Having worked on a product that actually did this, it’s not as easy as it seems. There are many ways of drawing text on the screen.

GDI is the most common, which is part of the windows API. But some applications do their own rendering (including browsers).

Another difficulty, even if you could tap into every draw call, you would also need a way to determine what is visible on the screen and what is covered by something else.

I also wanted to mention that DDG doesn’t really say what editorial changes they make to the results. I would like to see more transparency.

Only recently started using searngx. I would love to see more search engines implement their own indexing and ranking, instead of relying on other engines.

But I am aware that making a good search engine is hard. Even with all their flaws, google and Bing still have the best results, which is why most other engines rely on their results.

Which is just bing with a few extra editorial changes that aren’t really transparent.

Losing the internet archive would be such a huge loss… I really hope they have a backup plan in case things go bad legally.

And it’s made of thin stainless steel sheets with sharp corners and edges

Will valve allow accounts to exist indefinitely? Will they create an expiration policy, like accounts being closed after 100 years

Having a curated whitelist would definitely be a good idea, but if it only shows information from a limited list of websites, that would make it a terrible search engine incapable of searching most of the web.

It’s quite simple. Garbage in, garbage out. Data they use for training needs to be curated. How to curate the entire internet, I have no clue.

Running AI models isn’t that resource intensive. Training the models is the difficult part.

DuckDuckStop

I would absolutely love a linux smartphone that didn’t suck.

But what if there is heavy rain? Are you supposed to put the car in car wash mode then? Why wouldn’t those things be sealed all the time?

I seriously don’t understand how this could be possible. How does the car manage rain water?

That’s a clever way of getting people to work for them as moderators.

I was referring to the website. This article goes in a lot more detail about how it works.

I’m pretty sure they are consulting lawyers to see how much data they can sell to third parties without breaking the law.

Typically trackers are implemented client side because it’s more convenient. It’s closer to the user, it can collect more data, and there is only one programming language it needs to support, Javascript.

But the disadvantage is that it can be blocked by the users. Data collection and user tracking can also be done on the server side. There are many analytics packages that support it, including Google Analytics. This is much easier to hide from the users. Here is an article I found on the topic.

It’s not hacking because the website developers integrate it willingly.

The bad part is that even if you block everything on the client side with ad/tracker blocking extensions, there’s nothing stopping them from collecting data on the server side.

The problem is that there are no good alternatives. I don’t like Apple and I don’t want to support them. The Android world is terrible, all devices are locked down and sold by awful companies, or if they aren’t, they are probably made by non-reputable Chinese manufacturers.

The only option is to buy a mini PC (like a NUC, or similar) or reuse some older/second hand PC/laptop, and install your own software.

It’s not convenient, but the only way you’re not going to get burned. And the software is rough, I personally don’t like Kodi… I just use it like a computer with a wireless keyboard with integrated trackpad.

The cost of the parts necessary for the network connectivity is nothing in comparison to the money all that data brings. That’s probably why it’s happening everywhere.