IIUC (I'm no specialist in the field!!):

No, but one of the possible meanings of "dark matter" is "black holes created during the big bang". It's tricky to make it work, and it requires some adjustment in how stable black holes are, but it's possible. The problem is that it would require that they evaporate more quickly and quietly than theory says that they should.

Note that these would be relatively small black holes. Possibly the larger ones became the nuclei around which the first generation of stars collected.

We're you like, held out of school or something? It's hard to believe people can reach adulthood with such a hilariously shitty grasp of basic reasoning.

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 hilarious to see a federal government sue a state for banning an insanely unregularly shitshow.

"Minnesota banning prediction markets is like trying to ban the New York Stock Exchange,"

This is your future, United States. Just the dumbest shit spoken imaginable, in the service of protecting the freedom of separating people from their money, 24/7, backed up by an administration who nakedly wants dumb people to do dumb things - oh, the ways in which such policy posture enriches them personally? Totally unrelated.

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.

Dominion is going to need to add nuclear capacity in the next 15-20 years and having a larger demand base and cash reserves makes that practical. Adding renewables doesn't have that scale requirement though. I just wonder how they will try to structure utility rates to pay for capacity commitments.

Yeah, agreed. I actually am really struggling to understand how they think there is demand for this kind of thing. Is there market research where someone says "sure, I don't care who's talking, just as long as the content is a topic that I am plausibly interested in and the _conversation_ is not too jarring".
It's true that people will watch AI slop on YouTube; my guess is that is the demand signal they are responding to.

I have once watched an AI generated YouTube video (really it was weird graphics over an audio that sounded like Richard Feynman reading) and I found the explainer vaguely interesting enough to continue watching in the background for 20 min while I worked. I guess that channel got a few ad impressions off my eyeballs for that.

So I can see notionally how this kind of slop might win over some other slop in a transactional zero-sum way, but I really can't see how any of the typical marketing stuff - audience building, brand development, downstream sales conversions, fits in with AI-generated, undifferentiated commodity content. Isn't the whole idea of an influencer that the audience wants a person to connect them to content?

Maybe it will work, but my guess is it will just result in a lot more content that one has to wade through. I'm sure someone will have an AI solution to that. Turn that Hamster wheel up to ludicrous speed!

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".

lol, shashdotters are an adorable lot, forever living in the past

The Linux kernel has had multiple major vulns lately. I don't think you can put it down to Microsoft not caring about security so much as it's a hard job and getting harder with every line of bloat Microsoft adds.

I'm curious if anyone's found an OpenBSD vulnerability lately?

> YouTube maintains its very nebulous Medical Misinformation Policy and continues the censorship to this day. Facebook's core health misinformation rules still target vaccine skepticism,with automated systems and human review carrying forward pandemic-era frameworks despite 2025 Community Notes shifts: they still do it. Apple Podcasts continues hosting and algorithmic promotion decisions that deboost or limit visibility for episodes questioning COVID narratives, as seen in ongoing complaints and selective removals of skeptical medical podcasts

And? Private entities don't want their users killed via misinformation. How is this either a bad thing, or an example of government censorship?

You're not arguing that the elites are tying to "control" anything, you're arguing the large powerful amplifiers of user generated content should be completely irresponsible and knowingly host content that could kill people.

There was a moment where the press coverage seemed to shift with COVID that made me think "No, this is real". That never happened with Hantavirus.

The Ebola thing... still not getting that sense that it'll end up being an emergency in the US. But with this clown-show in charge, anything's possible I guess.