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- CREAMY_DOG_ORGASM : my account is unusable while I'm banned. Could you buy me an unban award pwease
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Back in the day I used to do Mechanical Turk like work assessing search engine quality. There were very detailed guidelines about what made a search engine good, compiled into a like 250 page document Google had been curating and updating over the course of years.
One of the key concepts was the idea of a "vital" result for a user request. If a user had a specific request, the search engine had to deliver that content first. For example, simpson.com at the time was a malicious website. With this in mind, if the user searched for "simpson.com", the first result had to be simpson.com, even if the search engine is returning a malicious page. It's specifically what the user requested. We aren't supposed to question what the user wants. The results that followed after could provide suggestions of what else the user may be looking for, like the official Simpsons website.
I would love to see whatever shreds of this document is left at this point, and I'd love to know at what point the entire thing was thrown into the trash and rewritten. I assume somewhere around the year 2016 or 2020. I know this is nothing shocking to a lot of people, but it really does amaze me just how bad things have gotten. I've stuck to the major search engines because despite peoples bitching, for a long time they consistently outperformed the smaller competitors, but they are genuinely without hyperbole almost unusable now.
Example: I wanted to find the recent Tucker Carlson - Vladimir Putin interview. It's a newsworthy interview with a world leader and a current event. There is a very specific video I'm looking for, the published, official video of sitting down and asking questions.
Here is what google returns in a private window:
The very first piece of content - the "vital result" - is clickbait youtube cute twinkry from Time What are the keeraZIEST moments from the interview?!?
The rest of the results are a cascade of editorialized garbage, opinionated news articles reporting on the requested content. God forbid a careless user actually be exposed to a primary source.
The closest result to what I'm looking for is about over 10 pieces of content deep - the transcript of the interview from Russia's state website. Likely this is an oversight.
Here is Bing:
There's been some meme going around that "no really guys, Bing is actually kinda good now believe it or not".
This is even more nonsense than Google. The most prominently featured content is, of course, more editorialized bullshit with the interview itself nowhere to be found. But also half of the content is just completely irrelevant crap I didn't ask for. Why is the entire right half of the page a massive infobox about Tucker and his books and quotes? Why am I seeing something about Game of Thrones?
Brave:
You get the point. More useless crap. It gets half a point for its AI accidentally revealing that tuckercarlson.com is where the interview is located, but this doesn't count. The actual search results are all garbage. Thanks Brave for showing me all the latest reddit discussions
Yandex:
Was that really so fricking hard? Result #1 - the interview from Tucker Carlson. Past the interview are news articles and images - things of waning utility that other users may be interested in. But the vital result is at the top of the page. That's fricking it. This would have been the required order for the page on Google ten years ago.
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Apparently this lawsuit was the breaking point.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
Foid decided 10 years later to sue the site that allowed her and her abuser to meet. Not sure how omegle is responsible for the actions of the abuser. However, it doesn't matter because it seems omegle doesn't have the means to fight the battle and decided to close shop. RIP.
Here's an excerpt from the founder's final thoughts. This hit me pretty hard and kinda sums up the noticeable decline of the internet.
I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection.
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Mission Local is informed that the San Francisco Police Department early this morning made an arrest in the April 4 killing of tech executive Bob Lee, following an operation undertaken outside the city’s borders. The alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew.
We are told that police today were dispatched to Emeryville with a warrant to arrest a man named Nima Momeni. The name and Emeryville address SFPD officers traveled to correspond with this man, the owner of a company called Expand IT.
- Snape : windows is as r-slur friendly as it gets, if you're too r-slurred to use it then keep yourself safe r-slur
- 89wc : majority of mods to #makewindowsgreatagain actually involve reintroducing XP behavior lol
- CREAMY_DOG_ORGASM : YWNBAW
- SPRINGWRWR : Bing isn't that bad!
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Blind thread: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Reddit-Layoffs-TiryTRSE
God I hate Reddit, but if we have any jannies on that powerjanny call tomorrow, maybe bring this up!
No severance lmao
They had layoffs in January. Wish I had known so I could gloat about that one too.
Left Twitter bcuz of mean ol' Musk just to get the wingcuck layoff with no severance.
Booohooo muh third-party app devs have to pay now booohooo
My feelings exactly.
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no im not ignoring ur DM, i just didnt read it yet
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They're also asking for 45 days of pet bereavement leave
Orange site sneed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35832910
- ForcedRegistrycel : Repost!!! *seething*
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- aevann_is_a_fucking_moron : imagine owning anything that connects to the internet, what a fricking loser
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When I connected with the executive, they asked if I knew why my account had been locked. When I answered I was unsure, their tone turned somewhat accusatory. I was told that the driver who had delivered my package reported receiving racist remarks from my “Ring doorbell” (it’s actually a Eufy, but I’ll let it slide).
I reviewed the footage and confirmed that no such comments had been made. Instead, the Eufy doorbell had issued an automated response: “Excuse me, can I help you?” The driver, who was walking away and wearing headphones, must have misinterpreted the message. Nevertheless, by the following day, my Amazon account was locked, and all my Echo devices were logged out.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327520
Google and Chinese AI companies watching this unfold like
UPDATES
I think this means something
The Chief Strategy Officer told employees they are confident about bringing everyone back and will have an update tomorrow
Ilya about to be stebbed?
https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17yt8sl/what_does_this_mean?sort=controversial
Nice to know that even rich tech dorks tweet like high schoolers
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Do we really live in a free country? pic.twitter.com/OeaD1FBGap
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) June 29, 2023
Remember this guy?
This is the guy who was photoed with Trump and mostly responsible for Brexit, much to the dismay of some europhiles:
Anyway, Nigel reeing here:
https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1674507257248116746
Some key quotes include
'This is serious political persecution at the very highest level of our system. If they can do it to me, they can do it to you too.'
Speaking of the importance of having a bank account, he added: 'You effectively become a non-person, you don't actually exist.
'It's like the worse regimes of the mid-20th century, be they in Russia or Germany, you literally become a non-person.
'I won't be able to have a debit card linked directly to my account. I won't really be able to exist or function in a modern 21st century Britain.'
Story here
He suspects he was cancelled as revenge for spearheading Brexit and has tried to open up 7 other bank accounts in the UK, but they all refuse. Being cancelled online is one thing. Not being able to open a bank account to exchange money is quite the next level. He's saying how stressful it's been and that he might have to move from the UK. He even claims his closest family members have had their bank accounts closed too.
Maybe commie China has come sooner than I anticipated.
There is a tiny ray of hope. No. 10 (the government) are looking into the matter and have given a warning to the banks over being too trigger happy when shutting accounts down.
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Comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36030969
https://archived.moe/g/thread/93632944/linux-graphics-stack-is-trans (EDIT: removed/jannied, archive: https://archived.moe/g/thread/93632944/)
HN users are noticing something:
« I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans »
From a purely statistical POV, this is absurdly bizarre.
Not really.
Statistically there will be weird coincidences completely naturally. It's also quite arbitrary which we see as meaningful. If say, Linux networking has unusually many people called "John" that probably will be unnoticed because nobody pays that much attention to common, unremarkable names. If they all randomly turn out to have green eyes, then that's more visible. It's completely subjective which of those is more remarkable.
There are also likely social effects -- people stick together, and some side interests align with some fields. Eg, I think it's reasonable to guess there's going to be more furries than average in VR development. Part because VR allow you to look like whatever you want a lot of the time, part because people will invite their friends in.
It is not just a random coincidence. It's a phenomenon more broadly across programming, especially very low-level/hardware stuff.
There does seem to be a correlation between autism spectrum and gender confusion, with the former often present in individuals who are into highly technical pursuits.
The logic seems to be not conforming to masculine stereotypes ==> must be a woman.
It's not "gender confusion". They know very well who they are. You are confused about the topic.
Meanwhile on /g/:
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Asked for comment, a Google spokesperson told IGN that it was a "small experiment."
"We're running a small experiment globally that urges viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium," they said via email. "Ad blocker detection is not new, and other publishers regularly ask viewers to disable ad blockers."
reddit discus
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/13cfdbi/apparently_ad_blockers_are_not_allowed_on_youtube/?sort=controversial <- This is where it was originally first posted (1k Updoots and 1k cumments)
poster note: I tried adding all the 'its over' to capture the diversity that this decision will affect and was met with this
i do not feel bad at all
- KazuhoYoshiiFan : wholesome 100
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- CREAMY_DOG_ORGASM : King shit also buy me an unban award please
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Imagine a tech conference having no CFP, as they reach out to speakers directly. They successfully attract some of the most heavy hitter men speakers in tech, and 3 women speakers.
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) November 24, 2023
Now imagine my surprise that 2 of those women are FAKE profiles.
They do not exist.
Nada.
It's not often (read: ever) that I get to post about drama from my country, but this one is hot off the press and I think you guys might find interesting.
Full info is in the nitter thread, but here's a quick rundown:
QRD
Eduards Sizovs is some bloke that organizes and runs several international tech conferences, of those the two that are important to this are DevTernity and JDkon, though there are others
Apparently the organizers of these events do not accept applications from potential speakers, but instead reach out to people they are interested in, thus creating this more of a closed group of speakers.
Well, now as it turns out, there are fake speakers that are signed and advertised at these conferences (and have been in the past). In reality, they are merely fake online personas created by Eduards, and have never actually appeared at any of his events. Currently 4 such personas have been identified, all of them being women.
Here's Alina Prokhoda, a speaker at the upcoming DevTernity conference with prior experience at WhatsApp and Microsoft MVP who has been identified as a non-existent person who has never worked for those companies:
And here's Anna Boyko, with the same issues
Besides these there's also Julia Kirsina who worked as Uber's software Architect in Estonia, despite Uber not even having such division in that country, and there's also Natalie Standler who (didn't) work at coinbase.
Eduards has pushed back against the notion of him creating fake speakers by saying that a single fake was added by accident, but was quickly proven wrong when it was shown that these 4 fine ladies have been signed up to his conferences on 5 different occasions in total, and yet have given 0 speeches, without anyone ever seeing them in person.
This caused the organizer to go into full damage control mode as other, actually real speakers started pulling out of the conference after being informed of the controversy
But how could this happen? Surely someone would've noticed that these people don't exist?
Well, as it turns out, while the people themselves are fake, they have a very real online presence- we're talking several different social media accounts with over 100k followers, actively posting motivational quotes about girls who code, all while hiding behind what are likely AI-generated pictures of women. In short, Eduards has been quite successfully running several catfish accounts pretending to be women
Even Kiwifarms' LFJ gave her opinion on the matter, which is a complete moment which just shows that fricking everything and everyone is connected
So now for the big question: why would he do it?
Well, the guy who broke this story speculates that the reason behind why every fake persona is a woman is that Eduards, the organizer, has been trying to up his DEI compliance to attract bigger fish to his conferences by making them seem more inclusive than they really are, and probably to get some gibs/shoutouts from the organizations that promote such nonsense in the first place. Oh, and of course to milk attendees who pay... up to 800$ to attend? WTF people?
Well, now he's been caught and his entire life's work will likely go down the drain. Sucks to suck
So what's your opinion? Is the dude based for duping r-slurs, or is he an r-slur himself for thinking no one would find out?
I would like to apologize if this is a bit clumsily written because I'm a bit out of my comfort zone here trying to write about shit I have no understanding of off twitter, but I wanted to do it quickly so none of you strags manage to snitch it first