For me it’s probably the murder of arch duke Ferdinand, that started the WWI. It’s so fucking dumb all along, so much shit went south and yet here we are. It truly shows history is very stupid sometimes even if events in question have cathastrophic consequences - especially since that particular event shaped the modern history a lot.
The motorcade passed the first assassin before he could do anything. The second...also fucked up and didn't do anything. The third threw a bomb at the cars, which bounced off the convertible top of the car, under the next car. The guy who threw the bomb at the motorcade then took a cyanide pill and jumped in the river. But he failed his suicide attempt. Only because the motorcade driver took a wrong turn did they succeed:
After learning that the first assassination attempt had been unsuccessful, Princip thought about a position to assassinate the Archduke on his return journey, and decided to move to a position in front of a nearby food shop (Schiller's delicatessen), near the Latin Bridge.[93] At this point, the first and second cars of the Archduke's motorcade suddenly turned right into a side street, leaving the Appel Quay.[89] When the Archduke's driver followed their route, Governor Potiorek, who was sharing the third vehicle with the Imperial couple, called out to the driver to stop as he was going the wrong way.[94] The driver applied the brakes, and when he attempted to put the car into reverse gear he accidentally stalled the engine close to where Princip was standing.[95] The assassin stepped up to the footboard of the car, and shot Franz Ferdinand and Sophie at point‐blank range[94] using a Belgian-made Fabrique Nationale model 1910 .380 caliber pistol.[96]
Yeah - as someone who mindlessly would google code syntax all day while working, ChatGPT has taken over that duty (and is doing a much better job at it)
I've been on Kagi for a couple months now. Very happy with it. Generally unless i think the problem is small and easy (search is not, imo) i want to pay for servers in an attempt to not be "the product". So i like Kagi on that. It's search results are good too, especially after having used DDG for a couple years (iirc? time flies)
I tend to use Brave search, since it is the default in by browser. Sometimes I don't get good results, and will go to another search engine. Google has become a bit unreliable though, since they started integrating these "ChatGPT"-style responses. These AI systems often seem to just make stuff up, and you really can't rely on the information at all.
This may be confirmation bias, but I was thinking much the same thing before seeing your post, over the same time frame (last few weeks/days). Could be people are getting better at manipulating Google's algorithm, could be something else. But I've stopped going to Google as my first choice, getting much better results with Duck Duck Go (which is Bing I think).
For about the last year and a half Google results have been less useful - so yes it's fairly recent(-ish).
Especially for tech stuff. We used to have Reddit to turn to as an alternative, but now that's not working.
https://www.dexerto.com/tech/google-admits-reddit-blackout-tanked-search-results-2191128/ - e.g. the Senior VP for searching in Google even admits that Google is not as good anymore, somewhat as a result of the Reddit issue but that was only propping up the problem that Google itself caused, by allowing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to rank predatory webpages over real ones with actual content.
I don't know of any solutions to this. I was thinking to search on places individually - like SlackOverflow, but now that company too is having a strike from its volunteer workforce just like Reddit. Google, Twitter, Reddit, Slackoverflow, they all are having MAJOR issues right now, as a result of not wanting to pay their workers and get something for nothing.
So they are turning to AI to solve their problems. AI doesn't understand shit, and in its current form simply parrots the answers that it gets elsewhere, without proper context or anything, or even acknowledging at all where the original content came from. So now as the sources of true content are drying up, and the well having been poisoned, true information is suddenly much more rare and precious than it ever was, yet harder to find than ever before as it is mixed in with all the sewage of people vomiting up their emotions, and actively upvoting things like snarky answers or memes rather than "real" ones.
The information age seems to be over, and in this Late Stage Capitalism we are now entering a new era, whatever it's called (maybe disinformation age?).
I’ve heard people mention disinformation age and I wouldn’t be surprised if in 50 years this time period is called that. I imagine it’s at least going to get a bit worse before it gets better.
Disinformation sounds like an intentionality behind it, which in some cases is very much true (Russian sources proven in some cases in order to sow discord).
While the terms late stage capitalism and/or enshittification of the internet may capture how it is oftentimes rather a byproduct of a profit seeking motive - i.e. the disinformation was not the point, it is simply what resulted from the process of chasing profits at all costs not just to be responsible and keep the company going but to make enormous bloated kickbacks to executives and stockholders (at the expense of rather than while feeding forward the product).
It is ironic how the two forms of dis-/misinformation look remarkably similar to one another. Both are forms of destruction and decay, and both result from selfishness and greed, the only difference is whether it comes from an external or internal source, the former wanting to actively destroy while the latter is an even greater degree of malice in not even caring or possibly even noticing the fact that destruction is taking place. Like a zombie apocalypse where they eat and are not even sated as an animal eating would have been, and simply move on to eat again and again and still yet again, entirely unnaturally, according to a level of greed not even physically possible in the past (bc of constraints on stomach size, even if some animals can expand that like a python, yet they still have a limit whereas corporations do not?).
And then you have the whole "who rather than what you know" crowd for whom facts do not even matter so much, being too lazy to consume them personally. Humans are very much herd animals (sheeple) it just is a fact. These will consume the ads, and do not care really what info is fed to them, hence why should a corporation be interested in feeding them high quality info when low quality stuff is received better actually, as well as being significantly cheaper? In fact the users would outright complain if only high quality material were available, bc it is too difficult for them to read. This is an interesting tangent to explore bc it shows how it is not the greed of corporations forcing the misinformation down their users' throats unwilling, but rather corporations properly fulfilling their duties to both shareholders and a majority of users simultaneously, giving their customers precisely what they wanted, asked for, and demanded as in they go to whoever offers that. Who is really in charge here, if not you and I making decisions - Google or Bing or DDG - every single time we do a search?
Google is mostly ads and robots now, I use it mostly for typing website names, not for actually searching things.
For searching things I'm testing kagi (http://www.kagi.com) which is not free, but not being ad-driven is an interesting concept for me.
This looks like a very interesting option but the pricing seems bananas. Early adoption and spreading the word would be driven by power users who are easily above 1,000 searches per month....and 25$ per month is a lot just for search.
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