So, die of skin cancer instead of Alzheimer's?

Nope, there's now a vaccine for that.

I used duckduckgo for a while. I switched to Kagi last year. Not everyone is willing to pay, up front, for search. But if you do, the experience is even better, because there are no ads to watch out for at all. Everything is search results.

When Ukraine dissects the remains of Russian drones or missiles, they inevitably find western components. In one case, reported on here, they found an Nvidia chip inside a missile.

Is someone, or someones, inside the supply chain redirecting chips? Is this the same as the servers getting to China? Or is this merely a case of someone buying this stuff under a shell company and then passing it along?

I see what you did there.

Expect AI-written material to be put through a "cleanup to make it look less like AI and more like a person" post-processing step in the very near future.

It's probably already happening.

I had to add minimum paragraph and sentence counts to the prompts it uses to keep it from trying to write a few terse sentences each time.

I noticed this in Claude (from DDG). It invariably tries to shorten sentences or make them more compact and concise. Sometimes that can be good, but most times long-winded sentences are what are needed.

Except that non-ai search engines still work, whereas Google does not, unless you manually step in to tell it what to do. Still a reversion. And not an unavoidable one

and there is no way I can find to make it stop popping up giant intrusive ads for their other services every single time I open it.

Just like Firefox. There is no easy way to turn off being harassed by an intrusive pop-up telling me about a new update.

There used to be. It was a simple checkbox. But somewhere along the way someone had to justify their existence and removed that simple checkbox in favor of harassment.

The reason Google rose to dominance is that their algorithm accounted for trustworthiness. You didnâ(TM)t need to know the site that had your answer, Google knew it, and ranked it at the top of your results. This is basically asking you to manually do what Google historically did automatically, which is to vet websites that might contain answers to your queries. All so that they can inject LLMs into a process that does not need them. Yet one more reason Iâ(TM)m glad I ditched Google.

No one is going to visit a website they can't even pronounce let alone spell.

modern safety features and modern fuel economy.

OK that may mean a 2020s car with a 1970s user interface. Minus the 8-track, I don't need that.

Would like to add one tidbit because I've had this same conversation at work. The professor stated they used AI to help edit only after hundred of hours of writing. In other words, they did the heavy lifting and only used AI at the end to help refine what they had already done.

Is this any different than a human editor? If I write a book, do what I can to edit it down, then go to an editor who makes suggests, removes or reorders parts, and so on, is that any different than having AI do the same thing? In both cases you wrote the words. In both cases you went somewhere else to help edit.

If people claim that using AI to edit a work is "cheating" because it's no longer your work, then the same should apply to a human editor.

Multiple places in the USA. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.

Unfortunately, refundable tickets are more expensive.

Back in the early days of cable, I sometimes switched to dialup because of high packet loss on the cable connection. The dialup might have been slow but it was as solid as a rock.

A decade earlier I would sometimes throttle my modem to a slower speed for similar reasons.