As with most of their good products
This isn’t just personal sites. Large blogs (Gawker), whole news sites (Vice), and other content no longer exist, because cynical corporate parasites bought them out. Newspapers that exist from before the internet era are arguably better archived on microfilm, Google Books etc, than today’s news. The Internet Archive and other sites exist, but they are nonprofit and can’t keep up with the sheer scale of content being pulled down. Also strongly disagree with your assertion that some sites don’t need to be saved. The whole point of archiving is that we often can’t judge what is important to future generations
Gemini soon to be rebranded Allo Assistant All Access Chat
yes, I find Gemini actually not bad when it comes to my specific use case of showing generic examples for R programming, so I can figure out the syntax for my actual code. I don’t try to have it generate actual code for me because my topic of marine biogeochemistry is far too specific for it to have any idea how to work with it. Unlike ChatGPT, which often makes up nonsense functions or hallucinates whole packages, Gemini seems to do ok. I also found it pretty good for generating images of natural subjects. It did the best job of generating a pic of a giant clam of any image generator I’ve tried. I would never trust factual information from Gemini. So like Google+, it’s a pretty good product that in no way should be shunted into search results, Google Docs and other places where its output is not relevant, yet that is exactly the trap Google is falling into again.
Madam Harkonnen
I used to like Shaq, but he’s been involved in promoting a lot of seriously sketchy stuff. He will put his name on literally anything if they pay him enough. Few celebrities put their name on more stupid scummy crypto bullshit. He lost my respect with that. I bet he had a financial relationship with Univ of Phoenix
The Pebble UI was also just plain fun while also being so functional. I loved the timeline concept.
That’s the rationale Google uses. “We’re the best, that’s why users pick us.” They built a moat of investment in search and the browser that other companies can’t compete with. But as a consumer, I am not willing to accept that argument. Ma Bell claimed the same thing. We’re a lot better off economically in a world where Ma Bell was broken up, and Microsoft was forced to stop their anticompetitive activities. Google will be better off as separate companies, worth more than the sum of its parts
I recently read The Parable of the Sower and it really affected me, both because I felt empathy for the characters and because I saw some uncomfortable parallels in the recent history of our world. I also was disturbed by The Sparrow. Though frankly I wouldn’t recommend it for a lot of reasons. Battle Royale is intensely violent, in a really personal way. For graphic novels, From Hell is a really rough read honestly, but also really interesting
If there were multiple sources of traffic, the pressure to optimize to one source would be lower, and the disruption caused by algorithm changes would be muted. Which would mean more interesting content less driven by a narrow set of metrics
It’s an example of why monopolies are harmful. They create distorted economies that don’t serve consumers. Like ecosystems overcome by a monoculture, monopolies are inherently less resilient, less functional and prone to sudden disruption.
The tree was not complicit in that
I normally don’t post about my blog here, but I literally posted this today so…https://dantheclamman.blog/2024/04/24/environmentally-youve-got-to-hand-it-to-sauron/
Apparently it can. I think I tried it once when they had a promotion but hard to remember.
I believe PayPal can do it IIRC?
The first time I did it, it was a shitshow. Then I started over and it worked fantastically. YMMV
There are a lot of aspects of the world that are wonderful, can’t yet be explained, and maybe don’t even need explanation to be worshiped and enjoyed. Religion is just a means to make sense of these parts of our cosmos (I myself am a complete atheist, but have friends whose lives have been definitely enriched by finding religion). The problems arise when manipulative people codify these beliefs into regimented systems of control. That creates an incentive to coerce others to follow the same beliefs. That in turn leads to religions beginning to be shaped by a kind of memetic survival of the fittest. Some religions try to short-cut the hard work of having actually good ideas that improve people’s lives, by instead coercing people into beliefs that maximize birth rate and reduce individual thought.
Reminds me of the chants in the game Control https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOI-uY7m-Og
I don’t know about hardware, but they marketed that you’d be able to interact with an AI that would use your apps for you, via what they called a Large Action Model. None of those apps currently work, because they all are likely getting defeated up front by Captchas and other roadblocks companies put up to stop automated usage of their services.