It's a bunch of text files. Code snippets and log extracts. How large can it possibly be? They could probably serve the entire thing with an older Raspberry Pi and a 32Gb microSD card. If that's outside the budget, they can save the money by firing the person who says that less than $100 worth of hardware is outside the budget.

> With UBI you get a fixed income from the government regardless of any other income you may or may not make. The idea is generally you replace a lot of the existing benefits (income support, pensions, the whole lot) which have to be applied for, administered, policed for fraud and etc with UBI, and you then bump the taxes a bit so people earning some target income basically see no net change, thereby ensuring that you don't just print money, and the overall change to tax receipts vs money spent is basically zero.

Yeah, but it sounds like GP understands the implications of that, and you don't.

The government can, and will, vary the level of income from time to time. There will always be an incentive to lower it, but almost never to increase it. Increasing it reduces the number of people in the labor pool. It also will feel victim to the current prejudice against those who do not work. If there were forces likely to result in it increasing, those forces would already be applied to, say, the minimum wage, which hasn't changed in nearly 20 years, not even to keep up with inflation.

That means anyone reliant upon UBI to live, such as those currently receiving social security/pensions, disabled people (who frequently need far more money than most to live on because of the costs of maintaining their disability) or other benefits (unemployment etc) will end up with an unlivable quantity even though they have no other sources of income.

So instead of UBI being a way to eliminate these benefits in favor of some means-test-free utopia, what it actually is is a scheme to remove benefits from those who need it most, forcing the disabled and the elderly to work, and ensuring there's little or no safety net for those who lose their jobs.

Which is probably why the Epstein class, which has never shown any signs of being "pro-great-unwashed" in the last 20 years, is so in favor of it. Introduce it, raise the cost of living, and get everyone to have enough economic anxiety they'll put up with Amazon level labor standards and Walmart level wages. If we're lucky. Now they can run their corporations the way they want.

It's fucked up. UBI is as much of a con as genAI. It's just people are so eager to see what appears to be a utopian escape route from the current system they can't see it's a trap.

No, and not just because of Betteridge, but because TFS says the only proposal involving DST is to make it permanent. That's not "ending" it.

Not a nothingburger. Propagation may take a while for normal configuration changes, but a revoked key is not a normal configuration change and absolutely requires a different approach so that it doesn't take more than seconds to show up.

If, for example, Twitter pre-Musk can show a new tweet to a follower within seconds of it being posted, Google can implement a key revokation propagation protocol that's just as fast. Twitter was transmitting millions of messages every hour, the # of key revokations is probably in the hundreds at most.

You can, but it'll be a while. You wouldn't believe the number of red-ring-of-death XBoxes piled up inside and outside his office he needs to fix first.

Well, in the past it was owned by various groups, including but not limited to:

- Millionaires

- Publicly traded Corporations

- Trusts built around the interests of journalists. ...etc...

Right now, ABC/Disney and NBC are the only two major media groups not owned by billionaires more or less directly. Even they have to deal with billionaire-owned TV networks who they're reliant upon to franchise their content - hence the temporary cancellation of Kimmel. And despite 30-40 years of propaganda claiming otherwise, corporate media like ABC/NBC is not really a second voice. It parrots the same talking points as CBS and Fox, the Bezos Post, and so on, 90% of the time, because the interests of big business and billionaires are usually aligned. The main difference is that NBC and ABC at least recognize that treating sections of society as anything but human beings is... bad for business, and that some level of truth is needed to ensure their output commands some respect, while Fox and CBS know they'll only get funding if they repeat their master's basest prejudices.

We're not living in the 1990s any more. Hell, the 1990s weren't the 1990s, but consolidation and the emergence of uncontrolled, psychotic, billionaires, has really fucked things up, the media included.

WebAssembly is technically an answer as it first appeared about nine years ago, but it was widely discussed before that. WebRTC dates back to 2011. Can't find a date on flexboxes but I see blog articles from 2013(!) on that. CSS grid is more recent, as are CSS variables - long after SCSS became standard because everyone got fed up of waiting - but I agree with the GP, is any of the actually more recent stuff actually necessary?

Of all of the above, WebAssembly is kinda useful, (and WebRTC fills a hole but is pretty old now.) The rest? They're just different ways to achieve things you could already achieve.

I think there's a case for arguing the core web standards went wrong at some point in the late 1990s, and became more and more bloated without adding significant functionality with each generation. A web browser has roughly a subset of the functionality as Microsoft Word - it's a rich text viewer with scripting and network connectivity. Yet Microsoft Word requires a maximum of tens of megabytes of RAM per document. And arguably Word is more powerful.

Maybe it's time we reset and started again. Freeze the standard for HTML, and create a new format (WPDL - web page description language?) that's lighter and less confusing to render. Browsers might even start being consistent if we did that.

Thanks, yeah, I'd seen that before, but I also know it's heavily reliant on everyone else's engines. But is definitely worth supporting even if it's not quite where I'd want to go (which I'm not sure of yet.)

> I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen some form of cooperative / community driven web search alternatives pop up.

This is what I was originally getting at. I've been trying to figure out a way to think of some kind of semi-selfhosted/federated/etc technology that could be an alternative to Google, but right now I'm not finding anything that's practical. And the usual alternatives people who aren't idiots like the one who thought I'd never heard of webcrawlers (WTF?) come up with are things like "Just use DuckDuckGo! They're not evil!" - because apparently Google was "evil" from the start ;-)

It'll be a complicated project, especially as anything public domain can be examined for ways to game it. Every time I think of something, it ends up being "Sure, but this relies upon webmaster cooperation", or "Sure, but this involves trusting people that can't necessarily be trusted". But there has to be a way!

What exactly are you proposing here that I'm too "dumb" to know? That every single person who wants to get away from Google should run their own webcrawler to populate a local database?

Do you seriously think that this is practical in any way at all? Do you know how large the world wide web is right now?

It's not "AI search", it'd be useful if it was. One genuinely legitimate use of LLMs would be to filter search results so that when, for example, I search for something like "Linux DAAP client" it doesn't give me a list of DAAP servers and pages on how to set up DAAP servers and so on because webpages that talk about setting up servers inevitably include the word "client" in them for obvious reasons.

What Google have been doing instead is more LLMsplaining. You ask it for help finding something and instead of helping it inserts its annoying and frequently inaccurate opinions in and only reluctantly will actually give you access to the things you actually asked for.

Google have decided that that really loud guy in the office who insists on giving you - well, everyone - his opinion on everything is a role model, not an annoying useless tosser.

Their search engine has been steadily decreasing in usefulness ever since Google+, but for some reason their competitors just keep copying them.

I've been wondering for a while (and not come up with any solutions) if we could at least create a practical "self hosted" (quotes because obvs it'll be impractical to do that literally) search engine technology so we can start getting Google et al out of the equation if we don't want it, even if everyone else just slavishly uses the big corps systems. It doesn't have to be a one for one match, just something that spits out a list of useful websites when you ask it a question. But... no idea how to make it work, at least not without the cooperation of a whole bunch of groups who won't cooperate.

That should be "<subject> wikipedia" in that last bit, Slashdot ate the brackets.

> So? The Linux kernel folks patched within hours or days.

Thank God that's all that's necessary and means we immediately get the updates to our computers without even having to reboot. There are no middle men between those plucky fast acting Linux kernel folks and me too, which also helps. Unlike Windows where... oh wait, no, it's the other way around isn't it?

Seriously gweihir, I'm sure you have your heart in the right place, and I run GNU/Linux (Debian) myself, but stop with this fucking nonsense that GNU and Linux people are somehow the only ones who "care" about security and Microsoft doesn't care at all. There are clear reasons why Windows has vulnerabilities more frequently than GNU/Linux, and they aren't because Microsoft doesn't care about it.

Likewise the GNU/Linux folks, especially the kernel people - a sizable number of which have conniptions when you just ask them to maybe work with people who are trying to introduce better security and use more solid programming languages than C - are not far more security focused. They benefit from having more eyes on their work, but most are just trying to get a device driver to work or make something a little faster. The userland people aren't much better - these are people who don't see the problem in throwing out wholesale decades of well tested code in order to "improve" security because they don't have the brains to figure out how to graft a security layer onto X11 when it's never been easier to do so.

We're going to be picking through Wayland related CVEs for the next 20 years.

The GNOME/Wayland people in particular are more unserious about security than Microsoft is.

I did. I didn't find anything. But Google is crap these days, so I'd rather ask experts. Have you used Google recently? It's even worse than it was 5 years ago, and it was pretty fucking close to useless back then for anything except getting celebrity news or " wikipedia".