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A little chilly to go outside today, but if the forecast holds, we'll start clearing out the garden next week. Happy weekend to all!

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founding

And if you're really stuck, you can do the old-fashioned thing and consult a librarian at your local library. Just beware the woke ones, who might be as bad as Google.

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Librarians used to be great at finding obscure things. In the late '80s at the University of Illinois Main Library (located completely underground so as to not throw a shadow on the famed Morrow Plots) there was a place to "ask a librarian" in a kind of "stump the librarians" sort of way. Most answers were posted within a day, frequently within an hour.

I asked them "What was the total population of Athens, Greece, in the time of Plato?" After more than two weeks they admitted they were stumped. They had the number of voters, but had no good way to find or compute the total population from that. But it was great fun, and they posted "some other good stuff we found" while looking.

Those were the days. Today most librarians, and especially school librarians, seem to be purple-haired, nose-ringed Woke crazies.

Too bad. I used to love librarians in general.

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founding

I haven't had Google installed on any of my devices for years, and I don't regret a minute of it. I used to use DuckDuckGo, but they lost me during the Canadian Trucker Convoy when they buried results, so I've used Brave ever since. There are a couple of sites that I have to use Safari because there is something about Brave that won't let a payment be made on those sites, but there are literally two of them, so I'm still pretty pleased.

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Did Frank Fleming ever ask it to make a picture of "an oppressor"? Or of a "angry crowd marching with tiki torches"? The bad dancing and mayo stuff is funny, but you have to really dig deep into the biases of the developer to coax out who the "AI thinks" a white person is. Machines, in the end, are only doing what they were told - to some degree or another.

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I use Brave browser, although it's less than excellent. At least it gives somewhat better, and way less biased, results than Google. Bing makes me nuts for reasons I can't easily explain. I used to use DuckDuckGo, but then they started sliding Lefty.

I keep hoping for something better.

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DuckDuckGo is a privacy wrapper around search results from other engines (including, most notably, Bing). Brave Search uses its own database.

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Thanks. I was unaware how much Bing was in DuckDuckGo. I used it for years, then a couple of years or so ago it seemed to me to become kind of 'wonky', like loading a lot of old stuff before new stuff even when both were pretty close on topic.

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founding

"So it only makes sense that this new Gemini has revealed Google’s other face so clearly." THIS is why I subscribe to you.

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author

Thank you. Please tell your friends!

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