There is an article called "The man that killed X" for every X.
Including X (formerly called Twitter)
Clever! I like it.
The man who killed Google Search?
621–630 of 939 posts
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting drunk off that AI kool-aid aren't ya
the othering of creators because they use a different paintbrush was bothering me.
I can relate, AI is a tool, and if I want to write my code by LEGOing a bunch of AI-generated functions together, I should be able to.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but I think the other lesson might be that those black box machine translations have ended up being more valuable? It sucks when things don't always work, but that is also kind of life and if the AI version worked more often that is usually ok (as long as the occasional failures aren't so catastrophic as to ruin everything)
> Yes, but I think the other lesson might be that those black box machine translations have ended up being more valuable? The key difference is how tolerant the specific use case is of a probably-correct answer. The things recent-AI excels at now (generative, translation, etc.) are very tolerant of "usually correct." If a model can do more, and is right most of the time, then it's more valuable. There are many other…
A case in point is the ubiquity of Pleco in the Chinese/English space. It’s a dictionary, not a translator, and pretty much every non-native speaker who learns or needs to speak Chinese uses it. It has no ML features and hasn’t changed much in the past decade (or even two). People love it because it does one specific task extremely well.
On the other hand ML has absolutely revolutionised translation (of longer text), where having a model containing prior knowledge about the world is essential.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure it does prevent some harm that would otherwise happen. There are certainly people in the world who would think twice about breaking an oath they've made, regardless of whether or not you think it's goofy. And I think that is really part of the problem. The idea that something like this is "goofy" just makes me feel profoundly sad. Do people just not care about integrity anymore, to the point that asking some…
Perhaps the people who think it's goofy may have actually put some thought behind their statements and have good reasons? For example, I find the oath as written to be effectively impossible to implement- it's very lofty sounding, but depends greatly on the nature of "honesty": "I shall participate in none but honest enterprises" Who defines honesty in this context? What if two engineers disagree in their interpretat…
Wait so because different people have different concepts of honesty you reject the concept of honesty wholesale?
Like surely you have some concept of honesty that you strive for... Unless you're like a sociopath?
I'm not saying it would be wrong to be a sociopath or to genuinely have no concept of an honest enterprise. I'm just trying to understand if you are truly amoral here, and that's why you can't formulate the statement in a way that makes sense to you, or if you're belaboring the point in protest because you need the statements to be more precise. I suspect it's the second one - you're just not aware of the common components of what an ethical enterprise is.
If you need a principal to be more precise, the usual way is to define sub principles that make up the principle. These principles in turn would tend to be defined in terms of other principles but let's assume that just one level of recursion gives us more meat to really judge the meaning of honest Enterprise. Then we might adopt principles like this:
Defining an "honest enterprise" in a way that is precise and actionable could incorporate several key principles. Here I have asked GPT4 to provide them, since it's excellent good at these kinds of ethical elaborations. I also happen to agree with the principles that it came up with.
Honest Enterprise is commonly taken to mean:
1. *Legal Compliance*: An honest enterprise complies with all applicable laws, regulations, and standards. This is a baseline requirement, reflecting a commitment to operate within the legal frameworks that govern its activities.
2. *Ethical Integrity*: Beyond legal compliance, an honest enterprise adheres to ethical standards. This includes transparency in operations, fairness in dealings with customers, suppliers, employees, and other stakeholders, and integrity in financial reporting and corporate governance.
3. *Social Responsibility*: The enterprise actively contributes to the welfare of the community and environment. This includes practicing sustainability, engaging in community development, and avoiding actions that harm the public or the environment, even if such actions are technically legal.
4. *Accountability*: An honest enterprise holds itself accountable to its stakeholders by being open to scrutiny and responsive to feedback. It should have mechanisms for addressing grievances and correcting misconduct.
5. *Commitment to Truth*: The enterprise should commit to honesty in its communications, advertising, and all forms of public interaction. This includes not engaging in deceptive practices or misrepresentations.
6. *Employee Respect*: Treating employees with respect, providing fair compensation, ensuring workplace safety, and supporting their professional development are signs of an honest enterprise.
7. *Innovation and Fair Competition*: The enterprise should engage in fair competition practices, respecting intellectual property rights, and avoiding practices that unfairly eliminate competition.
By strongmanning these principles into the definition of an honest enterprise we gain an ethical principle that is much harder to dispute or disagree with. Someone encompassing all these principles will tend to naturally have credibility and ethos.
It's not about the fact that the principles are arbitrary and vary from person to person. It's about the fact that you have taken great pains to collect a set of sub principles that are powerful and effective.
Oaths may come from a Time when such principles would have been more or less normalized through society. But we still have the power, by reflecting upon and studying the component principles of honest Enterprise, to adopt a strong and effective principle here. When you see a vague ethical principle, just take it to the strongest and the most effective version that you can reasonably compile. I think that's all that can really be expected of someone, ethically.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to chime in, I started reading the article due to this comment, as I wanted to check the style of the writing, but the amount of in-your-face insistence to subscribe to yet another newsletter just put me off entirely. There was a CTA right at the beginning (which appeared suddenly after 4-5 seconds of reading so I lost my place), then another one a few paragraphs later, then less than 3 seconds after that, a pop…
Aside from the annoying pop-up, I didn't actually notice the other calls to subscribe. It's a bit of an unfortunate situation for the author, if any reasonable number of people are like me. If I didn't notice the less-intrusive efforts to get me to subscribe, and when I see the intrusive one (the modal pop-up), it makes me less likely to want to subscribe... oof. I think the theoretical ideal from the reader's standp…
Not sure if it's my browser config, but I saw all these CTAs I mentioned, which I find absurd.
I really think the article was relatively interesting, enough for me to consider other articles if it weren't for the amount of annoying nudges I got, which is a shame because the author probably put some good effort into it.
I agree that the only CTA should be at the end, but more and more it looks like it actually works, otherwise I would imagine people would stop doing it so often.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it's worth, I do not remember a time when YouTube's suggestions or search results were good. Absurdities like that happened 10 and 15 years ago as well. These days my biggest gripe is that they put unrelated ragebait or clickbait videos in search results that I very clearly did not search for - often about American politics.
15 years ago, I used to keep many tabs of youtube videos open just because the "related" section was full of interesting videos. Then each of those videos had interesting relations. There was so much to explore before hitting a dead-end and starting somewhere else. Now the "related" section is gone in favor of "recommended" samey clickbait garbage. The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML…
>The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand.
I would go further and say that it is impossible. Human interests are contextual and change over time, sometimes in the span of minutes.
Imagine that all the videos on the internet would be on one big video website. You would watch car videos, movie trailers, listen to music, and watch porn in one place. Could the algorithm correctly predict when you're in the mood for porn and when you aren't? No, it couldn't.
The website might know what kind of cars, what kind of music, and what kind of porn you like, but it wouldn't be able to tell which of these categories you would currently be interested in.
I think current YouTube (and other recommendation-heavy services) have this problem. Sometimes I want to watch videos about programming, but sometimes I don't. But the algorithm doesn't know that. It can't know that without being able to track me outside of the website.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display. Or when they would show more than 3 results before spamming irrelevant videos. Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video. Or when they had a dislike button so you would know to avoid wasting time on low quality videos.
> I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display. Wait what?! You "Consume Content" on a COMPUTER? What are you some kinda grandpa? Why aren't you consuming content from your phone like everyone else? Or casting it from your phone to your SMART TV! Great way to CONSUME CONTENT! CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT…
Lol, Youtube on Apple TV is great. Mostly because I either need to find something fast or I switch it off because the remote is not conducive to skipping. But the only time I watch Youtube on my computer is for a specific video. The waste of space is horrendous. Same with Twitter (rarely visited), just a 3/4 inches wide column of posts on my 24 inch screen.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display. Or when they would show more than 3 results before spamming irrelevant videos. Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video. Or when they had a dislike button so you would know to avoid wasting time on low quality videos.
> I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display. Wait what?! You "Consume Content" on a COMPUTER? What are you some kinda grandpa? Why aren't you consuming content from your phone like everyone else? Or casting it from your phone to your SMART TV! Great way to CONSUME CONTENT! CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT…
I'm not consuming the content on my phone, because the user experience of using these services on my phone sucks. Just the app vs website difference with urls is a difference in behavior I hate let alone all the UI differences that make the mobile experience awkward.
I don't know about the TV though.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#629What I can't wrap my head around is how these types of people manage to land such prestigious positions. How is it possible that we see people failing upwards across companies everywhere?
I mean, consider if you are looking for someone to maintain the building you live in and someone comes along and says all the nice things but you also know that the previous building they maintained burned down. In my view, it does not even matter what the reason was, it burned down. It could be their activities, their negligence, or even really something out of their hands, which is then anybody's guess whether they could have done something to prevent it.
So, how do they manage to get hired?
For a regular coding position, you have to have a good resume, do on-site meetings with the team, demonstrate the ability to code and be able to discuss complex design problems and sketch out solutions.
For these positions you only seem to have to know the right people and, probably, do a lot of lip service and you are in. Seems so broken it boggles the mind.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed - I can appreciate the sentiment and the history, but the ad hominem is not really necessary to prove the point and undermines the credibility of the post. I still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to what I want.
Calling someone a name is only an ad hominem fallacy if you try to use it as an argument. Here it's just used for style. Since the author has plenty of valid arguments, the name calling - which is not an argument - can be dismissed without weakening the actual argument. In any case, it is not sound reasoning to reject the entirety of an argument just because one of the subclaims is not a valid argument. Doing so is t…
this comment is a wonderful exercise in logic.