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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37152 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Both "tony blair flashing" and "boris johnson flashing" do indeed not deliver autocomplete results, as expected. (well I wasn't sure about Boris)

Whereas if either of them had been flashing anyone lately, I would certainly expect Google to autocomplete accordingly -- what else would you expect?

Once they manage to integrate advanced hallucination LLMs into their search, I guess the engine might make something up -- but otherwise once you get down to a level of specificity that will return very few to zero results, "nothing" is exactly what autocomplete should do.

If you do the actual google search on Boris you will find that he opposes 'cyber-flashing' (whatever that is), and that somebody in Parliament claims that Angela Rayner was flashing him during Question Period to put him off his game -- there doesn't seem to be an obvious autocompletion there, given that it's supposed to work by suggesting 'hot searches'. (as it were)

I'm afraid you've lost me there. People tend to generally write and speculate more about the possibilities of politicians (particularly US ones) being assassinated than them flashing anyone. I can't say I'm so well-versed in the mechanics of autocomplete to say for sure, of course, but my general feeling is that I'd expect "biden assassination" to bring up some results, and it not bringing up any would indicate similar manual cleaning of results to what's been done to Trump, ostensibly for similar motives.

The point with 'flashing' is that it's an example of a thing that never happened, and you would not expect autocomplete to bring anything up.

Turns out in the case of 'President X assassination attempt' it is in fact a thing that happened for some value of 'attempt' and all X > 'Coolidge'. (TBF nobody tried to assassinate Eisenhower while he was president, but apparently ze Germans took a poke at him as Supreme Commander)

Coolidge does autocomplete, suggesting links in association with other attempts around the time of his administration -- you need to go back to Harding to find somebody other than Biden) boring enough that "Harding assassination" does not autocomplete with "attempt".

So do you think Google is trying to keep Trump, Biden and Warren Harding from being assassinated by excluding them from the autocomplete?

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