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You Will Not Understand This

stanleylieber.com

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Re: You Will Not Understand This

#101

Post by coldtea »

rtpg wrote: post #91
nludd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If I search for "takeaway pizza", I'm going to be pretty annoyed if the results are generated using PageRank alone, with no weighting for local relevance. Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". >If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport Google "cricket provider" or "cricket insect". >if a British person makes the same search, th…

As someone doing a lot of language switching in my Google searches: should I preface every search with the language as well? I search for some error message. Now I get answers in English. What if the person is actually German? Is everyone now going to be stuck with English websites? What's the point of a search engine if you have to be super precise? Part of Google's magic is that it can figure you out even in imprec…

>As someone doing a lot of language switching in my Google searches: should I preface every search with the language as well?

What part of the parent's argument is invalidated by the need of some outlier doing "lots of language switching" to add the language?

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#102

Post by xelxebar »

busterarm wrote: post #14
xelxebar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple people have replied about problems setting up private email servers and getting flaggad as spam. I run my own. With SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup properly, I've not noticed anywhere that's flagged me as spam. GMail users certainly receive my emails no problem.

Are you running your own on physical hardware on-premises or in the cloud?

Oh shoot. Good point. It's running on a Google VM instance, so I push outgoing SMTP through Mailgun. That's a factor I hadn't considered.

Incidentally, if you are getting flagged as spam, using a relay like Mailgun could be an option to explore. For postfix, the relevant option is 'relayhost', cf. postconf(5).

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#103

Post by nludd »

rtpg wrote: post #91
nludd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If I search for "takeaway pizza", I'm going to be pretty annoyed if the results are generated using PageRank alone, with no weighting for local relevance. Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". >If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport Google "cricket provider" or "cricket insect". >if a British person makes the same search, th…

As someone doing a lot of language switching in my Google searches: should I preface every search with the language as well? I search for some error message. Now I get answers in English. What if the person is actually German? Is everyone now going to be stuck with English websites? What's the point of a search engine if you have to be super precise? Part of Google's magic is that it can figure you out even in imprec…

I'm Dutch, so I have to switch languages often as well. I don't think I get what you're trying to explain. Could you provide some examples?

If I search for an English error message, I.. search for that message. If I search for a Dutch person, I look him up on the Dutch Wikipedia if he's well-known enough.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#104

Post by coldtea »

vog wrote: post #71
rootlocus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Educating" users is not as profitable as serving users. Manipulating "uneducated" users is much more profitable.

This is a true statement, but how is this relevant? What do localized search results have to do with manipulating uneducated users?

For one, they depend on schmucks willing to give Google their personal data and allow for it to keep their location, preferences etc, in order to give them those "precious" localized/personalized info that would be perfectly possible with no personal info kept and just an additional search word or two.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#105

Post by oblio »

hzay wrote: post #74
jdietrich wrote: post #36

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…

Pretty sure OP gets the idea of personalization. Google's personalization is like piling up chairs in order to reach the moon. It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Instead its present implementation simply stops your world view from expanding in any direction, by serving you the same stuff that you knew over and over again. This is not personalization. This is a child's imitation…

I'm pretty sure you're part of the millions the parent poster was talking about, Google doesn't really "care" that much about your use case.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#106

Post by xelxebar »

tvmalsv wrote: post #50
busterarm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you running your own on physical hardware on-premises or in the cloud?

I also run a personal mail server and haven't had any issues with delivery (that I know of). I'm using Mail-in-a-Box, which deserves all of the credit for keeping the box low friction to setup and maintain. I'm running it on a low-end VPS from a cloud provider I'm too embarrassed of to name, but it works (usually). Edited: cleaned up some of the mistakes made when editing and moving text around, prior to posting.

Now I'm really curious about your cloud provider. I'm running mine on a Google instance, which seems silly if avoiding GMail is the goal. :P

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#107

Post by crdoconnor »

jdietrich wrote: post #36

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…

>The entire job of a search engine is to return relevant results.

Their job is to make money. When the user is searching with an intent to buy it doesn't pay to return the most relevant results, it pays to return the most profitable results.

It only pays to return relevant results (because it builds the brand), when it is clear that there is no intent to buy.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#108

Post by amelius »

hzay wrote: post #74
jdietrich wrote: post #36

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…

Pretty sure OP gets the idea of personalization. Google's personalization is like piling up chairs in order to reach the moon. It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Instead its present implementation simply stops your world view from expanding in any direction, by serving you the same stuff that you knew over and over again. This is not personalization. This is a child's imitation…

> It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him.

Personalized sales strategies can also lead to the reverse: [1]

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/personalized-pricing-smart-st...

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#109

Post by KozmoNau7 »

sametmax wrote: post #94
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gmail dicthed IMAP in favor of their own API. Pluging an IMAP client into your email account requires to dig inside your account security settings and change several obscure values with scary names and warnings. Sometime it even doesn't work, and then you do it again later, and it works for no reason. A non tech saavy user will never succeed in doing that, and hence everybody will use the web base version. I went t…

> I went to the settings page, selected "enable IMAP" and used the values in the provided link to set up my Gmail as an IMAP account in Thunderbird. No messing around with account security, no "obscure values" to change. A.K.A."It works on my machine". Lucky you. > Why were those documents ever on an Internet-connected device? Because that's the whole purpose of 0bin.net. The fact it's a good practice or not has noth…

> A.K.A."It works on my machine". Lucky you.

It has worked flawlessly on multiple PCs, multiple operating systems, multiple email clients. It's my primary way of using Gmail and Gcal, through Evolution on Linux Mint.

It even worked perfectly on my ancient Sony-Ericsson feature phone's terrible built-in email client, back when I still used that hunk of shit.

There are no "obscure values" to change, just a completely ordinary settings page with a toggle, and a link to the URLs and ports you need to use.

> So your argument is that I made bad decisions so I should not criticism Google's behavior ? That's a weird stance.

My argument is that you were blinded by the allure of free email with ~unlimited storage, and forgot to take into account that 1) there is no such thing as a free lunch, and 2) Google is an advertising company, first and foremost.

You knew what you were getting into, being a privacy and security minded person. If you decided to forego your principles to get a fancy @gmail.com address, that's your own mistake.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#110

Post by fjsolwmv »

mahranch wrote: post #5
whiteandnerdy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I _guess_ he means that siloing email provision to a few large providers means that its harder to run your own email server without being flagged as spam.

Does he not remember how much spam we received before those sorts of upgrades? Email spam in the late 90s and early 2000s was insane. And every grandmother who plugged in their PC at the time got hit by it. "I ordered v1gr4 cheap from this business, why hasn't it shown up 4 months later?!" Sure, I guess it's harder to run your own email server, but the trade-off was virtually zero spam making its way to my inbox. I t…

I want all the solutions Google provides and none of the drawbacks. If Google can't do that, they are obviously incompetent and worthless.
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