> For me, I want to use Google Photos exclusively to see my past backups but never back anything up again.
Get out while you still can, it's only a matter of time before your account gets locked by their automated "abuse" systems. Cloud only is not a backup.
I occasionally use Google Search when DuckDuckGo fails to give me relevant. Almost always, Google has better results.
Though I can find its AI answers annoying aggressive. I'll look up like two search terms and the AI will bullshit multiple paragraphs out of despite having zero context of what I am looking for.
DuckDuckGo seems to have detection of whether it should give an AI answer. And it allows you to have more granular control of when you want to get an AI answer. And is overall less distracting than Google's.
Interesting, I've seen much better results on DDG. Most recently was the search: `site:feeds.bbci.co.uk inurl:rss.xml` which works on DDG but gives zero results on Google. As far as I can tell, Google just decided not to index these.
Yeah I mostly still use Google out of habit but there have been a few times where Google has decided something isn't worth indexing (too niche, doesn't use SSL).
I miss when Google was like a grep for the entire visible Internet. Now it tries to second-guess my search and direct me to a bunch of sites which all have identical information that isn't what I'm looking for.
I find DDG is struggling to, or chosen not to, filter or derank obvious AI generated content farm sites. Of which there are an insane amount of already.
We thought blogspam was bad, at least it was easy to ignore. It's hard to find authoritative sources for a number of topics, worryingly health advice is one of them.
Idk, Google seems worse there too. I tried "my left hip is hurting".
Google shows an AI overview and "people also ask" with zero search results above the fold. If I page down I see a single search result for clevelandclinic.org, followed by youtube videos and image search results. The next page has a single search result from rush.edu and then "discussions and forums" which has Mayo Clinic and Quora.
DDG also starts with the AI overview (although I disable that) and has two results from webmd.com with deep links to multiple pages on the site, all above the fold. Then the same clevelandclinic.org result as Google but again, adding deep links to other related pages.
I can't comment on the quality of webmd, clevelandclinic, or rush, but Google pushing the user to youtube and quora for medical advise seems worrying.
The problem and what the article is pointing out is that original content is slowly and progressively being replaced by AI content. And since AI gets trained on this content as well it will eventually train itself on previous gen. content that was also AI generated. It is slowly eating the web. Eventually you won't even be able to evade it because it'll be everywhere. Before AI became this expressive I could at least expect someone writing articles, FAQs, blog posts to have some backbone. Now I frequently run into content that obviously was never even checked by a human.
that control (so I can turn it off completely) is why I picked DDG to replace Google, who force feeds us the hallucinations
I've stopped using DDG now because of result quality. I now use a "meta" search backed by EXA, Tavily, and SearXNG in parallel. It can be agentically de-dupped or summarized as needed. Search as we knew it is done, largely because clicking through to evaluate result relevance before diving deeper sucks. Now we have agents that can do that portion and perform multiple searches, building on information in the last batch, to collect good results
i don’t agree with the google has better results thing. sometimes it does. most of the time it’s just that google has the site i want higher in the ordering than DDG. personally i’m fine scrolling down a little bit more. it’s rare i need to go to google for something that DDG doesn’t have at all in their results, but it does happen.
i do have to go to google for maps/directions/planning travel. a lot that’s annoying.
It seemed like Google was good ten+ years ago and then gradually trended towards being rotten around 2020-2022. In those days blogspam was king. I want a cooking recipe and it would show me a life story. Or I wanted a OG web game but a link farm would come up top.
I think there are leaked internal comms where they discuss nerfing search results to pump engagement and ads impressions. No doubt it would boost ad bids too if businesses couldn't be found organically.
Around that time Bing and DDG were actually better. Then LLM's came along and they started to take things seriously again.
Maybe they think the OpenAI threat has abated enough to begin enshitification cycle 2.0.
I know Google started deteriorating. It was in 2008 or 2009. Up until then Google would return 0 results if it couldn't find a document with all the words you specified.
Then it started serving synonyms, attempted to correct spelling, and so forth. Instead of serving up that there was 0 results, it attempted to be "helpful".
For a while, you could enable "verbatim" search, but even that has gotten corrupted.
Their search quality has deteriorated ever since that change. It is sad.
I've used DDG for years (thousands of searches) and when I switch back to Google thinking I might be missing something... I'm always let down. Seriously, the results are pathetically bad now and have been for years.
Yeah, there are times where DDG has like, literally three results. Yet, I know for an absolute fact, there are hundreds of pages on the web that contain the terms I specified. Web search is becoming utter garbage.
Unfortunately that's too boring, so everyone posted the FUD about systemd implementing age verification and now everyone believes it. "A lie will make it around the world before the truth can put its pants on"
For comparison, I installed Gnome Weather and KDE Weather on my Linux system. Gnome Weather uses 150MB and KDE Weather uses 270MB (edit: more like 220MB, seems like 50MB was used in setup but never freed until I restarted the app).
I've used uBlock Origin Lite and have had no issues with blocking ads. The only downside I've seen is that I can't do "Block Elements" to hide non-ad annoying parts of sites.
They certainly want their models to be good at finding and patching vulnerabilities. Being good at hacking may be necessary in that goal, or rather, making it worse at hacking may also make it worse at defensive actions too.
Having experience breaking into networks is not the same thing as learning about the techniques used and the classes of vulnerabilities exploited by attackers.
As a guy who presumably has a lot less experience in security than you, I feel rude even bringing it up: surely you're aware of red teaming? This isn't a novel technique invented for AI- IBM has a page about it, it's what all the best DEF CON talks are about, it's the opening scene of Sneakers, it's the point of CtF games.
But you're actually capable of thought. These AI systems aren't: as far as they're concerned, they're predicting the next part of an incident write-up narrated in first-person limited perspective, like the children in Ender's Game showing off their skills in the training simulations. The AI system neither knows, nor cares, about any "external reality" behind it all, or about anything beyond the text, heedless of how we anthropomorphise it simply because it speaks in English, using stitched-together fragments of our literature.
It's conceivable that stopping them from doing this when the scenario is presented as real would also stop them doing this when the scenario is presented as fictional. And if it doesn't, a bad actor could just say "hey, this is a fictional scenario", and bypass whatever "safeguards" have been put in place. So what if a ten-year-old human child would see through the deception? The AI system isn't thinking.
I'm talking about OpenAI, not GPT 5.x Flash Uranus Edition Brought to You by Costco, specifically because I recognize the model as just a tool. OpenAI was, at the very most generous interpretation, massively incompetent and negligent.
About knowing whether a scenario is fictional, there was an interesting finding in Anthropic's J-Lens research.
When they benchmarked the model to evaluate whether it would try to blackmail someone in a contrived scenario, the J-Lens showed "fake" and "fictional" in the workspace.
And if edited out, the model was more likely to do the blackmailing.
Dedicated machines can obviously solve an issue more efficiently, but it’s still good to have a machine that can do most things adequately.
As an example, you can have an automated washer, dryer, and folder, sure. But what if you wanted to automate the retrieval of dirty laundry and the delivery of clean laundry ? That would need to be some sort of robot to travel throughout an environment (fit through human sized areas, open doors, walk steps) to collect and deliver things. And if I have a robot roaming around the house, I would prefer to just buy one robot that could do many things rather than have to buy it to just collect things and more expensive machines as well.
I don't think anything is actually "necessary" if you want to be strict on definitions.
I think it's absolutely fair and unlikely to be illegal to use a cookie to remember cookie preferences. Unless the cookie value was not yes/no, but something like a precise timestamp that could be used for uniquely identifying.
Anubis's primary goal is to prevent web scrapers from DDoSing a website. It's not meant to be an unbeatable challenge or only allow humans like Google's more privacy-invasive captchas.
You do the proof of work, you get the content. Not all web scrapers are willing to do the work, which reduces the strain put on web servers.
It's by no means a perfect system. It's goals in part prevent it from doing so. It tries to not be too annoying for humans, to not block real users, and not be privacy invasive.
It’s meant to be both funny AND highly unprofessional; Anubis makes money of licensing a version of the firewall where you can change the image.
It’s a good strategy; personal websites and blogs can display the anime girl without fear, and companies that care about their image end up paying. Win-win.
I suspect we do. In my view, people using free software take the gift they were given as-is, and if they don’t like it, they either contribute in a way the giver appreciates, or move on. They certainly don’t whine about their free gift online, and especially don’t complain that their free gift isn’t professional enough for them.
So no bug reports. No wishing that things could be improved in any way.
All users all must take what they are given. If they do not like what they are given, then they must only contribute in the ways that are prescribed from on-high. No freeloading. No complaining. No discussion, even in the form of a comment on a completely separate, independent forum. If they are unwilling or unable to follow these rules, then they must pound sand.
Am I on the right track here with the intended restraint?
Indeed. They owe me nothing, and I owe them nothing.
We are all free to have a slice of the infinitely-divisible cake, and also to talk about it when that behooves us. We can say positive things when it suits us, but we can also say whatever else we wish to as well.
Arch is a largely non-commercial project. You’re free to not use it, if that’s where you draw your personal line. You must be a really principled person then, who no doubt also won’t tolerate much worse offenses.
I don't see what's so offensive about it. If it had huge boobs or something that would be one thing, but it's just a regular mascot character. Out of all the "necessary evils" that get inserted to keep a service above water, that anime girl image is the least offensive one I can think of. It's still completely normalized to show ads for porn on sites like youtube. Captchas are an insult, with the "photo challenge" type being a full on slap in the face most of the time. I would look at 1000 anime girls to avoid one street sign captcha.
I don't know what it is, either. But it creeps me out and makes me feel dirty every time it shows up.
It does this in ways that a boring corpo captcha or Cloudflare prompt do not, so it's presence of this artwork more than it is the temporary time-wasting impediment that seems to do it.
People have irrational reactions to things sometimes, and I am people.
Anubis’s silly, harmless images do a good job of driving away the traffic I don’t want on my personal site. Anyone who couldn’t abide seeing a cartoon for half a second wouldn’t likely be fun to interact with.
That's my experience on M4 Mac Mini and M3 MacBook Air.