Try a different search engine. At least part of the issue really is with Google, specifically.

If the opinions of shallow-minded wanna-be gender police matter that much to you, then there is nothing I can do to help.

Not if they let you send cash (although that is, alas, unlikely).

Part of being an adult is assessing what “everyone” knows and tells you to see whether it’s actually true, and if so whether it’s relevant to you and the life you want to make for yourself. Granted, this guy is only 23, so he’s got a long way to go with that process.

Raking in a $250,000 salary

And isn’t willing to move to a more ethical company if it means taking even a modest salary hit, I’ll bet. Men seem more likely to make that particular prioritization error, although people of other genders certainly aren’t immune.

Part of the problem here is that too many people live to work, instead of the other way around. Once they retire, they have no idea what to do with themselves and take the least-effort path to occupy their time. Which makes them perfect targets for the addictive aspects of social media.

Maybe what we need to do is flood Facebook and Instagram and all the rest with material about the rewards of volunteering for charity.

(Sometimes I’m almost thankful my mother is a technophobe.)

$120K spent advertising a kid’s Minecraft channel is suspicious. The initial flag should just have been for “card not normally used suddenly spending a shit-ton of money—does this look legit?” After that, a ten-second check of what was being advertised would have shown that something was fishy.

Seems to me that this is a dual fail. The father should have monitored his kid more closely and not used his company card for this, but Google should have noticed the unusual spending pattern and flagged it somehow—I mean, it looks like something someone might do using a stolen card, in which case Google might never have gotten its money, if you need a self-interested reason why they should have been keeping a more careful eye on this.

Y’know, it’s funny, but I can’t recall ever having heard even one thing I would consider positive about fraternities in the US, and now I discover them tangled up in this matter too. Why are they allowed to continue to exist, when their whole purpose seems to be manslaughter, rape, defamation, and alcohol abuse?

So instead allow Cloudflare to take over the Internet? I do not consider this an improvement.

One is under your control. The other is being passed through a script on the server that may be doing who-knows-what in addition to redirecting you.

(Better if you just drop Google altogether.)

You realize what this suggests about Trump’s hair . . .

I have the cables I might conceivably need again some day sorted into labeled plastic bins (USB, ethernet, etc.) The serial cables and other stuff I doubt I’ll ever touch again unless something odd happens are coiled, bound neatly with twine, and stuffed in a cardboard box in a semi-inaccessible corner where I don’t have to worry about them.

This is one of the few times I’ve thought it unfortunate that we have a loser-pays system in our civil courts. That means we can only bankrupt at most one of them. But in this case, SOCAN seems the lesser evil. By a very narrow margin.

So once it’s bankrupted you, where does it ship you off to?

I wouldn’t put one in charge of a water treatment plant or a set of traffic lights, but even if it stuffed up and killed people, the responsibility would still not be the AI’s. The responsibility would lie with those who built it, trained it, and prompted it, just as, if a bunch of people are fried by a nuclear missile, the responsibility lies with the person who pushed the button rather than with the missile itself. It’s a piece of software. It does what it’s told. It may be complex enough to display unexpected emergent behaviour, but so is Dwarf Fortress. Any destruction it accomplishes is just the real-world version of !!Fun!!, disgusting concept though that may be.

The short version: Most of them spammed people, except possibly for the one that slept 70% of the time. None of them came up with a product or service anyone sensible would buy even if a human was providing it. Alas, none of them ordered tungsten cubes, either. It was a bunch of particularly boring fails.

All this money, all these resources, to produce artificial con artists. As though we didn’t have enough of the natural organic sort.

Startpage uses Google’s index, or used to. At very least, it seems to have more and different results than DuckDuckGo.

Given the memory requirement, my guess is that they’re not removing anything, just hiding it. And adding more useless crap on top.

I apologize for phrasing things so poorly that several people seem to have missed my actual point, which was: no one else with an auto-update feature requires any information about you, therefore if they claim that’s their reason for asking for users’ personal information, they’re lying. They may have other reasons, which they have not stated. They may even be good reasons, although I’m not holding my breath.

And yes, I have compiled my own copy with that nonsense switched off, thanks for asking. However, it’s the job of people who understand that this is overreach to push back against it on behalf of the people who lack the knowledge, time, or energy to investigate it. I don’t like throwing even Windows users under the bus.