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Its easy and fun to dunk on them. And rightfully so. But I’ve never been genuinely tempted by tens of millions of dollars before. I can’t imagine it would just be “one big moment”, more like slowly boiling a frog.
I will always hate the prequels for this. George needed help but was too proud to ask. We couldve seen how strong the pull of the dark side could be.
Yeah, sadly I’ve had to deem everything but the first, that Mrs. Lucas held together, as non-canonical fan fiction.
Would have been interesting to see it as a true trilogy and not something spawned from an atomic explosion of money.
And decades later they’re multibillionaires who hold all the traits of multibillionaires. They’re into transhumanism, the singularity, effective altruism, microdosing, owning your own private yachts, planes, and islands, donating to conservative candidates, and moving their assets to avoid paying taxes. Complete scum. Utopia isn’t going to happen when all your AI shit is making creative people miserable.
Study math at university, start a search engine company using your sick math skillz, become the evil businessman you presumably hated when you started out, and then use your wealth to fund AI that will make nobody want to study math at university. Pulling up the ladder. What a world.
Naomi Klein is right, being a billionaire or even a millionaire, changes who you are fundamentally.
If money is power, and power corrupts absolutely, then money corrupts absolutely.
It’s economic carcinization, eventually everyone becomes Mr. Krabs
How on earth is effective altruism a negative?
Because Effective Altruism doesn’t mean what it sounds like. It’s a pseudo-ethical philosophy that justifies gross accumulation of wealth with the implication that at some point in time you will use your wealth to do good. The poster child for this is Sam Bankman-Fried, the scam artist CEO of FTX who conned investors into believing he set up a securities-backed cryto-exchange, when in reality the securities firm insuring the cryto was being inflated by the cryptocurrency it was allegedly insuring.
SBFs fall from grace should have killed any legitimacy Effect Altruism ever had, but unfortunately there are billionaire sycophants trying to bring it back to life. I guess the reasoning is if there are that many idiots that keep falling for Donald Trump’s promises, they should be able to find enough idiots in the investor class to keep running the same scam over and over.
Right, it shouldn’t be up to the goodwill of rich people to provide for the poor. That is the duty and whole purpose of a society and a democratic state.
They seem to hate handouts yet they claim that their wealth provides them the possibility of doling out handouts anyway they personally deem proper.
It’s just feudalism embedded in way more bureaucracy.
It wasn’t, in the hands of the philosophers who came up with it. Then it was coopted by silicon valley nutters and now it’s basically an excuse to self serve, while claiming the moral high ground, for techno feudalists.
It’s name washing. Carnegie was a horrible person no matter how much his foundation funds classic arts.
I’ll ask the shareholders, that’s a good trick!
Their later solution to this problem is interesting: for a long time the search and ad teams were entirely separate. The search team had one mission and that was to make Google search as good as possible. Selling ads and making money was someone else’s task. The old reasoning of “Make a really good product and then the profit will follow”. This is how Google search was able to outcompete all it’s competitors.
Then 2019 rolled around, the Google Ads team failed to meet objectives, and they blamed Google search for their failure. Google’s solution was to make search worse, reduce the visual difference between ads and results, and eventually put the ads guy officially in charge of search. The goal of Google search had changed from making the best search engine possible to optimizing ad views and clicks. This is one of the best documented stories of enshittification imo.
Good reads about this:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
https://codingwithcody.com/2025/10/search-is-dead-google-killed-it/Didn’t know this until you wrote your comment but 2019 is definitely when shit fell off so hard I rethought using Google at all
That sounds about right. I haven’t used Google search is half a decade. Same with chrome.
There are so many better services out there today I’m surprised Google is still something people use
TIL and wow
Some say that If you speak Prabhakar Raghavan’s name three times while looking into a mirror Ed will appear
I laughed. It definitely feels like that when reading Ed’s articles, the glee is almost palpable whenever he gets a chance to dish on Prabhakar.
I think they also discovered they were charging companies for all the blocked ads nobody saw, and were about to get sued into oblivion, so they refunded a token amount, and threw ads into overdrive.
I think ads were never paid by the dished out links, but by the actual opens. sometimes even only by the click on it (impression vs click).
Google ‘charges for YouTube adverts viewed by bots’ Published 23 September 2015
I think this lead the charge to confirm you’re a human, i.e. age confirmation.
Interesting, I didn’t know about this. Youtube isn’t search however, Nibbler is right that advertisers in search only pay per click, not per impression.
Disney+ changes subscriber agreement to allow ads on every plan
https://feddit.org/post/35666466
If you can’t opt out of ads then they are not only there to sell more products.
You should only support staying services that have an ad free plan so ars don’t take over. I’ll still pay for and ads free plans i can subscribe to and cancel the ones that don’t provide this service. But as well know consumers as a whole won’t do this. Look at YouTube premium. It’s amazing, cheap, and no ads, and you can share the keys with friends and family.
Yet no one wants to pay for it.
Just realize that consumers are not willing to pay for ad free plans. The future is grim.
While a noble effort, voting with your wallet means that those with the biggest wallets get their way.
We need legislation. We need us to be in power, and to put an end to capitalism superseding our democracy.
In the words of Mark Carney addressing the European Parliament a few days ago (and I paraphrase):
“We believe in a strong economy, not as a goal in itself, but as a means to create a good democratic society.”
and to put an end to capitalism superseding our democracy.
George Washington and others were Capitalists. Capitalism bought you Democracy because the Capitalists didn’t want to share with the king.
consumers are not willing to pay for ad free plans
I guess that, ironically, they don’t advertize them well enough.
Disney has never been on the other side of that.
Yeah, Disney’s origin story is as shitty as Apples: business man screws his creative partner, expunges him from the company’s origin story, and declares himself the true visionary.
Oh, like Tesla?
its kinda funny in hindsight.
Brin now actively interfering with elections to avoid being taxed. You are the face of evil, Sergie.
Spending over a hundred million to avoid chipping in to the public purse
A single greedy man pissing away 5% of the total tax revenue of Wyoming into lobbyist pockets just to not pay for public education, health & infrastructure that would benefit people
Bringing up the tax revenue of Wyoming as a yardstick sounds like you’re trying to diminish the severity. Like we should be more pissed off that they get away with it for so cheap when you put it that way.
They don’t only not pay taxes, they get money from the taxpayers in the form of subsidies.
It looks like he underestimated the power of the dark side
Some alternatives:
- Duckduckgo (Bing with privacy)
- Qwant (Bing with privacy, but building their own index)
- Mojeek (pet favorite of the privacy community but small index, search often unsatisfying for me)
- Kagi (apparently really good but paid)
I paid for kagi for a year or two. Problem (for me) is, they are very USA centric and offer less value to other regions. For region-independet search they were on par or better with google.
That’s my problem with DDG too, unless the query makes sense for the US it outputs mostly garbage. They don’t handle localization very well, or at all.
Not trying to pick on one thing but I guess I am focusing on it in my reply.
Am I the only person that thinks duck duck Go is no longer worth recommending?
No, it’s not just you. DDG hasn’t been very good in my recent experience. I bit the bullet and gave Kagi a try and it’s been excellent. It’s what I recommend now.
It’s not free, but I’ll gladly pay to ensure that I’m the customer being tailored to instead of the product being sold.
Yeah initially it felt silly to pay for a search engine, but I gave kagi a try and really like it. I could immediately turn off all ai shit. I can block websites that are ai trash or that I just plain don’t like or I can just down rank a website so I’ll see other results first. For example, I have the Minecraft fandom website downranked but not blocked so that if I’m searching for something that isn’t documented on the Minecraft wiki then the fandom page will still pop up, it just won’t be the top result ever
Also, I’m on the basic 300 searches a month and I’ve never hit the max despite feeling like I search a lot between my phone and computer
Edit: there’s also a little indicator next to websites that have a lot of trackers and ads so you can avoid or block those sites if you want
I’ve been using DDG since the beginning when it was an inferior product to Google, manly because of the bang! search feature (which replaced Yubnub for me) and for the privacy aspect. If a DDG search didn’t give me good results, I could just add !g and see the Google results. It cut down my dependence on Google by about 75% at the time but only got better as the '10s wore on. By 2020 it was just a better search engine.
Since then it seems to be going through the same enshittification that Google went through, although they know that they live & die on their privacy feature and that seems to still be better. Instead, they have added the AI summary (“search assist” is not auto by default, so a basic search doesn’t query the AI), prioritize a few of the top hits on the search (along with context results like wikipedia, dictionary, stock summaries, etc.), but the rest of the results on the first page appear to be paid ranking pages. Below that are related searches, and below that is the “more results” button that is the hits that used to come before the paid ranking pages.
Even though it seems to be sliding into the same patterns as other commercial search engines, I still think it is better than most of the alternatives. I still set it to default some from the browser I can do things like search for RAM on NewEgg (“!ne 16gb crucial ram”) and go directly to that page instead of going to a search results page that may or may not be a sponsored link that takes five seconds to load because of spotty wireless & all of the 3rd party elements having to load.
Could you please tell me why you dislike it?
I simply feel like search quality has dropped, and I’m no longer able to find quick answers.
That does not mean the competitors are better, it just means ddg is slipping hard imo
There’s also Ecosia that lets you choose between Bing and Google as result provider. (And for a while now they have been working on a European Web Index with Qwant to replace the US sources.)
And they plant trees!
Shouldn’t “paid” be a a huge advantage, if we are complaining about advertising?
Main problem with “paid” is that you have to log in for searching = all your searches can be tied to your payment into / identity. That’s a big no-no.
Not to mention Kagi is based in the U.S. Whatever privacy promises they make are bullshit.
Either bullshit or delusional (which amounts to bullshit for the users) if they don’t realize that they can’t do anything about a FISA court order. Do they have a warrant canary at least?
They also have options for anonymous search.
I’m curious about how well they enforce that, and how as a European on European servers they do more, but I wil assume it’s all transparent to state actors. As are all others.
The benefits are in corporations and being monetized.
Yeah they will all be transparent to state actors. Which is why the best option imo is to mix our searches by doing them in private browser windows of different browsers, occasionally wiping history and sometimes using VPN / tor
VPN providers and torrent sites solved this a while ago, allowing anonymous payments: crypto, even mailing cash.
Are you really so naive to assume that your searches tied together won’t allow to identify you within days? Please never work in cybersecurity.
Also, crypto coins are a scam nowadays, thanks to the investment markets making them unstable as fuck.
Bad news for you, I do work in cybersecurity (for over a decade), and I don’t search for “hot singles in my exact address”, so a bunch of k8s error message searches and the odd banana bread recipe won’t identify me in a while.
Working in cybersecurity and mistaking your own online behavior as being relevant for everyone else. How could that possibly backfire? /s
If someone cares, they have to be careful. No amount of anonymous tor usage will prevent exposing you if you Google your name and social security number.
Not everyone on the Internet has money to burn.
So then we need to choose between advertising or demanding unpaid labor…
we need that altruistic billionaire just doing it for the love of the consumer
yeah you know that’s how most of them become billionaires, by being altruistic and always putting others before their own needs.
exactly!!!
It’s a difficult choice indeed
no one’s demanding unpaid labor
I use DDG but i wish it filtered out sites that are clearly 100% AI generated
Problem with all SEO is AI is really good at grabbing hold of the search crawlers and creating articles on questions whether it answers the question or not. I sometimes search by date published so older non ai articls have a chance. Perhaps they could increase the wighting based on age.
I use https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ together with the uBlacklist browser extension. It lets you ban domains from your search results across all major search engines and also lets you subscribe to blacklists compiled by others, such as https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist (I see now that this hasn’t been updated since last year, but there are most likely others out there.)
I wish it didn’t append completely irrelevant “Apple Maps” results for places thousands of miles way, to everything I search for.
I would imagine ddg can’t licence Google maps. I’m surprised they don’t use bing maps (if that’s still a thing)
They used to use Openstreetmap, which was very accurate where I lived, and also seemed to be reasonably good at knowing when something needed a map (like a business or location you were trying to find) and when it didn’t need a map (like any other normal search).
Brave has its own index. I’m happy with it. No crypto stuff there.
Fuck brave. One huge anti-feature collection.
is this satire?
I use it with Librewolf. Search engine is just a website. I don’t count Brave as Big Tech so that is a win in my book.
it’s funny that they talk about ads hurting search results because they literally became an advertising company that does shitty search on the side.
Bros saw those profits and changed their tune.
Throw potentially $100,000,000 at me and I would be a wholly different person. Humans aren’t meant to have that much power and systems that allow it are inherently psychologically poisonous.
Quite honestly, if I was handed that much cash, I would 100% go the Paul Newman route. Food for children, free education, free healthcare… damn dude, if I were elected President, I would be assassinated the same day. I would tax anyone with a billion dollar net worth 95%.
And I would also close down the military budget. Vote for me to be dictator, and I will start practicing Neo’s moves. I would be literally dodging bullets and would have to wear an anti-bear bullet proof suit.
But I would do it in a heartbeat for humanity. So much of this suffering is so easy to stop that it makes me sick.
Psychologically poisonous? How? I’d imagine that it’d liberate you and then you can just be yourself.
Liberated in the same way a toddler is liberated from social decorum. The world enforces personality traits via social and evolutionary pressure. As that pressure wanes, humanity’s prosocial nature can morph or decay.
You are right, you get to be yourself. Ultimate freedom. Say hello to people at the park? That’s an option. Purchase a restaurant you enjoy? That’s an option. Gain an uninterruptable supply of cocaine? That’s an option. Kidnap kids to be your island sex slaves? That’s an equally easily available option. You are free.
Released from restraints, people can be their best self or the most debaucherous, ladder pulling, vile thing ever to be birthed. Or cycle between either extreme as they slide through philanthropy and torture like a saltwater crocodile between marine and freshwater environments. Eventually, an itch that shouldn’t be scratched might arise and an opportunistic infection could follow. I’m not interested in putting myself in that situation, let alone others.
This isn’t universally true. There are plenty of people with that amount of money that aren’t psychologically poisoned, but they stop trying to double their weathly and many go philanthropist but you rarely hear those stories because they don’t make a big deal about it.
If you have that kind of money and choose to keep it, you’re evil. Full stop.
To play Devil’s Advocate, that kind of money gets you connections you’d never have access to otherwise. If your goal is to improve the world, having a direct line to the people in charge could let you do more good, and nothing is stopping you from donating it all posthumously anyway.
If we don’t let anybody accumulate that kind of wealth, then that wealth can’t be used to buy access.
Where do you draw the line?
A retiree that invests well and owns a home can easily end up with well over 10 million.
I’m fine with a billion but I find it gets tricky below that. Since a billiion is a very large magnitude above the mean.
I’d rather push for philanthropic efforts rather than force people to do weird things like setup trusts for every heir that sits just below some limit but remain funds they still directly control by being the trustee.
If the goal is truely to prevent being able to possible accumulate those amounts then we’re looking for a different economic system which is fine but then just say that.
No human being can own more than the average insurance value of a human life. Raise the average value of a human life if you want more money. That’s my solution.
We should in some way couple the amount of money retirees receive (don’t know how it is calculated in the US, here it is dependent of how much you earned in life and how many years you were working, with a minimum and maximum value) to the maximum amount a single person can directly and indirectly own. If your investments get over the limit, you can only spend, but not earn more money - in some cases this might result in you having to sell off something you own and donating what you get for it (and you can’t use your investments as collaterals for a credit line when over) until you are back below the max.
Yes, that’s why I keep saying America’s problem is the boomer class. By value of assets it’s 8 times bigger than even the billionaire class. And that’s just boomers, it gets worse when you include the older ones (silent or greatest or whatever).
Like MacKenzie Scott (Bezos ex-wive). The amount of money she is funneling to struggling NGOs is insane.
The idea that NGOs can provide better ROI than tax supported public services is billionaire propaganda.
I agree, but she can’t really force the state to tax her more, can’t she? Supporting NGOs (which also might lobby for higher effective tax rates for the rich) is for sure a better way to help people now instead of sitting on the money and waiting that the country does something they will never do on their own.
I would probably break mentally if you gave me that much money. After a short shopping spree to buy the things i always wanted but never was able to finance (nothing major - mostly high end PC hardware and around 100 TB redundant storage, a phone without a huge amount of scratches, a nice e-bike and some home renovations) I would give most of it away with minimal involvement from my side and just keep a small nest egg because i never had one.
I’m old enough to remember them having “don’t be evil” written in big letters on their campus…
Then they got money. That changed everthing.
Google is THE success story of the end of the dot com bubble.
I hear it does that
Advertising is the most prolific form of environmental pollution wrought by commerce.
It needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking, and every instance of it must be exhaustively scrutinised and required to be justified.
2011, the removed the “don’t be evil” from their mission statement. they’ve only been evil for 15 years. /s
Imagine the internal meetings they had leading to that outcome.
“Guys, we’re evil now, okay?”
