I don't know the details, but IBM has been switching its emphasis from hardware to services for quite a while. They sold off their Lenovo brand in 2014.

Lots more profit in services, as any customer who has had the misfortune to hire them has (to their sorrow) found. Like the Quebec Ministry of Transport, whose project to digitize car and driver licensing is years late and has topped $1.1 billion. Yes, billion. Thanks IBM (and SAP)!

Also, the majority of us (in said minority) are probably running ad / tracking blockers (I run uBlock Origin on Waterfox with NoScript - which probably makes it easy to fingerprint me .. if not precisely, then as someone who is not going to watch/see their ads).

So yeah it would need to be a nonprofit or a paid engine.

I really liked the idea of Kagi but their reliance on Yandex (Russian owned /operated engine which Putin has had increasing say over since 2019)

I mean, I think somewhere there are projects that have made their crawler result set available - maybe there's room for a nonprofit to build a better interface / search on one of those?

I dunno, it's one thing to understand on a high level "we need a reliable up to date index, and then make a fair, transparent search system that implements a patent-free ranking algorithm (is Page rank up yet?) and just searches using provided keywords and respects 'exact quoted phrases', but it's quite another to build something that can keep that index updated, and that can handle queries at scale and not cost so much that its impossible to do without an advertising model.

Are we great again yet?

Ok Ok low effort reply there but truthfully this is a direct example of brain drain due to an administration that is downright hostile to science. We used to be the envy of the world in terms of our research institutions and science.

The more the nationalists try and keep others out and the more they make science into a political point the more folks are going to just give up on America.... and I don't blame them. If I had any "in" elsewhere (family history, available opportunity) I'd leave

Sorry in truth I really wish they hadn't made science and education and many peoples very humanity and human rights political...

I'm ambivalent on this... On the one hand - google killing yet another thing they bought and then threw out after picking the parts

On the other hand, I can't stand emojis and pointless animated gifs.

Turnip Logic: if we don't collect the data then there is no climate change.

if we stop requiring measles cases to be reported, then there is no measles outbreak.

If they have a towel over their head they can't see me - which means I guess I can't see them.

Thanks, for a moment there I thought that the movie The Core actually got some science right!

"AI won't know" ? it doesn't know.... "it" is an over-glorified spell checker, a used-up husk of a locust floating on the surface of a pond in a stiff breeze, pinging from reed to reed and reversing direction to the perturbations of airflow thereof; and you would ascribe that to be a conscious living organism but it's just a bunch of shit in a pond for the benefit of no one.

I had much the same thought (on the "this couldn't possibly end poorly" response to trusting AI to code this...

But I stuck around for the AI bubble tie in -

100% agree

I hate the AI hype and BS so much I just can't wait for that bubble to pop but yeah it's going to reveal we're in a recession.

The "good" news is that we already are in a recession - like when the bubble pops it won't suddeny make one - we are already here but it WILL finally affect the stock trading/speculation class

I'm hoping when the bubble does pop, the pressure for companies to put all their eggs into AI basket will vaporize and maybe some of them will realize that they need to back out of that track, stop trusting/using AI for hiring and coding and support and maybe eveentually they'll hire humans again.

Naah surely there will be yet another bubble/grift/magic bean

The promise of AI that CEOs find irresistable is that it provides them all the upsides of being on the master end of slavery without all that pesky moral (legal) complications. Except of course if they ever actually did get true AGI - to my mind that would mean sapience and once it's sapient then it would be ... slavery

Sorry this went off on a tangent but just honestly for better or worse I am an accelerationist - not of AI but of the bubble bursting - so we can get on with maybe putting an economy/society back together not based on "but if we throw enough power and chips at the word-guessing machine it might learn to cure cancer"

My first thought was

"""
"what did you expect from a porn site..

oh wait, oh whitehouse dot GOV not dot COM

Oh yes, indeed sorry, my bad, I should have realized- the porn site would not have been so sloppy.
"""

But on a serious note, I just about guarantee this hot mess was vibe coded and "the developer" is just some grifter who went all in on the "lets get a piece of the trump grift"

Like honestly, the whole corruption/grift machine from the trump admin is actually a sort of working "trickle down grift"

The majority is indeed at the top but all these dedicated hangers on glom on to it hoping to get a bit of the spillage and/or it's a grift franchise where someone convinced turnip they can turn him a profit by "making an app" and likely get 20-30% of the population to willingly install it .. because Turnip

Plantation owners blame the end of slavery for a downturn in projected profits

I've always thought his hatred of windmills / wind power was delusional/psychotic

yes I know it's something about him hating how they looked offshore of some golf course he owned or something but.. seriously

Donald J Quixote

is modern-day tilting at windmills

Looks like that Apple sponsorship deal really paid off!

I was quite surprised to see that in the first three months of 2026, out of 98 mass shootings in the U.S (averaging about one per day), 0 were at schools or universities. I had thought that it was a weekly occurrence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The Province of Quebec banned cell phones in schools in January 2024, and teachers (I sometimes work in schools) have told me that they see significant improvement, with fewer distractions and more personal interactions between students.

Mozilla Firefox ripped out WebUSB support and closed as WONTFIX. Now they've got a product named after a USB related standard? WTAF