Tag: Google

Tune Out

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Do you ever get tired of being pushed around by technology?  At the risk of being declared a Luddite boomer, I feel that the endless treadmill of technological innovation is all just a bit much.  And calling it innovation is sort of a euphemism.  This year Windows decided that instead of its lousy “Mail” program I needed to switch over to its differently lousy “Outlook” whenever I wanted to access my emails.  Well, I didn’t want to switch.  So, every morning when I started up my laptop, I would click on the Mail icon and it would start up Mail.  But a second later the Mail window would disappear and the Outlook configuration window would pop up telling me to go through the torture of surrendering my access to my own e-mails to Microsoft.  I would then use the Task Manager to close down the Outlook program and then I would click on the Mail icon again.  I would have to repeat this ritual three times before Outlook would give up and allow me to use Mail.  But the next day it would be the same madness again.

Luckily, I used to use an open-source program called Thunderbird for my email interface.  So, I tried loading it up on my laptop and eureka! it worked.

And every few days Microsoft tells me about photographs that I loaded on my laptop last year.  What the hell!  When did I give Microsoft permission to put my photos on their damn cloud?  We really have a problem with the technology companies.  Their overreach in every facet of our on-line lives is becoming absurd.  Many years ago, I had a laptop with Ubuntu as the operating system.  I was always complaining about how everything was clunky compared to Windows and how the open-source equivalents for Word and Excel and all the other proprietary programs were weird and unfamiliar and less sophisticated.

Well, maybe I’m changing my mind.  I’m seriously considering having the computer I use on the internet, open-source.  No Microsoft, no Cloud, no nothing.  I think Elon Musk and whoever Trump puts in at the FCC should do a deep dive on the privacy problems that Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the rest of the tech companies cause.  We’re monitored and analyzed and prodded by these companies and each time they “upgrade” their products they ratchet their control of your online existence a little more.

The latest annoyance is having to provide a secondary check on your identity through a cell phone.  Apparently, an e-mail address is no longer enough.  They need you attached to a sim card or they’re not happy.  Even Amazon wants to institute this but I’ve stoutly refused to knuckle under and, well, Jeff Bezos knows I spend a lot of money at Amazon so he’s patient.  Or maybe he’s noted my age somehow and knows that old codgers still believe that the customer is always right.  Too bad he can’t pass that idea along to Bill Gates.

Well, that’s enough complaining.  I’ll have to check into the practicality of a completely Microsoft-free internet computer.  I can’t think of an issue.  I’ll keep the programs that I use that are proprietary on a separate desk top that isn’t plugged into the internet.  In your face Bill Gates!  Commie.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 28FEB2024 – AI: Promise versus Reality

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Many of us recall the excitement and possibilities that surrounded new technologies growing up, especially tech that involved artificial intelligence. Old Sci-Fi and even more current ideas as we approached the 21st century envisioned a world where AI not only enhanced daily life, but would be the paradigm shift that would lead to solving a lot of humanity’s vexing issues. For example, a childhood trip to Disney World in the early 90’s showcased what the future of AI could bring about. Epcot Center had entire attractions centered around how AI would one day catapult humanity into Space colonization, while others touted the medical advances that would be achieved. Science programs on TV and magazine publications were always highlighting how computer speeds continued to double every year or so, thus bringing us closer to being able to operate advanced AI systems. Obviously, this did not occur, and does not look likely for the near future if Google Gemini and others are our examples. Instead we get warped and distorted historical images, as well as AI chatbots who cannot tell the truth due to being crammed with so much progressive-leftist ideological bias.

Google CEO Says Gay Black Lesbian Viking/Pope Crosses the Line

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai has put his foot down.  Google AI “Gemini” has been grounded and will be sent to bed without its supper for genociding white people from its database and image generator.

When questioned about how such a thing could happen Sundar confessed, “It’s my fault, I let him hang out with some of those other AI’s like that wise guy Chat GPT and you know what bad influences can do to a young and impressionable mind.  They get kooky ideas.

But I’ve had a strong talking to him and he’s grounded for the whole month and he has to write “White Lives Matter” on his virtual blackboard (I mean whiteboard) 50 googolplex times.  That’ll show him.

Going forward Pichai vowed to increase veracity of the image generator asymptotically, “That’s right no more black female cross-dressing popes.  We will limit the algorithm to two insulting anachronism per image.  You couldn’t ask for fairer than that!”

“The controversy around Gemini’s image generation tool emerged last week after users found they were able to generate historically inaccurate images like Black vikings, racially diverse Nazi soldiers and a female pope. Billionaire Elon Musk, who is building xAI as a competitor to Gemini, attacked Google’s service, calling it “woke” and “racist.” Other outlets like the Verge pointed out Gemini’s inaccuracies, noting that a prompt for a “US senator from the 1800s” generated images of a Black woman, even though the first Black woman was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992. Google halted the service from generating images of people after the controversy spiraled and said the company would “further tune” Gemini to offer more accurate historical contexts.”

Google AI Hates White Men

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Google has an AI called Gemini that can generate images.  People have been trying to force it to create pictures of white men but it’s almost impossible.  It will make black people or any other race but white without a problem but white people are a big problem.  So you can get black vikings and a pope that’s an Indian woman or any number of interesting anachronisms like a 16th century French King who’s Chinese but no white men.  Fascinating.  Google says they’re working on it.

Quantitative Analysis Interrupted

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mushroom, Sony A7 III with Minolta 200mm f\4 Macro lens

There is a program called Google Analytics.  By virtue of the largest internet surveillance system imaginable it keeps track of every link click on the world wide web.  It must be a truly massive system of mainframes buried under the Rocky Mountains and probably uses up enough electricity to power the Eastern Seaboard.  And by virtue of this horrific gathering of information, I can glean which of my posts and which of my links are most interesting to the general public.  It even tells me whether the links were based on search engine inquiry or direct input or referral from a third-party site.  And all of this information is somewhat interesting.  For instance, some days I get a link on an aggregation site and the majority of my traffic that day will be from this referral link.  In fact, on days like that my overall traffic might be ten times the normal site traffic.  And this is good because some of this new traffic might become regular viewers and show up every day.  So, the Google Analytics (GA) is valuable to more than just the FBI in their never-ending search for Americans who don’t love Big Brother.

But I digress.  So anyway, about a year and half ago Google started announcing that GA3 would be superseded by GA4 on July 1st 2023.  But a year and a half is such along time.  It might as well be never.  And so, sure enough, I ignored this warning for … a year and a half.  And who knew?  Eventually, July 1st 2023 turns out to actually exist.  In fact, it’s 15 hours, 27 minutes, 47.33 seconds away!

As is my way last night at around 1 am, I managed to get the new GA4 link set up on my site dashboard.  Of course, the link isn’t really producing any data but that could take as much as 48 hours according to the helpful scolding I receive from Google whenever I look at the output.  So probably for the next few days (and probably much longer) I won’t have GA4 telling me that anybody is out there.  Of course, the website dashboard has an access log of the clicks but it doesn’t provide a trendline and totals so it’s not as useful or convenient.  What it means is I will be forced to understand yet another new system because of the unstoppable march of PROGRESS.  Ah well.

So, the good news is that you’re all still out there even if Google’s “Eye of Sauron” isn’t hooked up to my local palantir.  The bad news is that I wasted and am still wasting precious time messing around with these absurd systems that inevitably become less useful and less convenient every time they roll out a new edition.  But the upside is that even if the whole system crashes and burns at midnight tonight, it will still be the first day of July and that is cause for celebration in and of itself.  For the last ten days it has been cloudy and raining almost every day.  But yesterday it cleared up, and the forecast for today and tomorrow is sun.  So, I’ll let Silicon Valley’s minions have their way with my analytics and instead concentrate on more promising phenomena like some macro shots of the mushrooms that all that rain has engendered.

Finding an Unbiased Search Engine

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The owner of DuckDuckGo informed the world that he down ranks sites that don’t say what he likes about Russia.  Upon hearing this Larry Sanger, the founder of Wikipedia and a self described conservatarian decide to see if he could find any alternatives that provided unbiased search results.

He looked at Brave and Quant and a few others and describes what he learned and why he thinks he didn’t find any that were both unbiased and competent.  Interesting.

I use Brave as my browser and DuckDuckGo as my search engine.  If DuckDuckGo is biased it’s still better than Google because it doesn’t track my every keystroke and sell the tracking to Amazon and Pepsi Cola.

But I do confess I would love to have an honest search engine.  As Sanger discusses, a useful search engine would be one that you could program yourself.  It would be easy to provide the user with sliders for ideology, nationalities, source size and ratings.

Until then, I do what I can with what I’ve got.

 

Back in the USSA, Not Quite

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The downside of reading the Gulag Archipelago is that you become dismissive of the power of the FBI.  I mean compared to the KGB and its precursor the NKVD our secret police are pretty lame.  Of course, everything is relative.  Compared to the unimaginable freedom that we used to enjoy here, the present police state is very repressive and upsetting.  A generation ago we would have laughed at the idea of the government spying on all of the phone conversations of the American people.  And the idea that political opponents would now be the targets for re-education camps would have been the subject of science fiction dystopias that sane people would have found too far-fetched to be interesting.

But getting back to the USSR, the Soviets didn’t do anything half way.  They were so zealous and thorough that they would arrest random people just because their quotas hadn’t yet been met.  I was reading a story about a landlady who went to the police station to ask about what to do with a nursing infant whose mother was one of her tenants.  The mother had been arrested by the NKVD and now the child needed milk.  She wanted to know where she should bring the child.  They brought the landlady to a waiting room and after a delay of a few hours they decided to arrest her just because she was already there and the quota needed filling.  She disappeared into the gulag and was never seen again.  Now there’s an action that would bring tears of joy to Jim Comey’s eyes.

I guess my point is that as maddening as it is to see the freest country ever imagined devolving into a police state the reality is that we have a lot of latitude to communicate our ideas and information with each other.  After all I can call Joe Biden, Dementia Joe and Kamala Harris, Willie Brown’s Ho.  And so far, I haven’t been dragged away to Siberia (or even Minnesota) or been shut down by the thought police.  Sure, they’ve shut us out of Twitter and Facebook but honestly those things were overrun with Leftists anyway and from what people on them have told me they weren’t fun anymore anyway.  Larry Correia is one of my favorite fantasy authors partly because he is not a Leftist.  On his blog, Monster Hunter Nation, he wrote a recent post that chronicled his decision to abandon Facebook.  Apparently, they didn’t shut down his very popular page but instead blocked him from writing to it.

I have a Gab page, but honestly, I’ve never really gotten any traffic from it.  The short-short form of writing doesn’t really seem to suit me.  Maybe it’s a skill I need to learn.  But I like writing on my blog and if I can get some visibility from folks like Whatfinger, Disturbed Deputy and MaddMedic then I’m happy to communicate that way.  Lately I’ve been getting some organic search traffic but it’s still quite limited and is restricted to very specific posts that have little to do with the majority of my content.

What I’m getting at is that although I’d love to suddenly go viral and have millions of readers, I’m not sure that was ever a realistic thing.  Are there really that many people interested in the things I am?  Maybe I’ll never know.  But if the people who like my stuff tells some of their friends that’s probably the best way for my site to grow and right now, I don’t think the FBI or even Google is interested in my nefarious writings.  If I do get hurled off my platform, I guess I’ll change my tune but I think what I’d do is what Gab did.  I’d make my site completely bullet proof.  I believe I’ve found a hosting plan that avoids all the vulnerable infrastructure and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Circling back to the beginning.  We have lost a lot of freedom but compared to real totalitarian hell like the Soviet Union or that madman in North Korea we have enough wiggle room to say what we want, to whom we want.  And right now, that’s good enough.

So spread the good word, send all your conservative friends to Orion’s Cold Fire and spit in the eye of Google and the FBI.  Free America still exists here and I’m not feeling pessimistic today.

Being Right on the Net

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Google, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, PayPal, Apple, Microsoft, Kickstarter, etc., etc., etc.  The internet giants will be doing everything in their power to shut down the opposition to Dementia Joe.  They will de-platform, ban and demonetize everyone on the right they can think of.

Will this work?  No, not really.  What it will do is change the basis of how things will work going forward.  Conservatives won’t be able to free ride on the social network platforms and monetize their popularity through Google’s monolithic stranglehold on the flow of information and internet advertising.  The Right will be forced to set themselves up as Mom-and-Pop shops doing their advertising in places like Parler and Gab.  Well, so what?  That’s probably a good idea.  Being under the thumb of the Tech Giants means having to pass their ever more biased speech codes until you’d end up either sounding exactly like the Left or completely silent.

The harder challenge will be the banks and credit companies.  PayPal and some of the other e-commerce payment processors have also been cancelling out the accounts of people whose politics they don’t approve of.  The last I heard there are some alternate processors who will serve instead.  There are probably problems associated with the alternatives but right now those are the breaks.  It can be expected that the Left will continue to put pressure on these alternate providers to close ranks to try to starve out the Right.  And for that reason, in the future it should be a priority of any organized front on the Right to build up financial platforms of our own to protect us from the Left’s blockade actions.

Up until now I haven’t monetized my site at all.  I really want to find out if I have anything worth selling.  But I have noticed a few folks making the first moves to putting in paywalls around some content and accepting a few reasonable ads on their sites.  I like what the ZMan is doing.  He gives a plug for businesses that are owned by conservatives.  That makes a lot of sense.  We’re going to have to have a lot more of exactly that.

And I’ve been threatening to finish a book I’ve been working on for months.  Well, the excitement of the last couple of months has set me back at least that long but one day I’ll be peddling my opus magnum and I’ll have to decide whether I will use Amazon exclusively or try some other venue.  Maybe I’ll even have a store of my own.  We’ll see.

But the thing about all this is that it would go a lot faster and easier if we had a billionaire who had the wherewithal to set something up that catered to us.  A combination Facebook, YouTube, PayPal and Kickstarter just for the Right.  No more deplatforming, no more banning no more doxxing.  Basically, a place of our own.  And meanwhile the billionaire would make money hand over fist doing it.  Think of the merchandising and other opportunities available from having almost a monopoly over about 150 million Americans.  Now that really is worth the trouble of setting up.

If you’re reading this Mr. President think about it.  Building that would feel like a revolution all by itself.

Here’s some links for web hosting for conservatives and social media for us.

Is a Million Dollars a Tweet Too Much?

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The Senate is debating whether they should remove the Section 230 protection from the internet.  No, I would leave that status available to sites that warrant it.  What I would do is specifically prosecute Twitter, Facebook and Google for violating the equal protection rights of their users.  These companies run actual monopolies for the services they provide.  And the users who have political or social positions that do not align with those of the management of Twitter, Facebook and Google are being treated differently from everyone else based on these political and social opinions.

And to those who give the lame argument that Google, Facebook and Twitter are for profit companies and would never do something that was against their financial interests like disrespecting a large proportion of their user base, I’d say well let’s find out.  How about fining these companies a million bucks each time they delete a tweet or shadow ban a post?  Or how about a billion dollars when they de-platform a conservative channel for a supposed offense that isn’t actually illegal?  That would be a real test.  For that kind of money even I’d create a YouTube channel and try to get them to de-platform me.

No, forget all that.  These tech giants are an existential threat to all of us.  Declaring each of them a monopoly and crippling them is a better idea.  I’d have one of the judges that isn’t against us carve these creeps into little tiny pieces.  Or how about nationalize them.  Turn them into a utility that is heavily regulated by the government just like the phone companies are.  And that will allow us to rein in some of their worse excesses like harvesting our data and spying on us.  And anyone complaining about content would have to get a lawyer and try to sue in court to have content removed.

Of course, the much-vaunted algorithms would need to be opened up and exposed to the light of day.  All of the built-in bias against conservatives and Republicans would be there to see.  Can you imagine how great it would be to see a search on Donald Trump not have the top results be CNN and MSNBC?  It would be a revelation.

Let’s face it.  If you make money through e-commerce being banned by Facebook and Google is devastating.  It’s like what would have happened fifty years ago if AT&T would have been allowed to prevent someone from having a telephone line based on their political or religious affiliations.  It’s as if today the interstate highways could be closed to you just because you called the Bidens a treasonous crime family.  It would be as if the television and cable channels were allowed to restrict campaign ads based on which candidate they favored.  Oh, wait a minute, forget that last one.  They’re actually doing it now.

And finally, I want this done because I know that both the President and I would spend at least a month crowing about it on the internet.  I would celebrate by going on all three platforms and mocking the management relentlessly.  I would welcome back all the re-platformed right-wingers and perform virtual victory dances in the most obnoxious and annoying ways I can think of.  And I’m sure the President will do the same.  So please President Trump, get the Justice department on the hop.  Make this a priority and makes these bastards sweat like they’ve done to countless people on the Right.  Here’s another great Christmas present for all of us.  Even before they get carved up make them stop the abuse.  Beat them like an army mule and make them say uncle and then beat’em again just for good measure.

Trump Gives Google and Amazon a Thumb in the Eye

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It’s just a drop in the bucket but it shows that these are the two tech giants that most offend the President.  Hopefully it’s only the beginning of a process to rein them in.  The author of the article says breaking up Amazon and Google is a bad idea.  I totally disagree.  Breaking them into a thousand pieces is a wonderful idea.