There was nothing automatic about Google's trustworthiness. It simply counted up links that lead back to a particular page. If it had more links it was (supposedly) a better page. Almost immediately webmasters around the world started gaming the system. Google still restricts some of the things my account can do for hidden links that were added to some ads on websites that I ran in like 2001. GoDaddy and all of the other big web hosting companies of that era all rose to prominence on the strength of gaming the PageRank system.

I am sure that other industries tell the same story.

PageRank might seem trustworthy to you, but that's only because you weren't trying to game the system back in the day. I can assure you that, right from the start, people were abusing PageRank in precisely the same way that upsets you now. The only difference was that registering a domain back then cost $70 for two years, and you probably created the links you used to game the system by writing Perl. That raised the barrier to entry significantly. However, there was still real money to be made in that arena, and whether the winners paid Google directly, or paid for back links to their content (or both), I can guarantee you that the road to your trust was paved in money.

In the end Google has decided that the most reliable way to have publishers show that their information is trustworthy is to force them to pay for the privilege. Coincidentally that also happens to be the method that makes Google the most money. For years an entire SEO industry has thrived around the idea that if you pay someone enough money they can trick Google to steal your information instead of your competitors. Now we are finally at the endgame and Google doesn't even send traffic. They simply summarize the information for their customers. Chances are excellent that you don't even leave the google.com domain.

Google's competitors are simply doing the same thing at a different domain. All of them make their money by charging publishers to show up prominently in search ranks. Whether you are rooting for Oceania, Eurasia, or Eastasia it's Big Brother all of the way down.

You can also often reduce the risk of cancer recurrence significantly via diet (e.g. avoiding most or all animal products and ultraprocessed foods, and eating lots of greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries & fruits, and nut & seeds) -- especially along with other lifestyle changes like exercise, avoiding smoking and alcohol, stress reduction, good sleep, community, etc..
"G-BOMBS: The anti-cancer foods that should be in your diet right now"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/arti...

Problem is there is not much money in such advice... Especially when there are many vested interest in selling unhealthy food and profiting off of sickness. People who make money off of sickness don't even have to win the scientific argument, they just have to seed enough doubt to confuse people so they keep doing what they were doing. That strategy by industry of intentionally sowing confusion is mentioned here 18 minutes in - and it was based on the success by the cigarette industry (and I'd add the fossil fuel industry) in doing the same thing:
"What The Health - Full Documentary"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"18:24 You know the strategy is not on making their products any safer. The strategy is to just try to confuse the public to introduce doubt. You know.
18:33 there's a famous tobacco industry memo. It's called doubt is our product. That's all they had to do. They didn't have to convince Americans that smoking
18:41 was healthy right. They just had to introduce doubt -- then they would win. If there's just enough controversy people kind of throw up their hands: I
18:49 don't know what to eat. Confusion is their game"

That said, I hope treatments like Moderna's eventually show convincingly that they do a lot more good than harm -- since the process of getting individuals and societies to change their diets can be a very slow one -- as mentioned here about 35 minutes in:
"100 Year-Old Nutrition Professor: 7 Keys to a Long Life | Dr. John Scharffenberg"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"35:26 [Scharffenberg:] They're going by the cholesterol level with the idea that if you lower your cholesterol you will not have heart attacks anymore.
35:32 It's not true. It's not true. And we made a mistake. We should tell them that lifestyle [including a whole-food plant-based vegetarian diet] is important.
35:40 But the problem is we haven't persuaded people to live like they even know they should live.
35:47 Yes. That's our problem. [Interviewer:] And that's why I'm studying to become a therapist, I want to figure out how do we...people know what to do, but... [Scharffenberg:] A lot of them know what to do.
35:55 They don't do it. [Interviewer:] It's hard, yeah. [Scharffenberg:] It's hard."

How 'bout if I buy now and pay after I die?

sounds like the plots of a cheap SF movie.

They shouldn't be trying such a desperate solution without trying chlorox and ivermectin first.

Just don't leave the country after you participate.

For that matter, you may suffer remote retaliation even if you stay home. I would leave this to the military or other government branch.

Also there is the question of legality, government operation or not. It sounds to me like vigilante justice. And countries who like their anti-American cybercriminals will certainly treat it as illegal. (Hence the advice not to leave the country.)

We certainly need a way to stop cybercrime, international or otherwise. But this doesn't strike me as a good way to go about it.

Finally a prediction: in the not too distant future, one or more offshoots from this will turn into unmanageable domestic criminal organizations.

Even Batman's job is threatened by AI.

It's just ET trying to phone home. Probably dialed the wrong number.

Ideology vetos reality, news at 11.

A lot of people behave pretty ghastly when it comes to money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
      "(45:21) Interviewer: But theoretically, couldn't AI and biotechnology help you come up with a counter measure?
        Schmidt: Um, I had thought so, and that was the argument I made until I... I do a lot of national security work. And there's a term called offense dominant. And an offense dominant is a is a situation in a military context where the attack cannot be countered at the same level as the attack. In other words, the damage is done. And most people, most biologists who've worked in this believe that while the model can be trained to counter this, the damage from the offense part is far greater than the ability to defend it, which is why we're so worried about it."

And Mo Gawdat on ways to help prevent that:
"Ex-Google Officer: You Only Have 3 Years Left Before It Hits! - Mo Gawdat"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "AI Expert Mo Gawdat returns to The Diary Of A CEO to reveal why AGI has already arrived, why 30% of jobs will disappear by 2027, and why the most dangerous thing about AI isn't the technology - it's the people in charge of it.
        Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, founder of One Billion Happy, and co-founder of Emma.Love. He is a 4x international bestselling author, and his upcoming book 'Alive: A Human's Guide to Living in the World of AI', will be released in October 2026.
        He explains:
* How AI can give you a 400-point IQ boost, and why most people are wasting it
* Why Mo actually wants a machine smarter than all of humanity to take control
* Why Sam Altman said AI will "likely end humanity", and what he chose to do next
* Why capitalism breaks when AI replaces the workers who buy the things we make
* Why AI unemployment could trigger civil unrest before governments are ready for it"

Which all relates to my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

And also this essay I wrote: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
      "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Having lived through the 80-90s myself, there were indeed a lot of great things about them -- but don't forget living in the shadow of nuclear war and "The Day After" and also "Peak Oil" and "Club of Rome" fears of running out of resources. Advanced of technology like PV and EV and 3D-Printing have made a lot of new things possible (both for good and bad) -- and as Mo Gawdat says we need to upgrade our social perspective and political discourse to use them wisely.

Personally, I feel it is plausible that the direction we come out of any AI singularity may have a lot to do with our social direction going into it. So it is absolutely imperative to get our social house in order before developing AI -- and that means building a more compassionate, wiser, sustainable, and just world *first*.

That was my first thought too. (Assuming the article is correct - all kinds of stuff gets published that doesn't hold up in the longer run.)

Remember that time is also big. Suppose that there have been 1000 interstellar civilizations in our galaxy during the past 5 billion years, and that each one lasted a million years before collapsing. How many would be active right now?

Frankly, I don't consider it a paradox at all. We've explored approximately 0% of our galaxy and found nothing. That doesn't tell us much.

Doesn't he know he's supposed to play the fiddle while he destroys his country?

I'm skeptical about that second part.

As for trolls, I wonder if some anti-vax propaganda is being pushed by hostile foreign powers as a way of hurting us.

It's just a story about Meta and AI.

Oh, nevermind.