tinyrabbit

molly0xfff , 11 days ago to random

Newsletter: The crypto industry jumps on the Trump train, and other recent events in the crypto world.

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-60/

#newsletter #cryptocurrency #crypto #CitationNeeded #USPolitics

tinyrabbit , 3 months ago to random

I don’t know why Meta haven’t been public about this, but you can now hide any of your posts from Threads users by just adding the word ”pixelfed” anywhere in it. Nice to give the option to opt out so easily, but a somewhat strange way to do it and a very random choice of keyword imho.

breadandcircuses , 3 months ago to random

Take a look at how the U.S. “transition” to Clean Green Energy is going...

HEADLINE: U.S. Has Produced More Oil Than Any Country in History for Six Consecutive Years
https://www.ecowatch.com/us-oil-production-record-2024.html

HEADLINE: United States Produces More Crude Oil Than Any Country, Ever
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/03/11/united-states-produces-more-crude-oil-than-any-country-ever/

#USA #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual

ajsadauskas , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to DeGoogle Yourself

In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?

Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.

These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.

Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.

Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.

Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.

(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)

By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.

Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.

And for a time, it worked.

But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.

And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.

My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?

Do we really want to search every single website on the web?

Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?

Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?

At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?

And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?

@degoogle #tech #google #web #internet #LLM #LLMs #enshittification #technology #search #SearchEngines #SEO #SEM