ellie (slut arc) 🖤 
whoever the fuck decided that ecosia should have an llm generating answers to search queries should be shoved down the stairs and break something
the introduction of so-called "AI" into products whose users obviously and definitely Do Not Want It, such as ecosia or at mozilla, exemplifies the sheer soullessness of the nonprofit industrial complex. evidently the people making decisions at ecosia don't actually care about the environment, or being sustainable, or planting trees (which tbh is a very simplistic solution to a complex problem to begin with). No, to them ecosia is just a step on their career path like any other, and they're clearly more focused on being able to write "spearheaded introduction of AI at [company]" in their resume than they are on making good decisions that actually further the goals the nonprofit is ostensibly for.
The Nonprofit is a monument to the failures of liberalism
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK@roadblock161_ I gave up on Ecosia when they *repeatedly* moaned about me using adblockers (as its only rebranded Bing search anyway, same as DuckDuckGo)
Enola Knezevic@vfrmedia @roadblock161_ What do you use?
@rhelune @roadblock161_ a mix of Bing, Google and DuckDuckGo (all with adblockers activated) depending on what devices I am using and what I am searching for..
Sharp Cheddar Goblin@vfrmedia @roadblock161_ Same here. Unfortunately there really are no decent search services. I'm begrudgingly using DDG with no-AI flags for now, and accepting that internet searches are absolute garbage no matter what.
sb arms & legs@SharpCheddarGoblin @vfrmedia @roadblock161_
There's a meta search engine called #SearxNG that searches up to dozens of different sites, then returns the results to you. No ai. No ads. No BS.
I run my own instance here, but there are many to choose from: https://search.sbcloud.cc
Brad Macpherson
Ratsnake Games 🔞@vfrmedia @roadblock161_ isn't that because their whole business model is "we show you ads and buy trees with the revenue" so if you adblock you might as well use bing?
@vfrmedia i never understood the appeal of that
@ratsnakegames they went through a stage of saying adblocker use wasn't such an issue, then went back on it.
In any case if I didn't block ads about 80% of them would be for car-related stuff, which is hardly environmentally friendly, on top of which I've found companies that heavily advertise online often have worse customer service than brands you know about from word of mouth / seeing their delivery vans on the street..
@vfrmedia yeah, no need to convince me, i always adblock everywhere and just rolled my eyes when my ex-employer officially recommended Ecosia as search engine because trees good
Juho Mäntysalo@ratsnakegames @vfrmedia @roadblock161_
I've never understood this "spend money and we plant a tree" on any level.
Why not just buy some existing old forest from getting lumbered? And if you aren't going to do it, why shouldn't I spend my money to preserve some forest instead of using a sub-bar product with a gimmick?
Particularly as the product is itself working in a way that can't really be called green.
David Gerard@roadblock161_ it really is
as a veteran of decades experience at incompetent charities, i have a whole theory, which is that a really incompetent charity still monopolises its problem space and sucks the air out of the room for a hypothetical more competent one
if i had no ethics i'd get on the precise nonprofit grift path you outline
@roadblock161_ Nonprofit Kit for Dummies is a fucking amazing book, by the way, and more people should read it, especially if you're the sort of person who gets sucked into projects because you want to help their cause
Well, yes and no. After spending few years thinking about this problem on and off, I'd characterize this as one more example of tragedy of commons.¹
When the people of the Commons lose community, there's an opening for the executive to work without supervision for their own short-term benefit, which is nigh always opposed to the interest of the commons.
As long as you don't outright sink the ship, you're safe.
½
_
¹ The current dictionary definition. Not the original one.
@roadblock161_
2/2
It doesn't really matter are we talking of coöps, large stock companies with heavily distributed ownership, political parties that have become the status quo, or nonprofits:
At certain point there's no longer oversight, or loyal opposition beta testing ideas. Instead you get these professional administrators who are "just working there" and don't really care how their work relates to the non-stated goals and values of the community.
ranlvor@roadblock161_ I recently switched to Ecosia because they are less US-American than Duck Duck Go. Then they did a survey about what services one would be willing to pay in a Ecosia Premium Product and half of their ideas where AI.
Now I'm back to Duck Duck Go. At least on there I can turn off the AI. (On Ecosia even on the no-AI-Setting I needed to use my Ad-Blocker to get rid of the last AI-Button)
Helen LH@roadblock161_ I wrote a formal complaint about it to them and they responded by saying their AI is greener than the other ones and they have no plans in switching it off. So I told them I would change to a different provider that doesn't use ethically dodgy, environmentally destructive AI technology.
Ylönën@Research_FTW yup, greener as in "we tinted this site and the AI button green". @roadblock161_
Luzzy is bunnygirl@Research_FTW @roadblock161_ "green AI"
omfg
that's worse than calling natural gas... well.. natural.
Having a "low-power" machine wasting electricity might sound better than having a power hungry one but it doesn't answer the question of: Why do we need something wasting power?
omfg
that's worse than calling natural gas... well.. natural.
Having a "low-power" machine wasting electricity might sound better than having a power hungry one but it doesn't answer the question of: Why do we need something wasting power?
David Cantrell 🏏@meluzzy @Research_FTW @roadblock161_ natural gas is so-called in comparison to "coal gas", which was produced using coal and a lot of energy. Natural gas is a *lot* cleaner.
craignicol@roadblock161_ I can see where Mozilla are trying to tie it to their mission "wouldn't it be better if we had AI rather than Microsoft?" but it's an incredible way to miss the point.