Thankfully there are other options because you just nailed the two places I refuse to ever get gas from when there is any other option. If there was a good third option I’d take it here, but while Google commands so much market share and a new competitor would probably siphon users from Bing (and it’s not enough users) I don’t think a real alternative will come. I’m intrigued by kagi, though.

It’s on the falling edge of the hype curve. It’s quite expected, and you’re right about where it’s headed. It can’t do everything people want/expect but it can do some things really well. It’ll find its niche and people will continue to refine it and find new uses, but it’ll never be the threat/boon folks have been expecting.

People are using it for things it’s not good at thinking it’ll get better. And it has to an extent. It is technically very capable of writing prose or drawing pictures, but it lacks any semblance of artistry and it always will. I’ve seen trained elephants paint pictures, but they are interesting for the novelty, not for their expression. AI could be the impetus for more people to notice art and what makes good art special.

If that was what you took from my post, give it another read. I’m not pro MS. I’m pro not feeding Google. And Bing is fine.

Supposedly there’s a paid one that is good. I haven’t tried. The thing is Google is completely enshittified. They don’t have to care about you or the sites you search. So my theory is Bing is better because they are hungrier and anything that takes away market share from Google is good—but I’m fully aware that Microsoft was just as shitty as Google and will be again if they get back on top.

Everything else I know of is either just an alternate front end for one of them or an aggregator of both. So you’re right, there’s precious little alternative to Google. But it’s almost bad enough I’m ready for the return of web rings of good sites vouching for each other.

Google results are actually already pretty terrible. They just have tremendous inertia.

That makes perfect sense and explains why you can’t fix it just by bypassing blocking temporarily and reinstalling the app.

This is the way to go. I tried pihole using Samsung smart features, but if you block the telemetry eventually your apps stop working and you can’t get them working again without doing a factory reset with blocking down. It’s prohibitively a pain in the ass, taking hours every time YouTube stops working.

Never had any issues with Roku on pihole.

Flash and applets. Let’s just have a do over of the 90’s and early 00’s.

/s

I appreciate the information and the links. I didn’t mean to imply this isn’t exciting or useful technology, just that when an article is pure hype I come away thinking someone is trying to sell me something, not give me actual information.

That sounds really impressive. But describing it as “the best thing ever” really has my skepticism at full mast.

ETA: I can’t find any mention of a single drawback or tradeoff to this new technology. That makes this a marketing piece rather than journalism. Nothing is ever better in every conceivable way than the current state of the art.

Ultimately the reviewer souls be paid for their efforts because honest reviews are their livelihood. Saying, “I liked this and if my review helped, buy through this link to support me for free,” is a fairly innocuous way.

Is it completely unproblematic? No, but earning money for your opinion is always going to be fraught.

Yeah I’m clearly not making my point very well so I’ll just leave it be.

I didn’t mean to imply the suit isn’t legitimate. I’m sure out of all of them Starlink is the worst because Elon is such a fucking moron. I’m just not going to cheer the winner either way. I’m glad all the bad guys are fighting and I hope they have a bad quarter over it.

Wow. I hate everyone here. I can’t even say I hope the lawyers take everyone for lots of money because if someone is a lawyer for one of these companies, I hate them, too.

How about they just meet on the field of battle and sort it out that way?

It’s a convenient way to work together remotely. I’m in the US and my partner for a project is in Portugal. GitHub isn’t the only solution, but it’s very convenient.

It could be those are just preferred news sources for them. If I were in the habit of reading news and posting what I thought was interesting, I would probably browse a handful of sites and maybe you’d be able to see a similar pattern.

But I can’t figure why they never comment. Not even to add clarifying information or links or whatever.

Their posts are largely well received and commented, but yeah it’s a little weird. I can think of a few possibilities for this, but whatever they’re doing doesn’t seem like typical user behavior. They don’t seem to be shilling for Tesla because I see at least one semi-negative post.

shrug

Unless it’s too humiliating to be a paid user and you hide your check.

That’s valid. And I’d be surprised if that could be watermarked.

I don’t hate it. I’m just not sure it’s feasible. We’ll see.