A chat about an eugenicist in California made me think about rhetorical tricks. My gentle readers are familiar with objective allies, where the centrist journalist cries “that candidate is horrible and awful and I am going to put his words on the front page and in the prime-time news every day” and watches the ad revenue roll in, while the candidate launches a line of propaganda on the theme “look how much those elitists hate me and how powerful I am” and hires a new accountant to track his donations. Ever since smartphones came out, vlogs and podcasts are funded by people declaring another influencer the enemy, launching a five-part series to attack them, and sending their viewers to the ‘enemy’ channel until the ‘enemy’ returns the favour by launching a counter-video or anti-episode. This pays much better than useful factual videos on knitting or woodworking. There is a related concept whose name I am trying to find.
Behold the power of our fully-armed and operational Colossus! Enter the same search term often enough, and the bot gets confused about which language to reply in. Image c/o mhoye (Mastodon)
In May a company I remember called Google declared war on the web. They propose to replace all their search results with slop. The predicted consequences are emerging, such as searches for strings which contain the words “disregard” and “ignore” failing because LLMs cannot separate instructions and data, or search strings that are too long producing responses in random languages because the LLM places less weight on earlier parts of its context window like the part that tells it “answer in English (Canadian).” Every query to a LLM is a SQL-injection attack waiting to happen. For those of us who host websites, this poses the question of how to respond, because Google has broken the social contract where we let them scrape our website and they send visitors to our sites. When search engines provide slop instead of links, traffic to many sites collapses (although mine has been steady for a few years). Computer scientist Paul Cantrell is arguing for blocking Google’s crawlers and filing DMCA takedown requests. I stopped using their search engine in 2013 for many excellent reasons, but I am curious if any of my gentle readers still find my site on it. I will be back next weekend with a post about swords, but right now I would like to talk about why I am not sure we will have to think about these companies and their race-obsessed executives twenty years from now.
One of the few uncovered sections of Bowker Creek, one of the dead rivers of Greater Victoria like the Walbrook. This section runs between Cadboro Bay Rd and Bee St
I have no blog post today, just one scheduled and three almost complete. My review of the “Matthew Amt” kopis from Deepeeka in India is complete except for editing and photography (I need a sunny day with no day job). I have a post about Google declaring war on the web, and why now is an excellent time to disconnect from centralized American services. And because it is income-tax and rebalancing season, I have two posts on personal finance: one offering two cheers for dividend stocks, and the other on the performance of an actual index portfolio over thirteen years. Instead of finishing this post I attended a Victoria Civic Orchestra concert at Oak Bay High on Saturday, then picked up a preorder copy of Greeley’s Almighty Dollar at Munro’s and checked the posters for events along Government Street.
