581–590 of 740 posts
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> At this point, we have to be actively be against free services. Nah, GCC is free, Linux is free, Debian is free. What we need to be against is free stuff provided by for-profit entities , because the love of money is the root of all evil.
Much of Linux is provided by for-profit entities.
Remember that Goole is not a public service. It is a business. It has two (or more) customers with different needs. For now, google needs to satisfy us (the users), but not delight.
I'll be honest.... I'm puzzled why OP did a web-search (i.e. used a business to find) 'midjourny' rather than simply entering the known URL. How times change.
Is it midjourney.ai or midjourney.com?
Is my health plan oscar.com or oscarhealth.com?
Repeat ad infinitum.
I have better things to spend my brain power on remembering. Fortunately, my browser will autocomplete the URLs for sites I frequently use, but a lot of sites I want to visit for the first time.
Its sad but I think at this point its kind of a safety issue not to use an ad blocker. Those results are not clearly ads and I've clicked on fake links in the past when they were.
One of my "sales pitches" is "I can find answers online, I know kung-fu". I've been using internet since '98, and I somehow developed this elusive skill of knowing how to navigate all these ads, seo farms, paid content, murky websites, and getting straight to the answer, no matter what the question was. For a long time I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speak…
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I agree about DDG, but I find Kagi worth paying for.
I have been using Kagi for about a month now. Haven't had any desire during that time to go back to Google. Solid search engine!
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Maybe B corporations?
Outside of the tech world, Unilever is one of the worst mega-companies in basically everything they do. Yet, their ANZ branch is certified since 2022: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/company/uni... B Corp enshitified itself, trying to get bigger, instead of staying true to its (supposed) mission
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unilever#Trade_in_Russia_amid_...
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> Does Apple do that on the App Store? Yes they do. Their search already sucks in normal circumstances—I remember searching for “Pinboard” (the bookmarking service) and had to scroll by thirteen pin ball (the game) apps before starting to see Pinboard apps—but you can type in the exact name of the app you want had have an ad for a competitor above it. Not only is it allowed, it’s encouraged.
They seem to have fixed that, at least for me all the top results are Pinboard clients or other products with Pinboard in the name. With the ads it really feels like Apple is playing all sides, they almost always show the competitor first. When you search the competitor it's a different competitor at the top. You can keep going until you terminate at some app that presumably pays top dollar to appear as an ad for the…
That's why Apple is now doing everything in their power to make app development easier, but that will more likely increase quantity and not necessarily quality, as it only deepens the ecosystem's problems by inviting more noise. The practical reality is, if you are not VC-backed and if you are not playing the heavy ad spend game, the App Store is more of a barrier than anything else.
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The Mac App Store is such a wasteland. I don't know why Apple doesn't provide it a budget and some real human curation. The average person searching for Microsoft Word, which is on the App Store, gets screens of templates and junky overpriced apps.
I don't know if curation is really the problem. Nearly every other platform has a search that when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page or parody that happens to have those words in the title/keywords. I think they just (A) have no idea what they're doing when it comes to search and (B) the scamware that fills all their App Stor…
Don't give them ideas
They do the same thing on the Play Store, for example I just searched for Firefox and the first result is a sponsored spot for Opera. Does Apple do that on the App Store? A funnier example: searching for Amazon gives Temu as the first result. Searching for Temu gives Shein as the first result. Searching for Shein gives Shein as the first result! ...but only because they outbid everyone else for the ad spot on their o…
Learned that App Store does this too during a recent MFA rollout. What really surprised me was that when instructed to install Google Authenticator, a significant portion of people (I'd estimate close to 50%) would search the exact name and then proceed to reach to install the sponsored top result with a completely different name until I stopped them.
There also has been a drastic change in YouTube search in the past year. It used to be that search would be logical, you search for a specific string and you can go through pages of videos that matchup to that. Now it at least feels like they have completely mixed that original search with a some sort of ranked preference of what they think I want to see. It’s a shame and an actual huge downgrade.