51–60 of 290 posts
My respect level for Boris actually went up a few notches after reading about this :)
Indeed. The "lovable bumbling fool" image he puts across is a very conscious choice on his part. Despite what you think about his politics (and I'm personally not a fan) you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then I'd argue that we are the greater fools for letting this happen without any consequences. Personally I think this is a genius move by Bojo and something that should be applauded by hackers (this is Hacker News after all). It literally hacks the system, and I think it's beautiful.
> Then I'd argue that we are the greater fools for letting this happen without any consequences. Letting what exactly happen? Him using a phrase that might or might not have been intended to make a previous story fall in search results? As if the original story about the model could not still be in the front pages of newspapers and websites, and so on? That's not even half an accusation... The public voted for someth…
The public did not vote for something specific - they voted for something very vague and ill defined, the little information they were provided was incorrect (e.g. "an extra £350m a week for the NHS"), nobody had anything even approaching a plan, the whole thing was a shambolic amateur affair, and that's one of the reasons it has taken so long and cost so much to get nowhere. The only vaguely professional part was the manipulation of the small majority via social media (Cambridge Analytica etc.) That is the bigger democratic scandal - the fact that we can no longer have nice things like democracy thanks to the abuse of technology by arrogant thugs from expensive schools, which is the original point of the parent.
My respect level for Boris actually went up a few notches after reading about this :)
Indeed. The "lovable bumbling fool" image he puts across is a very conscious choice on his part. Despite what you think about his politics (and I'm personally not a fan) you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think.
The funnier thing to me is the people in the thread talking about how DuckDuckGo finds the "right" results. DuckDuckGo is just Yahoo. I think the results are something like 99.9% the same, so whatever is the 0.1% they add, when I did the search, it results in maybe a slight difference in link ordering. The reason it finds the "right" results is also the same reason its results are such garbage. And this is coming fro…
(Not to mention the right side "Answer box" that throws me off a bit since that result is not on the list of links)
While fascinating, if this is a deliberate strategy, I wonder what its intended effect is supposed to be. Are people curious enough to google for stories about Johnson's alleged affair with the American woman going to be satisfied with the "model of restraint" quote? Are they going to forget what they have just been searching for, get immediately distracted and go read what this model of restraint business is all abo…
If I committed murder and wanted to hide the body, I would hide it on Page 2 of the search results. No one goes there. After all, if the first x results are not what you were looking for, how likely is it that the next x results will provide a match?
My page 2 might be your page 1, and vice versa, based on how we've been profiled by the search engine, our location, browser, etc etc
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. The "lovable bumbling fool" image he puts across is a very conscious choice on his part. Despite what you think about his politics (and I'm personally not a fan) you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think.
> you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think. In playing the political game at least, definitely so. Lots of reports from coworkers (especially from the Foreign Office) that he is genuinely as clueless as he comes across when it comes to other elements of his job.
If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wars the British fought to suppress Burmese independence) then he would've never recited the poem. But he is a 'well-trained idiot' - he's had an English classical education, so he knows Kipling, but he doesn't understand what it actually _means_ ('oh yeah, I totally was going to shag a girl when we were fighting in Burma') or how it would come across to someone who wasn't also from a classically trained English background.
So I think he is a clueless bumbling idiot. He, and Jacobs Rees-Moggs, are the British equivalent of a Texan politician who wears a cowboy hat and talks about their guns all the time.
The story is available here - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/30/boris-johns...
The most worrying for me? Even after countless updates to their algorithms, breakthrough AI and ML, breaking hundred of thousands of legit website each time, Google is still dumb enough to be tricked by such a simplistic tactics :-( Or is Google biased toward "official" speech (even from a really-not-trustable source) like Twitter is when it will allow BS from a President (because it's an official account so not subj…
Can't reproduce the "wrong" result locally, but I bet the results for the "woman model" interpretation are just below the results for the "model of restraint" interpretation.
This is just silly. The last thing anyone would know about Arcuri is that she was very briefly a model. It would be like searching for info about (UK supreme court president) Lady Hale by Googling “barmaid”. Try instead searching for “Boris Johnson technology lessons”, or indeed “Boris Johnson thigh”. Has his team SEO’d that yet?