Qwant and Ecosia are especially notable for their efforts to build an independent search index.

For those who don’t know, most “independent” search engines, including DDG, still rely on Bing or Google results behind the scenes. They basically just act as a middleman by taking your query, forwarding it to one of those providers, and then returning the results to you. Some of them will attempt to reshuffle the order of those results to push the ones they think are best towards the top, but they’re still fundamentally limited to what Google and Bing choose to give them.

Presently a lot of Qwant and Ecosia searches go through Bing, but they’re collaborating to build an independent index which will allow them to become fully independent. I believe they’re already serving a mix of results from Bing and their own index, with plans to bias more and more towards their index as it matures.

Topologically a dog is a sphere (assuming it keeps its mouth shut…

Next time I want someone to stop talking, they’re going to be very confused when I tell them to “become topilogically spherical.”

Isoamyl acetate, the chemical which is traditionally used for artificial banana flavor, was first synthesized in the UK where it was marketed as Jargonelle pear flavor. Companies importing it to the US believed that the American public wouldn’t be interested in pear candy, so they decided to call it banana flavor instead.

Also, as an aside, Lecroy now sells “sunshine” flavored sparkling water which I’m 90% sure is flavored with isoamyl acetate. I think they just decided to lean into the fact that it tastes distinctly fruity, but not like any one fruit in particular.

Now do yourself a favor and buy a good quality cable thats at least 10ft long and rated for 240W. The feeling of having one cable that can charge any of your devices from any seat on your couch is incredible.

Even in the wide world of dubiously useful AI chatbots, Copilot really stands out for just how incompetent it is. The other day I was working on a PowerPoint presentation, and one of the slides included a photo with a kind of cluttered looking background. Now, I can probably count the number of things that AI is genuinely good at on one hand, and context aware image editing trends to be one of them, so I decided to click the Copilot button that Microsoft now has built directly into PowerPoint and see what happens. A chat window popped up and I concisely explained what I wanted it to do: “please remove the background from the photo on slide 5.” It responded on that infuriating obseqious tone that they all have and assured me that it would be happy to help with my request just as soon as I uploaded my presentation.

What?

The chatbot running inside an instance of PowerPoint with my presentation open is asking me to “upload” my presentation? I explained this to it, and it came back with some BS about being unable to access the presentation because a “token expired” before requesting again that I upload my presentation. I tried a little longer to convince it otherwise, but it just kept very politely insisting that it was unable to do what I was asking for until I uploaded my presentation.

Eventually I gave up. The photo wasn’t that bad anyway.

Oh yeah, this has happened multiple times, and the story is always the same:

1. The government says they’re going to release info on UFOs. This caused a brief flury of interest from the general public which is reinforced by the conspiracy theorists who swear that this will finally be proof of little green men at area 51, or whatever.
2. The government takes a while to follow through, during which time the general public slowly loses interest. The conspiracy theorists start getting impatient and publicly worrying that there must be a faction within the government that’s deliberately slow walking the release or even modifying the documents because they don’t want The Truth to get out.
3. The documents are finally released. They consist of 99% dry, beauracratic paperwork and 0% admissions that aliens have every visited earth, but the conspiracy theorists dig through and pull out a few scraps that can be spun to make a good headline.
4. The nation spends at most a week talking about “video taken out the window of a fighter jet of a mysterious floating orb thats porobably just a balloon” #27, or “eye witness account from a sleep deprived 18 year old soldier who swears he saw an alien space ship while on guard duty at 2am” #382.
5. The national news cycle moves on, and most people promptly forget about the whole thing. Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists take whatever scraps they were able to find and add these to their rotating library of bullshit to talk about. The initial promise that this was going to be irrefutable proof that aliens have visited earth is quietly forgotten. If it ever does come up, they blame that shadowy faction of the government which must have succeeded in watering down the release before publishing it.

Rinse and repeat.

I’m not sure who would be considered the “main character” of strange new worlds, but I’d be happy to have any of their jobs.

Very well put. This is a dimension to the ongoing AI nonsense that I haven’t seen brought up before, but it certainly rings true. May I say also that “They already operate at the minimum level of reflection that they’re willing to tolerate.” Is a hell of a sentence and I’m a little jealous that I didn’t come up with it.

There’s a recent video from Hank Green outlining the very compelling argument for abandoning coal power in strictly economic terms. It turns out that even if you ignore the big picture environmental impacts like global warming and acid rain, and you also ignore the localized impacts like air pollution and chemical waste, and you ignore the other negative externalities like long term health effects on the workers, then coal is still hard to justify because natural gas plants are simply more profitable.

Not to say that we should be ignoring any of those things, but just to make a point about how impossible it is to make a good faith argument for coal in today’s world.

https://youtu.be/IfvBx4D0Cms

Out of curiosity, is this something that RISC-V does better, or are they going down the same path as ARM?

“Gunpowder caliber guano” is an absolutely amazing way to call something batshit insane and I will be taking every available opportunity to use it in conversation from now on.

You don’t even need to ban it. You just need to open up the marketplace to alternatives. Cory Doctrow has been pushing the idea that the best retaliation is to simply repeal anti-circumvention laws and allow companies to begin chipping away at the walled gardens of the tech giants. For example, John Deere famously puts software locks on its tractors so that even simple repairs require the owner to pay for a technician to come out and “authorize” the newly installed part or else the machine will refuse to start. This system could almost certainly be bypassed, but right now the law not only allows manufacturers to lock their tractors, it also forbids anyone else from unlocking them. If the EU simply repealed the law that bans circumvention then some clever EU citizen could legally reverse engineer the software running on those tractors and start a business selling unlocking software. They could make it a one-time purchase at 10x the cost of an official tech visit and make money hand over fist while still saving their customers time and money in the long term.
And of course it’s not just tractors. Make a third party app store for the iphone that charges half the commission of Apple. Make a tool that allows seamless account migration from Google to the independent cloud provider of your choice. A huge amount of corporate rent seeking is enabled by anti-circumvention laws.

Reminds me a bit of the work of Shou Xin https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/shouxin-graphite-cat-drawings/

For what its worth, Slotin in particular knew the consequences. If i recall correctly, he had a reputation for being a bit of a “cowboy” when it came to experimental protocol. I believe the lab even had specially made tools for handling the core, but Slotin insisted on using a screwdriver because it was easier.

In case you’re wondering how to get a list of all the apps installed on your phone, these instructions worked for me https://www.javathinking.com/blog/how-to-get-the-list-of-all-apps-on-android-device-using-terminal/

I just wrote a quick script to check my list against the google doc. The official Merriam Webster app and the official Letterboxd app both got flagged.

The bloodletting will hit hardest in back-office operations, risk management, and compliance

Compliance? Really? They’re going to put the non-deterministic halucination engines in charge of compliance?

I can only hope that the first time this goes south the regulators understand how important it is to make an example to everyone else that a company can not escape liability for their actions just because the AI system that took those actions wasn’t explicitly instructed to do so.

May I see it?

At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within OPs laundry room?

Time to once again pitch my idea for a Super Smash Bros style fighting game with all public domain characters and a new DLC released every January 1st.

An excellent talk from Doctrow as always. A lot of it I’ve hard before, but this part was new to me.

The thing is, software is not an asset, it’s a liability. The capabilities that running software delivers – automation, production, analysis and administration – those are assets. But the software itself? That’s a liability. Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down

…

Now, obviously, tech bosses are totally clueless when it comes to this. They really do think that software is an asset. That’s why they’re so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. That’s why they think it’s good that they’ve got a chatbot that “produces a thousand times more code than a human programmer.”

Producing code that isn’t designed for legibility and maintainability, that is optimized, rather, for speed of production, is a way to incur tech debt at scale.