181–190 of 229 posts
Google killed itself with the switch from good ol' finely tuned PageRank to blackbox neural networks with messy loss functions. It's still light years ahead of the competition
> It's still light years ahead of the competition How do you figure? I never use Google and get through my searches just fine. What am I missing?
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I unironically do that. Maybe I should publish? We could make a small project that just has interesting websites and reviews? Yelp for the interesting web?
I think some aggregators, like Jason Kottke, post lots of interesting things, but not usually the weird, unpolished, personal stuff that I associate with the 90s web. Something like early Yahoo would be cool.
Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? The Web used to be very information dense. It was built from the ground up by specialists and enthusiasts, educational and governmental institutions, and groups of like-minded individuals. Then it became commercialized and commodified. Entire industries popped up to shovel mass-produced crap to masses of people through Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. Forums became s…
I miss the non-commercial web of old. It's got into the point where I think my ultimate search engine is one that ranks pages by fewest ads. And I get that people make a living by putting advertising on their pages. I'm not really against that. (Though I don't do that myself for my own reasons, I wouldn't presume to tell other people what to do with their websites.) But it's been abused to the point where number of a…
> we count the number of uBlock Origin blocked requests on the page, and if too many, we kick it out, leaving only "clean" pages in the index.
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I miss the non-commercial web of old. It's got into the point where I think my ultimate search engine is one that ranks pages by fewest ads. And I get that people make a living by putting advertising on their pages. I'm not really against that. (Though I don't do that myself for my own reasons, I wouldn't presume to tell other people what to do with their websites.) But it's been abused to the point where number of a…
Teclis has a neat approach to this: > we count the number of uBlock Origin blocked requests on the page, and if too many, we kick it out, leaving only "clean" pages in the index.
My blog uses a 3rd party comment system that does it's own tracking, I'm sure.
This makes me want to ditch that to keep it clean.
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Time to get back to curated lists of interesting websites.
www.readsomethinginteresting.com / www.thinking-about-things.com are both pretty good aggregators.
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So, don’t worry, it all work out? Vast wealth being sucked up by a few people while huge swaths of society have little to no ability to handle a $1000 financial hit? Passing the big ball of wealth between a few select people and families over history is acceptable? The fallacy is in thinking that society will always be benevolent and never needs to be corrected or reconsidered.
This way of looking at things assumes that wealth is a finite resource, and that by some people having a lot it is depriving others. Wealth doesn't work like that, though. It's not a zero sum game. Wealth is infinite, and can be created from nothing by providing a good or service that people need. I had a friend who was a multimillionaire, got there by building stone walls. Another friend who's an immigrant, worth ov…
Your friend did not make that much money building stone walls. Your friend made that money acting as a middleman hiring teams of low paid workers (likely undocumented migrants) to build the stone walls while he received a handsome cut for little effort.
> Another friend who's an immigrant, worth over ten million, got there by making custom iron and steel windows and doors.
Not sure why you mention them being an immigrant. Are immigrants less capable than non-immigrants? Anyway, same rule applies. Your friend did not do this work; they hired people (most likely undocumented immigrants) and paid them under the table. They simply act as a middleman too, extracting the vast majority of the wealth while paying peanuts to the workers.
I bet both of your friends got government loans to go to college and took advantage of the free government CARE loans and possibly even received huge tax breaks for his/her business; virtually all of this government money is unavailable to his workers.
Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? The Web used to be very information dense. It was built from the ground up by specialists and enthusiasts, educational and governmental institutions, and groups of like-minded individuals. Then it became commercialized and commodified. Entire industries popped up to shovel mass-produced crap to masses of people through Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. Forums became s…
That still goes on, but the gold seems harder to find, the signal to noise ratio lower. Might be just nostalgia.