Coal power

[freebeard]

My attitude about war movies changed the day I turned 18. Suddenly it was poisional.

I was in a Civil Affairs platoon. We drove around and looked at foot bridges and schoolhouses, and distributed quarts of milk the mess hall didn't use. Armed to the teeth.

[redpoint5]

I imagined Red Dawn (before I knew it was a movie) and practiced fighting the Soviet invasion for play. I stacked rocks on the high ground of a hill and camouflaged it with brush to make a pillbox.

Was 1 second from signing the dotted line with the Marines, but went to prison instead.

[freebeard]

We put broken-up sparklers in the top of a dirt mound under a Castor Bean plant, and set it off after posing the plastic dinosaurs..

Nobody cares about coal-fired ram jets???

[Piotrsko]

I care but find them currently impractical

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

DDG seems to give me the same search results as Google, which is to say obscuring attempts to find facts on certain topics.

I found this just now:

discernreport.comr Simon Goddek Lays Out 25 Ways to Resist The Great Reset
by JD Rucker July 30, 2023
10. Insist on your privacy #2 (searx and brave, don’t google). – We all google, and I have to admit that google offers excellent features. However, Google is a dangerous data miner that also manipulates search algorithms (favoring Democrats and the current thing). SearX is a brilliant alternative. So is Brave, which uses its own search engine. Support your friends instead of your enemy.

One word to the wise. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx

Searx (/sɜːrks/; stylized as searX) is a free and open-source metasearch engine,[4] available under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, with the aim of protecting the privacy of its users.[5][6][7] To this end, Searx does not share users' IP addresses or search history with the search engines from which it gathers results. Tracking cookies served by the search engines are blocked, preventing user-profiling-based results modification.[8][9] By default, Searx queries are submitted via HTTP POST,[a] to prevent users' query keywords from appearing in webserver logs.[10][11] Searx was inspired by the Seeks project,[10] though it does not implement Seeks' peer-to-peer user-sourced results ranking.

Each search result is given as a direct link to the respective site, rather than a tracked redirect link as used by Google. In addition, when available, these direct links are accompanied by cached and/or proxied links that allow viewing results pages without actually visiting the sites in question. The cached links point to saved versions of a page on the Wayback Machine, while the proxied links allow viewing the current live page via a Searx-based web proxy. In addition to the general search, the engine also features tabs to search within specific domains: files, images, IT, maps, music, news, science, social media, and videos.[12][13]

Users can run private instances of Searx on their own computer, but there are also many public, user-run, Searx instances,[14] some of which are available as Tor hidden services.

Initial release January 22, 2014; 9 years ago[2]
Stable release 1.1.0 7 August 2022; 11 months ago

So it predates the re-branding of Twitter.

[redpoint5]

Google usually delivers superior results, until it purposefully attempts to redirect me, delivering exact opposite search results than my keywords.

I had an idea for fighting personal biases. It would be an AI that occasionally changes the subject of the story, mostly tribal attributes like Democrat and Republican, or black and white, or male and female... so it delivers the news, but you're uncertain if the subjects are truthfully reported or not. It would give some time to let the story run through the emotional filter, and just a little later would update the story with the actual subjects.

A non-biased emotional filter would be unaffected by news that the subjects were different than initially thought. It's an attempt to focus the psyche on the individuals and specific events rather than tribal affiliation and the generic.

[freebeard]

I had an idea for fighting personal biases. It would be an AI that occasionally changes the subject of the story,

He's on to me!!!

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

I had an idea for fighting personal biases. It would be an AI that occasionally changes the subject of the story, mostly tribal attributes like Democrat and Republican, or black and white, or male and female... so it delivers the news, but you're uncertain if the subjects are truthfully reported or not. It would give some time to let the story run through the emotional filter, and just a little later would update the story with the actual subjects.

No way people would become unbiased at all. Some are just slightly less stubborn, and try their best to look out for the other side of the story.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by cRiPpLe_rOoStEr

No way people would become unbiased at all. Some are just slightly less stubborn, and try their best to look out for the other side of the story.

I dunno, it could be somewhat effective. Would be neat to see an experiment.

The problem is that we don't challenge our own assumptions, so having an external mechanism to force the challenge might be useful.

When I hear information that sounds bad about a person I dislike, I like to imagine all the facts as they are, but about a person I do like. Do my feelings change after having changed the subject of the story? If not, perhaps my bias is low. If so, it might indicate a lot of bias.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

How could we be sure a so-called artificial "intelligence" would never reproduce the biases of its creators/programmers?