191–200 of 239 posts
Sort of AI content browser built as a client, running locally. Adjusted to you. With as much or as little manual tweaking as you wish.
The article mentions "correcting" searches as an instance of this. I find that particularly infuriating on Amazon. I often search for a specific thing, let's say, "CRI 95 LED light bulb", and it'll return thing that it determines are close enough. In this case, a CRI 96 or CRI 98 bulb would be fine, but it determines that because a CRI 80 bulb also has the same word in it, that it's close enough. (For context, the "c…
Amazon search is so bad it borders on completely useless. I've actually had an easier time using other search engines pointed at Amazon.
I sometimes just switch to DuckDuckGo to search Amazon, because it doesn't treat my search keywords as mere suggestions. What I really need to do is fully kick the Amazon habit.
Google search is becoming increasingly annoying. It randomly starts mixing results in local language. Worse they detect my location incorrectly and start showing results in languages that I can't even read.
The “best” part: when Google Maps auto-translates German business names into English, making it especially useless for a non-fluent German speaker to find them while driving. For example, a fabric shop named “Stoffe Bauer” was rendered as “Fabric farmer” (Bauer is a very common German family name, and literally means “farmer”). Flip side: when sites force me onto the German homepage because there’s not a German trans…
I reject the framing. The problem isn’t the lack of personalizabilty(?) or customizability. The problem is that we’ve collectively allowed providers of content to warp the www into a state where they have the ability to control our experience. Consider what the web would look like if instead of html and JavaScript, it only consisted of a content description language devoid of any ability to control layout, fonts, col…
That sounds a bit like Gemini.
It genuinely strives to do essential what the top-level comment describes. It presents content in a very raw form. All styling and presentation details are left up to the client applications. Gemini users are a small, but passionate, little corner of the internet.
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All I see on the Marginalia Plato article is a site that forces an uncomfortably narrow article width on me, while eschewing almost all the advantages of hypertext in the name of some ill-conceived notion of "quieter reading". I'm not saying it's all bad, though - it's something that could be an option offered to the unfortunate people with attention deficit disorder. The forced text width, however, is inexcusable.
Yeah I think that's probably from my own habit of never using full screen windows. Though I'm not sure how to deal with the fact that it's very hard to read long lines of text. Most printed books, newspapers, and so forth use that width (max 60ch) specifically because it's hard to follow lines longer than that. I chose to follow book guidelines specifically because that format has been largely stable for some thousan…
I reject the framing. The problem isn’t the lack of personalizabilty(?) or customizability. The problem is that we’ve collectively allowed providers of content to warp the www into a state where they have the ability to control our experience. Consider what the web would look like if instead of html and JavaScript, it only consisted of a content description language devoid of any ability to control layout, fonts, col…
Right on! Imagine if the web served up content and I could write my own processors for it to lay it out however I want...man, that'd be great. But the Web became about branding the moment they introduced images and font choices. I remember designing a website for my local skate rink in 1997 that had a left navbar with buttons I did in photoshop and cut-n-paste javascript to add a lens flare when you moused-over them.…
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A few months ago I had a discussion here with someone regarding good/bad design, what was personal preference and what could be considered objective judgment. They mentioned something about a design philosophy in which there should never be more than one button, or if there were two then one should be the main button that people really should click on. It seems there is an effort to raise a whole school of new design…
I think there's a middle ground. Providing clear options and deliberate choices can be done through not having a thousand options and buttons. Wikipedia is a clear example of not taking this into consideration. There's a hundred links mixed with the text, and buttons and doodads everywhere around it, which makes it very clear to actually think about what you want to do. If you compare Encarta '96 with Wikipedia: http…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato
It is still consumption-oriented and stripped down, but retains far more non-textual information than your experiment.
Instead of asking me what I want, they decide what I want. I'm not sure if authoritarianism is the right name for this trend, but I think it's also related to companies no longer wanting users to think of themselves as owning the products they bought, and the shift to subscription-based services. They want to turn users into dumb, docile, obedient cows to be milked for $$$, and what better than to start them down tha…
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It is also done in part to hide just how thin most catalogs are. Notice how Netflix does not allow hiding any of their offerings. Imagine you had the ability to never see particular movies / shows / genres / movies you'd seen paraded before you again — when you cut out all the junk and things you'd never watch, you see the 10 choices left you might, depending on how bored you are, actually watch. Once you're there, y…
I would love to see all my statistics. Netflix know what I watch, how long, what time of day etc. These are statistics about me, so I should have full access to it. Preferably with additional option to get JSON, so I could parse them as I want.