Just today a number of my searches had me wondering whether AI slop generators were generating articles and suitably titled websites in response to the searches I was making on my search engine.

I don’t know how they’d do that without being able to snatch search terms I make to my search engine (DDG, with its AI features disabled), just don’t find it plausible that anyone is bothering to generate hundreds of sites on extremely narrow aspects of obscure topics, even if semi-automated.

And they often have the same question worded slightly differently three or four times in the first paragraph.

Increasingly find that search engines ignore instructions to filter by date or site, which coupled with ignoring all operands will kill off their utility entirely.

To add to replies confirming he actually sounds this way, his sister seems to have a similar issue, albeit less marked.

Not wild at all - who better to help with intelligence than defectors?

Founder of the school I went to maybe somewhat similar to your idol, having had to flee himself once he spoke out against the regime he’d previously advised on education, then persuaded parents to send their teenagers to him after. It is said the war memorial is one of the few which has British and German in equal measure, so he wasn’t successful beyond keeping his own pupils safe whilst they were still his pupils.

Wake every day overwhelmed with dread, and the clinging stench of death and misery coating my everything.

Yup, there’s plenty of scope for closer ties between Mexico (along with other Central America countries) & the EU.

Just as Nazi Germany caused millions to flee Europe for the US, Fascist US is causing the first of millions to flee to Europe.

Here’s hoping all who make it will be safe for at least several generations.

Concentration camps conveniently situated near farms & factories & burgeoning with detained “undesirables”.

Doesn’t even need to be perpetrated directly by the Trump regime when he has pardoned Jan 6th extremists who have a great many non-MAGA journalists on their list of targets for summary execution, along with details about their lives.

Because they mostly have no clue that measles is a potentially fatal illness, with potential severe lifelong complications including some which require 24/7/365 full nursing care.

They think of it as a mild rash with mild flu-y symptoms for a week or two.

They also have no idea it is so very contagious.

So though the measles vaccine has an amazing safety & efficacy record, whether singly or as part of the combined MMR, with endless research turfing up no link to autism whatsoever, and carrying only a negligible risk of vaccine injury (none as severe as the complications of measles), those who reject it do so not only out of totally false beliefs about the vaccine, but also out of fully wild misconceptions about the risk of measles.

Though now the anti-vaxx movement has become such a big thing for a while, they’re all egging each other on with the help of ideological pundits. This combines to create a group highly distrustful of public health organisations and all medical advice on the matter, who are much more resistant to accepting correct information than their vaccine-shy counterparts ever were in the past. It also seems to be true that scary conspiracy theories are comforting to them in a world where serious infections can just catch a person, where autism isn’t something one can simply opt out of - they want simple answers, and everything which debunks that simple wilful ignorance is a threat to their sense of security.

Pretty sure AfD’s Alice Weidel additionally doesn’t even live in Germany but in Switzerland.

Well, it worked initially, then more often than not my searches produced no results or confusing error messages.

Experimented a lot with the SearxNG settings, and also with my browser and firewall settings in case there was some issue there, and eventually gave up.

I was unable to find information online about the issues I experienced, in part because I had no idea how to describe them in order to find help.

Think I tried it in three different browsers, over the course of a month or so, but primarily in Firefox.

Have tried out SearxNG without self-hosting, via different instances, but had to abandon it as it is way, way beyond my mental capabilities to get it to work.

I doubt I could manage to self-host, having looked into Docker for some other matter.

Using Mojeek currently, which isn’t great but not too terrible.

Yup.

DuckDuckGo’s search engine introduced AI assist and an AI chat as opt-out features, which it repeatedly re-enables at random, with no ability to disable it permanently, even though we’ve been able for years to set a bookmarklet to make all our other DDG settings persist.

Users are very unhappy, with requests for a way to permanently disable AI features ignored, receiving only patronising responses from DDG.

No matter, DDG’s utility for searching has deteriorated these past years so severely, even relative to the deterioration we’ve seen with many other options, that I wonder will it survive.

It is always unfortunate when a recommended privacy tool shifts away from privacy, but several doing so all at once is alarming.

Aye.

Have developed the habit of unblocking telemetry every so often, so that the settings I value show up as in use by someone.

Late to reply, but very excited to have Moldova in our Union. I realise a yes vote is not a given, so all power for continuing the campaign to join if it does not succeed this time.

Entirely different groups of people, and they’re profoundly opposed to each other.

At the core of this massive protest/strike are groups which have been against the bombardment of Gaza from the outset, and protesting Israel’s war against Palestinians for years.

UK Labour’s position on Gaza is no different to that of the Tories (or to the DNC in the US). In Scotland, the SNP is strongly pro-Gaza, but were wiped out. That’s likely to have been in matters besides Palestine, but voters had the option to prioritise it and roundly rejected it. In NI & Wales, pro-Gazan candidates did less considerably less well than predicted 18 months ago. A few pro-Gazan candidates ran for the Workers’ Party - a handful of them won seats, but others, including their party head lost theirs. Meantime far-right Reform loathe Israel & loathe Palestine more, but made massive gains.

In France, pro-Gazan FI is a major component of NFP, the alliance which got the biggest vote share, but they only scraped that by working strategically with the rest of the left & with the neolibs to see off the far-right, and even this alliance did not win a majority. Within this there’s little to no agreement on Palestine, and FI’s position drew in some voters and alienated others.

Nope, because those recent gains were in spite of positions on Gaza & in any case there are few positions which the US could take which would be more grimly anti-Palestinian than that of the GOP.

It is a very long time since I’ve read as ahistorical writing as this article. We all wish that support for Palestine were there, but it very demonstrably is not.

Am tired, but bit confused at sequence of events.

Did Russia ban Mozilla from offering specific extensions, whereupon Mozilla removed for Russian users the banned extensions?

Or…

Did Russia ban Mozilla from offering some undefined type of extension, whereupon Mozilla removed for Russian users any which seemed to fall under the ban under an abundance of caution until they could assess each & reinstate those which did not fit the ban?

Or, more worryingly, but maybe implied by the supposed temporary intent of the ban…

Did Russia ban Mozilla from offering specific extensions, whereupon Mozilla temporarily removed for Russian users the extensions in order to give Russia the ability to track or otherwise meddle with Russian users of those extensions… or to enable Russia to interfere with the extensions’ code for their own ends?

I feel I can make a reasonable guess, but there’s a fairly big safety issue here depending on what happened.

Anyone dissenting within an authoritarian regime knows to exercise extreme caution, but always good to put out reminders to have multiple layers of protection, so if one fails you are still ok.