Leon

As far as I know, on Pixel phones it’s integrated. Discovered that my work phone (Pixel 6) suddenly has it, I’ve never installed it, and I can’t remove it.

Nomad Sculpt. Great sculpting app, you buy it once and it’s yours.

My company has a policy to try to make use of LLMs for work. I’m not a fan. Most of the time I spend explaining the infrastructure and whatnot would be better spent just working, because half the time the model suggests something that flies in the face of what’s needed, or outright suggests changes that we can’t implement.

It’s such a waste of time and resources.

It is a direct result of structural racism, as it’s a product of the treatment of white men as being the default. You see it all the time in medicine. There are conditions that disproportionately affect black people that we don’t know enough about because time and money hasn’t been spent studying it.

Women face the same problem. Lots of conditions apply differently in women. An example of this being why women historically have been underrepresented in e.g. autism diagnoses. It presents differently so for a while the assumption was made that women just can’t be autistic.

I don’t think necessarily that people who perpetuate this problem are doing so out of malice, they probably don’t think of women/black people as lesser (hell, many probably are women and/or black), but it doesn’t change the fact that structural problems requires awareness and conscious effort to correct.

What I hate most about this is the lack of control over this it implies. Sure, maybe you don’t install this on your device, but all that’s needed for Google to access your messages now is for someone you message to have it installed and enabled, then anything you send to them will be gobbled up by Google.

Wanting full control over the sick is also some Mother Teresa evil shit. It’s bad enough that life-saving medication is gate-kept by patents and pharmaceutical companies thriving on suffering (oh look, there she is again) but now people that suffer should give up access to what makes them them, their entire personhood, to some tech-bro ingrate? Is that truly the best option?

I’d rather die.

This is so funny. It fails miserably and they’re all “yeah so this is promising.”

Sure, a world where your manager hallucinates meetings with you and assesses you poorly for not performing according to plans that were hallucinated through said meetings sounds like a fantastic idea.

Hoping this sets a precedent for the same kind of regulation about non-Chinese corporations. Otherwise it just comes across as sinophobic grandstanding and not actually about protecting the privacy of the end-user.

Ah yes, like Apple does. This makes sense.

Didn’t think I’d be excited about something Microsoft is doing, but this sounds great!

Which doesn’t make any sense.

LLMs don’t learn, and they’re not people. Applying the same logic doesn’t make much sense.

That’s very strange. If they value public land so highly, why would they back the party that always aims to privatise everything?

Capsaicin trigger nociceptors, tricking the brain into believing you’ve hurt yourself. It’s not a flavour.

Well yes. You obviously still can’t say “le dollar bean” without getting nuked from orbit. YouTube is a goodly Christian corporation after all, can’t have such content.

The rest of us will be stuck with those consequences also. When idiots are at work, third party always suffers.

It’s honestly ridiculous too. Imagine saying that your whole business model is shooting people, and if you’re not allowed to shoot people then it’ll crash. So when accused of killing people, you go “nu uh” and hide the weapons you did it with, and the legal system is okay with that.

It’s all so stupid.

I prefer the overview I get with them. I’m on an ultrawide monitor so it’s not like I’m sacrificing horizontal space either.

Through the years I’ve bounced between different engines. I gave Bing a decent go some years back, mostly because I was interested in gauging the performance and wanted to just pit something against Google. After that I’ve swapped between Qwant and Startpage a bunch. I’m a big fan of Startpage’s “Anonymous view” function.

Since then I’ve landed on Kagi, which I’ve used for almost a year now. It’s the first search engine I’ve used that you can make work for you. I use the lens feature to focus on specific tasks, and de-prioritise pages that annoy me, sometimes outright omitting results from sites I find useless or unserious. For example when I’m doing web stuff and need to reference the MDN, I don’t really care for w3schools polluting my results.

I’m a big fan of using my own agency and making my own decisions, and the recent trend in making LLMs think for us is something I find rather worrying, it allows for a much subtler manipulation than what Google does with its rankings and sponsor inserts.

Perplexity openly talking about wanting to buy Chrome and harvesting basically all the private data is also terrifying, thus I wouldn’t touch that service with a stick. That said, I appreciate their candour, somehow being open about being evil is a lot more palatable to me than all these companies pretending to be good.

There are search engines that do this better. There’s a world out there beyond Google.