Earlier quoted context omitted.
the othering of creators because they use a different paintbrush was bothering me.
please go other yourself somewhere else
Hit a nerve, it seems. Apologies.
The man who killed Google Search?
791–800 of 939 posts
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#792Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is likely. They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to watch a video I just watched today or yesterday, among other absurdities.
For what it's worth, I do not remember a time when YouTube's suggestions or search results were good. Absurdities like that happened 10 and 15 years ago as well. These days my biggest gripe is that they put unrelated ragebait or clickbait videos in search results that I very clearly did not search for - often about American politics.
YouTube seems to treat popular videos as their own interest category and it’s very aggressive about recommending them if you show any interest at all. If you watch even one or two popular videos (like in the millions of views), suddenly the quality of the recommendations drops off a cliff, since it is suggesting things that aren’t relevant to your interest categories, it’s just suggesting popular things.
If I entirely avoid watching any popular videos, the recommendations are quite good and don’t seem to include anything like what you are seeing. If I don’t entirely avoid them, then I do get what you are seeing (among other nonsense).
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#793Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies this size die several years before the body hits the floor. They're dead when everyone starts to hate them and someone says "no, look how much money they're making, they're fine." That's the fatal blow, because they think they're fine, and keep doing the things that make everyone hate them. At that point you're just waiting for someone else to offer an alternative. Then people prefer the alternative because…
That sounds a lot like Kodak. I remember running into Kodak engineers, at an event in the 1990s, and they were all complaining about the same thing. They were digital engineers, and they were complaining that film people kept sabotaging their projects. Kodak invented the digital camera. They should have ruled the roost (at least, until the iPhone came out). Instead, they imploded, almost overnight. The film part was…
One of the problems was just how profitable film was. No amount of digital camera sales is going to be as profitable as being able to charge people $2 per photo (film+development).
Fujifilm survived by diversifying more into a chemical company than a consumer product company (whereas Kodak sold off those portions of the company as "not being core to consumer imaging" and focused on printers(??))
And yet even Fuji are now back to having traditional film photography being their single largest revenue generator (their instax instant film is now so popular it is chronically sold out and they are doubling factory capacity to keep up)
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#794Earlier 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…
Call me back when you have voice recognition that doesn't constantly fail spectacularly.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#795Great article. But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years. In a previous avatar, Raghavan was a pure theoretical computer scientist. As a student, he won the best student paper in FOCS, the Machtey award, wh…
That is so weird. For an article that appears to be based on extensive research, it’s hard to understand how the author missed that.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#796Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author called Sundar a McKinsey consultant, not Raghavan. >A quick note: I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean-counting, morally-unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy. It also seems like a stretch to say that Yahoo's former "Chief Strategy Officer" had no in…
He called Raghavan a "management consultant", whilst acknowledging that he never was a management consultant. It's slinging pejorative nonsense labels.
Yeah. The author lost me when I reached the section labeled “Heroes and Villains.” As if I was reading a comic book.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#797Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Call me back when you have voice recognition that doesn't constantly fail spectacularly.
Voice recognition will never be rule based.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#798Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed - I can appreciate the sentiment and the history, but the ad hominem is not really necessary to prove the point and undermines the credibility of the post. I still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to what I want.
Calling someone a name is only an ad hominem fallacy if you try to use it as an argument. Here it's just used for style. Since the author has plenty of valid arguments, the name calling - which is not an argument - can be dismissed without weakening the actual argument. In any case, it is not sound reasoning to reject the entirety of an argument just because one of the subclaims is not a valid argument. Doing so is t…
> In this case, it's true that name calling weakens the credibility of the post for a general audience. But I contend that we might not need need to care. It only weakens the credibility of the post for members of the audience who make the fallacy fallacy, and refuse to evaluate the other claims on their own merits.
Strong disagree. The intentional usage of fallacious reasoning or histrionic name-calling weakens the credibility of the author, not of the post.
Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#799Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at leas…
> There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers. There's a lot of ML hate here, and I simply don't see the alternative. To rank documents, you need to score them. Google uses hundreds of scoring factor…
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Re: The man who killed Google Search?
#800Great article. But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years. In a previous avatar, Raghavan was a pure theoretical computer scientist. As a student, he won the best student paper in FOCS, the Machtey award, wh…
That is so weird. For an article that appears to be based on extensive research, it’s hard to understand how the author missed that.
must not have turned up in his google results