Julia

My idea (born out somewhat by experiences with business databases and expert systems) is that a system can be accurate often enough that you come to trust it, yet still fail far too often to be helpful overall. The problem is worse when the failure is hard to detect, such as a wrong answer to a ...

Good enough to make you trust it, not good enough that you should trust it.

The irony is their search has gotten so bad that even when I am sitting in my car desperate to drive to get some last minute thing one of my kids forgot for school or sports, Google can’t send me efficiently somewhere to grab and pay too much for it.

Internal KPIs and McKinsey consultant thinking are leading Google and everyone else to put AI in everything not even necessarily for profit-seeking reasons but because upper management has set up metrics to incentivize everyone to try to maximize usage of whatever feature their bonuses are tied to.

A bigger problem is that "webpages" are being generated by the AI slop engines: more and more garbage that clogs up search results.

i love that youtube gives up after 5 search results and just starts throwing up random video suggestions as a distraction. the system works.

The Eric Schmidt era was the peak: 2001-2011. Then Larry took over again and Google mostly coasted along on reputation until Sundar Pichai and Ruth Porat were given the keys in 2015. All downhill since then.

The peak was sometime in 2008 or 2009. Google was adding tools and services of incredible value through the mid to late aughts, including Google Reader (Oct 2005), News Archive Search (June 2006) and Street View (May 2007). They deprecated News Archives in 2010 and shut down Reader in 2013.

2/2 The two things that killed google search's ability to function: the end of the minus sign (-) to eliminate the tons of garbage you know you will get if you give google the chance and the use of ("") to make the fucking thing focus.

My most recent fav AI result:

reminds me a bit of switching the cars' dashboards from a tactile, physical display of knobs and levers to the absolute usability nightmare that is the new trend of making every control "digital and touch," nobody asked for (it's just a way to save pennies, sold as "innovation").

Had a nightmare of a time trying to buy kitchen equipment for my dad who is visually impaired - nearly everything now is a touch screen without buttons. He just can't see it!

removing the "cached" option was likely the first sign of collapse.

It didn’t start with the AI overviews though; they had been undermining their own search features with “did you mean $OTHERTHING” when you had searched for $THING, and ignoring advanced search syntax entirely (Boolean operators, quotes, etc). LLMs just turbocharged the decline.

Because Google's goal is not to bring you answers, but rather to show you ads.

The rot economy ruins everything.

Isn't it just 𝓒𝓵(3,1)

Added it to the bottom here

trans kids trying to get healthcare are vetted harder than members of congress

I just want to say for the record that we're not Enron. Don't put it in the papers that we're Enron.

Ok gang today is the day that I talk about solutions of the Dirac equation in the context of Clifford algebras and spin groups, I look at the parametrized version "spinor bundles" and introduce + characterize the notion of "spin structure", and then maybe talk about KO orientation and Witten genus

whose idea was it to give cats a rumble pack that shit is so cute

crazy week

I remain convinced DOGE was a massive, planetary scale data exfiltration scheme and that Palantir has it all now

AI is deleting our ability to have Passion Project Side Hustles, which we have been assured by economic brain-geniuses time and time again is the only way to rise above wage-slavery

Google ehrlichman rehnquist postal strike Al Mode • Al Overview The query appears to be a conflation of the 1970 U.S. postal strike and a 2024/2025 Canadian postal strike, with the names "Ehrlichman" and "Rehnquist" being associated with the former. While President Nixon's administration had officials like John Ehrlichman and William Rehnquist, their specific roles in the 1970 strike were primarily related to the administration's response to the labor action, not the strike's direct cause or immediate events. The 1970 strike was a wildcat strike that crippled the U.S. mail system and led to significant gains for postal workers, including a large pay increase and new collective bargaining rights. O

Is it possible to turn off AI assistance for searches and just get sites that, y’know, contain the search terms you enter, without commenting that you must be a total idiot for entering them? I long for Back Then.

Google used to pay people to work from home, analyzing search results to make sure they didn't suck & weren't scams.
Ah the good ol' days. High pay for an easy gig.

They updated their image search at least for Android so I literally don't have a "download image" option directly from their image search anymore. Driving me crazy I'm going to switch to bing or something I have no idea why they would take that option away

When they changed their motto from “don’t be evil,” the canary like straight up died. It had been dead a while, or we thought, but like by then the coroner had come around checked, recorded a time of death, then put that bitch in a shoe box and handed it to us.

I even had a job as a 'quality rater' in the late 00s, where I checked google search results to make sure they were good, factual, and not scammy 😭 Back when things like that mattered to google.. alas!