A new lawsuit alleges the Trump administration awarded the bulk of new Texas border wall contracts to two firms without “genuine competitive opportunities.”

One of the chosen firms has faced legal issues and claims of shoddy construction work.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-border-wall-contracts-tommy-fisher?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

#News #Texas #Border #Immigration #Trump #Construction #DHS #Business

New site: google just killed search https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/

yeah, we know. We saw a massive drop in SO/Wikipedia traffic over the last 2 years, so yday's announcement was just closing the deal. Google has officially killed the web that was made of links. It is now a giant box that steals web pages/images/videos from all websites and pretends to know everything with its model and weights often with lots of wrong information. I hope this madness leads to a better search engine and EOL of Google.

In Yesterday's IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web.

While they packaged it as a lot of "AI" talk what their whole approach of decontextualizing information, of taking away links to sources and instead producing some LLM generated response means is that they want to establish a new abstraction layer on the web. Where Zuckerberg with his Metaverse failed Google is starting the next attack: Your website, your work no longer matters.

Well it matters as (unpaid) raw material for their synthetic text extruders but not as cultural artifact you can share with others.

This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google's abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It's about monopolizing access to information.

If you care about the web, about people's ability to participate in it as more than mere passive consumers, this needs to be taken seriously. De-Googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Find other search engines, don't use their browser. Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment.

Stitches and Cream sock club for April, fraternal (or sororal?) low contrast colourwork socks inspired by the coast of Cornwall.

Love the yarn (John Arbon), love the colours, love me a 4-stitch repeat! I changed the heel and toe just to be difficult. I’m putting this on as soon as the cat allows it ;)

#knitting

New in PN: Trump's $1.8b slush fund could turn into giant can of worms

"The entire exercise is an elaborate troll. It is, as many people have commented, a vehicle for Trump to pay his supporters for the last attack, and maybe prepay for the next one using tax dollars. It’s also flagrantly illegal." https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-weaponization-fund

Please, please if you live in the US immediately stop using period and pregnancy trackers.

Don't put in another piece of data. Delete it.