I can't find the video anymore, but there was a team viewer video talking about a performance update on youtube, showing how it went from taking 20 seconds to start up to... 10 seconds.
1. Domain-specific engines is too complicated. Let's have a general purpose search engine.
2. Too many buttons is too complicated. Let's have a single search box.
3. Guessing what you want when you are anonymous is too complicated. We need your search history to tailor your search for you.
Please, search engines, hear me: you can not simplify the needs and wants of 7 billion people and zettabytes of online content into a single little shitty search box! It's too complicated!
At this point the only thing these search engines are good for is for finding the URL of something you already know the name of. It's a phone book. I type Hacker News on google, it tells me its phone number: https://news.ycombinator.com/
#3 is certainly bullshit, but Yahoo failed because of #1. Forcing a user to drill down through hundreds or thousands of categories to do a search is absurd, don't you think?
What other buttons do you want?
But for sure Google has crippled its core product. First they removed the + option, which forced the inclusion of words (their excuse was that it "interfered" with their stupid "Google Plus" product which is now gone). Yes you can use "allintext:" but come on. I'm not even sure that's honored anyway.
And the removal of the ability to exclude certain sites from results.
I think the search box was always there, but for some reason it seemed that you needed to select a category...
OK, I just looked up their old layout, and they buried the search bar amongst so much crap that it wasn't clear whether it pertained to the ad or the thing above it, or what... if you even noticed it: https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/longforms/04ILIeAX3JAF...
For output to be accurate, input has to be precise. But there's a trend of dumbing down and minifying interfaces and then tacking AI to guess what the user really means from the little input he is allowed.
It will never work. It can't work. Anyone who thinks this can work is delusional. And with Google it's particularly obvious how stupid the trend is.
Look at the "tabs" Google has for search: all, images, videos, shopping, news, etc. This is things users can input. But wait! What if an user wants news about something? And they have to reach all the way out to the news tab. That's too much for our bubbling moronic users to manage! They can't into computers. They have room temperature IQ. They have never used Google before, so they don't know where the tab is. They probably don't know what tabs or links are either. I know what I'll do. I'll put an AI to reorder the TABS of my users based on their search history, query input, season of the year, and their zodiac sign based on what birth day they used when they signed up for a Google account. That should solve it.
And now the order of the tabs is all over the place and when you want to click the "images" tab it's sometimes not the second tab and when you want to click the "videos" tab it's sometimes not the third tab.
I think this is very interesting because you have to think. If Google can fail this hard at tabs, which is not really a complicated thing to program, imagine how hard they are failing at indexing the entire interweb. Imagine if they are doing to search results the same nonsense bullshit they are doing to the tabs. Just imagine it. It's clear they have absolutely no idea what they're doing with the tabs.
>And now the order of the tabs is all over the place and when you want to click the "images" tab it's sometimes not the second tab and when you want to click the "videos" tab it's sometimes not the third tab.
I also noticed this; they redesigned their search tabs few months ago and now it's sort of bad and user unfriendly. Sometimes there is "News" tab, sometimes there is no news tab and tabs look all the same and generic(white rectangles with black text).
>I think this is very interesting because you have to think. If Google can fail this hard at tabs, which is not really a complicated thing to program, imagine how hard they are failing at indexing the entire interweb. Imagine if they are doing to search results the same nonsense bullshit they are doing to the tabs.
God knows what is in their index and what is not in their index. I think every search engine needs to make its index open and transparent. And yea Google can fail with all sort of things, they are not ubermensch or something like that.
Google's ranking algorithms and search technology are millions of LOC and not even Google engineers know how exactly Google Search works.
I agree it sucks, but if we are being honest here, technology was never for people on very little income. Everything has been free for so long because of ads, but then people started using ad blockers, so the services responded by adding more ads, leading more people to use more ad blockers.
I don't think most people who use ad blockers understand that the ads are literally the price you pay for the service. If you think your time is worth more than the ad length, work for an hour and pay the subscription. I know it sounds crazy when I put it this way, but there's no such thing as free internet video.
The intent at the beginning of the paragraph, but not at the end. Is an IMG meant to be in the paragraph? Is a SPAN? They are inline elements that can indeed be inside a P.
I honestly don't understand this level of laziness in 2023. Editors close tags automatically, ffs. For the sake of saving a keystroke or two we end up with unintuitive and ambiguous crap.
If I didn’t intend the img or span to be in the paragraph, I would have closed the <p>. The act of leaving the <p> open is what demonstrates that my intent is for the img to remain inside.
And now you have a tag that is sometimes closed and sometimes open, forcing me to scan the entire document to figure if you've ever closed this bloody thing - as opposed to knowing that you will eventually close it, and that anything I see until then is inside the P.
It seems everyone will ban you for anything with no recourse because they expect bad actors to just create new accounts every time. The answer to this is, ironically, and even officially in Google's case, that good actors should just create a new account as well if they get unfairly banned.
I agree that the web has gone downhill, but I don't think it's just the web. It's software in general.
When we were new to computers, every application was new.
Now, every application is a rehash of a previous application, except with missing features and a more "modern" look that completely disregards decades of what we know about UI/UX.
One example that I think about a lot is how we have copy and paste and drag and drop, but that's it. That's been it for decades. Nobody has invented a new way of getting data from program A to program B in ages.
By the way, Neocities is a website that tried to capture the Geocities feel by letting anybody just upload a static website hosted in a subdomain. They do seem to have some Lain fansites there.
Everything just gets worse as you age.
Sure, my dad said it too back then, but he just didn't get how the world moved on and improved. This time around though it's real, everything gets more stupid and dumb and I hate it.
One of the advantages of getting older is you get to see the same dumb shit play out again and again, and that's how you realize it's dumb.
Mainstream culture has always been vapid, heavily manipulated by big corporations, and mostly a waste of time. Anyone bemoaning how social media has guard rails and is all about passive consumption, is not old enough to remember television I guess, which was at one point just three networks telling you exactly what you could watch and when.
And in the TV era there was this same class of would-be commentators and tastemakers who would complain about how the culture had now turned to shit... they are just trying to make a buck and a name for themselves, but I always thought they seemed like a particularly unhappy bunch.
The only thing that seems really unique about the current era to me is the smartphone/social media combo, it shovels all this crappy mass culture into your brain at a level of efficiency and comprehensiveness that was previously unimaginable.
But you can just turn that off. My phone was either switched off or out of sight for all but 2 hours per day last week. With that piece of junk out of my hands life basically just feels like a better version of the year 2000 or so, in the real world not much has changed.
I read it more as wry irony. "My dad was dumb and wrong, but I'm totally right when I feel the same way he did." I don't think the comment really means either one of them was right or wrong.
I think (hope) it was sarcasm, but one sign of this time and age is, that it is increasingly hard to tell. Often people themself don't know anymore ..
So anyway, in this case I think the bitterness is real and the awareness, that it might be "just subjective" and not objective but that doesn't change the bitterness and misery of watching all those idiots out there ..
Things that were confidently set in their ways for the entire life of the product almost, also ended up buckling in recent years. I'm pretty disappointed, just for one example, in how Apple walked away from good old System Preferences into this System Settings for no good reason at all, just to make it analogous to their messy iOS settings page. It's a Mac and not an iPhone, and shouldn't behave like one, but what do you know, they know what is best for us I guess as we are saddled with yearly updates that must change some thing we've grown familiar with just for the sake of change. Imagine if the hammer in your garage changed how it worked every year.
I don't like that change, either, but making "System Settings" analogous to Apple's (indeed messy) iOS settings has been a boon to the users I support. They're used to iOS's quirks, and now require much less hand-holding when they have to make changes to their MacOS systems. I've decided to let go of my irritation: learning new systems is a core part of my job description; it's not theirs.
There are various third-party and sometimes first-party clipboard managers that give you more visual access to the things in the clipboard.
But you hit a steep uphill conceptual climb for the average user pretty quickly: the better solutions for moving data between applications end up resembling type-agnostic virtual 'registers' or Unix-style pipes for more than just text, but these abstractions seem to be too complicated in practice for anyone who isn't a power user.
PowerShell actually implements the latter solution, a kind of pipes-with-objects IIRC. And of all things the late Terry Davis' TempleOS has an ability to treat all kinds of things as text, render them, and pass them around.
I was using ComfyUI recently and the docs told me to drag a screenshot of a node configuration to load it. I was in disbelief but it worked. I assume the metadata is in the image somehow.
To be honest... it doesn't feel like an improvement, more like another way to control users' behavior.
It is quite common that if program B competes with program A, program A will go to great lengths to make sharing cumbersome and keep the users in program A. (e.g. try to open a medium post in the medium app from a linkedin feed).
In Python the Adler library returns a 32 bit checksum. It works pretty well when you're comparing one file to another file. It doesn't work pretty well if you want to, for example, create a quick fingerprint that (tries to) uniquely identify tens of thousands of files.
On StackOverflow I saw someone say that they got hash collisions in MD5 (128 bit) after hashing around 20k files.
When I tried making something similar I figured if I added the size of the file in bytes to the hash that would decrease the number of hash collisions since you would need a permutation of bytes in a set of bytes of same size to generate the same MD5 hash to get a collision. Still feels random and unavoidable in the greater scheme of things, though.
Conventional analysis of non-contrived files would suggest only a 50% chance of an MD5 collision among 2^64 (18 quintillion) files.
So any SO account of "hash collisions in MD5 (128 bit) after hashing around 20k files" may be indicative of some other bug, misreporting, or having a set of files that includes pairs intentionally-contrived to include MD5 collisions. (That's now trivial as long as you're not targeting a specific MD5 value, just intending two files to match, and have some ranges in the files where you can stuff the right result-aligning binary patterns.)
I'm not well-versed in this, but I think you're wrong. A MD5 hash has 2^128 permutations, so it's like the birthday problem, you'll get 50% chance of any two files in a set having the same hash with far fewer than 2^64 files.
Besides, we're talking about probabilities. It's possible for 2 files, one after the other, to have the exact same hash just because of chance. In fact, I think there was a bitcoin bug due to this, something about making the wrong assumption that the hash of the entire blockchain and the hash of the entire blockchain + 1 block would never be the same hash, if I remember correctly.
Hashes are simply not a reliable method of uniquely identifying things. They are a convenient method but if you implement any hash-based system for identification you should also implement a escape hatch for when two different things have the same hash but must be treated differently.
Nope. 2^64 is the number of tries needed for a 50% chance of a collision between two of the tries. You don't have to stay poorly read on this, and groundlessly allege wrongness:
