ciferecaNinjo

As far as we know, Google is not giving up any data. The crawler still must store a copy of the text for the index. The only certainty we have is that Google is no longer sharing it.

Here’s the heart of the not-so-obvious problem:

Websites treat the Google crawler like a 1st class citizen. Paywalls give Google unpaid junk-free access. Then Google search results direct people to a website that treats humans differently (worse). So Google users are led to sites they cannot access. The heart of the problem is access inequality. Google effectively serves to refer people to sites that are not publicly accessible.

I do not want to see search results I cannot access. Google cache was the equalizer that neutralizes that problem. Now that problem is back in our face.

From the article:

“was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.” (emphasis added)

Bullshit! The web gets increasingly enshitified and content is less accessible every day.

For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:” plus a website URL, or by typing “cache:” plus a URL into Google Search.

You can also use 12ft.io.

Cached links were great if the website was down or quickly changed, but they also gave some insight over the years about how the “Google Bot” web crawler views the web. … A lot of Google Bot details are shrouded in secrecy to hide from SEO spammers, but you could learn a lot by investigating what cached pages look like.

Okay, so there’s a more plausible theory about the real reason for this move. Google may be trying to increase the secrecy of how its crawler functions.

The pages aren’t necessarily rendered like how you would expect.

More importantly, they don’t render the way authors expect. And that’s a fucking good thing! It’s how caching helps give us some escape from enshification. From the 12ft.io faq:

“Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL webpage, and we’ll try our best to remove the popups, ads, and other visual distractions.”

It also circumvents #paywalls. No doubt there must be legal pressure on Google from angry website owners who want to force their content to come with garbage.

The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden of archiving and tracking changes on the world’s webpages.

The possibly good news is that Google’s role shrinks a bit. Any Google shrinkage is a good outcome overall. But there is a concerning relationship between archive.org and Cloudflare. I depend heavily on archive.org largely because Cloudflare has broken ~25% of the web. The day #InternetArchive becomes Cloudflared itself, we’re fucked.

We need several non-profits to archive the web in parallel redundancy with archive.org.

Bingo. When I read that part of the article, I felt insulted. People see the web getting increasingly enshitified and less accessible. The increased need for cached pages has justified the existence of 12ft.io.

~40% of my web access is now dependant on archive.org and 12ft.io.

So yes, Google is obviously bullshitting. Clearly there is a real reason for nixing cached pages and Google is concealing that reason.

This is probably an attempt to save money on storage costs.

That’s in fact what the article claims as Google’s reason. But seems irrational. Google still needs to index websites for the search engine. So the storage is still needed since the data collection is still needed. The only difference (AFAICT) is Google is simply not sharing that data. Also, there are bigger pots of money in play than piddly storage costs.

Isn’t this different because there are specifically truth-in-advertising laws? Not even a natural person is immune to truth-in-advertising laws. So it seems like Tesla is making a despirate move.

In addition to its first amendment argument, Tesla also said that the California DMV is violating its rights to have a jury trial, under the US Constitution’s 7th Amendment and Article I, Section 16 of California’s Constitution, both of which cover rights to trial by a jury.

Yikes. What does a jury of Tesla’s peers look like? Representatives from 12 other giant corporations?

I’ve been saying for years that Invidious needs to support comments. Glad there’s finally a free world option.

I’m not keen on browser extensions though. Is there a manual way? Is it a matter of searching a particular Lemmy instance for the video ID?

A VPN is only as secure as the endpoints. You have to figure cyber criminals are seeing countless opportunities. Breaking into the right insecure home network could get you into fortune 500 servers.

Not sure people are finding meeting-free gigs. I read about someone holding down 4 jobs who once had to attend 3 meetings at once (that story might have been in Wired mag, not sure). Like a DJ he had multiple audio streams going with headphones and made a skill of focusing where his name would most likely come up. I’m sure there’s also a long list of excuses like “had to run to stop the burning food” or whatever. Presumabely a long list of excuses to wholly nix a meeting in the first place as well.

Some people are secretly outsourcing some of their work as well, which works for workload but not for meetings.

it’s about time we restructure the workforce.

I suppose a big part of that will be managers learning how to measure productivity more accurately than your clocked-in hours. That’ll be the most interesting change… the “corporate welfare” program of just getting paid to occupy a desk space will have to be replaced with more sophisticated real performance measurements.

I have no idea how that pans out in software. Every bug is vastly different so they can’t merely count the number of bugs you fix. SLOC is a bit of a sloppy measure too.

Among the primary benefits: no commute, flexible work schedules and less time getting ready for work, according to WFH Research.

They forgot: being able to secretly simultaneously work 3 full-time overlapping jobs to triple your income.

More fun to mention 11 “states” at a 5.1% uninsured cutoff, because number 11 is Peurto Rico – a US territory that you might expect to be less developed. Since people are forced to run javascript to see the list, I’ll copy it here up to the 6% point:

1. Massachusetts
2. District of Columbia
3. Hawaii
4. Vermont
5. Iowa (what’s a red state doing here?)
6. Rhode Island
7. Minnesota
8. New Hampshire
9. Michigan
10. New York
11. Puerto Rico
12. Connecticut
13. Pennsylvania
14. Wisconsin
15. Kentucky (what’s a red state doing here?)
16. Delaware
17. Ohio (what’s a red state doing here? OH will worsen over time; to be fair they only recently became solidly red)
18. West Virginia
    …

(22) California (6.5%… worse than we might expect for CA)
…

(52) Texas ← ha! Of course Texass is last. 16.6% uninsured in the most notable red state showing us how to take care of people

The general pattern is expected… the bottom of the list is mostly red states.

You think Americans do t pay property tax?

That tax is irrelevant. That just muddies the waters to bring up property tax because every real estate property is subject to local property tax. It’s a wash. When you buy a house, you implicitly agree to property tax wherever that house is located.

It’s not just about money. It’s a labor burden and a privacy intrusion. And even if iceblade02 could renounce for free, they then must carry the renounciation cert for the rest of their life and show it to every bank they deal with and hope that no data entry errors trigger data oversharing anyway.

They must renounce to get their human rights back. Because without renouncing, they lose their human right to non-discriminatory treatment on the basis of national origin (article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

But back to money, that annual tax filing accidental Americans must file costs them $300+/year – accountants do not work for free. It’s effectively a tax on the poor.

It depends on where you are. If you live in Moscow or Geneva, that cut-off is still $120k USD worth of your local currency. That threshhold neglects the COL of where you are and also neglects the forex rate.

If how I’m saying it doesn’t make sense, use the IRS website I’ve provided numerous times.

You cannot expect people to use the irs.gov website. That’s not open to the public. It’s exclusive. Try going there over tor - you will get a 403. Indeed it’s shitty that access to legal information is restricted. It should be open to all.

You seem unaware of the population of accidental Americans. When a Dutch couple gives birth on US soil before returning to Europe, that child automatically a birthright citizen of the US. They can grow up having never set foot in the US (apart from birth), and for the rest of their life they have a legal obligation to file US tax and declare to the US all their Dutch income & bank accounts even if they are below that $120,000 line. They also get targeted for discrimination along with all other Americans by banks who don’t accept Americans (even if they are also Dutch). They have to pay a US accountant upwards of $300/year for the rest of their life just to file that zero.

It’s also worth noting that an income of $120k goes much further in the US than it does in Europe (where they might be living).

So obviously a lot of accidental Americans have become motivated to renounce. But if they already own a home, you can see the problem. I would not say owning a home makes someone “rich”. They still need to work to eat and to maintain the home.

I agree with your 1st paragraph. But IIUC the exit tax is not on wage income - it’s on their global wealth. I don’t see how the rich can escape that without cheating. But the problem is that non-rich middle class workers have homes and they’re being targeted.

It’s a tax on workers who don’t even live in the country.

Yeah indeed that’s the shame of the US tax policy. But to be clear that tax impacts citizens living abroad, not those who renounce. Renouncing actually escapes that.

Not sure where you are or what that amounts to but In the US I would consider double the median income middle class or upper middle class, still far from rich.

I think of “rich” as someone who can quit working right now and be able to live comfortably on their savings for the rest of their life. If they still need to work, that’s below the “rich” line.

I kinda like Chris Rock’s definition as well… something like: “you can lose rich if you pick up a drug habit… but if you’re wealthy, you can’t lose wealth… you can afford to do cocaine for the rest of your life if you’re wealthy”.