commandar
@commandar@lemmy.world
- Comment on Google Search Ranks AI Spam Above Original Reporting in News Results 8 hours ago:
As somebody that’s a paying Kagi used and generally happy with the service, it is interesting seeing exactly where the tradeoffs are.
While I’d say Kagi pretty much universally returns better results for technical information or things like recipes where it deprioritizes search spam, it’s also pretty clear that there are other areas where the absence of targeting hurts results. Any type of localized results, e.g., searching for nearby restaurants or other businesses tends to be really hit or miss and I tend to fall back to Google there.
Of course, that’s because Kagi is avoiding targeting to the point where they don’t even use your general location to prioritize results. It’s an interesting balancing act and I’m not quite sure they’ve hit the sweet spot yet, at least for me personally, but I like the overall mission and the results for most searches so I’m happy with the overall experience currently.
- Comment on Google Search Ranks AI Spam Above Original Reporting in News Results 8 hours ago:
Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you’re looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising.
And we have evidence that this is exactly why it happened, too:
www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
While I’d highly recommend giving either the article a read or the companion podcast a listen because Ed Zitron did some fantastic reporting on this, the tl;dr is that a couple of years ago, there was direct conflict between the search and advertising wings of Google over search query metrics.
The advertising teams wanted the metrics to go up. The search team rightly understood that there were plenty of ways they could do so, but that it would make for a worse user experience. The advertising team won.
The head of the advertising team during this was a man named Prabhakar Raghavan. Roughly a year later, he became the head of Google Search. And the timing of all this lines up with when people started noting Google just getting worse and worse to actually use.
Oh, and the icing on the cake? Raghavan’s previous job? Head of Yahoo Search just before that business cratered to the point that Yahoo decided to just become a bing frontend.
Zitron is fond of saying that these people have names and it’s important that we know who’s making the decisions that are actively making the world of tech worse for everyone; I tend to agree.
- Comment on Everything old is new again. 1 week ago:
that’s definitely going on for at least 5 years
Keyword: relatively.
Uber’s been around 15 years.
- Comment on Everything old is new again. 1 week ago:
unless you see the uber car circling around you on the map, then canceling the ride and cashing in the “cancelation fee”
That’s a relatively new phenomenon as people have learned how to game the system. The reliability of Uber when they first launched was complete night and day.
yes, uber was faster to adapt it than traditional taxi industry, but they are not doing it for your blue eyes, they are doing it for profit and they do lot of shady stuff to achieve it.
I never said otherwise. I was merely providing an example of why Uber gained adoption early on. The service was materially better than what taxi companies were delivering at the time in many places. I experienced that first hand.
- Comment on Everything old is new again. 1 week ago:
Tracking, arrival timer and an easy app.
The fact that they would actually show up.
Before Uber, you needed to call the cab company at least an hour before you wanted to get anywhere (in a city where you can get anywhere in 15 minutes). The dispatcher would tell you someone will be there in 20 minutes and, if you were lucky, somebody might show up in 45. Before Uber, there was more than one occasion where I ended up stranded downtown until 4 or 5am after the bars had closed at 3:00.
Being able to request a ride, having someone reliably show up, and show up reasonably close to when they said they would was an absolute game changer at the time.
- Comment on Sequel to Star Control 2 - The Ur-Quan Masters 1 month ago:
Free Stars is being made by the original creators of the series, Paul Reiche and Fred Ford. They had nothing to do with the SC3 or Origins.
The reason why it’s not using the Star Control name is because the IP ownership around the whole thing is messy. The short version is that the original creators owned the rights to the universe, but Atari owned the rights to the Star Control name.
When Atari went bankrupt, Stardock bought the name. They thought they’d bough the universe. This resulted in Stardock spending the next couple of years trying trying to use the courts to bully Paul and Fred into turning over the rights to them and generally being dickheads.
This finally ended in a settlement and worm on Free Stars has been happening quietly for the last couple of years.
- Comment on Kingdom Come: Deliverance II Official Announce Trailer 2 months ago:
It’s a shame that the game systems are so polarizing because it legitimately has some of the best written characters I’ve seen in any game ever.
- Comment on Microsoft reveals costs of Windows 10 end of life security update — and it might be more than you'd expect 2 months ago:
It is. And the price of ESUs goes up each each that a product is EOL.
- Comment on Need help understanding how to get around port-forwarding with tailscale 4 months ago:
You can also just spend $10 on a domain name with a registrar that offers dynamic DNS. Offhand, both Namecheap and Cloudflare do. I have no idea what my public IP address is because my router just updates it automatically for me. Plenty of DDNS desktop clients around if your router can’t for whatever reason.
- Comment on Voron 2.4R2 vs. Trident 4 months ago:
One thing this overlooks is that the rigid mounted bed of the V2 causes thermal expansion issues. There’s a lot of really bad lore that gets repeated in the community re: bed heater power because the V2 tends to want to taco the bed if it’s heated too quickly.
The WhoppingOrchard kinematic mounts are a solid option for addressing the issue.
- Comment on Voron 2.4R2 vs. Trident 4 months ago:
The Trident is the overall better design with a higher performance ceiling.
Flying gantries are a solution forever in search of a problem. They can work okay and they’re fine at the speeds that were common when the V2 was first designed, but there’s a reason why the community has converged on fixed gantry designs. They’re neat to watch operate but they don’t offer any practical advantage. The V2 tends to be relatively slow by modern standards, especially in terms of accel.
The Trident isn’t without flaws but it’s a perfectly fine starting point and the huge community does mean that most of the bigger design issues either already have a usermod or somebody working on cooking something up.
- Comment on Elon Musk demands another huge payday from Tesla 5 months ago:
The PT Cruiser was more or less a Dodge Neon with a funny looking body shell on top, meaning engineering cost to bring it to market was pretty minimal.
The Cybertruck is… pretty much the opposite of that. Tesla has spent literally years trying to get the thing to market meaning it’s failure will be far more painful than PT Cruiser sales tapering off was for Chrysler.
- Comment on I'm sorry, but it is true 7 months ago:
I feel the same about frozen lasagna. Either my wife, myself or both of us can spend hours in the kitchen making a good lasagna recipe and it doesn’t taste much better than a store bought frozen one that didn’t take any work.
Speak for yourself on that one. I can do a home made lasagna that’s far better than anything that’s available mass produced and frozen.
But I’m still gonna bake a Stouffer’s most of the time because it’s way less work.
- Comment on Philips Hue will force users to upload their data to Hue cloud 9 months ago:
The HA SkyConnect does Zigbee and will eventually add Matter support. Z-wave needs a separate dongle, though.
I’ve literally been in the process of migrating all my Home Automation from SmartThings to HA over the past couple of weeks. I have a mix of Zigbee, Z-wave, and WiFi devices. The HA side has honestly been easier to set up than SmartThings was in the first place.
I’ve also been working on getting some cameras set up with Frigate and Coral object recognition. That part has been more involved, but I’m pretty happy with the functionality so far.
I’ve definitely been happy with my decision years ago to stick to devices using standard local protocols. Has made the whole process far less painful than it could have been.
Funny enough, one of the few things I have that uses a proprietary hub/app are my Hue bulbs – they were my first dip into home automation a decade ago. I haven’t ditched the Hue hub quite yet, but moves like this definitely make me more inclined to.
- Comment on The Batshit Crazy Story Of The Day Elon Musk Decided To Personally Rip Servers Out Of A Sacramento Data Center 9 months ago:
Elon nearly took out both himself and Peter Thiel by rolling his McClaren F1 trying to show off during the PayPal days.
What could have been.