Schadrach

The idea is that Spain and Portugal are part of the “West”, but not Spanish or Portuguese colonial offshoots, which are mostly South American and haven’t fared as well as the colonial offshoots from other nations of western Europe.

They care about companies they have less control over and a foreign adversary has more control over invading privacy, for reasons unrelated to seeing privacy as a good in itself.

The only times I’ve had it be remotely helpful is when you want something specific that’s going to appear near the top of search results and is also likely to be buried in a bunch of irrelevant faff. Which is to say that occasionally “search for X and summarize the top result” is a useful tool but not often enough for them to front and center it like they do.

For example recipes. You can’t copyright a recipe, so recipes tend to be buried in a lot of crap that isn’t the actual recipe.

I mean, that’s because googles AI over view is designed to summarize search results on a topic. On one hand that reduces the degree to which it will simply hallucinate, on the other sometimes the top search result is already as concise as it can be at the target grade level of writing.

“Yeah but my friends use Messenger!”

My mom uses Messenger. Acts like texting is too hard for her but Facebook Messenger isn’t. Literally the only reason I have it installed on my phone, because otherwise I don’t get the message when she needs something. If I could pry her away from it I could finally be done with the thing forever.

Even then, you have local voice recognition. You don’t need to stream all microphone recordings to some central server for processing, you just do voice recognition and keep a log of say the last 100 nouns and a high priority log for the last twenty nouns used near verbs like purchase, buy or get. Then send those lists to the ad provider as context. All the hard work is done on the client device and the same backend used for ad context on web pages can be used for this as well.

Advertising company makes it harder to block ads on their browser, news at 11.

Or did anyone forget that they made an explicit effort to block another ad blocking extension a while back, including blocking it from the Chrome store, blocking you from installing it manually and even blocking at least some versions of it from being manually installed in developer mode?

Ad nauseam, because it also simulated ad clicks and thus ruined their metrics.

EDIT: Fucking phone autocorrect. “as clocks” -> “ad clicks”.

Free speech is protection from government oppression. Last I checked, I’m not the government, neither is Lemmy, neither is any other site on the internet that doesn’t end in .gov (typically), and this isn’t a free speech issue despite what MAGA idiots would have people think. If the platform wants that shit there, so be it, and I won’t use it when it’s painted on their front page. I use Lemmy because I was here (on another instance originally) before the MAGA weirdos decided to join to spread their bullshit, so I’ve had time to curate – apparently I have to do it again, or simply leave this instance.

This appears to be an argument against a position I wasn’t taking. You just appear to be upset that alternative video streaming sites don’t ban people you disagree with. Good luck with that.

Just because I use the internet (which I have been doing since only a few years after the WWW was invented), doesn’t mean I have to tolerate bullshit when I see it.

Hey, you may been around longer than I have. Only had the internet since the mid 90s. So it depends on how you define “a few”. It was a very different beast back then, and I for one miss the relative lack of concentrated corporate control and mandatory advertiser-friendliness.

Perhaps if everyone was like this, the internet wouldn’t be the shithole it has become.

I chalk that up to said concentrated corporate control and mandatory advertiser-friendliness, but then I don’t think it’s become a shithole because people I disagree with also have a voice, but because of aggressive monetization and the enshittification that that inevitably entails.

And I’m done responding now, because clearly you and many others in this thread will never understand, or even care to understand.

No, you are well understood. You are opposed to alternative video platforms (and apparently some other unnamed Lemmy instance) because those things do not necessarily reinforce your echo chamber, and you consider that reinforcement a vital feature. I’m waaay over on the far end of the spectrum, and chose my instance specifically because they do not defederate, they keep everything available and leave it up to the user to decide what they do or do not wish to see (and I to date have nothing blocked - no users, no communities, no servers).

You do know there’s a big difference between a “default” option and a “mandatory” setting, right? Specifically that you do, in fact, have a choice to change a default?

Not forcing the user to proactively make a choice is not the same thing as denying the user the ability to choose.

(such as screaming fire in a movie theater when there is no fire)

This idiom comes from an analogy in a SCOTUS opinion arguing that checks notes it’s a violation of the Espionage Act to distribute flyers that oppose the draft. That case was later partly overturned in Brandenburg v Ohio and the standard is that speech isn’t incitement unless it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. To the point that “$SLUR should hang from trees” is probably protected speech (because the lawless action isn’t imminent), but “you guys, grab that $SLUR over there so we can string them up!” probably isn’t.

So defending free speech inevitably means defending white supremacists and the like because free speech doesn’t actually protect anything if it doesn’t protect upsetting, outrageous, or offensive speech (and likewise, the arbiter of what counts as offensive is not guaranteed to always be on your side). It’s why the ACLU has defended them on more than one occasion. H.L. Mencken put it best.

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” ― H.L. Mencken

I mean, that is technically promoting violence against an identifiable minority political group.

Let’s see…I’ve been banned from subs I’ve never viewed so much as a single post from for having commented on other, entirely unrelated subs.

I’ve been banned from r/atheism for “egregious immorality” which ironically sounds like the sort of thing you’d be banned from a religious sub for.

The point of course is that if you don’t want to see it, you refuse to use any platform that allows others to see it. Which must make it awfully hard to use the internet. Surprised you manage to even use Lemmy.

Search engines other than Google seem to be able to index reddit just fine though. I thought the Reddit deal was about API access to make for easier AI training data, also I hadn’t seen anything saying that such a deal would be exclusive to Google.

Who do they have an exclusive deal with? Are there sites you can currently only search on Google? Or browsers or similar that require you to use Google?

The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.

You could just go to other search engines and run the same queries and compare results.

For example, I did a search on 6 different search engines earlier today looking for a specific Reddit thread related to an update to a certain Skyrim mod without quite naming the mod (because I couldn’t remember the exact name of the mod, and was hoping to find the Reddit thread to get the mod name or Nexus link). All 6 had the Nexus page for the mod itself within the top 3 results, and all of them but Google and Yandex had the Reddit thread in question on the first page.

Google can be REQUIRED to give users A CHOICE of Search Engines.

Don’t they, err, already do this?

I mean a search engine is literally just a website and absolutely nothing prevents you from just going to duckduckgo.com or bing.com or wherever. Don’t think Chrome prevents you from accessing other search engines in general, and last time I used it (admittedly a while back) it had a setting to change the search engine used by default if you just typed something into the address bar.

There’s an argument to make that digital data is by default a post-scarcity sort of thing and that in a post-scarcity environment communism is the only reasonable system. But we don’t operate in a post scarcity environment for physical goods and services, and there’s really not anything we can point to historically that suggests a communist takeover doesn’t do terrible things to availability, quality and variety of food available.

The most recent season has a surprising amount of sexually assaulting Huey though. The first time they even play it for laughs.

The Constitution didn’t establish a right to vote for men in general or any men in particular. It left the question of which citizens were allowed to vote fully up to the states.

Or to go deeper: The Declaration of Independence limited voting to landowners. The Constitution set no regulations whatsoever for which citizens could vote, leaving it wholly up to the states. There are various trends in state laws over time but nothing federal regarding who can vote (other than various immigration laws about who can be naturalized). Until the 15th Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Technically, men did not have a federally protected right to vote until women did, the 19th amendment. Though state laws had expanded to give essentially all free white men the vote in every state shortly before the Civil War, but that’s not from that federal point of view you’re so worried about.