Charlie Stross
PSA for American SFF fans wondering what the fuss is about over The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction publishing a story by David A. Riley just because he's a member of an obscure British political group called the National Front:
The NF in the 1970s was the British Nazi Party. This guy was a *parliamentary candidate* for the NF. Your reaction to F&SF's decision should be the same as if they platformed the leaders of Atomwaffen or the Proud Boys.
That is all.
Aral Balkan
@TomSwirly @johnbierce @cstross I mean, is it really that difficult to use a search engine?
Tom Ritchford
@johnbierce @cstross F&SF is the most radically left-wing print science fiction magazine left.
The editor is a woman of color who publishes all sorts of non-binary people, people from developing countries, and that sort of thing.
I've been reading F&SF for over 40 years, and I like these new changes.
I suspect it's simply that the American editor has no idea who the British writer was.
johnbierce
@cstross Uggghhhh what the hell.
Add that to the list of places I won't be submitting stories anytime soon...
Charlie Stross
@aral @TomSwirly @johnbierce It might be—have you tried using one recently? (The results from Google has taken a steep nose-dive in the past year, and it hasn't been terribly good for a decade: others are no better.)
Aral Balkan
@cstross @TomSwirly @johnbierce This is true. Here’s hoping DuckDuckGo doesn’t have its exit anytime soon.
Charlie Stross
@aral @TomSwirly @johnbierce DDG is a front end for Bing if I recall correctly, and is as contaminated by LLM junk and SEO spam as the other search engines. They're just not trying to sell adverts themselves.
Aral Balkan
@cstross @TomSwirly @johnbierce Oh, they’re VC-funded. That’s all you need to know to know they’re not a long term alternative by any means. But when you live in a sewer, sometimes the sweeter smelling shit is all you have for fresh air.
Aral Balkan
@wendyg @cstross @TomSwirly @johnbierce Then he shouldn’t have taken millions in venture capital. Because he won’t be able to avoid the eventual exit.
Wendy M. Grossman
@aral @cstross @TomSwirly @johnbierce Back in 2010, when DDG was just beginning, founder Gabriel Weinberg said he knew how to keep its burn rate very low. He seemed intent on building a frugal, yet viable, business.
Aral Balkan
@jaawerth @santiago @cstross @TomSwirly @johnbierce I have to say, founded by the ex-“VP of Product at GoDaddy” does not exactly fill me with confidence.
Jesse
@santiago @cstross @aral @TomSwirly @johnbierce
I've been very tempted to give https://kagi.com - a paid search engine - a try after skimming through their FAQ and philosophy and such. Seems weird to pay for it, but given how bad the alternatives have become and that the "free" services model is how we've dug our global vc hell pit in the first place... I've spent more money on less useful things 🤷♀️
Santiago Lema :amiga:
@cstross @aral @TomSwirly @johnbierce Hum so is there one decent search engine in this world ?
Steve Gisselbrecht
@TomSwirly @cstross @aral @johnbierce @pluralistic
I do miss the not being evil.
Aral Balkan
@stevegis_ssg “Don’t be evil” was never anything but PR.
They once asked Eric Schmidt was evil was and he replied along the lines of “it’s whatever Sergey tells me it is.”
Tom Ritchford
@cstross @aral @johnbierce I worked as a programmer at Google for five years, 2004-2009, in the "Don't Be Evil" days.
I had just been baffled by the fairly rapid degradation of their search, but @pluralistic clued me in: https://doctorow.medium.com/microincentives-and-enshittification-574290ea196f
It's disgraceful. It shows how the addictive power of money destroys everyone's integrity.
Aral Balkan
@foxxtrot @TomSwirly @johnbierce @cstross The EU’s Right to Erasure, as well as GDPR, etc., are valuable tools for people to defend themselves against trillion-dollar surveillance capitalists like your employer, Google. I realise that they make things inconvenient when farming the world’s population for their data but that’s a feature, not a bug.
#surveillanceCapitalism #peopleFarming #google #privacy #gdpr #humanRights
Jeff Craig
@aral @TomSwirly @johnbierce @cstross The EU's "Right to be Forgotten" could absolutely be used to remove this sort of thing from Search Engines, even without the LLM poisoning that is increasingly prevalent.
Aral Balkan
@foxxtrot @TomSwirly @johnbierce @cstross But if you enable people to protect their data from Google, Google would go bankrupt. (It’s like trying to reduce the amount of oil Shell can drill. If you really do manage to make a dent in the supply, you’ll become a liability for the company.)
That said, if that’s really what you’re doing there, then you’re sabotaging Google and you have my full support and gratitude :)
Jeff Craig
@aral @TomSwirly @johnbierce @cstross Not saying it isn't. My work deals primarily with Privacy and Security and enabling users to protect their data *from* Google. The GDPR, in particular, is generally good law.
The Right to be Forgotten is a much more complex issue, especially to the extent to which it allows some people to suppress information about themselves that may be in the Public Interest.
Aral Balkan
@foxxtrot @TomSwirly @johnbierce @cstross (Also, Right to Erasure excludes information in the public interest so people can’t just rewrite history as they wish. Mind you, no inverse “right to compel platforms to keep data in the public interest and/or preserve information of historical interest” exists either so platforms could, at their whim, delete anything they like, as evidenced recently by the petulant billionaire man-child’s actions.)
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