RedstoneValley

@RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 just lost 5% market share in two months despite Windows 10 losing support.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah the Antrophic guys are also firmly in the “believer” group.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 just lost 5% market share in two months despite Windows 10 losing support.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I think that Satya Nadella and a lot of other CEO types genuinely believe in AI, as misguided as it seems. This is more about who they choose to listen too than having an actual understanding of the technology and its limits. And probably some FOMO sprinkled on top.

Sam Altman knows what’s up though and so does Jensen Huang. In this gold rush one is peddling the fake gold and the other is selling the shovels.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 just lost 5% market share in two months despite Windows 10 losing support.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Do you have a source for that backtracking about AI? I think they did not mention that explicitly. Instead they were talking about unrelated improvements. The CEO is still in denial about AI bloat. He seems unable to comprehend that people don’t like to be force fed AI everywhere across the OS.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI Wants To Create Biometric Social Network To Kill X’s Bot Problem⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
because they can sell it for more money and as a bonus controlling people’s data gives them power. Supervillains love technology.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI Wants To Create Biometric Social Network To Kill X’s Bot Problem⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
This orb surveillance thingy looks like Wheatley from Portal 2, an AI which eventually turned evil. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheatley_(Portal) I’m sure that’s a good sign.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Neocities deindexed from Bing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Probably depends on what AI DDG is using… I switched DDG to noai so I don’t see any generated results
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Neocities deindexed from Bing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
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?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Neocities deindexed from Bing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
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 irony-machine.neocities.org while DDG did not.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don't want AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Neocities deindexed from Bing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
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 neocities.org (which can be found with DuckDuckGo via Wikipedia Snippet). None of the hosted sites are in the index.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don't want AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
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 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 in 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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Perceiving AI as a 'job killer' negatively influences attitudes towards democracy— When people perceive AI as replacing human labour, trust in democracy and political participation decline⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But think of the landlords!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bye, X: Europeans are launching their own social media platform, W⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
It will probably fail silently, if it doesn’t pick up enough momentum. * Sad failed platform noises *
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bye, X: Europeans are launching their own social media platform, W⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Y tho
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
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.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Most of the hype isn’t about machine learning stuff for cancer diagnoses though. When the average C-level guy talks about AI they mean almost exclusively LLMs. Fancy autocomplete is their solution to everything, from summarizing an email to agentic OSes. And that’s just not going to happen.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK you can add a noAI version of DuckDuckGo to Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I don’t have a link right now, but if you look it up at the usual suspects like wired, ars technica, the register, 404 media, or even Ed Zitron or Cory Doctorow, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of stuff. The search degradation started around the time Sundar Pichai became CEO at Google and it made quite a splash during all that time. Also, there have been several “rollouts” in recent years which changed the search result appearance, content and the page rank algorithm over time, this was published by Google itself. They did of course not disclose how the algorithm works.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
True. It’s also a good idea to check for Linux compatibility before buying hardware. That’s an annoying extra step to do, and makes it harder for new users. But on the other hand, there are now more vendors including this info on their own, and a lot of hardware is pretty much standardized (like USB HID devices etc).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK you can add a noAI version of DuckDuckGo to Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
The fact that search engine results gotten worse itself and that this was done deliberately is well documented, and it is documented that Google and others have a history of trying to prevent users from clicking through to the actual websites and keeping them in their ecosystem. They have developed similar things in the past, like Google AMP.

I have no definitive proof that they worsen their search results for promoting AI, but if you look at this thing there are a lot of indicators for this to be true. Controlling what the user will see and where they will go next is vital for these companies and it’s the reason why content algorithms exist and why they are creating “bubbles” to put individual users into. It’s all about controlling the content the user will see. Now if you think about it and ask yourself if having an AI box dominating the upper half of the screen giving you answers that the search results below don’t is beneficial to these goals, the answer is most likely yes.

Also you can do your own experiments which will make it pretty evident. Search for a few more obscure search terms. Use niche topics that will not yield a lot of results. In most cases the AI will nail it and the search results below won’t. Even if you use advanced search techniques it is really difficult to get the information that the AI gave you as a regular search result. But when you ask the AI for a source you get a website which has the content you were looking for.

Now the question is: Why is the AI that much better than the regular search engine? If you have used Google in the past, only a few years ago, it was perfectly possible to get those results through regular search, which is now bordering on being impossible. Odd, isn’t it? It seems like they gave AI a much bigger index to work with than their own search engine.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK you can add a noAI version of DuckDuckGo to Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
As I said elsewhere, the problem is in fact that search engine providers deliberately make their search results worse to push AI usage. This keeps the user entirely under their control and at the same time hurts the websites the AI training data was stolen from, because no one will bother to visit them any more. I’m not saying DDG does this, but they get their search results from other search engines where this is the case.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
You might have been unlucky. I never had serious installation issues when installing Ubuntu on a lot of different computers in the past five years. Just started the installer, click next a few times and reboot into the new installation. It used to be some tinkering required to get everything to work, but apart from having to enable the proprietary Nvidia driver in a GUI (and having to search for it) everything else just worked. My last Windows install however was a shitshow. Took ages and I had to disable a ton of surveillance stuff. On top of that I had to go through some weird hoops to keep the thing from requiring me to create a Microsoft account. What distro did you use? I guess some are more difficult than others
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Well, I live in the EU and I still have hope that there will be sufficient regulation to prevent the worst when it comes to privacy issues. There already is a lot of protection in place compared to the US (I know, recent developments point in the opposite direction, but the EU at least has some vocal privacy advocates which do their job well) Also I think there are not so subtle differences between recording telemetry (e.g. with anonymized user stats) and spying on users and selling all the data to the highest bidder.

But you are absolutely right that a working business model that is fair to the user, affordable and open still needs to be found. What we can see is that the US model is not sustainable. My prediction is that the tech conglomerates will enshittify themselves out of business in the long run. Because the competition does not need to improve much when the big player’s products get significantly worse over time. The competition can just sit there and wait until those big tech products become so unattractive to users that there is a real incentive to switch to an alternative. This effect can be observed when looking at Windows vs. Linux for example. While Linux has been pretty stable and easy to use for years now, Microsoft makes the Windows experience worse on an almost weekly basis, and now you need to use command line scripting to fix the worst things. Which is ironic, because it used to be exactly the opposite, Linux was the OS where you had to tinker on the command line to make it work. But these days are long gone. And as Microsoft doubles down in shitting on their customers with restrictions, ads and forced AI everywhere, millions of people feel compelled to stay on Windows 10 and wait how the situation develops or try something else. Windows was always disliked or seen as a necessary evil, but this time they might have gone too far.

Oh and about your last paragraph… people in the US are now beginning to learn the hard way why being the product is bad. When big tech is in bed with a fascist government and provides all the surveillance data which is suddenly being used against “ordinary people who have nothing to hide” it becomes pretty clear why being the product is a very very bad idea. Just takes a while to make the connection I suppose.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Good point… I found that apart from technical interoperability it often works pretty well if you explain to your friends that your alternative (signal,Matrix, whatever…) is just that. An alternative which is always good to have just in case. Don’t try to force them to uninstall WhatsApp, even if this would obviously be the best choice. Instead encourage them to try the alternative and keep WhatsApp in case they don’t like it. Test it with them. In practice this often means they find out that it works just as well and does not hurt to have on the device. Even if they don’t use it actively yet, the next time someone asks them if they have Signal (or whatever) they will be happy to say that they already have it. Patience is key.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product

There are many reasons, but I disagree on this one. Most of the existing tech in cloud infrastructure, protocols, social media apps etc. is built on the shoulders of open source software components and operating systems along with interfaces and APIs the US conglomerates themselves have opened to speed up adoption. This of course does not include the surveillance and ad network components, but we don’t want those anyway.

Some more valid reasons in my opinion:
1. Lock-In effect in general: If your friends, neighbors, even governments all use product x (i.e. Whatsapp) and expect you to use those too in order to communicate with them It is very difficult to switch to something else because the people you want to talk to have to be convinced one by one to give it a try. (it’s possible, just very hard to do)
2. Lock-in effect in business: High costs of switching to other products, sunk cost fallacy etc.
3. US Tech for decades gave away their products “for free” misleading customers into thinking that this should be the norm. People understand when something doesn’t cost money but they still don’t understand that they are paying with their data and ultimately with their freedom and well-being. Alternative products and infrastructures cost money. People need to eat. If you don’t take the dirty road of advertising and selling surveillance data there is no way around that fact. At least when we’re talking about products at scale.
On the plus side of this: there is nothing that stops enthusiasts like us from setting up self-hosted projects and providing services to a community. And just like the home computing enthusiasts in the 1980s paved the way for tech we use today, every new movement starts small with a bunch of nerds, aka “early adopters”.

There are plenty more reasons why this is hard and plenty more reasons why we should do it anyway. But I’m on my first coffee so I’ll stop here.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Didn’t find anything, and it would probably void the warranty. But on the upside, using the app isn’t necessary to operate the bike, and the most important features work with the controller/display on the handlebar. The motor lock is disabled for now and I’m resorting to more traditional methods of bike security… a chain lock. The motor lock has a huge disadvantage anyways because it depends on a bluetooth connection to the app on a phone. If that phone for some reason doesn’t work or is unavailable then the bike is essentially bricked. It’s a heavy and bulky cargo bike, so being stranded somewhere with a blocked motor would be bad.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
About the Bosch E-Bike, I have a bike with a Bosch motor and they really are that bad. The bike comes with an app and you need to give them your personal data to “unlock” basic features of the app and an electronic bike lock. If you want to let another person use that bike, you need a subscription. I deleted the app. Fuck Bosch.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Microslop' is heading for Edge – major browser redesign is inspired by Copilot, and it's already seriously unpopular⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Oh let me know if you find a solution. This is a task I have to accomplish this year too.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LG Electronics unveils 2026 Gram Laptop line with aerospace composite - up to 50% lighter than macbooks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
I have an old Chromecast but it’s not 4k. The new ones are enshittified as well as far as I know
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11’s 2025 problems are getting impossible to ignore⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
First of all, don’t feel bad about it. That said if you want to improve yourself in the virtualization department and get rid of Oracle’s VirtualBox, I recommend having a look at virt-manager with KVM/Qemu as a VM host. It’s a bit more of initial setup but once this is done it works pretty much the same way as VirtualBox.