From a 1960s comedy:

Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"

Virgil: "Yes, I have."

Interviewer: "Where?"

Virgil: "My aunt has one."

It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.

I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?

In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.

Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.

The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.

Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).

All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.

Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.

If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.

What, it's true. People really don't judge a product by how many things don't go wrong. It's like how the drummer in a band gets overlooked until he misses a beat. You might actually have nothing that can go wrong, but it doesn't matter if people don't believe it. You need both but perception is right out front like it or not. I'm not suggesting go lead with a perception gap, just that managing it is different from you know, the reality. Knowing it's out front, you have to address it.

Releasing a steady stream of post-quantum crypto upgrades, and being honest, and not regressing in other areas, is more important than waiting for a proven quantum supercomputer proof architecture for example.

So how does this affect the bottom line, will we sell more services?

Yes and let's optimize revenue on the search screen by sorting worst to best, maybe make a few of the ads confusingly look like plausible search results while putting other ads in almost clearly marked boxes throughout the results to lower the user's guard. Probably a banner at top and bottom and both sides that stays in place as the user scrolls, charge a premium for that space, cause you have to have tiers. Could make clicking on a search result pop up a little movie trailer or interactive game ad that you have to play to close, have you seen those?

I just can't believe Google has the gal to put the thing you're looking for right there at the top without properly monetizing it. Barbaric.

You all keep blaming AI, but 10 years ago the internet was already full of regular content mill garbage, SEO spam and ads. Half your results might be some mailing list server scraped and replicated to unauthorized web forum looking things to sell ads. You have to go back 15 years minimum, and rewind the entire internet with it. Some might argue the internet was already beyond fucked even then. Good luck, time traveler.

Man it's very weird knowing Google's whole story and seeing people in 2026 act surprised that search engines make more money the longer it takes people to find what they came for. Like that's how they killed their competition back in the day, by actually getting what you're looking for on the top of the first page. They made their fortune selling ads on OTHER sites. Selling ads on their own search page eventually happened as their competitors dried up.

This news is as dumb as suddenly realizing that the Feeling Lucky button generated less revenue than when people look at the results screen.

searches made through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search

Have you thought about disabling AI Mode and returning customers to traditional search? It'll not only make you more money, but result in happier users too. Everyone-except-Nvidia wins.

Remember when we were all techno-optimists who thought we would end up with 401Ms and even 401Gs? We're as dumb as the flying-car believers.

He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.

Nope. Can't happen. The whole theory is fucking batshit. There is an equal chance of lizard people from Neptune taking over humanity. The provenance of both stories is equally credible.

See if I just said lizard people from Neptune you'd just say that's ridiculous! When I add the take over humanity part, you say of course those fucking lizards would, they want our freedoms or oceans or people meat or some other shit we pretend to care about.

That's why you believe in AI singularity bullshit. You don't have the foggiest beginning of a clue how information theory can even support the concept, but you're afraid. The fear makes it real. Like being afraid of the dark makes whatever isn't out there feel real. It's a weakness, don't know what else to tell you.

I'm glad you have to pay more for groceries, you were eating too much.

Why would someone want to throw even more money away on a gaming PC? The economy is tightening up around everything, people are buying just enough gaming hardware, and just enough PC, and just enough anything else. "Why not buy more PC" is a losing proposition when people aren't really buying PCs anymore in the first place when they have just enough already - a phone. And you don't have to like it or agree with it, but it's what people are doing.

Idk it's like if the price of dirtbikes got uncomfortably high and you're trying to recommend building your own because they're faster. Like the mass produced hobby toy is unaffordable, and you know you don't have a private stash of parts that makes DIY cheaper, so your message is "its faster"... dude hobby spending will just drop. DIY takes off when money is good, demand is high, and that boosts PC sales. People don't cobble together expensive toys when money is tight. Look how many people in this thread are talking about retro potato gaming ffs, that's about where we're at.

I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

Only if you upgrade to goldtooth.

https://www.cisa.gov/about

The entire reason that agency exists is to help secure our infrastructure and coordinate with the public. Or do you see something in their mission about privately discovering vulnerabilities for politics.

If the point is to score political points for the party in charge, it's probably illegal for a federal agency to do that bud.