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  • This is why I shut The Den of Amateur Writing down after 25 years of running and developing it. I had written the entire codebase for Googles SEO, rolled out the update so my users would see a bit more traffic trickle in, and then watched them delist all my URLs 3 months later when this change rolled out. I just gave up. It was taking way too much of my life fighting googles bullshit to provide a free community.

  • As one Google executive recently explained: “Organizing information is clearly a trillion-dollar opportunity, but a trillion dollars is not cool anymore. What’s cool is a quadrillion dollars.”

    Any exec saying remarks like this should be old yellered.

    I'm saying this being fully aware of what I just said, and I say it because of what it implies.

    It requires massive poverty, massive control, massive casualties, people dying from whatever comes with that level of poverty, just so that a few assholes can brag about a quadrillion dollars.

    Fuck

    That

    Shit

    We need to start hard capping maximum sizes in companies. No company can employ more than 1000 people. No company can have a net worth of over one billion dollar. When a company goes over the met worth, handle it with taxes. When it reaches the employee max, that's it, can't hire no more.

    We also need to hard cap personal wealth. Both income and net worth must be taxed in brackets. Nobody should be allowed to own more than 10 million (or whatever is a sane max maybe less, maybe a little bit more)

    The lowest of the low pay no taxes, they have no money to do so. Then the next starts with 5, 10, etc. middle class should pay around 30 like in most countries. After that it goes up and up until you reach 100% for income, and whatever % is required to put the person's net worth back into that 10 million limit.

    With this we don't have a single quadrillion dollar company with a king that will soon enough fail, we'll have thousands of multi million companies, thousands of owners of which some might fail, others won't. Tax income will be so much that we can quite easily fund a giant social support system, free healthcare (physical and mental, eyes and teeth), free education, universal income to ensure everyone can live nicely

    NOBODY has the right to be a billionaire, it is not a right, it is not a privilege, it should be forbidden and the very fact that it's not is a cancer on humanity.

    This "quadrillion" asshole is a clear and present danger to humanity, it's the seed of a cancer that will destroy us all.

    • None of your proposals would work for long, they only touch symptons of the real problem. We should be dismantling capitalism. It's the system itselft that allows the massive unequality we see around us, and it's by design.

    • Any exec saying remarks like this should be old yellered.

      And their offspring if they grow up to be the same or worse.

    • As one Google executive recently explained: “Organizing information is clearly a trillion-dollar opportunity, but a trillion dollars is not cool anymore. What’s cool is a quadrillion dollars.”

      Any exec saying remarks like this should be old yellered.

      I’m saying this being fully aware of what I just said, and I say it because of what it implies.

      It requires massive poverty, massive control, massive casualties, people dying from whatever comes with that level of poverty, just so that a few assholes can brag about a quadrillion dollars.

      No, it don't for the simple reason that for them to be in the quadrillion dollars someone should be able to buy/use/rent whatever they do. And they know this even if they don't say it.

      We need to start hard capping maximum sizes in companies. No company can employ more than 1000 people. No company can have a net worth of over one billion dollar. When a company goes over the met worth, handle it with taxes. When it reaches the employee max, that’s it, can’t hire no more.

      We also need to hard cap personal wealth. Both income and net worth must be taxed in brackets. Nobody should be allowed to own more than 10 million (or whatever is a sane max maybe less, maybe a little bit more)

      The lowest of the low pay no taxes, they have no money to do so. Then the next starts with 5, 10, etc. middle class should pay around 30 like in most countries. After that it goes up and up until you reach 100% for income, and whatever % is required to put the person’s net worth back into that 10 million limit.

      Instead of these stupid ideas, what about closing all the loopholes that allow these companies to not pay taxes ? It seem simpler and more effective.

      BTW, all your ideas would work only in a socialist country where the state control what the people do. When you say

      When it reaches the employee max, that’s it, can’t hire no more.

      what about a guy that want to do that job but then can't ? He start a new company (but is he able to do so ?) Or the state plan what everyone must do ?

      You are simply trading, by hate and ideology, the freedom of few to be billionaire with the freedom of everyone else to do what they want in their life.

      True, the current system has a lot of problems, but you don't solve them simply not allowing a company to become too big hoping that this will lead to a multitude of smaller companies.

      With this we don’t have a single quadrillion dollar company with a king that will soon enough fail, we’ll have thousands of multi million companies, thousands of owners of which some might fail, others won’t. Tax income will be so much that we can quite easily fund a giant social support system, free healthcare (physical and mental, eyes and teeth), free education, universal income to ensure everyone can live nicely

      Nope, you hope so but you have no evidence that it would happen, not even theoretical. And such solution would work only if it is applied world wide, if you apply only to US (or any other country or area like EU) your companies would be crushed from the bigger ones that your laws cannot touch.

      Or are you proposing isolationism as the default for every nation in the world ? Are you sure it is a better option ?

      NOBODY has the right to be a billionaire, it is not a right, it is not a privilege, it should be forbidden and the very fact that it’s not is a cancer on humanity.

      But everybody has the right to try to be one as long as he follow the rules.

      So the problem, maybe, is that we should start to ask for laws that force these big companies to follow the rules everyone else play by instead of asking to destroy companies that became that big because the laws are bad.

  • Google's methods are shitty and exploitative, yes, but this is far from "censoring". And "censor" is not used just for a clickbait title - the author claims "censorship" multiple times in the article before I stopped reading for health reasons (the doctor says if I keep rolling my eyes, my ocular muscles will spasm and eject my eyeballs).

    Really wish people would stop wielding powerful words irresponsibly.

    • Not saying you're wrong but people use words that are useful in conveying to their target audience. Denylisting by the search monopolist is perceived as censorship by many.

      Bombast aside, I think the process and its implications are interesting and people need to be aware.

      • Agreed. It makes some solid points, and it seems well-researched in the way of exposing how the search-result hotdogs are made (at least in the 2/3 or so that I read). I just couldn't stomach the way it was framed as "censorship".

        I'm very passionate about "words have meanings" and strongly dislike when words typically reserved to describe mountains are inappropriately used (and watered down) to describe mole hills.

    • Would you prefer "suppress"?

      Also, wouldn't your eyes bounce right back since they're attached with a sort of rubber band?

      • No, because nothing is being actively suppressed, either. The gist of it is that they're basically being ignored which is completely separate from active measures like censorship or suppression.

  • They've been doing shit like that* without AI for decades. But yeas, it's getting worse all the time.

    censor | suppress - tomatos | tomatoes

  • Perhaps this is how they're trying to solve the factuality problem of their LLM? Limit the sources to a known good allowlist. Train the AI answers model on those. If that's what's happening, it would be ironic that they'd have to undo their search results enshittification in order to overcome the LLM's inherent flaws. Of course the regular search results could keep being shitty. In fact they might get worse depending on the cost of the AI Mode.

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