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What happened to Google?! Google AI being hilariously awful
Fran, a blogger from Reading, England, writes: "The people in charge of the Google Search Engine have decided to prioritise Google-owned websites (Reddit, Youtube, Quora etc) over any others when deciding what it will show you in answer to a search query. Loads of bloggers and website owners, who previously made a living providing informative and useful content on the internet... have found their traffic absolutely destroyed overnight by the latest updates.... [Google] is now pushing AI answers to people on its search engine, rather than directing them to the websites of people who have created the content it has used to train its AI bots, or whose content has been stolen wholesale and parroted out by the Google AI Bots.... With AI content giving people an instant answer to their query right there on the Google homepage there is now zero motivation from people to go any further and visit any other website." Bottom line: Use an alternative to Google search and ignore any AI replies that your search provider offers. Reward real content providers with visits to their websites.
RELATED: Fran writes about how she and other bloggers make money from their blogs. Note that most of these work for influencer blogs about things like parenting and homemaking, but not for hyperlocal blogs like BatesLine. I used to have managed blog ads (from BlogAds), but that's been over 10 years ago since that vanished. I've never wanted to have Google ads on my site. I've gotten offers for paid posts and link insertions, but that's not for me.
Digital Equipment Corp. RL-02 disk drive
In February 1989, I flew to the UK for the first time, bringing with me a disk cartridge the size of a large deep-dish pizza (15" diameter, 2.25" height) with a capacity of 10MB. It had to fly as a checked bag in a shipping box. The cartridge, an RL-02K, would fit into a DEC RL-02 disk drive connected to a PDP-11/70, and it contained the software to manage a DR-11W interface to a VMEbus chassis, which provided the ARINC 429 interface to communicate with a Flight Management System being added to a British Airways Boeing 737 Ground Maintenance Simulator at the airline's Viscount House training center.
Bitsavers has tons of documentation on the RL-01/RL-02 drives. The wealth of detailed drawings and protocol documentation (the sort of thing that modern manufacturers don't release any more) enabled Christopher Parish to convert an RL-02 into the world's largest thumb drive, as he explains in a Hackaday video. Parish designed a controller card using an FPGA to interface to the drive and expose the data as a USB mass storage device. He can connect it to modern OSes but also to emulators running DEC's RT-11 OS.
AM car radios seem quaint. But when the twister comes, you'll want that dial. • Kansas Reflector
Max McCoy writes: "Having covered the wake of three major storms -- Greensburg, Joplin, and Katrina in 2005 -- I can tell you that expecting to rely on everyday things is foolish. You're thinking about how much water you have and what kind of food is available and, if you're on foot, where you might possibly charge your phone. Not that your phone will do you much good, of course, because cell coverage is likely down. There's likely to be no electric power for lights or Wi-Fi routers or internet, and what you rely on for information are battery-powered radios, especially a NOAA Weather Radio, or the AM/FM deck in your car.
"AM radio gets a bad rap these days because it's seen as outdated when compared to the modern smartphone. Some vehicle manufacturers, including BMW, Volkswagen and Tesla, have either already removed an AM radio option or plan to do so. AM radio reception is susceptible to electrical noise, which results in static, and consumer demand (except for a demographic we'll discuss later) has softened. But the AM radio in your dashboard will bring you accurate weather information when other devices can't. Your local AM station, especially if you live in a rural area, is likely to provide live severe weather coverage, and these stations often rely on trained storm spotters. This is the kind of coverage that local broadcasters do best, but we're likely to forget about such an essential public service until the next storm season rolls around. Together with a NOAA weather alert radio, live coverage on a local AM station is a reliable source of weather information when the lights go out.
"FM broadcasts are limited to the line of sight of the transmitter, which in flat country like Kansas typically means 30 or 40 miles. But the signal from an AM station can go much farther, especially at night, because it can be reflected from the atmosphere and go beyond the horizon. This is a simplified explanation, and there are many variables in radio propagation, but generally FM radio, which operates on much shorter wavelengths than AM, is blocked by any physical object in the broadcast path. It's a static-free signal, and reproduces music especially well, but the trade-off is distance. An AM signal can be intelligible even if weak and scratchy....
"It's easy to scoff at the idea that AM radio, a messenger from an antique land, is of any use in these days of smartphones and social media. But phones are only as good as their number of bars, and social media are platforms with inscrutable rules enforced by mysterious, anonymous and downright antisocial entities that won't give adequate explanations for what they do. Unlike the broadcast spectrum, the internet is not owned by the public for the general welfare, but is instead treated by the FCC as public utility, sort of like a telephone company."
From the article: "Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I've obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like "build ninja" (cultural appropriation), "nuke the old cache" (military metaphor), "sanity check" (disparages mental illness), or "dummy variable" (disparages disabilities). One engineer was "strongly encouraged" to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including "zie/hir," "ey/em," "xe/xem," and "ve/vir"), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of "inclusivity" (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group)."
From the comments: "It is fascinating how so many successful organizations end up accidentally setting up incentives that reward and increase the influence of the dumbest people in the room. There are undoubtedly thousands of genius level engineers at Google, and yet they get their marching orders from people who couldn't pass a freshman calculus class."
FIRST - Mouser - Dean Kamen intervew
Mouser is an electronic parts company that sponsors FIRST Robotics. They've got a great little 9 minute interview on their website with founder Dean Kamen about the value of FIRST Robotics. "Every player can turn pro!"
cPanel: Enable domains' DKIM records
If you have a cPanel account and have a DKIM key to validate outgoing email, but none of your email is being signed with the key, here's the shell command to fix the problem.
W. Jason Morgan, discoverer of plate tectonics (1935-2023)
"In 1967, Jason Morgan presented a groundbreaking paper at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington DC. It showed that Earth's surface consists of about a dozen rigid plates. They are created at mid-ocean ridges, destroyed in subduction zones where they converge, and move past one another along great faults, such the San Andreas Fault in California. Other papers followed, explaining that volcanoes occur where plates subduct, mountains rise where and when continents collide, and earthquakes result from jostling and shearing at plate margins."
Rob's tips for uncovering radio station stream URLs | The SWLing Post
Many radio-listening apps and some old-time internet radio appliances need a stream URL to find a station. This article describes how to use diagnostic tools in your desktop browser to dig through all the Javascript to find the actual stream URL for a radio livestream.
RELATED: radio-browser.info is a crowdsourced database of over 40,000 radio streams around the world. A GeoMap makes it easy to browse for streams in a particular part of the world. You can add map entries: I just added one for 4RPH Reading Radio in Brisbane. In turn, apps like RadioDroid use this database to find streams for listening. Unfortunately, some radio megacorporations s use stream-hopping techniques to force listeners to use their apps.
A 2014 article (updated in 2020) suggests using packet-sniffer tools to grab URLs and has a list of frequently used streaming domains, media types, and file extensions to look for.
Long gone, DEC is still powering the world of computing | Ars Technica
"In 1977, DEC introduced the VAX, a new line of minicomputers that featured a 32-bit instruction set architecture and virtual memory. Its operating system, VMS, was a multi-user, multitasking OS that provided features we now take for granted, including virtual memory, file sharing, and networking. It amassed a wide variety of third-party software packages that made it the most popular system in its class."
In 1982, 6.001, MIT's first-semester computer science course, used a DECsystem 20 running TOPS-20, with Emacs for the editor. In '89 I had to adapt code from a PDP-11/55 to a PDP-11/70 on a British Airways 737 ground maintenance simulator and hope nothing clobbered the brute-force entry I stuffed in the memory map; I carried the software with me from Oklahoma to England on a 20 MB disk pack the size of a large pizza. In the early '90s, we had a machine running VAXeln (a preemptive RTOS) as host computer for a human centrifuge. The same model computer and OS was used for years to run Oklahoma's Pikepass toll tag system, something I spotted when visiting the Pikepass office at the Tulsa end of the Turner Turnpike. 1993 was probably the last time I touched anything DEC except perhaps for the occasional VT100. When I graduated, Digital Equipment Corporation was a major employer along Boston's Route 128 beltway, but they were overtaken by the PC revolution.
BASIC Computer Games - Wikipedia
I have memories of typing computer programs printed in a magazine (Byte, Creative Computing) into our TRS-80 Model I, with the cassette drive for storage. The favorite was the Star Trek text-based game, where you chase Klingons across an 8x8 map of quadrants, and try to destroy them with phasers and photon torpedos, one command at a time. We had it on the Wang 2200 at school as well. Here's the 1978 edition of BASIC Computer Games. Hunt the Wumpus was another favorite; I modified the playing field from a dodecahedron (12 nodes, 3 adjacent to each) to an icosahedron (20 nodes, 5 adjacent ).
MORE: History and source of the 1971 version of Star Trek, with screenshots.
