The platform is owned by Google. By using YouTube in any way, watching, liking, subscribing, commenting, searching, clicking, all of it, you’re “using Google”.

So, the answer is that you cannot use YouTube and not use Google.

If Google is broken up, that might change, but I’m not sure if that will ever happen, what form that might take or if it would ever happen at all.

Black Friday is a marketing exercise to get you all riled up about the massive savings you will receive if you buy something RIGHT NOW.

Suffice to say that the actual bargains on the day are far and few between.

If you actively track pricing you’ll discover that the price goes up before the event, then drops to the same or slightly lower pricing on the day. The “bargain” is notional at best.

Then there are the “pre Black Friday” sales, and the “Cyber Monday” ones afterwards. It’s all just marketing.

If you want an actual bargain, find what you’re looking for, set a price watch on it and track it for as long as you have patience. When you’re ready, buy it from your preferred supplier and get them to price match the amazing price.

As far as refurbished goes, ask yourself what is the upside for the supplier to give away any bit of return on their spend to refurbish the item in the first place?

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To enjoy yourselves doesn’t require that you all buy the latest gaming rig or even something new or identical. As long as what you decide on has games in common, you’re good.

“The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

I am not privy to your financial situation, but can you three pool your resources and find a common platform?

I’m not eligible to vote in your country. In mine, voting is mandatory and there are no stickers, just democracy sausages to aid in the funding for local polling places like schools and community halls.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_sausage

The thing about free speech is that there’s a whole lot of legislation surrounding it. At the moment, every single fediverse instance is run by( a small group of) people, many of them are run by individuals who are legally responsible for the content that’s posted on their site.

In addition, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, better known as the DMCA and the General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR, have requirements for people who own and publish data, like the people who run instances, not to mention privacy acts and myriad other provisions and laws.

Non compliance is very easy and costly, so instances who are aware of this are cautious in what they allow on their instance.

Finally, many instances want to create a community with a social cohesion and associated standards that they, depending on the level, encourage or enforce.

Why any instance bans something at any one time can generally be traced back to these reasons.

Of course there are also instances where it’s completely open season. Don’t expect these to stick around once lawyers get involved.

That’s like asking for an elephant stamp for wiping your butt after going to the toilet.

Voting isn’t an accomplishment, it’s your duty and the reward is the society you live in.

I’m fairly sure that the price information shown on a Google Search result page is advertising that comes from a different source than the results do.

As far as I know, you could write a plugin for SearXNG to query suppliers and format the output as required.

I think that Google Shopping might be queried in the same way, but I’ve never looked into it deeply.

No, you didn’t “edit” your mistake, you completely changed the meaning of your response which makes anything after it look absurd.

You originally stated that an algorithm was intelligence, the implication being that using your logic, you thought that a calculator was intelligent.

As far as the meaning of AI, you clearly don’t understand the landscape surrounding the hyperbolic assertions made by ignorant journalism about the topic.

Machine learning is one aspect of the landscape, useful as it is, intelligence it is not.

LLM emissions on the other hand appear to emulate enough grammatically correct language to fool many people some of the time, leading to their mistaken belief that what is happening is intelligence rather than, at least from their perspective, magic.

(Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke)

So, intelligence it is not, Assumed Intelligence is what it is, or autocorrect gone uppity if you prefer, an algorithm either way.

Ignorance is bliss…

A.I. means Assumed Intelligence, despite what you might have read elsewhere. Using it to do “research” is how you’re going to get first hand experience with so-called “hallucinations”.

But you do you…

How is this infuriating?

Would you like to sleep in a bed with clean sheets and have a shower in a clean cubicle?

How do you think that this happens?

Yeah, good luck with that. The Facebook bots are so bad, they literally hammer sites into the ground, to the point where they’re actively being blocked.

Where is this “community” you speak of?

I was recently introduced to a Microsoft focused Managed Service Provider who told me to my face that they absolutely adopted it in their business to “help run it”.

After that I stopped listening to anything they had to say.

Microsoft has very deep tentacles all over the Australian Government, even more after they donated some money for a random new initiative which does nothing for society and in my opinion absolutely benefits the Microsoft bottom line.

We’ve had “Cash for Comments”, this is “Government Bought and Paid For”…

https://news.microsoft.com/en-au/features/microsoft-announces-a5-billion-investment-in-computing-capacity-and-capability-to-help-australia-seize-the-ai-era/

I did originally write that in my post, but deleted it because I asked myself, “What’s the alternative?”

I’ve been using Linux for almost 25 years and I’ve never once considered mouse or keyboard incompatibility, and that’s including ADB, PS/2 and DB9 devices, let alone USB.

As far as I know, you can intercept any signal from any such HID device and map it to whatever action you want to achieve at whatever level you need it.

I’m happy to be wrong, but I’d be surprised.

And so the world of WordPress comes to an inglorious ending …

AI does not mean Artificial Intelligence, it means Assumed Intelligence.