotes and downvotes as some sort of facsimile of trustworthiness or quality. I think with a more personal internet, AI becomes less of a threat anyway.

Absolutely. We’ve got to start cutting back on our use of corpo-internet, if possible. Especially considering that many of these companies are either collaborating with a fascist government or are enthusiastically supporting and influencing said fascist government.

Yeah, I think the last time I went was a couple years ago. Went to the one in Downtown Seattle and most things were locked up and there were more armed guards than customers. Can’t say I had much inclination to come back, and this only cements that feeling.

Lovely. More goons for the American Gestapo.

Real nice of him to sneak this in while people are distracted with the Signal chat leak. While I do think that incident happened due to sheer incompetence and not anything like 4D chess or whatever, the administration is savvy enough to take advantage of the chaos to attempt to consolidate more power. So if you see something completely outrageous, keep your eye out for some bullshit.

This is a blatant attempt to expand red state style voter disenfranchisement nationwide. Except it’s worse than that, because apparently the Department of Homeland Security and DOGE are going to work together to find “fraud” in the voter rolls. And DOGE has access to the private information of virtually every American. Considering that there’s another recent EO trying to end the siloing of information between federal agencies, they’ll be able to do targeted disenfranchisement to the point where there’s won’t even be blue states anymore. It’ll be like Russia, with maybe a token “opposition” but the dictator gets 95% of the vote. That’s where we are at. We’re in a dictatorship.

Is this legal? Fuck no. States control elections, per the Constitution. Will it matter? The courts would need to actually enforce this, something they don’t really have any way to do. They could direct the U.S. Marshals to enforce their rulings, but they report to the Attorney General and are apparently quite Trumpy themselves, being cops and all that.

I wonder, will blue states roll over and accept this? I hope not, but we should prepare as though they’ll capitulate to the threat of having federal funding pulled. I don’t know how much federal funds figure into state governments, but I imagine it’s a substantial amount. And guess who lives in a state with a budget crunch right now?

I’m not trying to fearmonger or anything, but anyone continuing to talk about the 2026 midterms has lost the plot. We have to take action ourselves, and do so now. Our institutions will not save us, because they’re based on a document nearly a quarter of a millennium old that’s had 26 modifications tacked on(24 if you don’t count the Prohibition amendments that cancel each other out).

Bullshit. I actually did apparently have a bad reaction to the MMR vaccine when I was a kid, so I’m not sure if I still have immunity from measles. I would really prefer not risking it, you know? Anti-vaxxers are idiots.

This sure does make me feel like a giant fucking asshole for trying to convince people to cast a tactical vote against trump by voting dem.

Fuck the United States

Zelenskyy knows damn well he can’t trust Russia to uphold their side of the bargain. Taking this deal would only grant them a short reprieve while Russia recovers their strength and comes back to finish the job. Ukraine is in a terrible position(and honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Russia ended forcing them to reinstall Viktor Yanukovych), but, as long as Ukraine has the will to fight, they should do what they feel is best. If they choose to fight a losing war to make it as painful as possible for the Russians rather than sign a “peace” negotiated by two hostile powers in which Ukraine was not even consulted, that is their right.

Trump and Vance are a fucking disgrace. They were trying to discredit Zelenskyy in the eyes of Ukraine and the world. It’s important to remember that this is one of the least ambiguous conflicts in recent years. Russia literally declared a war of conquest using one of the flimsiest casus bellis ever. And here comes this asshole Trump, who is like “maybe we should try to do that might makes right stuff”. Now Canada, Mexico, and Greenland are getting threatened with invasion and forcible annexation. That’s why Ukraine must be supported if they choose to continue fighting; not only are they the unambiguous victim in the conflict, but the more painful things get for Russia, the less likely they will be able to wage further wars in the short term, and maybe it might make belligerent countries think twice about stealing land and subjugating people they have no right to.

To be honest, I’m not that interested in having a back and forth about greentext in a three month old thread (I did not know it was this old when I first commented), so I’ll just leave you with this: you should try to assume good faith when commenting here on Beehaw. You kinda gave ErsatzCoalButter’s comment the least charitable interpretation it could’ve been given.

If you don’t like them that is okay, but you shouldn’t spread lies about people or places just because you personally don’t like them.

I think you’re coming down too hard on this comment. A healthy skepticism of things that were derived from 4chan is pretty reasonable, given how at least some boards there reveled in bigotry and toxicity to the point where that was what 4chan was primarily known for. So, I kinda do try to avoid greentext communities because I don’t view them as benign, either.

You might want to give a member of a minority currently directly targeted by the regime a little grace, yeah?

Yes, what’s done is done, and there’s not much point in re-litigating the election at this point. Let’s not turn this into another neverending argument about Gaza, because I guarantee that’s just going to drive a further wedge between all of us.

In a virtual speech at the World Economic Forum, Trump suggested Canada could become a U.S. state to avoid his proposed tariffs on imports.

The remark elicited gasps from the audience.

yeah, so, rich people, perhaps pushing the “they’re eating the dawgs” guy so that you can continue to make late stage capitalism even worse was a bit of a mistake. he’s sundowning hard and completely off the rails.

yeah, I read the whole thing. I don’t recommend that, like holy absolute fuck

Players of Dragon Age II complained that the companion Anders would always flirt with Hawke (male or female), which made it impossible to avoid queer content

oh no, won’t someone please think of the bigots? their feelings are getting hurt!

And they won’t stop until it turns into Conservapedia. Can’t have all those inconvenient facts contradicting the fascist regime or anything. You’ll have your firehose of misinformation and you’ll like it. Seriously, I could see January 6th becoming a federal holiday down the line. They’ll call it Patriot Day or something.

Fortunately, you apparently can download a compressed version of all of Wikipedia for ~25GB.

this isn’t just dropping fact-checking. per the article:

Beyond the end of the facet-checking program, Zuckerberg said the company will be eliminating some content policies around hot-button issues including immigration and gender, and refocus the company’s automated moderation systems on what he called “high severity violations” and rely on users to report other violations.

Facebook will also be moving its trust and safety and content moderation team from California to Texas.

This is full bore capitulation to fascism, as capital will always do. soon, zuckerberg’s social media sites will be indistinguishable from musk’s x. everybody needs to defederate from threads if they haven’t already.

being nice is what our oligarchs want you to use to discredit people.

You do realize you’re posting in a Beehaw community, right? We do expect you to be(e) nice when engaging with people here. DdCno1 is trying to engage in good faith(and, honestly, getting very understandably frustrated). If you don’t want to educate them, that’s perfectly fine and valid. If that’s the case, then this conversation isn’t really going anywhere at this point and it’d be best if you disengaged and moved on.

I have never understood why some men will send unsolicited dick pics to girls they’ve barely even started talking to. Like, to me, anyway, it’s just sending the message “hey, I’m only talking to you because of this”. Not to mention just how creepy and invasive unwanted genital pics must be(I can’t speak from experience here, I’m a transbian in a committed relationship who hasn’t been out all that long).

When I was pretending to be a guy, I was hanging out with a group after watching a movie, and a friend of a friend was sending a dick pic to a girl he had just met. I asked him why, and he looked kinda confused and told me that girls want to see it. The other dudes there looked at me like I had an extra eye or something. fuck me for seeing things from the girl’s point of view. we didn’t really hang out after that

Seems to be a joke poking fun at the other post. I’m not bothered by this, but if people start making a bunch of these, I’ll ask them to stop.

Yep, the moment you have to explain it, you’ve already lost; the normies will check out. That’s the thing, these sites depend on having a huge userbase and people just aren’t going to go to a site with “nobody on it”. I maintain an account on both Mastodon and Bluesky… they’re both pretty neat in their own way. But Mastodon isn’t ever going to be the virtual town square. I kinda like it quiet there, tbh.

yeah, I live in Washington state, so I’m covered there. though, I’m not exactly enthused about my life depending on politicians deciding not to capitulate. thankfully, we bucked the trend this election and actually went more left.