Had my first ones yesterday too.

I’ll use FreeTube if I have to, though I don’t quite like the UI, but cleaning the cache seems to have done the trick for now.

Revanced users are within a rounding error of the total users, surely?

Some of us use NewPipe. 🤷‍♂️

Good, good, there aren’t enough microplastics in the sea, must dissolve more.

I just found out the other day that items pinned to the taskbar are in %AppData%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar. 🤦‍♂️

Microsoft is a sad parody of itself.

Hear me out, Eliza. It’ll be equally useless and for orders of magnitude less cost. And no one will mistakenly or fraudulently call it AI.

They add capabilities not replace.

They poison all repositories of knowledge with their useless slop.

They are plummeting us into a dark age which we are unlikely to survive.

Sure, it’s not the LLMs fault specifically, it’s the bastards who are selling them as sources of information instead of information-shaped slop, but they’re still being used to murder the future in the name of short term profits.

So, no, they’re not useless. They’re infinitely worse than that.

That’s all I want out of AI.

The ability to hurt my computer when it isn’t working properly.

Synthetic data is still ultimately built on raw data

So they’re still feeding LLMs their own slop, got it.

includes lots of curation steps to filter it for quality

Ah, so it’s going back to the good old days of curated directories like Yahoo. Of course, because that worked so well.

I don’t know what you mean by "a replacement for search engines.

I mean that they’re discontinuing search engines in favour of LLM generated slop. Microsoft just announced it was shutting down the Bing APIs, in favour of Copilot. Google are shoving LLM generated nonsense all over their search. People are asking LLMs questions instead of looking them up in search engines because they’ve been sold the fantasy that you can get useful information out of that shit when it’s evident that all you get is information shaped hallucinated garbage (also because search engines have been intentionally enshittified to the point of being almost as useless). People are being sold dangerous nonsensical misinformation and being told it’s factual information. That’s what I mean.

there’s still a search engine providing it with sources to generate that summary from

No there’s not, that’s not how LLMs work, you have to retrain the whole model to get any new patterns into it.

Even if you stick the LLM between an actual search engine and the user, it just becomes a perverted game of telephone, with the LLM mangling the user’s prompt into a search prompt that almost certainly will have nothing to do with what the user wanted, which will be fed into the aforementioned enshittified search engine, whose shitty useless results will be fed back into the LLM, which will use them to hallucinate some answer (with inexistent references and all) that will look like an answer to the user’s question (if LLMs are good at anything it’s brainwashing their victims into believing that their answers are correct) while having no bearing whatsoever in reality.

The tragic fact is that LLM’s offer practically no benefits over 40 year old Eliza if you gave it a fraction of the data and computational power they need, while being many orders of magnitude more expensive and resource intensive.

They have no affordable practical applications whatsoever, and the companies selling them are so desperate to earn back the investment and run off with the money before the bubble bursts and everyone realises that the emperor has been hanging his shriveled little dong in front of our faces the whole time that they’re shoving this shit everywhere (notepad!? fucking seriously!?) whether it makes sense or not, burning off products that used to work, and the Internet itself, and replacing them with useless LLM infected shit so their customers have no option but to buy their useless massively overpriced garbage.

there doesn’t seem to be any reason why synthetic data can’t be used for the whole training run

Ah, of course, it’s LLMs all the way down!

No, but seriously, you’re aware they’re selling this shit as a replacement for search engines, are you not?

Obviously, yes.

They knew this when they poisoned the well¹ (photocopy of a photocopy and all that), but they’re in it for the fast buck and will scamper off with the money once they think the bubble is about to burst.

1.– Well, some of them might have drunk their own coolaid, and will end up having an intimate face to face meeting with some leopards…

Or 1984, or Brave New World.

My money’s on Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, though.

Late stage capitalism, then. 🤷‍♂️

You could make a great movie about the fluoride prohibition

We already have one: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

At one particular point it was, if I recall correctly, though Chrome also (mis)implements some standards its own way, so Google might also use that as a form of attack against anyone who implements them properly, much like Microsoft did in the bad old IE6 days…

It’s all a silly arms race, though, with Google coming up with new ways to enshittify the web for anyone not using Chrome or using ad blockers and Mozilla and ad blocker (and alternative YouTube frontend) developers trying to figure out what they broke this time and how to fix it, so what worked yesterday might not work today and work again tomorrow.

It’s all a profoundly stupid waste of everyone’s time and resources (all for a few more ad views) which will hopefully end up with Google losing their monopoly position on the web like the Internet Explorer bullshit did for Microsoft, but will keep being a major hassle for everyone until it does.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/youtube-responds-to-delayed-loading-in-rival-browser-complaints, for instance.

Or https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/, for an older one.

As for how to fix it, Mozilla tend to do a pretty good job of eventually working around Google’s bullshit, so keeping the browser updated is a good first step.

Since Google tends to roll this stuff out regionally and doing A/B testing, though, the best way is to identify what specific handicap they’re hassling you with (which specific features don’t work or don’t work right, when they work properly on chrome), and look for an updated add on or userscript to fix that particular issue.

Or you can just look for a generic YouTube or Google Docs “enhancer” add on and hope it fixes the issue without making the whole user experience too different from what you’re used to.

Mainly that Google intentionally makes its sites (like YouTube or Google Docs) slower and less useable when they detect you’re using Firefox, and/or ad blockers (which you need Firefox to use, so same difference).

It’s mostly fixable with add-ons and userscripts (and eventually, one hopes, with an antitrust lawsuit), but it’s still a hassle.

The NT kernel is built on top of a hardware abstraction layer, which should make it easier to port it to different architectures.