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The man who killed Google Search?

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731–740 of 939 posts

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who talks about class traitors, or almost any sort of traitor, outside of a real war, is deeply misguided on this point.

"class traitor" has a specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_traitor

Yes, I know.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#732
post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using English, instead of C, to get a computer to do something doesn't turn you into a beaurocrat any more than using Python or Javascript instead does. If one uses English in as precise a way as one crafts code, sure. Most people do not (cannot?) use English that precisely. There's little technical difference between using English and using code to create... ... but there is a huge difference on the other side of…

> Most people do not (cannot?) use English that precisely. No one can, which is why any place human interaction needs anything anywhere close to the determinancy of code, normal natural langauge is abandoned for domain-specific constructed languages built from pieces of natural language with meanings crafted especially for the particular domain as the interface language between the people (and often formalized domain…

I gotta say, I love how you use english to perfectly demonstrate how imprecise english is without pre-understood context to disambiguate meaning.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#733
post #649
post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... obviously SOAP was dumb[1], and lots of people saw that at the time. But SOAP was dumb in obvious ways, and it failed for obvious reasons, and really no one was surprised at all. ML isn't like that. It's new. It's different. It may not succeed in the ways we expect; it may even look dumb in hindsight. But it absolutely represents a genuinely new paradigm for computing and is worth studying and understanding on…

ML has already succeeded to the point that it is ubiquitous and taken for granted. OCR, voice recognition, spam filters, and many other now boring technologies are all based on ML. Anyone claiming it’s some sort of snake oil shouldn’t be taken seriously. Certainly the current hype around it has given rise to many inappropriate applications, but it’s a wildly successful and ubiquitous technology class that has no repl…

That ML I have no problem with.

This new ML that's supposed to be the basis for an entire new economic wave, that I mostly dislike.

But I guess that's how we build new things... We explore and throw away 80% of what we've built.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#734

I'm so sick of search systems ignoring or changing my search string. LinkedIn is especially bad for this. If I search for "OpenGL", many of the results don't contain the one word I searched for. Many of the results are "promoted" jobs from Microsoft that have nothing to do with graphics. On Apple’s job site, it will include OpenCL jobs in addition to OpenGL. It is probably more efficient for my time and sanity to cre…

I agree. Fuzzy searches are a bane of my existence. Like trying to search amazon for any specific detail about a product. All you get are basically the same promoted crap from a non-specific search. I just want my results.

I switched to using DuckDuckGo primarily, and it's now fuzzy by default. It returns lots of results that doesn't contain more than the most generic word in my query, and I always get this one hit for a completely unrelated site just because it has the name of my town in the headline.

Sure you can force it by using "foobar" but yeah, searching the web isn't what it used to be.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read some marx. There is a whole analysis and theory behind class traitorship, it's causes and effects. You can't be ignorant of something as fundamental as marxian theory in this context, and then act as if it's the author making the faux pas...

Sorry I think you've made a lot of this up. Where did I say I was ignorant of something, and where did I say anything about a faux pas?

Here is what you said:

"Anyone who talks about class traitors, or almost any sort of traitor, outside of a real war, is deeply misguided on this point."

This is where you appear to imply you're ignorant of class traitorship. If you truly knew what it was - which you claim elsewhere to know - then you would know it doesn't require a war. Class traitors are non-capitalists who collaborate with capitalists against workers. They can do that during peace.

Now forgive me if the following explanation is unnecessary:

When someone uses a term in a misguided way we can say they made a faux pas. When you claim the author is misguided for talking about class traitors outside of war, you're implying they have made a faux pas.

But the author is making no mistake. Class traitors exist in peace time as well, as I mentioned.

So if you know what a class traitor is, then admit the author is not misguided. If you can't make that admission, you have misunderstood the nature of class traitorship.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I think you've made a lot of this up. Where did I say I was ignorant of something, and where did I say anything about a faux pas?

Here is what you said: "Anyone who talks about class traitors, or almost any sort of traitor, outside of a real war, is deeply misguided on this point." This is where you appear to imply you're ignorant of class traitorship. If you truly knew what it was - which you claim elsewhere to know - then you would know it doesn't require a war. Class traitors are non-capitalists who collaborate with capitalists against worke…

> Class traitors are non-capitalists who collaborate with capitalists against workers. They can do that during peace.

I think this is deeply misguided.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any examples of this actually playing out with a company as established as Google? You can read comments like this on many companies... Microsoft (70B$ income), Meta (40B$), Oracle (8.5B$), IBM(7.5B$), SAP (6B$), yet none of them seem to ever actually enter the predicted death spiral. And the internet isn't new anymore. There is no vast landscape of unexplored new technological possibilities, and no garage start up w…

Microsoft and Meta reinvented themselves a few times over. At this point Windows is just an legacy business unit for instance, and Meta literally changed name to mark the turn. Oracle, IBM and SAP have the advantage(?) of being heavily business focused from the start, and I don't see them ever die a natural death in our lifetimes. As long as they have the money to outbribe the competition they'll be there, and it wil…

The point is, if Microsoft managed, why wouldn't Google be able to reinvent itself?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#738
post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a Steve Jobs fan, but one business-quote I do like: "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will." In other words, it could have been better for Kodak as a whole if they allowed their digital-arm to compete more with their film-arm, so that as the market shifted they'd at least be riding the wave rather than under it.

I'm also not a Steve Jobs fan, and this reminds me of how Flash died[1]. The Flash Renaissance was the counter-era to the search despair era we currently find ourselves in. In the same vein as Kodak, I wonder what the alternate timeline would look like where Adobe cannibalized native apps. [1] https://youtu.be/65crLKNQR0E?si=mXPgXxlMRxU-xjcu&t=2472

The mistake Adobe made was in canceling Flash instead of open sourcing it. Publish a spec and the let browsers implement the client side, then you can keep selling tools to make animations without everyone having to deal with the bug-riddled proprietary player Adobe clearly had no interest in properly maintaining to begin with.

It's kind of astonishing that all these years later we still don't have something equivalent in browsers. In theory they're Turing-complete and you can do whatever you want, but where's the thing that makes it that easy?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#739
post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not need to. Counting how many links are pointing to each document is sufficient if you know how long that link existed (spammers link creation time distribution is widely differnt to natural link creation times, and many other details that you can use to filter out spammers)

> You do not need to. Ranking means deciding which document (A or B) is better to return to the user when queried. Not writing a traditional forward-algorithm to rank these documents implies one of the following: - You write a "backward" algorithm (ML, regression, statistics, whatever you want to call it). - You don't use algorithms to solve it. An army of humans chooses the rankings in real time. - You don't rank do…

Statistical methods are debuggable. Is PageRank not debuggable? I am not sure where ML starts and statistics end.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any examples of this actually playing out with a company as established as Google? You can read comments like this on many companies... Microsoft (70B$ income), Meta (40B$), Oracle (8.5B$), IBM(7.5B$), SAP (6B$), yet none of them seem to ever actually enter the predicted death spiral. And the internet isn't new anymore. There is no vast landscape of unexplored new technological possibilities, and no garage start up w…

IBM used to be bigger than MS, it's a 10th of it today. But most importantly all the above listed companies with the exception of Meta are those that are heavily ingrained in large companies operations. IBM still provides mainframes, MS has Exchange and Windows domains and is successfully transitioning a lot of customers to Azure, Oracle has their databases and other products, SAP their ERP systems. Once a non-IT com…

In 2023 the revenues of Google Cloud, Youtube Ads and "Google Other" and Google Network Members Ads were 130B combined.

If they could reduce headcount and operating expenditures to 2019 levels without losing that, they would be roughly breaking even without any search. They also have 280B$ in equity to tide them over.

When Google actually sees its business failing, it will have many many many chances to turn things around.

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