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RIP Google Reader

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Re: RIP Google Reader

#401

Post by subsaharancoder »

cletus wrote: post #11

Whatever was said at the time, I’m convinced Google Reader was collateral damage from the Bay of Pigs Google Plus effort. It had social features (which I honestly never used) and anything social had to be G+. Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.

I worked at Google, albeit not in mother ship (MTV) when Google+ was everything, those were some crazy times!! I recall when G+ numbers were so embarrassing that dashboards (built using jigsaw) were scrubbed clean and teams were mandated to report usage numbers in terms of percentages instead of active users. Apparently "25% growth QonQ" sounds better than "we added 2500 users"

Re: RIP Google Reader

#402

Post by crucialfelix »

45ure wrote: post #299
crucialfelix wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a sync script that fetches all my google Keep notes and saves as markdown. I was using it to sync into Roam for a while, but now I have it syncing into my markdown folder. My current note taker is iA Writer. On the go markdown authoring, syncs with dropbox.

Thanks for the tip on iA Writer ─ like the aesthetics, and features. I will definitely give it a shot.

Yes, the aesthetics are great and quite functional too! They have released the fonts for free as well. I use that my VSCode for markdown:

` "[markdown]": { // use the beautiful duospace font when available "editor.fontFamily": "iA Writer Duospace, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe WPC', 'Segoe UI', system-ui, 'Ubuntu', 'Droid Sans', sans-serif, monospace", `

I should mention that I use it on mobile and share article links to it if it's something I want for research. Then on desktop I read and take notes on that same page. It turns reading into a more active process of knowledge acquisition/retention/application.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#403

Post by matkoniecz »

SpelingBeeChamp wrote: post #389
matkoniecz wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.) Damnatio memoriae? > Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the des…

Neat. How did you know that? (The term, not the quoted Wikipedia text.)

I spend large part of my life on reading about things that are interesting, even if not directly useful.

I would learn about it from brilliant https://acoup.blog/ - I think that it was mentioned there somewhere.

I think this specific case I have seen first mentioned in work by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Kopali%C5%...

"Kot w worku, czyli Z dziejów pojęć i rzeczy" - with short text on wide range of topics, ranging from art forgery (and interesting case of art forgery so old so it was precious historic treasure anyway) to topics such as disease eradication.

(for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping, even if it is not something directly useful - for example this video showing unloading process of container ship is rally interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INsf6XHdfAA - shows crane picking up truck-sized containers, dropping them into truck, then immediately following process)

Re: RIP Google Reader

#404

Post by KMag »

subsaharancoder wrote: post #400
KMag wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor nit: Page Rank is pretty much spelled out publicly in the patent. I haven't read the implementation code, but I was on the indexing team. I don't think the source / root node(s) of the graph were ever made public, but other than that, the algorithm itself is known. Ascorer, Amit's Scorer is where the ranking magic happens. My team generated a few of the hundreds/thousands of signals that went into Ascorer. I'm…

Does "Ascorer, Amit's Scorer" have anything to do with Amit Singhal, he who led Google Search for many years?

Yes, my understanding is that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Singhal wrote the first version of Ascorer and named it after himself.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#405

Post by KMag »

matkoniecz wrote: post #403
SpelingBeeChamp wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat. How did you know that? (The term, not the quoted Wikipedia text.)

I spend large part of my life on reading about things that are interesting, even if not directly useful. I would learn about it from brilliant https://acoup.blog/ - I think that it was mentioned there somewhere. I think this specific case I have seen first mentioned in work by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Kopali%C5%... "Kot w worku, czyli Z dziejów pojęć i rzeczy" - with short text on wide range…

> (for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping,

One thing I learned from poking around financial models (I was/am a maintainer for a domain-specific financial modeling language used by a Fortune 500 financial services company) is that some ships are capesize[0], meaning they're too big for either the Panama or Suez canal and must transit Cape Horn and/or Cape Agulhas.

In our language, Booleans are represented as IEEE-754 double-precision floating point numbers (0.0 is False, everything else is true, with the constant True being 1.0), so for a bit I was imagining gigantic container ships dressing up as superheroes and putting on capes, and going to parties out in the middle of the ocean. Digging a bit deeper, I discovered this particular field was being used as a Boolean, and a quick web search ruined the magic of what capesize really meant.

I presume this wound up in our financial models because whether a ship is capesize affects its value, which affects the value of corporate bonds (or other corporate debt instruments) partially backed by ships as collateral. I suppose it's also possible that at some point we entered into bespoke repurchase agreements involving ships. (To avoid various risks in bankruptcy courts, sometimes financing is arranged by selling some asset below market value with an agreement to buy it back at a fixed date at a fixed higher price. There might also be a rental agreement involved. The cash flows look like a secured loan, but in case the loan can't be repaid, a court order isn't necessary to seize assets... the collateral assets have already legally changed hands.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capesize

Re: RIP Google Reader

#406

Post by hopesthoughts »

pauljonas wrote: post #391

I miss Google Reader. Migrated to Feedly & Feedly has been OK but recently, soured on Feedly as they capped the number of feeds. And I've written my own RSS readers, pre-Google-Reader & now in 2021 (though it a work in progress & starting to buckle with a 300MB sqlite DB file on a shared host ;)). Those limits might not rankle many subscribers but I don't view RSS as a "I must consume every item" but as a stream to w…

yeah I myself don't view RSS like email. It's an archive where you can pick what you want to read and leave the rest. If you have a lot of feeds, and the reader is limiting and/or removing feeds and/or unread items, this annoys me, because I like to keep everything in an archive. Time for a VPS for you?

Re: RIP Google Reader

#408

Post by hopesthoughts »

matkoniecz wrote: post #371
KMag wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor nit: Page Rank is pretty much spelled out publicly in the patent. I haven't read the implementation code, but I was on the indexing team. I don't think the source / root node(s) of the graph were ever made public, but other than that, the algorithm itself is known. Ascorer, Amit's Scorer is where the ranking magic happens. My team generated a few of the hundreds/thousands of signals that went into Ascorer. I'm…

> (On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.) Damnatio memoriae? > Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the des…

Otherwise known as throwing it down the memory hole.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#409

Post by hopesthoughts »

caoilte wrote: post #56
OskarS wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The social features were actually killed off before the product itself: a few years earlier they did a redesign which removed all of the social features. The social features were cool, I remember following a couple of journalists i really like who commented on the articles and discussed it with each other, it was a really nice thing. The reason people are so bitter is that Google Reader was the kind of thing that if…

You can avoid content curation by only using Twitter with a unofficial client.

yeah, I do this myself.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#410

Post by hopesthoughts »

conesus wrote: post #109
ecliptik wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for Newsblur, it's one of my essential apps and I use it for almost everything; RSS feeds, reddit, youtube, twitter, newsletters, even gemini:// via proxy. It's a solid product, and the amount of work you've put into it shows and I plan to remain a customer for years to come.

Then you'll be excited to see the upcoming redesign that I have yet to publicly launch (but want a few users on to test the waters early): https://beta.newsblur.com

Are you going to make the new design accessible so I can use it?
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