Tootfinder

Canceled the Google account for my small business... Less money going to AI bullshit and Google's evil practices.
And I let them know.
(I had to click through a lot of screens where they tried to get me to stay, offered discounts, or offered to archive data for a few dollars a month. No thanks.)
#noAI

Have you had an "AI error in your favor" yet?
I just got done slogging through Amazon customer support chat, where while talking to the bot it promised an item was returnable within 90 days, even though it actually was only eligible for the normal 30 days policy. When I finally got through to a human, they were able to let me know why the return actually wasn't eligible, but when I quoted them what the bot had promised, they made an exception and let me do the return. I didn't even really try to push the bot to make any promises, though that should be easy.
#AI

Faculty Job!
Associate Professor/Professor - Dr. Davindra Singh Chair in Sikh Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga.
The Department of Historical Studies - my department - is a genuinely great place to work. Please share and let me know if you have any questions.

Development of aiocoap, my Python CoAP library, is approaching its next breaking release.
If there's anything about its usability as a library that has been bugging you, especially if it would require breaking changes: Let me know soon, either here or on the issue tracker at https://github.com/chrysn/aiocoap/issu

Managed to finish a Debian preseed file, some things will be prompted but the system you'll get:
- non-free/firmware/contrib repos
- barest gnome
- git/distrobox/ptyxis/flatpak/flathub/gnome software plugins
- the good ext manager
Let me know how it fares, VMs and IRL
https://chrislowles.com/deb

@…
It just occurred to me that I should probably let you know about this entry if you didn’t already know about it :
The 27th Annual North Quabbin Garlic and Arts Festival will be held on September 27 and 28, 2025.
10:00 AM – 5:00 PM, Rain or Shine, at Forster Farm, 60 Chestnut Hill Road, Orange, Massachusetts.
It’s garlicky!

I just managed to pick up eight "Sun Netra 210" 1U UltraSparc-IIIi servers yesterday. In case any #retrocomputing enthusiasts here (particularly those of you I know personally) are interested in such equipment, please let me know. #sun

Heads up Mastodon! I am doing a small European tour with Peter Gordon (Love of Life Orchestra) at the end of November. We'll play Glasgow, London, Cologne, and Brussels. These shows will be great fun, and a very rare chance to catch me playing live music outside the US.
If we know each other here, let me know if there's a possibility to meet up in person at one of these shows?!
Tickets and info here:

Yes, please.
https://deanebarker.net/tech/blog/let-me-know/

@… @… ooh let me know if you figure that out!

@… @… I have this page for embedding YouTube in a privacy-enhanced way. Don't know if that works for you but just wanted to let you know.

I'm also encouraging people to use somethin…

@… welcome to gardenstate.social! Let me know if you need help with anything.

It won't let me create an image file based on the drive because of disk IO errors. I'm trying to copy the files off without trying to create a disc image. I don't know if that's going to succeed but I'm guessing it won't.

There is a giant mountain in the US carved with the faces of a couple of slavers, and two guys who tried to stop slavery. Now most Americans will stop right there and say, "wait, two? Lincoln did that though..." They'll say that because Americans don't know anything about their own history, including the fact that the practice of slavery remained central to the southern economy well through Roosevelt's administration. If this is not familiar to you (because, maybe, you were taught history in the US) and you'd like to actually learn about that, you might want to read "Slavery by Another Name."
But let's talk about half-slaver mountain for a minute. This mountain is functionally a sacred site for Americans, but it's literally a sacred site for Black Hills Sioux. Speaking of stolen land, did you know that JBLM (a military base in Washington state) is built on land promised the Puyallup in the Treaty of Medicine Creek before being stolen in 1918? I remember being taught that all the land was stolen a long time ago and now there's nothing we can do. Yeah, does anyone remember that DAPL was under Obama? In fact, unused federal lands are supposed to be returned to the tribes from which the land was taken but there's a whole site to auction off federal property... That's a whole section of the government dedicated to violating the Treaty of Fort Laramie.
They could just comply with the treaty, as they are legally obligated to do. These violations are ongoing. Slavery, again, is still legal. Slaves are still used by major corporations today, they just have to be tricked into confessing to a crime first. The sins that this country is built on remain fully active today... Because the system was built to preserve white supremacists patriarchy. How could the founding of the US not lead *directly* to Trump? How could this have been different, from the beginning?
But, please, tell me, how, exactly, are you going to fix that by voting harder in the mid terms. How?

This is *incredible*
I grew up in the DF @… https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@thomas_kole/115424326100493079

Dear USians,
How about you don’t call a Middle Eastern guy “white” and go on to tell him he’s “no better than any other oppressor we encounter” simply for trying to warn his Palestinian friends to not take any unnecessary risks and to be careful on Mastodon?
Also, apparently Divya has blocked me for this, which sucks because it has made it impossible for me to keep boosting her fundraiser, which you should, of course, still follow and support (link below).
I’m not going to …

I recently learned about a new way to leak your #privacy, and it’s a scary one. Before going further, know that I’m not a network engineer: perhaps if you work in this field, you’ve known it for your whole career, but it’s quite new to me. Let me share my findings, and you can judge for yourself.
Since the original post was quite lengthy, I have broken it down into two installments: the probl…

Let me know when the user can do a Kamehameha
https://lemmy.zip/post/47057628

The Royals sure have a knack for putting their feet in their mouths
"Sarah Ferguson dropped from multiple charities over Epstein email"
The duchess had said she would "have nothing ever to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again" only for the later email to say she "humbly apologised" to him and "know you feel hellaciously let down by me".
Sarah: You're a slut (The Craft (1996) - Quotes)

“But in the words of Anansi from American Gods, anger is good. Angry gets shit done.” https://mas.to/@BlackAzizAnansi/115250982690818639

Something else that bothers me has just been added to my list:
Spam phone calls.
I've not long got back from picking up a supermarket click & collect order. For the second time tonight.
Why? Well, I've had so many spam calls to my mobile this week, I've got in the habit of just declining them. Except one "spam call" was actually the click & collect guy calling to let me know he'd found another tray in the van. But, because I declined the call, I only discovered this when I got home and unpacked.
So, yeah. Spam phone calls - you bother me!
https://cjhearn.co.uk/that-bothers-me

@… ooh let me know if you find any good games for this

I have a Frequently Asked Questions page!
This covers my process, payment, free stuff and pricing.
If there's a question you have about my work that isn't listed, then please let me know.
#faq #frequentlyaskedquestions

Perhaps the foremost tragic threat to humanity is gullibility – so named after seagulls, which swallow everything that's thrown at them. People's ability to believe pretty much anything is astounding. You see it with advertising, news, politics, religions, conspiracies, scams, et cetera.
There doesn't seem to be an effective remedy, believe me. Let me know if there is one.

The baskets are also perfect as planters for kitchen herbs, for example. Just let me know if you'd like to see them on Etsy. #3dprinting #baskets #openscad

If any Canadian artists out there would like to attempt a design of an appropriately tongue-in-cheek T-Shirt for “ByeChuck.ca”, let me know.
Purpose: A humorous campaign to abolish Canada’s connection to the Monarchy.
Proceeds would go to website maintenance, the original artist, and any excess to a deserving charity.
All designs welcome. My only requirement would be that it is fully made by a person, no AI.
byechuck.ca (redirects to UK Republic page for now)
#canada #monarchy #art #artist

Let me know when the coast's clear. .... guys? folks??? Huh, where did everyone go? #totp

I'd like to say something to you all.
If you are so "private" that you won't even appear on my "follows" list in my notifications I'm going to remove you from my followers.
If you have information that Mastodon removed the feature where we can see "follows" please let me know
#Mastodon

A friend (who is also a mathematician) sent us feedback that this text is maybe too optimistic and contributes to the general public trusting LLMs to do math. If that is read in there, I have done a terrible job writing it. So let me quote the core of my answer:
On the societal level it is a disaster. Look what it has done to education already and it will not stop there. I think math research as we know it is in big danger.
#llm #math
1/n
https://machteburch.social/@tomkalei/115038889042353525

Continuing on my Meshtastic kick, (probably because I keep buying radios to play with...) This time I have a configuration guide for common settings I've found which are useful. Still a work in progress but I think most of the common options are there.
If I've forgotten something, gotten something wrong, or you have a trick I should add, let me know!

I’m so proud of my little brother.
I just spoke to him in his dorm room at a top 30 college here in the US, he just arrived for freshman orientation.
He got in on a full ride - tuition, housing, food, books, travel, stipend for daily expenses. Won a competitive scholarship to do so.
More than that, he’s had a tougher road than most to get there:
- he had to suddenly move away from Manila, Philippines (where he grew up) in middle school because of COVID restrictions that didn’t let kids go outside (2020)
- then, just as he adjusted to school and a different language in our home country, Ukraine, Russia invaded (2022)
- he stayed in Greece for a month while I was calling our congressional representative here in NY and negotiating with the US embassy to get them a visa ASAP to enter the US and be with me and my husband. There were no paths for Ukrainian refugees yet, we just wanted them with us temporarily for a few months to figure out what options they even had next.
- he had to wait, not going to school, with no clue where they’d move next, until TPS became available to Ukrainians and they got to stay here in the US
- then he had to continue high school in yet another system, yet another country, amidst news of bombings and destruction back home
- my mother wasn’t allowed to work for months while their documents were pending, so we had to raise money with a public GoFundMe campaign and my husband and I maxed out our credit cards to help them get by
- they shared a one-room cottage for the first year, graciously hosted for free by an elderly local couple
- he saw a therapist who also graciously took him in for free while they didn’t have insurance
- he had to graduate high school amidst news of other immigrant students getting arrested, detained, and deported at their own graduations around the country
- he wasn’t sure if he would even make it to college as this administration publicly considered canceling TPS for Ukrainians and cutting off their pathway to maintaining legal status.
We don’t know what tomorrow holds. But he’s there. He’s on campus. He got to go to college.
I love him so much.

exactly! There is something that I can not even explain to myself.
@…
https://mastodon.world/@NoRomBasic/115146988360996382

Tasha, you are a criminal!! 😹

on my way to Munich today. In the odd case that anyone local in my timeline feels like meeting up tonight, let me know.
For the curious: Reason for the visit is to inspect and backup a Siemens EWSD exchange and plan logistics of its upcoming move to the Dresden telecommunications museum. #munich #telecomhistory

@… - let me know if a discussion in github is better.
i have a question about the general working with the branches. At the moment the last #pixelfed release is 5mo old.
You already merged some stuff into the DEV branch, but it's not released.
From …

I've just 'soft launched' my new online personal development community 'WorkLifeSpark'. Membership starts at £Free, but if any of my contacts here would like to access the Plus level of membership for free, just let me know.
You can visit WorkLifePsych.com/spark to learn more.
#worklifespark

Hey friends, my partner has put together a course to help people with the mental side of landing a tech job. Confidence in interviews, finding stuff that aligns with your values, salary negotiation; that sort of thing.
She’s been a programmer for 15 years and a therapist and coach for a few years now.
She is looking for feedback on the course in exchange for some free coaching on the topic.
If you’re interested, let me know! And boost or forward if you like.

HELLO NEW FOLLOWERS IF ANY OF YOU ARE INTO FOOTBALL⚽️ LET ME KNOW IMMEDIATELY
thank u. :bighonk:

Series C, Episode 12 - Death-Watch
SERVALAN: I see the Orac computer has broken our latest security code.
AVON: A useful gadget. Worth every penny you ALMOST paid for it.
SERVALAN: Wasteful of you to let me know the code was broken, surely?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/312/329 B…

It's shpooky season! 🎃🦇🕷️
You know what that means, dontcha? 🧐
Yep, evil spirits 👻 are haunting you in the evening.
Let me to lure you into spending your precious life on #firmware hackery instead. 👩‍💻✨💾
That will keep you from turning into zombies. 🧟
Now be a good fella and join the @…

@… Let me know once done!

I have a ticket for Martin Parr for Tuesday 14th October Cheltenham Literary Festival at 10:30.
If anyone wants it let me know, first come first served.
Cross posting to BlueSky

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

And many of the people that support him, let me guess…white and rich? Shocking. https://mastodon.social/@jakelazaroff/115304688954799868

Is anyone interested in Syncthing at GoLab? Or well, anyone seeing this :)
Let me know if you are, would be nice to meet (and I still have stickers I made for fosdem).
#golab #golab2025 #florence

We'll be rescuing another Siemens EWSD digital telephone exchange. If anyone is interested in helping us with disassembly and loading into the truck in Munich on October 23rd/24th, please let me know - more information in German at https://discourse.osmocom.org/t/ewsd-a

EDIT:
This is not a novel idea https://github.com/w8tvi/dircproxy
---
I need some kind of client-dæmon IRC client that I can connect to from clients on various hosts which leaves me logged in via the dæmon, idles if explicitly set or no clients are connected, and shields the chatroom from joi…

Obesity & diet
I wouldn't normally share a positive story about the new diet drugs, because I've seen someone get obsessed with them who was at a perfectly acceptable weight *by majority standards* (surprise: every weight is in fact perfectly acceptable by *objective* standards, because every "weight-associated" health risk is its own danger that should be assessed *in individuals*). I think two almost-contradictory things:
1. In a society shuddering under the burden of metastasized fatmisia, there's a very real danger in promoting the new diet drugs because lots of people who really don't need them will be psychologically bullied into using them and suffer from the cost and/or side effects.
2. For many individuals under the assault of our society's fatmisia, "just ignore it" is not a sufficient response, and also for specific people for whom decreasing their weight can address *specific* health risks/conditions that they *want* to address that way, these drugs can be a useful tool.
I know @… to be a trustworthy & considerate person, so I think it's responsible to share this:
#Fat #Diet #Obesity

@… Let me be clear: you know your domain and your company much better than I do, so I am not trying to be prescriptive here, except as clickbait. I would like you to be aware of the trade-offs (trades-off?) you are making, that’s all.

Back to my issues with my Heltec V3 not accepting to firmware to new versions, got the work I did to resolve the issue published for folks who have the same issue in the future. In short USB directly to 5v, GND, GPIO19, and GPIO20 accesses the JTAG directly.
If you have the same problem and it helps you, let me know!

instead of complaining about something I'll just type
complain complain complain
Ok, done it...Pointless to complain, you didn't hear it that's great for everyone including me
Let's now see what complaints are trending on Mastodon!
Ok, great got to block someone annoying!
Also pretty pointless...
It was something like:
"We the programmers know stuff while regular users are stupid like hell"
I'm like...what you smok…

TL;DR: what if instead of denying the harms of fascism, we denied its suppressive threats of punishment
Many of us have really sharpened our denial skills since the advent of the ongoing pandemic (perhaps you even hesitated at the word "ongoing" there and thought "maybe I won't read this one, it seems like it'll be tiresome"). I don't say this as a preface to a fiery condemnation or a plea to "sanity" or a bunch of evidence of how bad things are, because I too have honed my denial skills in these recent years, and I feel like talking about that development.
Denial comes in many forms, including strategic information avoidance ("I don't have time to look that up right now", "I keep forgetting to look into that", "well this author made a tiny mistake, so I'll click away and read something else", "I'm so tired of hearing about this, let me scroll farther", etc.) strategic dismissal ("look, there's a bit of uncertainty here, I should ignore this", "this doesn't line up perfectly with my anecdotal experience, it must be completely wrong", etc.) and strategic forgetting ("I don't remember what that one study said exactly; it was painful to think about", "I forgot exactly what my friend was saying when we got into that argument", etc.). It's in fact a kind of skill that you can get better at, along with the complementary skill of compartmentalization. It can of course be incredibly harmful, and a huge genre of fables exists precisely to highlight its harms, but it also has some short-term psychological benefits, chiefly in the form of muting anxiety. This is not an endorsement of denial (the harms can be catastrophic), but I want to acknowledge that there *are* short-term benefits. Via compartmentalization, it's even possible to be honest with ourselves about some of our own denials without giving them up immediately.
But as I said earlier, I'm not here to talk you out of your denials. Instead, given that we are so good at denial now, I'm here to ask you to be strategic about it. In particular, we live in a world awash with propaganda/advertising that serves both political and commercial ends. Why not use some of our denial skills to counteract that?
For example, I know quite a few people in complete denial of our current political situation, but those who aren't (including myself) often express consternation about just how many people in the country are supporting literal fascism. Of course, logically that appearance of widespread support is going to be partly a lie, given how much our public media is beholden to the fascists or outright in their side. Finding better facts on the true level of support is hard, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about the "fact" that Trump has widespread popular support?
To give another example: advertisers constantly barrage us with messages about our bodies and weight, trying to keep us insecure (and thus in the mood to spend money to "fix" the problem). For sure cutting through that bullshit by reading about body positivity etc. is a better solution, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about there being anything wrong with your body?
This kind of intentional denial certainly has its own risks (our bodies do actually need regular maintenance, for example, so complete denial on that front is risky) but there's definitely a whole lot of misinformation out there that it would be better to ignore. To the extent such denial expands to a more general denial of underlying problems, this idea of intentional denial is probably just bad. But I sure wish that in a world where people (including myself) routinely deny significant widespread dangers like COVID-19's long-term risks or the ongoing harms of escalating fascism, they'd at least also deny some of the propaganda keeping them unhappy and passive. Instead of being in denial about US-run concentration camps, why not be in denial that the state will be able to punish you for resisting them?

You know what? This holds true today more than ever. Other thing, Mastodon asked for a ALT text for this image, sure I thought, let me be lazy and copy it to OpenAI ChatGPT to transcribe it, so I can post that version instead
I got flagged by the system, not for the gun violance described, but because of women healthcare

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #Radio3InConcert
Charles Hubert Parry, Tenebrae & Nigel Short:
🎵 Songs of Farewell: Lord, Let Me Know Mine End
#CharlesHubertParry #Tenebrae #NigelShort
https://open.spotify.com/track/1BLtFdZgoX4g7FVuOum56B

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #Radio3InConcert
Charles Hubert Parry, Tenebrae & Nigel Short:
🎵 Songs of Farewell: Lord, Let Me Know Mine End
#CharlesHubertParry #Tenebrae #NigelShort
https://open.spotify.com/track/1BLtFdZgoX4g7FVuOum56B

It's time to lower your inhibitions towards just asking a human the answer to your question.
In the early nineties, effectively before the internet, that's how you learned a lot of stuff. Your other option was to look it up in a book. I was a kid then, so I asked my parents a lot of questions.
Then by ~2000 or a little later, it started to feel almost rude to do this, because Google was now a thing, along with Wikipedia. "Let me Google that for you" became a joke website used to satirize the poor fool who would waste someone's time answering a random question. There were some upsides to this, as well as downsides. I'm not here to judge them.
At this point, Google doesn't work any more for answering random questions, let alone more serous ones. That era is over. If you don't believe it, try it yourself. Between Google intentionally making their results worse to show you more ads, the SEO cruft that already existed pre-LLMs, and the massive tsunami of SEO slop enabled by LLMs, trustworthy information is hard to find, and hard to distinguish from the slop. (I posted an example earlier: #AI #LLMs #DigitalCommons #AskAQuestion

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #ThroughTheNight
Gabrieli Consort, Hubert Parry & Paul McCreesh:
🎵 Lord, let me know mine end (no.6 from Songs of farewell for mixed voices)
#GabrieliConsort #HubertParry #PaulMcCreesh
https://open.spotify.com/track/6wsHqAefjTKvqwu5GvVvJK