idk feels like today might be the time to call it, official time of death for the Google search engine

either the incentive structure there is just irretrievably fucked or there's a product manager who decided jumping the shark was the best way to try to put an end to this "put LLMs everywhere" craze

The author of @allaboutberlin on how Google AI Overviews are killing independent web publishing, citing a 70% drop in traffic after seven years of steady growth. His work trains the model. The model is replacing his site. There is no credit, clicks, or revenue. This is what the "enshittification" of the open web looks like in practice.

Hard to imagine moving to Berlin without stumbling upon his guides at some point.

https://allaboutberlin.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicolasbouliane_ai-is-killing-all-about-berlin-when-you-share-7463188284924616705-I3Mn

#AI #OpenKnowledge #Berlin #Google #Enshittification #OpenWeb #IndieWeb

How to get prescribed ADHD medication in the Netherlands, a guide based on real world success:

1) spend over a year repeatedly trying to tell the GP that it’s not going well and you need help. This will not cost you money, only your precious finite time on this earth. It helps if you have a husband to drag you to the doctor when you’re at your lowest and argue with them

2) finally get escalated to a psychologist who takes a few months to be sure there’s definitely something wrong. She will recommend the GP to prescribe ADHD medication

3) Your prescription mysteriously disappears into the system. After several attempts to follow up that take months, and several confused phone calls from your psychologist to the GP, it turns out the GP refuses to authorize it because *shrug* reasons. Maybe if a psychiatrist also signs off on it?

4) You attempt to get an appointment with a psychiatrist. Every psychiatrist in the Netherlands is booked until 2034.

5) Finally, after a dozen rounds of pleading and nagging, you get a mysterious phone call from an unknown number. They give you an address and tell you to be there at 7 in the evening.

6) You find yourself at the door of a historic art deco mansion in the most exclusive district of Amsterdam. There is absolutely no indication that this is a medical practice. You ring the doorbell. Nothing happens. You wait nervously, and try again.

7) The door creaks open. An elderly man wearing crocs stands before you. He silently bids you follow him up a winding staircase to a parlor filled with a thousand thick and aging books in every tongue of the earth and perhaps a few also of the angels. They concern prophecy, and music, and poetry, and the apocalypse.

8) In a thin whisper of a voice barely to be heard, he asks your name, and where you were born. He slowly, very slowly, so slowly that you think you have died and this is purgatory, types this into a computer. It is in his lap because his desk is covered with strange devices beyond identification.

9) He tells you the prescription will be ready for pickup tomorrow.

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.

RE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/116604745957981805

"links will become an afterthought" is not even coded language for "the rest of the internet is merely training data and we will own the entire means of accessing information online"

I'm a software developer and sysadmin who could really use being #fedihired.

What I'd really like to do is Rust, but once you ignore the dubious scammy stuff, there seems to be nothing out there. Prove me wrong with a counterexample!

I've spent decades fixing Enterprise mudballs mostly written in #Perl. If you've got a crufty legacy system that everybody else is too scared to touch, I'm your man. I love fixing stuff like that.

I've also done commercial #Scala, #Python, #C/#C++, and although I don't usually admit it on my CV but these are now Trying Times when everything is on the table, even #PHP (the longest six months of my life).

Perl naturally leads into Unix system administration and infrastructure. I've built and maintained mail clusters, VoIP systems, network monitoring, DNS management platforms, that sort of thing. If it's non-sexy but something which needs to be done, I'm there.

Available immediately, for contract or permie, onsite in Amsterdam/Randstad or remote to anywhere.

Drop me a private mention or mail [email protected] if you have or know of something.