How many of you are older than 23? I turned 23 in 2020. It feels like a lifetime ago. What would it have been like if, amidst all the chaos of the initial emergence of COVID, I also had to deal with my home being destroyed? With a shrapnel injury? I've barely been holding together, honestly, but I shudder to imagine where I would be if I didn't live in a safe place, if I didn't have a home at all.
How many of you are younger than 23? Imagine if that was your future- a destroyed home and a shrapnel injury. Imagine if your only hope for a future, to get medical treatment, was to leave everything you loved. That would be a future more terrifying than you can imagine.
Someone named Fadel asked me to share his story. I would like you to donate to his GoFundMe and share this post.
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npr ran a story this morning on air about the recent supreme court ruling in favor of trans youth sports bans, a ruling that specifies trans girls in particular and allows even public schools in red states to do whatever kind of exclusionary policy they want. and for this story they interviewed two people: a teenage trans boy in massachusetts who participates in tons of school sports, and an activist trans man in nyc who runs a nonprofit for trans youth. I'm not saying that either of these people have absolutely nothing pertinent to say about trans youth issues, but the teenager from MA mostly spoke about how lucky *he* is to participate in sports and the activist from NYC spent the entire interview plugging the book he wrote while barely answering a single question. The activist guy mentioned that he actually has spoken to the west virginian trans girl who was part of the case, but only to say how proud/sad he is to watch her become an activist "just like him".
not to be a critic, but its crazy to me that they could not speak either TO or ABOUT the people affected by this ruling (trans girls in conservative areas) at all. a combination of transmisogyny and shitty reporting means that the takeaway from that segment seemed to be "well, it sucks, but at least blue states are still allowed to be accepting of trans youth" rather than the very real attempts to eradicate trans people from public life or the very real possibility of violent retaliation against trans girls in these states.
during the activist's interview, the radio host asked him if he could quickly dispel some of the myths around trans youth in sports somehow being unfair to cis youth, and his response was to awkwardly shrug off the question and say that the answer is simply too "complicated and nuanced" to give a short soundbite on air about. are you fucking kidding me? live on WNYC with about 1 million weekly listeners, and you can't just say with your whole chest that trans girls belong in girls sports because they are girls too? come on
US based but it’s similar reasons in other countries. and of course many companies have international locations. idk if that’s why it’s happening with sour patch kids but this is a thing
My nephew is very allergic to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, and sesame. Last year my sister discovered all hot dogs and hamburger buns now contain sesame. Not "may contain", but listed in the ingredients. This year basically every brand of sliced bread also now contains sesame, making it very difficult to find bread items he can eat.
They're just adding it to their products, so they can just list it as an ingredient and not bother with worrying about cross contamination. And they aren't even bothering with telling anyone. Capitalism is going to kill us all.
"Which brings us back to Kellogg’s. Back in 2016, the company found a way around the added burden and expense of complying with the FSMA: they simply began adding trace amounts of peanut flour to their cracker products. Doing so allowed them to list peanuts as an ingredient of the product, freeing them from having to prevent cross-contact.
At the time, Kellogg’s notified Food Allergy Research and Education (FARE) about the impending change and left it to them to warn the allergic community. In this case, Pearson’s didn’t even bother as near as we can tell."
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the highest recorded wet bulb temperatures in the world occur in india, jsyk. in odisha, they’ve hit 34.6 degrees celsius. the human survivability limit is 35 degrees celsius but the body faces significant risks, potentially fatal risks, even at 30 degrees as it starts failing to cool itself, like i’m talking organ failure levels of risk. climate change isn’t coming to peak, it’s been in the global south where you can’t see it or feel it.
imagine temperatures that high and humidity as high as 75%—you make more heat than you can ever cool. your sweat cannot evaporate fast enough. you literally boil alive. heat deaths in india are underreported and they already hit the thousands. there is no plan, for a nation of almost 2 billion people. no plan. nothing.
The Rodeo Rule: you only have to do it for the first time once.
The Rohan Rule: if you are at a social function full of new people and you want to be liked, find someone doing important work like setup or food prep and offer to help.
The Tutorial Mode Rule: to navigate an unfamiliar situation where you fear you will mess up an interaction, preface the interaction by mentioning that you've never done this before, and let them know if you have a specific concern or question.
The Rocket Science Rule: most new things you want to try seem very complicated but are simple when taken step by step.
The [X] Will Remember That Rule: if you need to make small talk with the same person on a regular basis, try to save one fact or current event in their life from a given conversation and bring it up next time you talk.
The Cool Binder Rule: by wearing clothes and accessories that are to your taste instead of trying to blend in, people will be more likely to compliment you and show interest in you as a person.
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Palestinian children were prevented from going to school by razor wire and israeli soldiers — so they sat down and studied right in front of them (via AndreyX)
Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Write a critical AI book, and you become everyone's confessor for their AI sins. People in my life keep telling me about their guilty AI pleasures, in search of an explanation, absolution or7 condemnation:
Their most common confession: "I only ever use Google's A7I-generated search summaries these days. I no longer click those blue links beneath it, not even to verify the summary." People know that the summaries are full of "hallucinations" (that is, "defects" or "errors") but the summaries are right often enough that many people have come to rely on them, to the exclusion of actual websites, made by actual people, on the actual internet.
Everyone knows this isn't good. The reason there's a web for Google's Gemini AI to summarize is that Google – the thrice-convicted monopoly search company with a 90% market share – directs people to websites, and when you visit a website, you generate revenue for the site, which pays for its maintenance. Most commonly, you generate an "ad impression," but you might also buy a subscription, or generate an "affiliate fee" by purchasing a recommended product.
When Google strips all this away by harvesting an "answer" and displaying it at the top of the page, the bargain between Google and the open web breaks down. Google is extracting 100% of the value from the websites it summarizes, and giving nothing back in return.
This is a marked reversal from Google's founding ethos. In the old days, Google measured its success by how little time you spent on its site. The ideal Google outcome was for you to visit its page (or even better, just a search-box in your browser), type a few words, and get "ten blue links" back, the top one of which was the correct link to locate the information or resource you were seeking. The point of Google was to serve as a conduit, a trusted intermediary that neutrally adjudicated the relevance of every web page for every web user from moment to moment.
Everyone dunks on Google for its high-minded motto, "Don't be evil," but over the years, the company's mission was far more important: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That was the pole star that googlers followed for the first couple decades of the company's history…until, that is, the company saturated its market and its growth stalled out.
That was when Google started to panic over its plateauing search revenue, this being an inescapable consequence of 90%+ market-share. The ensuing power struggle pitted googlers who were committed to technical excellence against the company's most ardent enshittifiers, who pointed out that by making search worse, they could increase revenues. After all, if you need to search two or three times to get the answers to your questions, that means the company can show you two or three times as many ads:
Where once Google measured its success by how quickly it could send you away from its site and out into the open internet, today's Google is a sticky-trap full of ways to keep you inside its walled garden.
A decade ago, tech had three major approaches:
I. Google's: let you do anything you want, but spy on you while you do it;
II. Apple's: strictly control what you can do, but leave you alone to do it in private; and
III. Facebook's: control everything you do, spy on you from asshole to appetite.
Today, tech is undergoing a form of carcinization, in which every company is turning into a Facebook-crab: maximally surveillant and maximally controlling.
Apple has added surveillance to its walled garden:
While Google has turned its free-range, internet-wide surveillance system into a walled garden that tries to keep you away from the open internet as much as possible.
Now, in Google's defense, the "open internet" kind of sucks these days. Any piece of useful information you seek out on the open internet is liable to be buried under half a dozen pop-ups, pop-unders, and dickovers:
Even after you clear these away, the actual information you're seeking is further buried in word-salads that anticipated insipid AI prose by half a decade. Think of all those omelet recipes that appear beneath 2,500 words of cod-Proustian remembrances of "the first time I ate an egg."
The major advantage of AI search summaries is in shielding you from all this nonsense. But where did all that nonsense come from in the first place?
It turns out that this is largely Google's fault.
Google and Facebook monopolized the display advertising market, entering into an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig the bidding so that advertisers paid more and publishers received less:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
The Google/Meta duopoly suck up 51% of display advertising revenue – more than triple the historic take for advertising intermediaries (buyers, brokers, agencies, etc). As ad revenues for web publishers cratered, the "ad load" on web pages went up. This set up a vicious cycle: increasing the number of ads decreases the number of readers, driving publishers to increase the ad-load even more to make up for the losses.
The major brake on this is ad-blocking. In a world with ad-blockers in it, publishers contemplating an increase in ad-load have to confront the possibility that they will induce ad-overload in their readers, who will install a blocker that stops them from seeing any ads:
Google has been looking to kill ad-blocking for a decade, and now they're on the verge of making it happen in Chrome, the dominant web browser they use to reinforce their search monopoly:
Google long ago did away with ad-blocking on mobile devices (reverse engineering an app is a felony, which means an app is just a web-page skinned with the right kind of IP to make it a crime to protect your privacy while you use it). Part of Google's argument for killing ad-blocking for the web is that this puts the web on an even footing with apps – which is a very weird way to describe a race to the absolute bottom:
To top it all off, this decade has seen Google make a series of changes to its search prioritization that favored low-value shovelware sites over carefully researched, reliable alternatives. Search for product reviews and you're apt to get a "site reputation abuse" result from a once-reliable outlet like Forbes filled with useless and even dangerous reviews, which are ranked far above independently maintained, rigorous competitors:
This has only gotten worse with AI search, which preferentially draws from spam sites to produce decontextualized, highly confident recommendations for substandard, overpriced junk, at the expense of recommendations for good products:
It's not like Google doesn't have the ability to sort the good from the bad. Kagi.com is a $10/month paid search engine whose results are vastly superior to Google's. But Kagi doesn't have its own search index: instead, they rent access to Google's index, but apply their own (much smaller and less resourced) team's algorithm to rank the results for your queries. In other words, Google could deliver good search results, they just choose not to:
Gresham's Law holds that "bad money drives out good." It refers to a counterfeit coin crisis in Tudor England, where people preferentially spent counterfeit money in order to make it someone else's problem; meanwhile, everyone hoarded their good coins. Soon, virtually all the money in circulation was bogus.
By downranking quality material in favor of low-effort spam, Google set up a web-wide version of Gresham's Law, where bad webpages drive out good ones, and since so many of those webpages contain product recommendations, they're greshaming the world of real products, too, so the bad is driving out the good there, too.
This is the problem that Gemini search summaries solve: in its role as the web's most important gatekeeper, Google remade them as an ad-festooned cesspit of garbage text and cynical shovelware sites. Now Google proposes to wipe out the publishers whose content they stripmined by breaking the web's bargain: that search engines are symbiotic with publishers. Google has turned fully parasitic, sucking the last drops of juice out of the open web before discarding its husk.
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