• 0 Posts
  • 970 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle



  • If Biden had been up there saying that about a political opponent … it would make headlines all over the world.

    It’s like the “only Democrats have agency” thing.

    When Democrats fuck up we’re like wow they really screwed up, look at these bad choices, they’re fucked up.

    When Republicans fuck up we’re just like well yeah that’s what they do. You don’t get mad at the sun for setting or a fire burning. Sometimes we act like they’re just immutable forces of nature instead of human jerks.

    We don’t really hold Republicans to any standards.


  • MacOS by default hides scroll bars. They’re big on form over function which I hate.

    Some people are just like that.

    I knew a couple that mounted their TV in a way that all the ports (eg: HDMI) were inaccessible. They just didn’t care that a big chunk of the TV’s functionality was now blocked. They didn’t want to see wires.


  • A lot of people making decisions are idiots, or are following the whims of idiots above them.

    Back in like 2017 a company I worked for made a mouse tunnel on their web UI. That’s where like you mouse over a menu, and that opens a sub menu. You mouse into that sub menu, and another menu opens. If at any point your mouse leaves this area, the whole thing closes. It’s shit. It’s been a known bad pattern since like the 90s.

    Product guy wouldn’t listen. Not sure if he didn’t care or didn’t understand. Either is bad.

    This happens all over. People don’t care. They don’t understand. They don’t listen to people that do. They have their own metrics and goals that are disjoint from actual value.


  • When people do try protests that are disruptive, people complain about it.

    i think protests should be focused on stopping the machinery that’s grinding us all up. But if your protest means traffic or a closed Walmart then all the short sighted idiots and all the people barely holding on get mad.

    I don’t think people are smart enough to deal with this world we have created.



  • There are credible allegations that the AI companies are not merely scraping publicly available resources, but are also consuming content in violation of the terms of use / copyright law. Like, a site has a robots.txt file that says “no scrapers” and they scrape it anyway. People would be mad about traditional search doing that as well.

    Secondly, if a search service scrapes your site and then directs relevant users to it, that’s probably fine. Most websites want users to visit. A lot of AI stuff sucks up the content, and then the creators of that content get nothing. No users are sent there. The scraper hitting the site takes resources, and gives nothing back.

    Google has also gotten some flak for putting stuff on their own site instead of sending users to the source. Like you do a search and get a snippet on the google page, and you never click through to example.com/cool-stuff. Well, now the owner of example.com/cool-stuff doesn’t get the click. If they run ads, they get no credit. If they have metrics, they probably don’t see any visitors. If they have like forums, people are less likely to engage.

    If the “AI Search” includes links back to the source, that’s not perfect either. One, it’s kind of excessive to use an LLM to parse text when the origin site is already there and readable. If I search for “population of london”, you can just send me to a census website or even wikipedia. You don’t need to use a whole ass LLM. Two, as I touched on in the previous paragraph, users are less likely to click through if google is putting the core of the information right there (even if it’s not always accurate). It’s still lessening traffic to the origin site, and traffic is often the lifeblood of websites.

    Lastly, a lot of AI stuff is simply inaccurate or misleading. We’ve all laughed at the “use glue on your pizza” stuff or the “there are two Rs in ‘strawberry’” fuckups. If traditional search was really bad, like you type in “cat food” and you got a webpage that was all jewelry and “buy gold” scams, you’d be annoyed, too. That’s more like how search was before old google came about. There were a lot more low effort “SEO” hacks like putting a bunch of keywords in tiny print to fool the search indexer. Now google is the shitty old guard, but they have too much money and power to be easily replaced.

    That’s just off the top of my head. Scraping for AI isn’t the same as scraping to make a searchable index.









  • It was a good game. Not perfect, but very good.

    Even the things I don’t like are pretty minor.

    • upgrading weapons is kind of tedious. Once you know where the stones are or the bearings, it’s kind of a chore to get them.
    • related: once you know where some high value items are, it’s really tempting to just beeline for them from the start. But that’s kind of tedious. I guess I could just pretend I don’t know where the +5 stats talisman is.
    • a lot of side content isn’t especially rewarding. The first time you play it’s exciting because you don’t know what you’ll find. But later it’s like “nah, this catacomb has a useless ash and boss I’ll fight elsewhere”. Which is a shame because most of the level design is great.