@belochka@lemmy.world

comments

• SEO is not the problem, the problem is that it’s not balanced with opposing interest.

  I’ll explain: there’s no mechanism to reward fighting it, and there’s no mechanism to reward providing computing resources to some ideal public search engine, sort of modern take at Archie, that would allow complex queries, would be federated and wouldn’t rate results by some obscure metric.

  I mean that if, suppose, some sort of (for public indexes) a mechanism similar to garbage collection in programming existed for search engines, where the referenced objects to be preserved would be those taken from some modern alternative of trusted web rings and directories, and the rest would be discarded as it should, you could have a usable search engine with no obscure metrics.

  The problems here are - 1) web rings and directories were not a technical concept, but a social one, a kind of webpages, 2) trust was also social, 3) you need to reward people making these, these can only be made by people.

  Which is where I want to say that maybe cryptobros were much better than AI bros, since they have produced some means to make that.

  Good rings and directories can be rewarded by cryptocurrency payments. Their consistency can be tracked via blockchains, that’s one of the good uses, I think. And the same thing with trust.

  Then the actual content of indexes might be shared via some Kademlia-like network.

  In short, you need ability to pay for good things made by people, which was a problem in the golden age of the Web, and you need to make search engines not the enemy of web rings and directories, but something working on top of them.

  There’s a lot of misguided enthusiasm over taking people out of the loop and somehow making a system that will purely automatically find what we need, there’s no such thing. Web rings and directories were how it should be done. There just should have been a different model of layers in that whole “Web” thing. Rings and directories being technical objects and not a kind of webpages, tying together pages and groups of pages, and indexers walking over those of them someone wants to track in a standard way. It just should be structured. Probably links (references) should also be a separate object, containing versions of two pages, the source and the target, position inside them and some display information. Not a link inside the page object.

  OK, I’m thinking about this again, what the hell.

  on ‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12h ago

• I think in older search engines the results were not rated at all, and you could use syntax similar to SQL.

  Using them as sort of a Web index. Would be very useful if not for all the bots and SEO sites.

  Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo and others gradually reduced that to just a set of keywords.

  on ‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13h ago

• Yes, that’s how plenty of 60s’ and 70s’ sci-fi stories were about finding gems in the dust, and much of XIX century gothic stuff.

  That’s sarcasm. Each time is like no other, but also the grass is always greener 100 years ago, and it’s always somehow better and worse at the same time.

  But then, of course, there are tendencies and periods which won’t be remembered kindly or won’t be remembered at all.

  I have only one question about that title - why the hell would anyone play a game with ads? People play games to relax, to get some rest from society, or to have some personal time with their friends mowing down cockroach hordes or something like that defending their city-fortress.

  Until competitors are able to develop and sell games without such ads, people will just play those.

  on Microsoft Patents Technique for Inserting Ads Into Videogames While You’re Playing Them. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 1d ago

• sometimes well over a decade ago.

  Sometimes before I was born, that’d be 3 decades ago.

  Networked collaborative office applications were a thing before 1995, BTW. Networks were not quite up to the task, but the rest was there.

  Famous things like Word, Photoshop, AutoCAD and even raytracers were already feature-complete (by the computing ability of that time).

  The Web (not the current one, but the hand-edited HTML pages by amateurs, Perl scripts as CGI, web rings and directories one) was the main new revolutionary thing in those, as you might have noticed, it’s also the very thing they are trying to destroy from all angles.

  The overarching problem is that people who want you to buy things you don’t need and not buy things you need from someone else and not tell them to go to hell are able to push regulations and standards in their favor. They are joined by power-hungry people in governments in that.

  All that is tangential to personal computers. A personal computer is a very powerful concept, especially with the Web (as it existed), and there are people trying to dilute and disperse and destroy that.

  It’s all similar to printing press, mass media, widespread literacy, freedom of speech, all these things. A very important thing to protect.

  on LibreOffice developer explains why it cannot display some Microsoft Office charts in c/technology@lemmy.world · 1d ago

• That’s because didactics and urbanism of today are not science-driven, or more precisely, they are science driven, but aimed at things different than stated.

  There’s the famous city benches example, that today’s typical benches are only useful for sitting in one inconvenient pose not doing anything useful and not moving, and for not too long, you won’t even be able to relax. And that’s considered good urbanism, it disallows people to lie down on a bench (that’s in itself not too bad a thing, who the hell decided we all should be upright stick-in-the-butt serious types, preferably in suits, with faces like from ads, only doing things the accepted way? what’s the problem in someone sleeping a few hours on a bench? it attracts drunks and homeless? they’ll make their own bench of cardboard and junk, I promise you it won’t smell better), to take conversational poses while sitting on a bench (like when playing chess or drinking coffee or eating a sandwich or whatever, use it as a social space), to even rest - one would think benches are for resting.

  It’s being justified in various ways, but in fact these “urbanists” are not too different from police agents, their only goal is to destroy opportunities for public social spaces in urban areas forming. They are approaching the problem scientifically, just not the one they are claiming to approach. They don’t want you to just meet and talk with strangers, or hang out with your friends, without all the control apparatus of FAANG moderation, whitelist of allowed ways to communicate typical for today’s Web, blackbox recommendations and no agency at all. That’s also why today’s urban park zones are more like green streets than like well-treated small forests.

  It’s the same with learning environments for children and playgrounds. It’s being claimed that those “safe spaces and only vetted ways to communicate” environments and approaches are scientifically justified for didactics, for that they are not, but they condition children to obey authority. It’s aimed to discourage them from thinking outside of the presented ruleset, from verifying and checking claimed reality, and from experimenting before believing. Like those idiotic colorful playgrounds with nothing really to do, which is why children are usually not very excited with them. If you take a child to a zoo, they’ll look at animals all the time and never be bored, and they’ll play in all the spaces around, just because those are neutral things like containers for junk and benches (normal ones) and signs. But in a dedicated playground (a modern one, with all that colored plastic round crap) they’ll be bored to hell, because those are not designed to be interesting for children. They might play in the surroundings, because, well, they usually don’t erase the district around that new playground, but those playing in the new playground itself are usually like 4-6 years old at best.

  It’s all crap aimed at somehow “growing” and “conditioning” people who will be better material for what these jerks want the humanity to be, with their likes being the ones making policies, of course.

  It’s the lowest quality human material experimenting on others’ children.

  Each and every such initiative should be met with Molotov cocktails and just somehow broken legs for those pushing them.

  Because, no matter the inconveniences, universal city spaces are necessary with all the homeless and drunks and junkies and exhibitionists and hooligans included, and environments for children allowing to learn are also necessary.

  Those doing all this “safety” crap only want to somehow grow a generation of humans that will obey.

  on EU Kids Act Won't Keep the Internet Accountable and Trustworthy in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago

• Kaspersky had, of what I’ve head, their hardened OS implementing Linux ABI (of 2.6 times). Was apparently even floating somewhere around the interwebs. Don’t know of commercial uses, but honestly there could be such amounts of money directed at solving that goal that all the Russians in Thailand combined won’t be very significant in comparison, even evaluated themselves as potential organs.

  on Putin casts online vote using unlicensed Windows on an American Dell PC in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago

• How do you know the pay is terrible?

  Qualified people seem to work for drug cartels and slavers. I’m certain a nation-state can provide both pay and conscience better than that.

  on Putin casts online vote using unlicensed Windows on an American Dell PC in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago

• How do you know?

  on Putin casts online vote using unlicensed Windows on an American Dell PC in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago

• I suppose people allowed near him are already sufficiently background-checked and threat-impressed.

  on Putin casts online vote using unlicensed Windows on an American Dell PC in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago

• Of what I’ve heard about Putin and computers, it’s very probable this PC is running some hardened Linux distribution made look like Windows, or even a specialized OS developed for him specifically, and all it does is show previously prepared pictures and run some narrow-function native applications too developed specifically for the occasion.

  And it’s probably not a persistent installation. And it’ll probably be destroyed after he’s done with voting or “voting”.

  And I can’t imagine it not being air-gapped with the kind of security measures they write about in other things.

  And I’m probably confidently wrong in many things, just the security part with computers that man seems to take seriously enough.

  Honestly this is right, when you are considering how wary you should be of this or that thing, it’s good to pay attention to what powerful people are doing of what seems more or less certain. They, of course, can afford some things impractical for you or me.

  on Putin casts online vote using unlicensed Windows on an American Dell PC in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago

• This wasn’t the case before 2022, but after MS no longer officially selling licenses in Russia, it’s everyone again.

  But it’s different, for things you can’t license because of sanctions piracy is seen as normal, for other things nobody cares, but people stopped pirating.

  In general, the ex-Soviet culture of not understanding copyright violations as real crime at all, period, is gone. It’s a few tech-savvy people, sometimes older, and “pirate party” idealists, and communists (not all of them by far).

  Those Russian piracy sites are, as a rule, banned in Russia. They mostly started 20+ years ago.

  However, those doing copyright protection in Russia are mostly former pirates who legalized their business via some acquaintances. Oops. I also doubt that Aldebaran (the e-book library), for example, licensed all of the books they give for a buck from authors, and with LitRes it’s also highly unlikely. There are plenty of other such Russian paid e-book libraries, movie sites and so on.

  It’s a common opinion in Russia that there’s some western “rule of law” which, if applied to Russia, could fix it, I think it’s the other way around, the main problem with Russia’s society is the inferiority complexes, the “rule of law” one among them, leading people to overlook brakes and feedbacks existing in the wild to good effect, when deciding what they want “fixed” and “civilized” to be good.

  That “rule of law” idea sometimes leads to following laws set by people who just don’t understand what “acting in good faith” means.

  EDIT: What I meant is that piracy situation in Russia is close to what’s it’s in the western countries now, except for sanctions. Younger people pirate, but not all of them. Older and middle age people often see piracy as something bad and shameful. In the “nobody in Russia pays for software” times it was the other way around, most people didn’t understand the concept, and younger and more fashionable people had some licensed copies to boast and would tell their acquaintances that actually it’s very cool to buy official copies, pay for software, give it back to authors, and that otherwise it’d be theft and those people whose names are printed here and here wouldn’t really approve, to say the least.

  on Putin casts online vote using unlicensed Windows on an American Dell PC in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago

• “All by itself” usually doesn’t happen, “it” just stops looking like a problem for those not destroyed by “it”, and those destroyed by “it” stop existing.

  on ‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5d ago

• That’s not quite the thing. They know that people in various societies in the course of history could create artifacts getting much less in return than they’d get today in a market without LLMs. They just want those people to become crops in their fields, so to say. To reap and not sow.

  There’s the obvious problem with this, that there still are alternative business models of closed circles and ordering artifacts, not accepting offers to buy them. And, of course, that either it’s IP violation of ultimate proportions, or if it’s not, then they are going to have too much competition to get anything out of it anyway.

  So it’s either oligopoly with regulatory capture, or too much competition to make this profitable.

  They apparently want to make some theft legal and some not, a bit like copyright protection entities in ex-Soviet states, which are usually controlled by former pirates legalized (with ex-pirate electronic libraries which are now legitimate stores, except I’m confident they didn’t get consent of most authors whose books are being sold, similarly with movies and such), hunting their “honest pirate” competition.

  So - no, at the point this is mainstream, the only regulation of this should be aimed at enforcing existing laws against them. Then one can think of some, but before existing laws are being firmly enforced - no.

  Except enforcing existing laws can mean fines bigger than their capitalization and some life sentences for all chief people involved, and these are all “too big to fail” companies, so I don’t even know.

  If these companies are, figuratively, sentenced to death for doing this, then it’ll be a process of the century. It’ll define future. A bit like with Standard Oil and United Fruit Company. Or so I think.

  Except it might go differently, in their favor, then it won’t be a very nice future.

  on ‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6d ago

• At least they are going to pick one between copyright and using all the Web as accumulated material for their answering machine.

  on ‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6d ago

• Except the USA too makes small drones. It’s asymmetric, shields are temporarily useless, as if your adversary were no longer shooting arrows or soft lead musket rounds, using rifles with fast piercing rounds instead (I know there were shields against rifle rounds in WWI, just didn’t work well enough, because those were too heavy).

  Sometimes empires crash because of such tendencies, but we are talking about the empire which is propelling them, so - no. They’ll just start clearing trade routes with their own cheap autonomous weapons, probably.

  Might be genocide involved. Or perhaps with modern precision that won’t even be required.

  on Iran and Houthi rebels used Anthropic's Claude AI to target US warships and build hypersonic missiles — Houthi rebels also used the bot to code ballistic missile guidance systems in c/technology@lemmy.world · 14 Sep 2026

• That’s bad, but good, at least not in every metric this reduces inequality of real power.

  Almost that ancap dream of ancaps 3d-printing small drones keeping the statists in line, a peer-to-peer revolution, so to say, a smoothie anarchist rebellion, to abolish the cryptocurrencies’ Sound Toll.

  I know that always seemed fake and childish (I liked the idea, but still), except looking how that really can eventually start happening with propagation of such power, I’m not sure it is.

  on Iran and Houthi rebels used Anthropic's Claude AI to target US warships and build hypersonic missiles — Houthi rebels also used the bot to code ballistic missile guidance systems in c/technology@lemmy.world · 14 Sep 2026

• The description you are replying to is more fundamental.

  on Iran and Houthi rebels used Anthropic's Claude AI to target US warships and build hypersonic missiles — Houthi rebels also used the bot to code ballistic missile guidance systems in c/technology@lemmy.world · 14 Sep 2026

• Already doing it. Such things being openly marketed and discussed in news mean only that they are commonplace for all the governments having the money.

  Notice how Web’s popularity and stagnation coincided with stagnation of politics. It seems to be natural, but there is the undercurrent, I think, of civil societies having become more predictable and invisibly regulated.

  Well, I mean, in the initial stage the ground was ours, and then it was theirs, and then it was ours again, and then the somewhat longer period of it being theirs started and it is still so. Things change. Not always for worse. People sometimes feel as if the last flip of the coin were the last flip of the coin, period. That’s usually wrong.

  on Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026

• They are smart walking into that. They want exactly that. It’s you for whom it’s a dystopia.

  Honestly I no longer hope for propagation of such abilities to create feedbacks negating them.

  Seems to be too much power on the side of centralizing them and using them to build perfect totalitarianism with no laws, because administrative rule doesn’t require laws, just decisions. Laws are required in systems with some power balance depending on common agreement.

  At the same time there’s the much slower feedback loop of societies built that way degrading in the span of decades and societies preserving some competitiveness of will progressing. Except this will work as very slow evolutionary selection between shades of the former, because the latter won’t survive the initial stage.

  on Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026

• I’ve just realized what this family of technologies is - it’s an attack at capitalism.

  That word is hated here, but it’s generally a good thing, with one condition.

  When things marketed are something possible to supply an instruction for and to teach the customers basics of telling good stuff from bad stuff, sort of good lightbulbs versus bad lightbulbs, good radio receiver versus bad one, not very deep knowledge, but high school understanding of electricity, mechanics, chemistry, stuff like that.

  So most of all it’s a family of technologies good for generating “something” that looks plausible for a person about things they themselves don’t do. Meaning - deceiving laymen.

  So, for the commie types, it’s partially good news - it’s their part of history finally, and partially bad news - cause the flood wall they were trying to break because they thought it spoiled the view is being finally broken from the other side by a stream of sewage.

  Just a random passing thought.

  on Harvard Is Selling a $699 Course Taught by A.I. Clones of Its Faculty in c/technology@lemmy.world · 24 Aug 2026

• Sue them.

  I mean, should if you can defend your rights. Anyway, posted from Moscow, Russia, so I’m stopping.

  on Google buys Spirit Airlines data for AI training for just $10 million — purchase includes hundreds of millions of emails, Microsoft Teams chats, billions of flight pricing records, and anonymized pass in c/technology@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026

• Quality control was there because competition and customer agency were there.

  Now your typical customer is an ape. They are less brain than what Apple stuff was intended for in the 00s. By far.

  Quality and competition are reliant upon customers with agency. While customers are now the kind of people who are secretly thinking they are almost there in inventing a warp engine, because Claude told them so.

  on Best Buy 'repairs' customer's gaming laptop by simply removing half the RAM— claims unit in question only accepts 32 GB of RAM despite listing a 64GB configuration in c/technology@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026

• No they can’t, this is a good faith problem. Fundamentally. You can invent all the words you want and any law will somehow be a couple of terms short of covering the particular description exactly and without doubt.

  You can’t solve this with properly formulated laws, you can solve this with a sufficiently participatory legal system, and British legal tradition is better for that than Roman legal tradition in the first place, but it still is derived from popular power.

  In other words, from societies forming the responses by networks of sufficiently pissed citizens.

  The alternative was the government and big fish being interested in doing the right thing somehow, not the case here.

  This, I think, is related to how all over the world laws have become very precise, literal and with plenty of special cases, which wasn’t the case in the 60s even in socialist countries.

  To replace good faith mechanism with literalism, which allows with sufficient power to create cases immune to law, because some special cases are not written into laws yet.

  Also that naturally makes legal proceedings more expensive.

  on A judge orders Kalshi to stop offering most of its prediction contracts in Washington state, after finding it likely violated state gambling-related laws in c/technology@lemmy.world · 14 Aug 2026

• Watch lists are so 1937. The whole point of building datacenters for that kind of thing is to not have the separation between people on watch lists and people not on watch lists.

  So nobody should be ashamed by your measure. We live in a wonderful time when, instead of selecting few suspicious individuals to monitor, you can monitor everyone automatically and don’t have that risk.

  It’s like lossless encoding, like FLAC, versus lossy encoding, like MP3. It’s better to have the former if your resources allow it.

  Watch lists have that downside of being a Russian roulette, what if your watch lists give you a wrong impression of the society outside the watch lists? You might think you have it under control, while you don’t.

  With everyone being monitored if you think you have it under control, you really do.

  That just was a bit too expensive, but times they are a-changing.

  That’s really nice, isn’t it?

  on The Government is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Aug 2026

• Yes, of course it’s a surprise that people from a fighting military’s most important branch won over a bunch of lazy peacetime professionals from a military of a country that doesn’t have hostile neighbors by land.

  That was sarcasm!!! I don’t get where’s the “new” in such news.

  That’s not what US military is doing anyway, with supreme logistics and air supremacy putting army into such a situation would be a deliberate choice.

  on U.S. and Ukrainian Forces Went Head-to-Head in an Exercise. Ukraine’s Drones Won. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Aug 2026

• Somehow people sharing your point of view in my experience are mostly men and mostly imagine it as lots of handsome young-looking people walking around in half-transparent elastic body suits in some future where everyone is “fixed” to be fit and look nice. And in that kind of sci-fi books somehow women are prevalent among characters, but the leading ones are men.

  You get the general idea, yes?

  I’m a very social awkward person, but honestly that worldview hints you should get out more. Again, I should follow my own advice, but.

  on Woman Calls Out Doctor Wearing Smart Glasses During Consultation Where She Had To Take Off Her Clothes: 'They Need To Be Banned' in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Aug 2026

• There are two parts to this:

  1. Ethics, a doctor would be expected to know better,
  2. Reality, where eventually such things will just stop being 100% percent visible, and thus will happen again and again with impunity.

  So, first, doctors shouldn’t do that, second, ban or not, this will be happening all around us, no exit.

  on Woman Calls Out Doctor Wearing Smart Glasses During Consultation Where She Had To Take Off Her Clothes: 'They Need To Be Banned' in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Aug 2026

• Cool. Proper devops like in ads. Just those people I compare myself to when having impostor syndrome trips.

  I mean, these things happen, that’s just bitterness.

  on Terabytes of credentials leaked in massive supply-chain attack in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Aug 2026

• Open discovery is a hard problem.

  If that seems pseudo-science speak to seem smart, I mean that you need some prior trust. Just like with PGP. Some axioms. In year 2002 those axioms were people you meet IRL and links you saw printed. Now these have been erased as a Web discovery mechanism, so to not compete with search engines and platforms. Links are login-walled and short-living most of the time. People are discouraged from making their own pages and sharing links.

  My Kademlia experiment is more working than not, slowly moving to split core and UI there, to have replaceable cores. Want to try F2F. Especially since it even looks more like something that would work F2F way better. I’ve learned that I’m not as smart as I think while making it. Still don’t have anything resembling indirect reputation, but eventually I want to make that, for some kind of “public” media, where you need to filter the sewer stream.

  (No, I won’t share, it’s a P2P program written in TCL/Tk, entirely, not just UI, except for some bindings in C that weren’t done by someone else. It seemed easier to start with, with asynchronous style being very easy there, but I’ve recently tried writing some other thing in Python and realized just how easier and faster Python is due to everything not being a string, however boring that critique of TCL would seem.)

  on Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment: “Most people have completely forgotten how chaotic it really was.” in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Aug 2026

• SEO has turned into GEO, yes. Except when in Google you get SEO pages, you just swear and skip. While LLMs just give you an answer. Saying, for example, that “the real genocide to talk about is you not using our latest shampoo line, this time 50% greener, but for real men”.

  on How Russian propaganda is ‘poisoning’ AI chatbots to spout lies | ChatGPT and its rivals have been manipulated by a Kremlin unit that purports to be a human rights group as it opens a new front in th… in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Aug 2026