451–460 of 939 posts
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Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is likely. They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to watch a video I just watched today or yesterday, among other absurdities.
YT Shorts recommendations are a joke. I'm an atheist and very rarely watch anything related to religion, and even so Shorts put me in 3 or 4 live prayers/scams (not sure) the last few months.
Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”. That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.
Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”. That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.
I have been using Google search for many years now and for the past few years have been wondering if the search has really gone bad or is it just me. I remember the days when searching for something used to bring up a few sponsored links separately and I could go page after page with different results on each page allowing me to access a wealth of information and extending my reach deep into the internet. Now, it is…
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I'm really glad the article came out though, it fills in some gaps that I was fairly confident about but didn't have anything other than my sense of the players and their actions to back up what I thought was going on. I and a number of other people left in 2010. I went on to work at Blekko which was trying to 'fix' search using a mix of curation and ranking. When I left, this problem of CPC's (the amount Google got…
A) I think it’s important to acknowledge that in many ways Google is actively trying to keep CPC low - what they care most about is total spend. A low CPC means an effective advertising network where interested consumers are efficiently targeted. Their position is complex thanks to their monopoly status over online advertising. B) I don’t think it’s fair to characterize recent layoffs as some put-off collapse… critic…
Really? I have the impression Google’s other tools (I have lots of uses of Docs and Meet ) are degrading in quality quite quickly
That is a subjective judgement, but it seems Google no longer cares
What's sort of interesting about that catalyst of “steady weakness in the daily numbers” is that it didn't equate to a plateau, decline, etc... It was that the ad dollars weren't, for the umpteenth time, exceeding YoY growth that far exceeded the growth in eyeballs watching/seeing ads. They were just somewhat exceeding the already meteoric growth of the web in general. Google had unrealistic expectations in sustainin…
People ran experiments where they showed big, ugly, profitable ads, and they convinced themselves that the metrics meant it was a positive experience for users.
p-Hacking, again and again.
I have a ton of sympathy for everyone involved in this. It's incredibly hard to have a good model of what is good for users, and to have metrics that measure relevant things, and to have the discipline to make yourself test a real hypothesis rather than hunt for evidence that proves your foregone conclusion. And to reward people for negative experiments.
All very hard to do.
And frankly, if Google can't do it right - who can?
I think you need really powerful product managers who happen to be right. And that's not sustainable. Not something you can plan on or measure. Only reward if you happen to be lucky enough to notice it. Ow.
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It's also a good lesson for the new AI cycle we're in now. Often inserting ML subsystems into your broader system just makes it go from "deterministically but fixably bad" to "mysteriously and unfixably bad".
I think - I hope, rather - that technically minded people who are advocating for the use of ML understand the short comings and hallucinations... but we need to be frank about the fact that the business layer above us (with a few rare exceptions) absolutely does not understand the limitations of AI and views it as a magic box where they type in "Write me a story about a bunny" and get twelve paragraphs of text out. A…
The people I see who are most excited about ML are business types who just see it as a black boxes that makes stock valuation go vroom.
The people that deeply love building things, really enjoy the process of making itself, are profoundly sceptical.
I look at generative AI as sort of like an army of free interns. If your idea of a fun way to make a thing is to dictate orders to a horde of well-meaning but untrained highly-caffienated interns, then using generative AI to make your thing is probably thrilling. You get to feel like an executive producer who can make a lot of stuff happen by simply prompting someone/something to do your bidding.
But if you actually care about the grit and texture of actual creation, then that workflow isn't exactly appealing.
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Thanks for writing this insightful piece. The pathologies of big companies that fail to break themselves up into smaller non-siloed entities like Virgin Group does. Maintaining the successful growing startup ways and fighting against politics, bureaucracy, fiefdoms, and burgeoning codebases is difficult but is a better way than chasing short-term profits, massive codebases, institutional inertia, dealing with corpora…
I formed a worker co-op - but it's just me! And I do CAD reverse engineering, nothing really life-giving. I would love to join a co-op producing real human survival values in an open source way. Where would you suggest that I look for leads on that kind of organization?