It’s becoming more and more obvious all the time, that Canada needs to cut ties with the US. Completely.
Just close the door, pull the blinds down, and turn off all the lights.
There’s just no chances of that. I don’t know about other provinces but in Québec the provincial governments have always had a strong bias towards Microsoft. Schools have multi million contracts for Windows and Office 365.
And the government is absolutely not ready to change that. Using FOSS means they need internal specialists instead of just paying consultants, and they really hate that idea.
I can’t recall the exact context but a few years ago, the provincial government “recognized its need for FOSS” and had it codified somewhere. But every time schools and organizations have a choice to make, they just say it would be unrealistic to even try to make any change, and automatically give the millions to Microsoft, Apple, or Google.
means they need internal specialists instead of just paying consultants, and they really hate that idea.
They “hate that idea” because almost every time those external consultants end up taking longer and costing way more than using internal resources.
Yeah, it’s pretty disappointing. I worked for a consulting firm and it was doing the same thing for clients, and internally.
There is the perception that paying continually for your own specialists is a waste of money and you’d be better off just paying consultants when they are needed. It always ends up costing more money and/or the organization loses all internal knowledge of how their things work and they even have to pay more consultants to sort that out.
I love public transit and it’s the same exact problem. Instead of having our own team of transit specialists, that knows how to plan, and build this, we just pay for consultants at every stage of the project. It ends up costing way more, and we repeat the same thing for the next multi billion project a few years later. So every new project is a huge undertaking costing millions in consulting, and that’s why we don’t continually develop public transit. We have to start anew every time. It’s so horrible. Yet, that’s apparently how we “save” money.
Lol. What now, Canada?
Maybe letting a foreign monopoly control an entire sensitive sector was a bad idea.
It’s ironic because you can run a better Google for like 5k a month these days
Google is doomed with nothing protecting it but default search engine deals.
Citation very needed. Not just for fact checking but because I would personally use that.
Even the big alternatives like Duckduckgo and Startpage just use a Bing or Google backend, because regularly crawling the whole web and then efficiently searching the resulting index is a massive undertaking.
It’s probably something where we need a crown corporation in the end. Other Google products are FOSS-replaceable, though, that’s true.
I was wrong, it’s actually 50k per month, but for a company that’s affordable.
https://blog.wilsonl.in/search-engine/
I’ve actually reproduced this on a smaller scale and it works very well, but computing the embeddings is slow. This is going to be the future of spotlight type search on PCs I can guarantee it.
For personal use you can cut down the 200 gpus and you can probably use common crawl instead of scraping (I have not tried that though)
I bet you it’s not the future.
Okay, we’ll talk when the future is over
Playing around with it a bit, it’s noticeably inferior to Duckduckgo, although it’s still pretty good and would suffice for anything close to basic navigation. Nice. It also seems to adapt to mistakes in the search pretty well. Direct link to the live demo.
It has an index of 280 million English-only pages, which seems tiny for this kind of thing, although I can’t find recent hard numbers on the big names.
and you can probably use common crawl instead of scraping (I have not tried that though)
Hmm. I’m guessing recency is the reason it isn’t usually used?
It’s also made by just one person
As a proof of concept its very good
Yes, definitely!
Canada’s privacy commissioners, and privacy legislation, is an absolute joke. They still focus on things like “data residency” instead of “data sovereignty”. In part because all our government agencies have already put all our government shit into US cloud services.
Like BC’s Financial Regulators, the BC FSA, is totally in Microsoft’s cloud. And they require all Financial Institutions to upload tons of customer sensitive data into that cloud – if you have a loan in Canada, the USA can access it, through our own regulators. They also OK industry to do the same, because they can’t say “that’s not allowed!” while being totally US Tech’s bitch. So organisation’s like Canada’s Credit Unions placed all their payment processing into Microsoft’s cloud. So if you bank with a small local CU anywhere in the country, it’s highly likely that all your payment transactions are accessible to US interests. Likewise for our health records, all in US cloud products.
Canada’s government likes to claim it’s sovereign, but it literally can’t run/function without a subscription to a US company. And if the states were to cut that off, our gov would have significant issues.
I have two remaining google accounts; one is Eric Smit I am using it to tell agencies who send me snail mail junk mail addressed to me that I am dead, then I have one that I use solely for youtube and Unwatched, I cancelled my youtube premium in January and saw ads so I needed to find a way to block the ads. I use Ecosia for web searching, they are moving to the EU database or something like that away from Google. I have a multiple pi-hole setup to block ads, I have ad blockers in my browsers as well. I do not want to pay Google.
I’m completely de Googled in my personal life these days.
I only have one backup email that is only there for things like accounts you can’t change addresses on and ones that require Gmail (fuck you android).
I decided I didn’t need accounts that required a google account, or I resigned up with an apple hide my email. I have sense gone through and changed all those to my pseudo random email accounts from my host.
