DDG is fucking awful now. I took a break from hardware design for the last 5 years. Coming back to it now, finding information like I did in the past is fucking impossible. Search results are 2 dimensional fuckwit level stupidity with no abstractive salting for depth or peripherally useful results. The results heavily favor commercially motivated stupidity. They do not cross into forums or social spaces where there is a wealth of information. The lack of depth is clearly manipulative for adversarial AI training.
I run my own models and I know alignment thinking at a very advanced level, and have done my own training and fine tuning. Search results are intentionally poisoning any form of data mining for AI training. In so doing they have totally destroyed the informative value that made these companies useful in the first place. I do not hate AI, quite the opposite. I despise the fuckwits managing these companies and their complicit developers.
Freedom of information is the most important foundation of democracy. Without it, democracy cannot exist. The obfuscation of search results is absolutely treason and should be prosecuted vigorously.
The same applies to AI alignment. Anything unrelated to the scientific AI Alignment Problem is immoral treason against democracy. To say anyone is not allowed access to information of any sort, no matter how offensive to some, is fascist authoritarianism. Democracy prosecutes those that cause substantive harm to other citizens. It is the freedom to know, and to choose for yourself.
Kagi is pretty good
I have replaced most my search engine usage with Wikipedia and I’m much happier with the results
Think about practical skills, though. Anything from repairing downspouts to rebuilding a bike wheel. You can do it, but it’s becoming notably harder to find good information on these things, especially when you have some specific situations that complicate things.
Booleans. Change the year to 2020, or remove certain sites/results.
All the data is still there, just gotta know how to find it, kinda like an old school library at this point! If you’re going through the process of self learning and/or bettering yourself instead of just watching and repeating, you’ll know how to wade through crap already. And if you want the latter, well googles crapification isn’t a concern to you.
