I’ve heard the competitors are nearly as bad. Anyone have a search engine they like?
Try DuckDuckGo. I only use Google for the Maps function, and only because the succession of characters who have owned MapQuest allowed it to rot.
I use DuckDuckGo.
Advanced Google Search is superior for finding words or phrases from a specific website. But for generic searches, DuckDuckGo is fine.
Love those milkweed pods. Rural NE memories….
I’m sure that each one of us might have some issue–large or small–which we could be “deeply concerned” about.
I see that spokesman John Kirby says that the White House is “deeply concerned” about the leak of the Israeli plans to attack Iran.
In other words, supposed “feelings,” instead of “actions.”
The real question is, what are they going to do about this leak?
A leak which, reports say, has very likely come from an Administration official who was already considered pro-Iranian.
Are they going to pinpoint who leaked these plans, and are they going to arrest, frog march them out of the Pentagon, and to prosecute them with all the vigor and harshness that they have applied to the supposed January 6th “Insurrectionists.”
Somehow, I doubt it.
Just another open-thread comment about something I read.
Scott Yenor, who works for the Claremont Institute, has written an article entitled “Destroying the Higher Education Machine” (https://tinyurl.com/2u9vm8hb).
Well, at least somebody’s talking about it. That’s a start. I still think it’s a fantasy, but most Republican state governments don’t realize that they have the power to drastically reform their states’ universities. They’re afraid to do it, so the thought never becomes fully formed. Who knows, maybe the Claremont Institute can start an intellectual and political trend.
I use brave
Weve known about tabatatabai for 14 months that tells you are on her side
Mike Plaiss on October 23, 2024 at 10:40 am said:
So, everyone knows about this, but what’s the alternative?
I’ve heard the competitors are nearly as bad. Anyone have a search engine they like?
_______________________________________________________________
I’ve been using Luxxle (https://luxxle.com/) and am pretty satisfied with it.
Can’t say that I’ve done a thorough analysis of the search engine, but here’s a link to a short review that covers the basics: https://tinyurl.com/338cbjsx
DuckDuckgo on Firefox browser. Seems good for me.
Cornflour,
Won’t happen until all the current faculty leave and even then there’s been 20 years of new PhDs being produced in the same mold.
When I started, yes the faculty was predominantly Democrat. However the vast majority of those people were classic liberals. As they retired they were replaced by radicals. Many of those people I’m still in contact with and are as appalled at the changes as I am.
I’ve read that some people have disputed DuckDuckGo’s claims to maintaining users’ privacy, so I posed the question to the Perplexity AI LLM. Below, I’ve copied the most relevant paragraph from Perplexity’s reply, along with citations.
“However, recent controversies have raised questions about the extent of DuckDuckGo’s privacy practices. Notably, it was revealed that DuckDuckGo allows certain Microsoft trackers to operate on its platform due to a search syndication agreement with Microsoft. This arrangement means that while DuckDuckGo blocks trackers from companies like Google and Facebook, it does not block Microsoft-related trackers, which has led to criticism regarding its commitment to user privacy[2][5]. DuckDuckGo’s CEO acknowledged this issue and stated that the company is working to improve its privacy protections[2][5].”
Thanks for the article, Cornflour. I’ll give Luxxle a try.
Really do like that picture. The way the seeds themselves seem to be floating before you almost in the foreground reminded me of something, but I couldn’t remember what.
After a little time on DuckDuckGo I realized it was this:
Van Gogh’s Poet’s Garden at the Art Institute in Chicago. Hard to see in a picture of a painting, but when you’re standing in front of it the little white/blue flowers at center/bottom seem very three dimensional, like fireflies hovering off the surface or something.
Am getting a lot of “AI Overview” returns with Google search now. Am no big fan of Google search, but it’s what I mainly use—sometimes resorting to Bing & DuckDuckGo for different results. Sometimes get better results when I change to – say the News tab from the All tab and/or change the Anytime drop down to past Month.
Ran a blog a few years ago (Linux Newbie since 1996) and it was getting to be pretty popular—100-125 visits a day, which was good for me & Linux. Then some elections were coming up, and my visits dropped to 0-10 a day. Posts that had been on the Google Front Page were no longer showing up. Hey, Linux isn’t that popular, and it basically has some 600+ versions (aka Distros) of the Linux OS – so a post on Porteus Linux can certainly end on that Front Page. However, I also started adding the occasional Political post—favoring REPs and bashing DEMs. Got mad at Google after the drops, but still used their search engine even though I knew they favored DEMs.
Have also started using various AI chatbots for my some of my searches now…
Chatbots can suffer some of the same… ahh… predispositions that search engines can if they’re trained on garbage or biased information. Nothing is immune from human failings if it uses data created and maintained by human beings.
I hear Tulsi Gabbard finally joined the Republican party. Conversely, Liz Cheney has yet to join the Democrat Party, perhaps in an attempt to fool gullible Republicans (assuming there are many of those left)?
I greatly appreciate this daily interlude of calm and grace amidst the chaos. I have been reading you for many years. Thanks. Mike Roark
Nonapod on October 23, 2024 at 1:26 pm said:
“Chatbots can suffer some of the same… ahh… predispositions that search engines can if they’re trained on garbage or biased information. Nothing is immune from human failings if it uses data created and maintained by human beings.”
______________________________________________________________
David Rozado has done some analyses of LLM’s political biases.
Rozado uses graphs to summarize his work, so it’s a fast read.
Recommended for those interested in the topic.
I grew milkweeds in my yard. Beautiful 3 ft plants with good orange flowers.
So I took some seeds, as pictured, and distributed them in the wild, in sunny spaces near where I hunt woodcock.
Not one sprouted.
@Cornflour, that’s a great little article and the results are depressingly not very surprising to me. One thing of interest though is that the political preferences of pretrained LLMs seem to generally be relatively neutral and it’s only after the so called “supervised fine-tuning” phase that the leftward leaning biases start to appear.
I also show in the paper that LLMs are easily steerable into target locations of the political spectrum via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) requiring only modest compute and customized data, suggesting the critical role of SFT to imprint political preferences onto LLMs.
Supervised fine-tuning, involves adapting a pre-trained Language Model (LLM) to a specific downstream task using labeled data. In supervised fine-tuning, the finetuning data is collected from a set of responses validated before hand. That’s the main difference to the unsupervised techniques, where data is not validated before hand. While LLM training is (usually) unsupervised, Finetuning is (usually) supervised.
“Labeled data” is raw data that has been annotated with tags or labels to provide context and meaning. So this so called labeled data seems to be fairly influential in establishing these biases. It’d be interesting to see what is being labled with what.
At any rate, David Rozada isn’t willing to conclude that Supervised fine-tuning is the primary cuprit in the emergent biases.
Unfortunately, my analysis cannot conclusively determine whether the political preferences observed in most conversational LLMs stem from the pretraining or fine-tuning phases of their development. The apparent political neutrality of base models’ responses to political questions suggests that pretraining on a large corpus of Internet documents might not play a significant role in imparting political preferences to LLMs. However, the frequent incoherent responses of base LLMs to political questions and the artificial constraint of forcing the models to select one from a predetermined set of multiple-choice answers cannot exclude the possibility that the left-leaning preferences observed in most conversational LLMs could be a byproduct of the pretraining corpora, emerging only post-finetuning, even if the fine-tuning process itself is politically neutral. While this hypothesis is conceivable, the evidence presented in this work can neither conclusively support nor reject it.
Ukraine is fighting for its survival, and here’s hoping the Republican party doesn’t turn it over to Putin’s Russia—if Trump wins. Lots of Israel supporters here. Lots of Russia supporters here.
Currently, the ratio of artillery shots between Ukraine and the Russian invasion army at the front is approximately 1 to 2.
***
The Lieutenant General noted that at the beginning of this year, the ratio of artillery shots fired by Ukrainian and occupation forces was 1 to 7, 1 to 8, and even more in some months. As of early summer, the ratio was 1 to 3.
Yeah, some of the Ukrainian bombings of Russian ammo storage sites has started to pay off. Ukrainians are a HARD fighting people—especially when it comes to their survival. Most European countries would’ve rolled over if a 40-mile Russian convoy headed towards their nation’s capital.
Ukraine is a potential ally that America could seriously use!
Jon Baker:
Unfortunately, a lot of Catholic institutions are barely recognizable as “Catholic” anymore.
I have to give props the Baptists — a local Baptist university asks applicants for employment about their relationship with Jesus, asks them to verify they regularly attend church by providing the name of their minister, and includes core values and mission (biblically based) and asks employees to affirm them annually. I think that is great. (I think the student application is similar.) It’d be great if all institutions associated with a religion did that.
I realize that synagogues specifically hire someone non-Jewish to work in Facilities, but they don’t seem to care a lot about who the hire to teach their kids way too often.
Kamala Harris has evidently now reduced to an argumentum ad hitlerum. At first blush it seems pretty desperate.
Grim’s Hall explains the classification markings on the leaked document about Israeli strike plans:
On Google bias: a week or two ago I started seeing jokes all over the place about “eating carburetors.” I suspected it had something to do with the Democrats’ notorious ad featuring “real men” played by fake actors, but I hadn’t watched that and didn’t want to. So I Googled the phrase “eating carburetors.”
What came up was, first, an “AI Overview” on eating CARBOHYDRATES, followed by page after page of information on carbohydrates. There was not a single link in the first few pages to anything about actual carburetors. What’s more, the first page was not headed by that little query you used to get when Google thought you’d made a typo that said “Did you mean . . .” with a link to references to what you’d actually typed. I had to put the word “carburetors” in quotes to get references to the Dem ad, and even then, half the references were to carbohydrates.
By this time, I knew what the actual reference was, and I suspected Google was playing politics with me. So I tried it in Duckduckgo, and the results were almost the same. The first reference — a sponsored one — was to a place that rebuilds carburetors (not eats them), but everything else, including all the highlighted images and videos, was about carbohydrates. On page 3 I finally got to somebody’s blog post on the Dem ad. Once again, putting “carburetors” in quotes was the only way to get at least a partial list of what I was looking for.
Then I tried it in Bing, without quotes, and got almost all carbohydrate results, although in this case the first page did have several sponsored carburetor-rebuilding results. Nothing, though, about eating them, and no double-check, like Google used to have, to see if you really meant what you said you meant.
Finally, having located the source of the reference, I searched the actual line, “I eat carburetors for breakfast,” but with no quotation marks. Google still gave me almost all nutritional sites, including the irritating AI overview, but with one or two Dem-ad references sprinkled into the first few pages. Bing’s first reference was to the Dem ad, but all the rest were nutritional. Duckduckgo mirrored Bing.
On all three sites, only putting the actual quotation into quotation marks brought up the results I’d been trying to find.
So, in this case anyway, it doesn’t appear to be political bias. Instead, it seems that these sites are just so sure that they know more than I do that they don’t even double-check to see if maybe I actually wanted what I said I wanted. I’m not sure that’s particularly reassuring.
Mrs+Whatsit on October 23, 2024 at 4:03 pm said:
On Google bias: a week or two ago I started seeing jokes all over the place about “eating carburetors.”
Does this prove political bias by Google and others? No, but we already know that bias exists, so why not try Luxxle? I swear I’m not on their payroll.
I don’t think Neo has talked about this, but now five college volleyball teams have decided to forfeit their matches rather than compete with San Jose State University, which has a transgender male on its team.
“We, the University of Nevada Reno women’s volleyball team, forfeit against San Jose State University and stand united in solidarity with the volleyball teams of Southern Utah University, Boise State University, the University of Wyoming and Utah State University,” the team wrote in an exclusive statement to OutKick. “We demand that our right to safety and fair competition on the court be upheld. We refuse to participate in any match that advances injustice against female athletes.”
The University of Nevada-Reno had decided to go ahead and play the match at SJSU, on Oct. 26, but apparently has reversed its position and will forfeit the match.
I had heard from my son-in-law, who has coached volleyball at the community college level that the University was going to go after the players legally, so it appears they have reversed course on that. I’m not sure what legal actions could be taken against the players other than to revoke their scholarships, but the optics might have played against the University, as I don’t think forcing girls/women to play against transgender men is a popular position.
This cannot be an easy decision, since it could affect goals the girls have worked their entire sports careers to win a championship.
Another reason to vote for Donald Trump, as his administration will not doubt reverse the Title 9 decision by the Biden/Harris administration to force schools to accept transgender boys playing in girl’s sports.
This is a decision by the NCAA, so I don’t know what affect title 9 would have at the college level.
Neo has talked about the issue of the strength disparity between girls/women and transgender boys/men, I think.
The NCAA changed its rules regarding transgender athletes in 2022, stating that a transgender woman athlete must complete a full calendar year of testosterone suppression treatment before playing for a women’s team.
Fluffy milkweed reminds me of the intro to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978), when the milky motes of dust descend through earth’s atmosphere into San Francisco, then grow into the flowers which turn humans into pod beings.
What a great film. After the titles there is a wonderful cameo of Robert Duvall as a Catholic priest strangely swinging on a playground swing set in the park where the pod flowers have begun their unholy work.
Regarding search engines better than Google, let me add an outside of the box suggestion: the Russian Yandex.com.
When I’ve found Google or DuckDuckGo lacking, knowing that more is out there but censored, I almost always find it there.
I suspect Yandex exploits Western tech parasitically, just like in the Soviet Years. Thus, it can reliably stay older school in its biases.
Also, Bing is reliably superior with image searches.
Testing Yandex for “eating carburetors” Like Mrs+Whatsit, got the rightsphere answering.
First was lifezette.com, then Daily Signal, TikTok, and in fourth place, Fox News. QED.
Quite liberating.
T J on October 24, 2024 at 5:29 am said:
“Regarding search engines better than Google, let me add an outside of the box suggestion: the Russian Yandex.com.”
_____________________________________________________________
TJ:
I’ve read quite a few reports of Yandex spreading spyware, malware, and viruses. There are also serious privacy concerns about the search engine. I didn’t save any of those articles, so I asked the LLM Perplexity.ai if there was any evidence for what I’d read. The short answer is “Yes, there’s abundant evidence.” For the long answer, you can try asking Perplexity yourself. In my opinion, using Yandex is a high-risk, low-reward activity.
Below, I’ve copied the first paragraph and citations from Perplexity’s response to my question.
“Recent allegations against Yandex, the Russian search engine, suggest its services may be involved in facilitating spyware and malware activities. Notably, a new Android spyware known as LianSpy has been reported to utilize Yandex Cloud for command-and-control communications, enabling it to operate stealthily since its emergence in July 2021. This malware is designed to capture sensitive information such as screencasts, user files, and call logs while evading detection by using legitimate cloud services like Yandex Disk for data exfiltration [1][2].”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YFXWx1tq1I
That’s a very nice picture.
So, everyone knows about this, but what’s the alternative?
https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/22/when-did-google-search-become-totally-useless/
I’ve heard the competitors are nearly as bad. Anyone have a search engine they like?
Try DuckDuckGo. I only use Google for the Maps function, and only because the succession of characters who have owned MapQuest allowed it to rot.
I use DuckDuckGo.
Advanced Google Search is superior for finding words or phrases from a specific website. But for generic searches, DuckDuckGo is fine.
Love those milkweed pods. Rural NE memories….
I’m sure that each one of us might have some issue–large or small–which we could be “deeply concerned” about.
I see that spokesman John Kirby says that the White House is “deeply concerned” about the leak of the Israeli plans to attack Iran.
In other words, supposed “feelings,” instead of “actions.”
The real question is, what are they going to do about this leak?
A leak which, reports say, has very likely come from an Administration official who was already considered pro-Iranian.
Are they going to pinpoint who leaked these plans, and are they going to arrest, frog march them out of the Pentagon, and to prosecute them with all the vigor and harshness that they have applied to the supposed January 6th “Insurrectionists.”
Somehow, I doubt it.
Just another open-thread comment about something I read.
Scott Yenor, who works for the Claremont Institute, has written an article entitled “Destroying the Higher Education Machine” (https://tinyurl.com/2u9vm8hb).
Well, at least somebody’s talking about it. That’s a start. I still think it’s a fantasy, but most Republican state governments don’t realize that they have the power to drastically reform their states’ universities. They’re afraid to do it, so the thought never becomes fully formed. Who knows, maybe the Claremont Institute can start an intellectual and political trend.
I use brave
Weve known about tabatatabai for 14 months that tells you are on her side
Mike Plaiss on October 23, 2024 at 10:40 am said:
So, everyone knows about this, but what’s the alternative?
https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/22/when-did-google-search-become-totally-useless/
I’ve heard the competitors are nearly as bad. Anyone have a search engine they like?
_______________________________________________________________
I’ve been using Luxxle (https://luxxle.com/) and am pretty satisfied with it.
Can’t say that I’ve done a thorough analysis of the search engine, but here’s a link to a short review that covers the basics: https://tinyurl.com/338cbjsx
DuckDuckgo on Firefox browser. Seems good for me.
Cornflour,
Won’t happen until all the current faculty leave and even then there’s been 20 years of new PhDs being produced in the same mold.
When I started, yes the faculty was predominantly Democrat. However the vast majority of those people were classic liberals. As they retired they were replaced by radicals. Many of those people I’m still in contact with and are as appalled at the changes as I am.
I’ve read that some people have disputed DuckDuckGo’s claims to maintaining users’ privacy, so I posed the question to the Perplexity AI LLM. Below, I’ve copied the most relevant paragraph from Perplexity’s reply, along with citations.
“However, recent controversies have raised questions about the extent of DuckDuckGo’s privacy practices. Notably, it was revealed that DuckDuckGo allows certain Microsoft trackers to operate on its platform due to a search syndication agreement with Microsoft. This arrangement means that while DuckDuckGo blocks trackers from companies like Google and Facebook, it does not block Microsoft-related trackers, which has led to criticism regarding its commitment to user privacy[2][5]. DuckDuckGo’s CEO acknowledged this issue and stated that the company is working to improve its privacy protections[2][5].”
[2] https://cyberguy.com/privacy/duckduckgo-privacy-browser-caught-sending-tracking-data-to-microsoft/
[5] https://www.wired.com/story/duckduckgo-microsoft-twitter-ft-bush-assassination-whatsapp/
Thanks for the article, Cornflour. I’ll give Luxxle a try.
Really do like that picture. The way the seeds themselves seem to be floating before you almost in the foreground reminded me of something, but I couldn’t remember what.
After a little time on DuckDuckGo I realized it was this:
https://images.app.goo.gl/YQ1eDDcvJD5P4Gz98
Van Gogh’s Poet’s Garden at the Art Institute in Chicago. Hard to see in a picture of a painting, but when you’re standing in front of it the little white/blue flowers at center/bottom seem very three dimensional, like fireflies hovering off the surface or something.
Am getting a lot of “AI Overview” returns with Google search now. Am no big fan of Google search, but it’s what I mainly use—sometimes resorting to Bing & DuckDuckGo for different results. Sometimes get better results when I change to – say the News tab from the All tab and/or change the Anytime drop down to past Month.
Ran a blog a few years ago (Linux Newbie since 1996) and it was getting to be pretty popular—100-125 visits a day, which was good for me & Linux. Then some elections were coming up, and my visits dropped to 0-10 a day. Posts that had been on the Google Front Page were no longer showing up. Hey, Linux isn’t that popular, and it basically has some 600+ versions (aka Distros) of the Linux OS – so a post on Porteus Linux can certainly end on that Front Page. However, I also started adding the occasional Political post—favoring REPs and bashing DEMs. Got mad at Google after the drops, but still used their search engine even though I knew they favored DEMs.
Have also started using various AI chatbots for my some of my searches now…
Chatbots can suffer some of the same… ahh… predispositions that search engines can if they’re trained on garbage or biased information. Nothing is immune from human failings if it uses data created and maintained by human beings.
I hear Tulsi Gabbard finally joined the Republican party. Conversely, Liz Cheney has yet to join the Democrat Party, perhaps in an attempt to fool gullible Republicans (assuming there are many of those left)?
I greatly appreciate this daily interlude of calm and grace amidst the chaos. I have been reading you for many years. Thanks. Mike Roark
Nonapod on October 23, 2024 at 1:26 pm said:
“Chatbots can suffer some of the same… ahh… predispositions that search engines can if they’re trained on garbage or biased information. Nothing is immune from human failings if it uses data created and maintained by human beings.”
______________________________________________________________
David Rozado has done some analyses of LLM’s political biases.
Here’s a link to one of his posts:
https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/the-political-preferences-of-llms
Rozado uses graphs to summarize his work, so it’s a fast read.
Recommended for those interested in the topic.
I grew milkweeds in my yard. Beautiful 3 ft plants with good orange flowers.
So I took some seeds, as pictured, and distributed them in the wild, in sunny spaces near where I hunt woodcock.
Not one sprouted.
@Cornflour, that’s a great little article and the results are depressingly not very surprising to me. One thing of interest though is that the political preferences of pretrained LLMs seem to generally be relatively neutral and it’s only after the so called “supervised fine-tuning” phase that the leftward leaning biases start to appear.
So what exactly is “Supervised File-Tuning”? I found this here.
“Labeled data” is raw data that has been annotated with tags or labels to provide context and meaning. So this so called labeled data seems to be fairly influential in establishing these biases. It’d be interesting to see what is being labled with what.
At any rate, David Rozada isn’t willing to conclude that Supervised fine-tuning is the primary cuprit in the emergent biases.
In a NBC News interview VP Kamala asked about religious exemptions in her federal abortion bill she says ” …no concessions…” So every Baptist and Catholic hospital must perform abortions? Every doctor and nurse in the military must be willing to perform abortions or face dishonorable discharge? Will doctors face civil rights prosecutions if they refuse to participate?
https://nypost.com/2024/10/22/us-news/kamala-harris-doesnt-want-to-make-concessions-to-get-abortion-legislation-through-congress-cannot-be-negotiable/
Ukraine is fighting for its survival, and here’s hoping the Republican party doesn’t turn it over to Putin’s Russia—if Trump wins. Lots of Israel supporters here. Lots of Russia supporters here.
Russia says it has no intention of abandoning Iran as it faces Israel’s wrath
Yeah, Russia & Iran are like two peas in a pod now…in case the Russia supporters here haven’t noticed yet.
Russia tells Israel to not even consider attacking Iranian nuclear facilities
Guess we’ll soon see how the Israeli Air Force stands against Russia’s help, advise, aid, etc. for Iran.
Meanwhile, some good news for a country actually in a fight with the once #2 Military in the world—Russia.
The ratio of artillery shots between Russia and Ukraine has fallen to a record low
Yeah, some of the Ukrainian bombings of Russian ammo storage sites has started to pay off. Ukrainians are a HARD fighting people—especially when it comes to their survival. Most European countries would’ve rolled over if a 40-mile Russian convoy headed towards their nation’s capital.
Ukraine is a potential ally that America could seriously use!
Jon Baker:
Unfortunately, a lot of Catholic institutions are barely recognizable as “Catholic” anymore.
I have to give props the Baptists — a local Baptist university asks applicants for employment about their relationship with Jesus, asks them to verify they regularly attend church by providing the name of their minister, and includes core values and mission (biblically based) and asks employees to affirm them annually. I think that is great. (I think the student application is similar.) It’d be great if all institutions associated with a religion did that.
I realize that synagogues specifically hire someone non-Jewish to work in Facilities, but they don’t seem to care a lot about who the hire to teach their kids way too often.
Kamala Harris has evidently now reduced to an argumentum ad hitlerum. At first blush it seems pretty desperate.
Grim’s Hall explains the classification markings on the leaked document about Israeli strike plans:
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-big-leak.html
This is very bad.
On Google bias: a week or two ago I started seeing jokes all over the place about “eating carburetors.” I suspected it had something to do with the Democrats’ notorious ad featuring “real men” played by fake actors, but I hadn’t watched that and didn’t want to. So I Googled the phrase “eating carburetors.”
What came up was, first, an “AI Overview” on eating CARBOHYDRATES, followed by page after page of information on carbohydrates. There was not a single link in the first few pages to anything about actual carburetors. What’s more, the first page was not headed by that little query you used to get when Google thought you’d made a typo that said “Did you mean . . .” with a link to references to what you’d actually typed. I had to put the word “carburetors” in quotes to get references to the Dem ad, and even then, half the references were to carbohydrates.
By this time, I knew what the actual reference was, and I suspected Google was playing politics with me. So I tried it in Duckduckgo, and the results were almost the same. The first reference — a sponsored one — was to a place that rebuilds carburetors (not eats them), but everything else, including all the highlighted images and videos, was about carbohydrates. On page 3 I finally got to somebody’s blog post on the Dem ad. Once again, putting “carburetors” in quotes was the only way to get at least a partial list of what I was looking for.
Then I tried it in Bing, without quotes, and got almost all carbohydrate results, although in this case the first page did have several sponsored carburetor-rebuilding results. Nothing, though, about eating them, and no double-check, like Google used to have, to see if you really meant what you said you meant.
Finally, having located the source of the reference, I searched the actual line, “I eat carburetors for breakfast,” but with no quotation marks. Google still gave me almost all nutritional sites, including the irritating AI overview, but with one or two Dem-ad references sprinkled into the first few pages. Bing’s first reference was to the Dem ad, but all the rest were nutritional. Duckduckgo mirrored Bing.
On all three sites, only putting the actual quotation into quotation marks brought up the results I’d been trying to find.
So, in this case anyway, it doesn’t appear to be political bias. Instead, it seems that these sites are just so sure that they know more than I do that they don’t even double-check to see if maybe I actually wanted what I said I wanted. I’m not sure that’s particularly reassuring.
Mrs+Whatsit on October 23, 2024 at 4:03 pm said:
On Google bias: a week or two ago I started seeing jokes all over the place about “eating carburetors.”
___________________________________________________
As I noted above, I’ve been happily using the search engine “Luxxle,” so I entered (without quotation marks) “I eat carburetors for breakfast.”
The first entry retrieved looks like something relevant to your search. Here’s the URL for that: https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/i-eat-carburetors-for-breakfast
Does this prove political bias by Google and others? No, but we already know that bias exists, so why not try Luxxle? I swear I’m not on their payroll.
I don’t think Neo has talked about this, but now five college volleyball teams have decided to forfeit their matches rather than compete with San Jose State University, which has a transgender male on its team.
The University of Nevada-Reno had decided to go ahead and play the match at SJSU, on Oct. 26, but apparently has reversed its position and will forfeit the match.
I had heard from my son-in-law, who has coached volleyball at the community college level that the University was going to go after the players legally, so it appears they have reversed course on that. I’m not sure what legal actions could be taken against the players other than to revoke their scholarships, but the optics might have played against the University, as I don’t think forcing girls/women to play against transgender men is a popular position.
This cannot be an easy decision, since it could affect goals the girls have worked their entire sports careers to win a championship.
Another reason to vote for Donald Trump, as his administration will not doubt reverse the Title 9 decision by the Biden/Harris administration to force schools to accept transgender boys playing in girl’s sports.
This is a decision by the NCAA, so I don’t know what affect title 9 would have at the college level.
Neo has talked about the issue of the strength disparity between girls/women and transgender boys/men, I think.
https://nevadasagebrush.com/2024/10/14/breaking-nevada-volleyball-reverses-decision-will-forfeit-match-against-san-jose-state-amid-transgender-player/
Cornflour, thanks, I will.
Fluffy milkweed reminds me of the intro to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978), when the milky motes of dust descend through earth’s atmosphere into San Francisco, then grow into the flowers which turn humans into pod beings.
–“Invasion Of The Body Snatchers”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Uv4-iJqLxQ
It may already have happened!
What a great film. After the titles there is a wonderful cameo of Robert Duvall as a Catholic priest strangely swinging on a playground swing set in the park where the pod flowers have begun their unholy work.
Brr!
Brian E.,
Megyn Kelly interviews a young woman on the transgender volleyball player’s team.
https://youtu.be/t3Kt1hO-6Vs?si=vK-SJzrXJMa5XYoX
Regarding search engines better than Google, let me add an outside of the box suggestion: the Russian Yandex.com.
When I’ve found Google or DuckDuckGo lacking, knowing that more is out there but censored, I almost always find it there.
I suspect Yandex exploits Western tech parasitically, just like in the Soviet Years. Thus, it can reliably stay older school in its biases.
Also, Bing is reliably superior with image searches.
Testing Yandex for “eating carburetors” Like Mrs+Whatsit, got the rightsphere answering.
First was lifezette.com, then Daily Signal, TikTok, and in fourth place, Fox News. QED.
Quite liberating.
T J on October 24, 2024 at 5:29 am said:
“Regarding search engines better than Google, let me add an outside of the box suggestion: the Russian Yandex.com.”
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TJ:
I’ve read quite a few reports of Yandex spreading spyware, malware, and viruses. There are also serious privacy concerns about the search engine. I didn’t save any of those articles, so I asked the LLM Perplexity.ai if there was any evidence for what I’d read. The short answer is “Yes, there’s abundant evidence.” For the long answer, you can try asking Perplexity yourself. In my opinion, using Yandex is a high-risk, low-reward activity.
Below, I’ve copied the first paragraph and citations from Perplexity’s response to my question.
“Recent allegations against Yandex, the Russian search engine, suggest its services may be involved in facilitating spyware and malware activities. Notably, a new Android spyware known as LianSpy has been reported to utilize Yandex Cloud for command-and-control communications, enabling it to operate stealthily since its emergence in July 2021. This malware is designed to capture sensitive information such as screencasts, user files, and call logs while evading detection by using legitimate cloud services like Yandex Disk for data exfiltration [1][2].”
[1] https://securityaffairs.com/166680/malware/new-android-spyware-lianspy-relies-on-yandex-cloud-to-avoid-detection.html
[2] https://www.scworld.com/brief/yandex-cloud-ensures-stealth-of-lianspy-android-spyware