because they can sell it for more money and as a bonus controlling people’s data gives them power. Supervillains love technology.

This orb surveillance thingy looks like Wheatley from Portal 2, an AI which eventually turned evil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheatley_(Portal) I’m sure that’s a good sign.

I also do Camembert mind melts

Probably depends on what AI DDG is using… I switched DDG to noai so I don’t see any generated results

Interesting, if i do site:neocities.org with a random search term e.g. site:neocities.org anime in DDG I get zero results. In google, this yields thousands of neocities subdomains. Do you get any relevant results in DDG this way?

I chose a random neocities website and searched with both DDG and Google. The search was “irony machine neocities” without quotes. Google yielded a result which pointed to the correct URL https://irony-machine.neocities.org/ while DDG did not.

Yeah, I think SEO is pretty much dead by now, and probably because web search as we knew it is kind of dead as well. You’ll probably need to spend ad money if you want visibility. But I’m no expert on SEO and I could be wrong.

Before you say haha no one is using bing… Your beloved DuckDuckGo uses bing results and this means it’s censored there too. And it’s not only about the start page https://neocities.org/ (which can be found with DuckDuckGo via Wikipedia Snippet). None of the hosted sites are in the index.

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.

The article itself looks like it’s written with AI. Inconsistencies, repetitions, dull language and an unnecessary bullet point summary at the end. While I haven’t read the actual study, nothing in the article seems to explain what makes this causation instead of correlation.

Personally I’m a bit annoyed with articles like these because they try to create the impression that criticism of AI only stems from it being too powerful, instead of recognizing that the technology has very real capability limits. What is presented as two opposing viewpoints is effectively just one. AI boosters and AI doomers are both strong believers in something that hasn’t happened yet and probably won’t happen for a very long time.

solve this by upvoting what I like

This doesn’t solve the privacy issue. It still enables bad actors to create a very detailed profile of who you are, just by looking at the content you upvoted. Your interests, political alignment, medical/mental health issues, sexual orientation… just to name a few.

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.

The good news is that everything Larry Ellison touches dies slowly and painfully. Oracle’s touch of death is well known in the tech community… Java, MySQL, etc.

That’s a dumb and misleading take on the situation. While Trump himself is just a rambling, demented egomaniac it’s going very well for the horse whisperers in the background. Inciting violence to enable the administration to justify even more atrocious acts in the process is part of a strategy. This is done deliberately to dismantle the US institutions and to build a new order out of the rubble. It’s now carried out in the open for everyone to witness and it’s a classic playbook of fascists everywhere in the world. Trump is just the ugly face of that, it does not matter much what he thinks or if his ego is hurt, as long as the people in the background manage to keep him under control.

Just a reminder that the underlying problems that lead to this kind of architecture aren’t explicitly left-wing. When you were born all the land already belonged to someone else. These might be private properties, corporate owned properties or state owned properties. If you weren’t lucky enough to inherit something from your parents you are forced to live in these boxes. This problem gets worse over time. Lack of opportunities to earn enough money to buy a plot/house, paired with a lack of space in cities also contributed to the situation. It’s shit everywhere because we as humans have continuously failed to implement better solutions.

It will probably fail silently, if it doesn’t pick up enough momentum. * Sad failed platform noises *

Y tho

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)

That’s exactly the reason why you get good results when prompting a chatbot. You have the knowledge to ask the right questions with the needed keywords and lingo. What’s problematic is that Microslop and big tech in general are advertising AI as a generic tool for everyone and their grandmother. The result is garbage in, garbage out. It’s not going to work as advertised.