I’ve been using DDG for a bit, and honestly, it’s kinda garbage. They are just borrowing data from Bing, and it shows.

Nothing is “an apocalypse” for anything.

JFC, people, stop pushing these extreme opinions on AI. It is not simultaneously the solution to everything and the end of the world. It’s just a goddamn tool.

It’s almost as bad as the opposition’s comparison of it to Skynet. People are never going to understand technology without applying some fucking nuance.

Stop hyping new technology… in either direction.

Only the Sith believe in absolutes.

Imagine playing Borderlands with a controller…

We’re talking about software engineers, not plumbers.

Then don’t live there.

I’m sorry, but I can’t sympathize with normal people with normal salaries that choose to live in the most expensive cities in the world, and then discover that they can’t afford shit, especially when they find themselves out of a job.

Move out, find towns that are affordable, go work for employers that embrace remote work, get a normal salary, and enjoy a low cost-of-living.

It is 2025. The job market is global and remote work is now. If you’re relying on salary to be magically tied to where you live, then you obviously don’t know how capitalism works.

Shitty media’s greatest trick is cherry-picking and anecdotal “evidence”.

Is there a search engine that doesn’t leech off of some huge corporate API?

Oh, geesh, where have I heard this pattern before with technology? Is it self-driving cars? Remember when the sky was falling because everybody said car transportation was going to change overnight because a bunch of fucking college students figured out how to win a self-driving car race. Where the hell is my fully-autonomous Level 5 self-driving car that was going to replace all of the truck driving jobs? Oh, what’s that? Are all of the jobs still here?

Technology moves the needle. It does not jam it all the way to the other side. Stop spending trillions of dollars on pipe dreams, only to have to force expectations back to reality ten years later.

Only off by a few orders of 10^x.

Typical shit journalism can’t be bothered to look at the units on their calculator.

I’m trying, but it’s hard to stay motivated when the information on a lot of local areas I visit are so damn old.

There are entire areas where it looks like it acquired the data 5-10 years ago from some other mapping software (Google, Bing, something else), and hasn’t updated since. It didn’t have all of my street information for my neighborhood area, so I started there first. I didn’t really mind it too much, because, hey, Google didn’t have it filled in several years ago, either. I started using Vespucci and drew out some of the houses and streets.

But, as soon as I expand out, there are strip malls with really outdated information. StreetComplete tries to ask me questions about these places that were replaced long ago, and it doesn’t have the tools to allow me to carve out sections of the strip mall, since it only thinks there are two shops, but there’s now 8-10 shops. So, I go back to Vespucci and try to fill it out, but I only have so much time before I’m going to some other location, and I don’t really have the time to draw out even the map details in the place where I’m parked. I feel like I’m the only one that bothers and the entire city is out-of-date. It’s overwhelming.

If bots somehow got this information back then, then why can’t it pull this data now? Certain sections and entire cities desperately need a refresh.

I remember seeing JonTron videos back in 2011, well before the 2015 gamergate era. Even back then he’d make offhand remarks about how tough it was being White, how badly women treat men, etc.

You seem to mistake cause and effect. JonTron was an racist and misogynistic asshole because that’s who he was. He wasn’t doing that because he was trying to tap into some kind of audience as a trick.

And he has been largely forgotten because of his behavior and image. People ditched him and moved on. GameGrumps cut him out a long time ago.

“Woke” didn’t really become a right-wing attack in the gaming and movie spheres until pretty recently.

Even before that, there was this whole corporate wokeness marketing trope that really drove the concept into the ground, like Popular Movie But Female and adopting it as a business strategy. It’s like kids all running with this popular meme, only for parents to sudden adopt it and it’s not cool any more. So, right-wing spheres to pick it off of the ground, dust it off, and just carry that energy forward, which is unfortunately what they are good at. Leftists are shit at messaging. Like, really really shit at messaging.

And now, you can’t even tell if people are being critical of “wokeness” as a right-wing attack or as a response to corporate synergy marketing bullshit. Because the latter might actually be a good argument, but it’s so abused that most just now assume the former.

Let’s not forget that Russia was playing both sides. As soon as GamerGate started, a bunch of games “journalists” all posted garbage articles like this, in the same day, pushing this shitty “gamers are now dead” message, fanning the flames even further and basically just pissing everybody off.

Sorry, I’m a gamer. I’m still alive, even ten years later. Gamers ain’t dead.

And then CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and the rest all ran with it to treat it like a horse race, which is exactly what the Russian experiment was trying to achieve.

Articles like this sound a lot like that garbage back then. Stirring shit in the wrong directions without proper context or thought, using dubious connection points.

I don’t inhabit those spaces, so I’m only going off the biggest names.

Obviously. The list you rattled off looks like you did a Google or YouTube search on “gaming influencer” and picked a few random names. Don’t spout off uneducated opinions about subjects you don’t know anything about.

Rich people tend to lean right. Is this the lesson you’re trying to illustrate here?

Reality? I mean, I assume you live in the Aussie Zone, right? How often does that county ban things in the name of “protecting the children”?

Parliament over the Australian

ban it for children

Banning shit from children in the biggest Nanny State the world has ever known? Really?!?!

Why think hard when you can have somebody think for you?

“Every facet, every department of your mind, is to be programmed by you. And unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you.” — Jack Kornfield

Who runs the verification service? How is that paid for? How do you know the verification service is trustworthy? What happens if they have a blue checkmark and it turns out it’s not accurate?

First rule of the Internet

Narrator: They could.