Technology: May 2024 Archives
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.
