ALT

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

ALT

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

ALT

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

ALT

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>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

ALT

google doesnt give a shit what you're trying to search any more. it's like "I didnt bother using half of your search terms but here's pinterest and wikihow. enjoy"

I don’t know anything at all abut computers but

You know how, when you first talk to a new chatbot (the kind that are designed to be trained as they go), it’s kind of limited and stilted and obviously AI? And then, once it’s been online and trained up and tweaked for awhile, it gets really convincing and talks mostly like a person? And then after a golden period it rapidly descends into incoherence, with a few phrases dominating regardless of conversation context and everything else being sentence fragments and non-sequitors?

The last few years of using google have kind of felt like slipping into that incoherence stage.

it pretty much is what the above person is saying. a few years ago they switched to usimg the 'bidirectional encoder representations from transformers' (BERT) algorhythm, which used AI to scan your quety f9rwards and backwards searchong fpr intent, rather than just using the meaning of the individual words ypu type. few problems with this. one, it's shit. two, it is actively ignoring what you say in favour of trying to figure out what it THINKS you're trying to say. great leap forwatd for AI, and great slip backwards for clear communication vs essentually being gaslit by your computer. three, it is trying to work out ypur meaning according to the indescribably vast pool of search data from all of history, around the world. which is great if you want to search for the same things as everyone else in history arpund the world has. it's using previous searches to predict your intent. so if yoy want to search for 'can the measles vaccine cause blood clots', congratulations, ypy're going to get a load of results about the covid vaccine. you didn't mention it but millions of other people did, so that's probably what you wanted, right? how on earth could google have made such a niave mistake? simple. it's no longer invested in showing you what you want; it's trying to show you what you should want. looking for an independant crafts shop? nobpdy searches that, you're having amazon instead. searching for a specific live journal, by name? yeah wrll it isn't so bothered abput names now, and your intention is presumably to read a blog, so here are 50 links to the same huge blog sites owned by the same huge multimedia corporations. you asked for a biography of a local photographer but running your query against every similar one in history, turns out more people use pinterest and wikipedia than that random guy you mentioned, so obviously you meant to search for 'photographs' on pinterest or 'photography' on wikepedia, right? essentially, the old algorhythm was like ordering grocery delivery by saying what you want to buy and accepting that sometimes they won't have certain items in stock and will send something similar instead. the new one is saying what ypu want to buy and it analyses your shopping list to figure out which items you're most likely to want, according to how previous shoppers have purchased, and sending ypu that instead. and call me cynical, but i think the latter method is going to lead to an awful lot of 'you want coca cola, you just didn't know it'. sooner or later ypu won't even bother to search for that off-brand cola you used to drink, it never comes up anyway. what a shame. you can read abpit the model at google's own blog at https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert/ which is a simple, clear explanation of the algorhythm and also the answer to the question 'what will happen when AI starts correcting humans?'. the answer is profit.

thank you for this explanation! but now I want to start killing people at google

I found this resource and it's already giving me better results.

I found this resource

and it’s already giving

me better results.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

There should be a specific fashion item for keeping your sleeves rolled up. Like big clasping arm bracelets. I think this would improve morale in the gay community somewhat.

There is though

They’re called Sleeve Garters, they started off in the 19th century and where popular with musicians, gamblers, gunslingers and the occasional Victorian gentleman. Nowadays you can see bartenders wearing them

"In it, when it’s time for teenage vampire Juliette (Hook) to make her first kill so she can take her place among a powerful vampire family, she sets her sights on a new girl in town named Calliope (Lewis). But much to Juliette’s surprise, Calliope is a vampire hunter, from a family of celebrated slayers. Both find that the other won’t be so easy to kill and, unfortunately, way too easy to fall for…"

Just when you thought it couldn't get better...

... Elizabeth Mitchell enters the chat.

@quariian

And also worth noting from time to time, from an earlier reblog

The photos from What We Do In The Shadows & the real art

Titles of the paintings (see here for a lot more info):

1. Salome (1870) by Henri Regnault
2. Portrait of Diego de Villamayor (ca. 1605) by Juan Pantoja de la Cruz
3. Portrait of Roelof Meulenaer (1650) by Ferdinand Bol
4. Woman in a Riding Hat (L'Amazone) (1856) by Gustave Courbet
5. Carroll Borland and Bela Lugosi in the film Mark of the Vampire (1935)
6. Albert and Isabella Clara Eugenia by unknown 17th century master
7. French Portrait of a Couple (ca. 1610) by unknown French master

If you are like me and always need to be working on something to keep your anxiety under control, during this quarentine why not helping scientists by looking at pictures of some neat penguins? or even galaxies? 
There’s this site call Zooniverse, where you can help on scientific projects by analyzing pictures and data! 

Right now my favorite project has returned, called Penguin Watch (where yeah, you get to watch penguins, it’s amazing)

you basically have to analyse photos looking for penguins, their chicks, eggs or even predators and human interaction

But there are lots of interesting projects you can help in areas such as biology, physics, history or even art: 

Oh and the best part, some institutions even accept it as volunteering/service hour requirements for graduation and scholarships!!
It’s helping me a lot during this time, so I thought it was worth sharing 

Zooniverse is awesome. They have a relatively new project classifying and transcribing recordings of vintage Cuban radio around the revolution.

Another project is about the fan and hate mail sent to Orson Welles after the broadcast of War of the Worlds.

Another project is rescuing data from handwritten records from a Scottish weather station.