MetaFilter

A bit late to the party but for anyone still reading and interested, there IS a working modern web directory service: Risen from the ashes of DMOZ, Curlie.org! I mentioned it in this Ask thread (which btw took me several G searches to find despite knowing several strings on the page and the domain).

Curlie is fun and interesting. I've found a bunch of cool stuff through them, almost like the early days of the web. It's better at finding good sites than a specific snippet... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by SaltySalticid at 6:26 AM on April 24, 2024

Back in the late 90s I had an idea for a fiction story about software engineers looking for The Next Big Thing in tech: a search engine that instead of giving you the results for the thing you wanted, gave you the results for the thing you didn't even know you wanted yet.

In a way, all this messing around with tracking personal data and AI is trying to do that, but only in the service of showing you ads you might possibly click on.
posted to MetaFilter by rikschell at 5:33 AM on April 24, 2024

My experiment with using Wikipedia as my search engine default is continuing. Its a little frustrating when I don't need something from Wikipedia and I need to remember to throw the request at a 'real' search engine, but it also throws up content & articles which are often tangentially relevant to my query so its still a net positive.
posted to MetaFilter by phigmov at 12:26 AM on April 24, 2024

The European disinformation payment scandal uncovered by Czechia continues. Allegedly over 500,000 Euro was paid out by Russian agents to a German politician, who complains in a recording that part of a 20,000 Euro cash bribe was delivered in notes which he can not use at gas stations or shops, since they don't accept €200 notes.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by UN at 9:38 PM on April 23, 2024

Every user doing their own web-spidering seems impractical, but interest groups setting up spidering for their particular topic would make sense.

Back in my day we called that a web ring.
posted to MetaFilter by cosmologinaut at 9:41 PM on April 23, 2024

I think what might possibly help is self-hosted search? People have been doing web search for decades now, and helpful packages like BeautifulSoup exist. Imagine having a spare desktop machine spidering the web based off of a list of links you provided while you sleep, so when you want to find information you'd have your own customize database to search through? Start with the list of all Metafilter posts, maybe.
So, uhhhhh.

I sort of did (and do) this due to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by verb at 8:54 PM on April 23, 2024

From the article:Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan chose to bulldoze actual workers and replace them with toadies that would make Google more profitable and less useful to the world at large. It wasn't until this sentence that it clicked for me that this Raghavan is that Raghavan. Tthe one from randomized rounding, the one from Motwani and Raghavan.

For non-Computer Science people, Raghavan was... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mhum at 7:32 PM on April 23, 2024

Nelson: There is something wrong with navigational queries, though! The problem is that Google will happily take malware companies' money to appear at the top of search results! Not for Amazon, sure—they know they don't want that hassle—but for smaller sites? They sure as hell will.
posted to MetaFilter by adrienneleigh at 5:59 PM on April 23, 2024

they type amazon.com into Google’s search field, and then click on the Amazon link Google returns

There's absolutely nothing wrong with people doing this. It's very very common, it's called "navigational queries" because the intent is simple navigation, not research. There's a small shortcut those folks could learn; just typing "amazon" will probably work, or maybe even "amaz". Google works very well at navigational... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Nelson at 5:49 PM on April 23, 2024

(I can confirm that I've seen metro ads that'll basically include the Yahoo search bar graphic with the name of the business they'll want you to get to, that gets a larger real estate than the actual url)
posted to MetaFilter by cendawanita at 5:12 PM on April 23, 2024

I know so many people who have Google set as their home page, and use the search field as the browser url field. That is to say, if they want to go to Amazon, they type amazon.com into Google’s search field, and then click on the Amazon link Google returns. And these are 30-40-somethings. Y’know, “digital natives.”

Unless things have changed in the last 5 years, replace Google with "yahoo" (yes even now), and that is... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cendawanita at 5:10 PM on April 23, 2024

The whole reason everyone appends “reddit” to google searches these days is because they’re just looking for that one spreadsheet, or its contextual equivalent. And because LLMs have a tendency to parrot humans put on the spot and our smokescreens of utter bullshit, even if you can’t distinguish human vs LLMs-authored listicles and “content,” you might be able to positively identify “trove of useful information.”

This is still a race humans can't win.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mightygodking at 4:59 PM on April 23, 2024

Yeah, marginalia.nu is turning up weird right-wing conspiracy shit for me as well, for just plain searches for things that are a bit prone to that. Searching for "jews" turns up a link to Khazar conspiracy theory. Another search for something fairly innocuous turned up links to Lyndon LaRouche stuff. Granted, I'm trying to search for stuff where I think conspiracy theories and far-right shit might turn up, but so far, I'm succeeding in making it serve that to me.
posted to MetaFilter by Joakim Ziegler at 4:49 PM on April 23, 2024

For both of those use cases, which are probably 95% of my searches

That kind of search is well under half of my use of search, likely under 25%. Yep, that kind of trivial thing is still well served, no matter what engine you use. The kind of thing I'm looking for when I'm designing is really, really broken and increasingly so. That tends to be material information, how other people have tackled similar problems, interpretation of technical... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by deadwax at 4:43 PM on April 23, 2024

Reading this gives me a strong feeling that I should divest as much of my personal data as possible from Google. It's something I haven't thought about since I experienced my first Google Funeral which was Buzz, where the group of friends I made in the comments sections of non-literature posts on Sparknotes moved to for very off-topic chats and threads.

If it can happen to Search...
posted to MetaFilter by shenkerism at 4:31 PM on April 23, 2024

For me, for the most part, searches fall into one of two categories: "I can't remember the specific URL for this entity that I know has a web presence"

I know so many people who have Google set as their home page, and use the search field as the browser url field. That is to say, if they want to go to Amazon, they type amazon.com into Google’s search field, and then click on the Amazon link Google returns. And these are... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Thorzdad at 3:35 PM on April 23, 2024

For non-Google/Bing/Yandex'd search results, search.marginalia.nu is pretty good

In the top 10 results for me was a page from white supremacist and Holocaust denier Ron Unz's blog - so their "[attempt] to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed" may have some ulterior motives attached.

same here, depressingly. Searched for a particular university,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by bigendian at 3:29 PM on April 23, 2024

so their "[attempt] to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed" may have some ulterior motives attached

Not a tremendous surprise that a (solo-developed?) site designed to boost sites that mainstream search engines would downrank would end up revealing that some things are downranked for a reason, is it? I don’t think an ulterior motive is required to explain this.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by atoxyl at 3:21 PM on April 23, 2024

... and

metafilter: {satisfied bubbling noises}
posted to MetaFilter by Artful Codger at 2:43 PM on April 23, 2024

I know Ben Gomes from my time at Google. The events Zitron relates are many years after I left. But I can say that Ben Gomes seemed like a good engineer and leader, just the kind of guy you want in charge of search quality. Honestly surprised he still worked there, it certainly wasn't for the paycheck.

Back in the early 2000s we regularly talked about how our ideal experience was to get users the information they were looking for as quickly as possible, to get them on... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Nelson at 2:39 PM on April 23, 2024

from the military Keynsianism

since war labor is just going to ends that are not wealth-accruing, economically Putin'd be better off just paying the war-workers the printed rubles to stay home, PPP-loan style.

Keynesian spending is (arguably) good to inject money into dying local economies to get them spinning again (aka 'pump-priming') to hook up suppressed wealth consumers to wealth suppliers with (otherwise) excess... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by torokunai at 9:07 PM on April 23, 2024

Two interlocking pieces on underreported aspects of this wretched war:

1) Coverage of the war is changing, but it too often misses the mark in communicating complexity (Postsocialism):
Even as we move well into the third year of war in Ukraine, the media sphere, dependent as it is on the economy of attention seeking, is still pretty narrowly focused. I can read millions of works a week penned about military technology, grand strategy, geopolitics or even... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kmt at 2:12 PM on April 23, 2024

Not that management isn't evil but there's nothing inherently ethically or morally pure about software development. It's some old school Silicon valley/Microserfs philosophy.

On the other hand, most programmers want to, at the least, produce something that works, rather than something that will work at least until they jump ship to their next golden perch... So maybe not heroes, but not the worst thing in the room.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 1:06 PM on April 23, 2024

For non-Google/Bing/Yandex'd search results, search.marginalia.nu is pretty good

In the top 10 results for me was a page from white supremacist and Holocaust denier Ron Unz's blog - so their "[attempt] to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed" may have some ulterior motives attached.
posted to MetaFilter by ryanshepard at 1:00 PM on April 23, 2024

no salad of woman born shall harm macbeth

This crouton was from its mother-loaf untimely rip'd!
posted to MetaFilter by nickmark at 11:27 AM on April 23, 2024

how else do bowls sit

Let's ask Troye Sivan!
posted to MetaFilter by mittens at 11:24 AM on April 23, 2024

no salad of woman born shall harm macbeth
posted to MetaFilter by i used to be someone else at 10:49 AM on April 23, 2024

It’s about principle, not pedantry.

The preservation of principle forever is pedantry; sic salad tyrannus.
posted to MetaFilter by grokus at 10:31 AM on April 23, 2024

This isn’t just a phenomenon of coastal fine dining. I took a slow road trip through rural eastern Oregon last year that started with a bizarre bacon-kale “Caesar” and then made a research project of ordering the Caesar at every restaurant we stopped at. Not one of the five contained anchovies. Most had cherry tomatoes. It was bizarre—these were steakhouses and diners in ranching towns with a thousand residents, not hubs of culinary innovation.
posted to MetaFilter by Just the one swan, actually at 8:01 AM on April 23, 2024

One of my favorite salads is served at a local restaurant, and I think it’s just called “Summer Salad.” They are clear that it’s not a recipe, it’s a method, and it will be different every day, depending on what they have. The dressing is mostly the same — creamy with a touch of acid, but the plate will have greens, something crunchy, something cooked, something pickled, and something fun (the latter is often edible flowers). When I order it, I always know what I’m getting but also always... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 7:28 AM on April 23, 2024

But… it isn’t. A Caesar Salad isn’t a method or a template; it’s a dish. You should not have to interrogate the waiter or parse a menu to know what you’re getting. If the only place you can get them is fusty Italian places and steak houses, that’s fine. You want to innovate, great; give it a new name, and the description can be “think Caesar, but with kale, poached duck eggs, no fish, and bagel bites instead of croutons.” It’s like if I order a dirty gin martini, I don’t expect to get something... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 7:13 AM on April 23, 2024

What muddgirl just said. MS Bing at work is completely useless and even actively harmful. If I believed some of the cruft it recently returned on a simple query about Oregon statutes, I'd be out of a job by now and deservedly so.
posted to MetaFilter by mygothlaundry at 12:45 PM on April 23, 2024

What's to stop Google or someone else from hooking up search directly to some LLM so that everything you click after a search is auto generated content made to look authentic and serve you ads?

Microsoft Bing basically does this now, at least on my work computer which has a corporate Microsoft account.
posted to MetaFilter by muddgirl at 12:42 PM on April 23, 2024

This is interesting but I have a problem with the framing of heroic software engineers against evil management/consultants. Not that management isn't evil but there's nothing inherently ethically or morally pure about software development. It's some old school Silicon valley/Microserfs philosophy.
posted to MetaFilter by muddgirl at 12:36 PM on April 23, 2024

My Apple ][ has suffered a couple of maladies in its long life: a failed power supply (probably a bad capacitor) and a bad DRAM chip.

Voyager 2 also suffered a failed capacitor, resulting in radio receiver degradation. And this recent memory failure involved a different technology (CMOS static RAM vs NMOS dynamic RAM) but not far removed from what was available commercially, except for a lot more radiation shielding.

The Voyagers don't have to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by credulous at 12:07 PM on April 23, 2024

So how much of the 61 billion will end up being stolen this time?

Well guess what? You can check
here

The funding for Ukraine is overseen by a giant number of experienced auditors. It has 10 times the oversight of US aid going to Israel, for example. So by all means go allay your fears and report back here on what you find.
posted to MetaFilter by nestor_makhno at 12:17 PM on April 23, 2024

The vacuum it leaves is going to be hard to fill.
There’s Bing, but it’s a) Bing and b) likely to disappear into AI and other bullshit while chasing money even worse than Google will.

There’s duckDuckGo, but that’s just dressed up Bing.

So the golden period of the entirety of the web being easily searchable is just going to disappear and who knows what comes after.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 12:04 PM on April 23, 2024

It was always conventional wisdom that Google could fuck up as many products and launches as they wanted and they'd still always be fine as long as they didn't fuck up search.

It's been fascinating to watch them fuck up search. Both the speed and breadth of the fuckup is astounding. Search went from "eh, this seems less good than it once was" to "barely useful" in the course of a few years. My primary use case for Google search now is indulging my... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by phooky at 11:58 AM on April 23, 2024

There's a certain craft and joy in understanding your hardware and software top to bottom. What a great piece of work.
posted to MetaFilter by JoeZydeco at 7:40 AM on April 23, 2024

Two people popping out of the woodwork to tell us that the most sensible, leftist/liberal, sane, progressive thingg would be for Ukraine to surrender to Russia in such close proximity is pretty damn weird and unusual given the tone of all the other talk about Putin's war of imperial aggression.

I wish I could say I found it unusual but this has a bad habit of happening pretty much any time this conversation comes up in generally left-of-center... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Method Man at 8:54 AM on April 23, 2024

Meanwhile forces from the "Center" group took half of Ocheretyne (Rob Lee on twitter, DeepStateMAP). Syrsky "disbanded" the 67th Mechanized Brigade (Pravy Sektor far-right radical volunteer unit) due to:
One of the factors revealed by the audit was issues within the brigade. The leadership allegedly separated the soldiers from the Right Sector and those who were transferred from other parts during the recent replenishment (they were referred to as... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kmt at 8:52 AM on April 23, 2024

All signs point to Ukrainian aid being better accounted for than any other military spending in the US. 8 million of the package is earmarked oversight. The Pentagon itself has never passed an audit, so that might not be a high bar to clear. But there is no evidence of any of the funds or weapons making their way onto the black market, in two years of people looking really hard for it.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Harald74 at 8:22 AM on April 23, 2024

I am going to take this opportunity to express a minor pet peeve of mine, the thoughtless hyperbole that is saying "no one" does, or is, something, when the fact is that relatively few people do/are it. In this case "no one" obscures the fact that millions of books are sold, just not by many authors.

It is true that it's rhetorically appropriate, and by saying this I don't mean anything against dis_integration. It... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:29 AM on April 23, 2024

I'm not sure why we should be depressed that few titles sell more than half a million books a year. That's a lot of books.

The numbers from Kristen McLean, quoted above, are very interesting, but as she points out, a) it's just US figures; b) it's just frontlist books, i.e. those published in the last year; c) it's just major publishers; d) it's just print books; e) it doesn't include direct sales from publishers or authors.

I've sold about 50,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by zompist at 1:54 AM on April 23, 2024

> Large portions of this article were debunked, a year ago, by Lincoln Michel.

Not really debunked. Michel notes that the claims are underspecified, so we don't really know what's the sample universe, which is true. Most of the claims in the OP article were made in a trial, so I would expect selective and massaged claims but not outright lying.

The Michel post does include a comment by an analyst at Bookscan which has concrete data. An... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by daksya at 1:20 AM on April 23, 2024

Large portions of this article were debunked, a year ago, by Lincoln Michel.
posted to MetaFilter by Happy Dave at 12:33 AM on April 23, 2024

I do wonder, though, how we get a 46-year-old spacecraft to keep working but any electronic device here on Earth is lucky to survive a 12-month warranty.

There's a 1979-vintage Apple II+ in my shed that's never been serviced* and still works.

*I know this for sure as I've owned it since new.
posted to MetaFilter by flabdablet at 12:54 AM on April 23, 2024

Ukraine capitulating is not a question of just swapping out the administration and getting a new currency and otherwise business as usual, as Russia pretty clearly has genocidal intentions. The case for genocide is stated almost daily on Russian state-sponsored media, this article being a good starting point. As a start Ukrainian language, customs, food and traditions are routinely mocked and they are called slurs, all basic dehumanising tactics, while the talking heads are constantly calling... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Harald74 at 1:35 AM on April 23, 2024

This is both fantastic and amazing news all at once. But I'm not all that surprised. I do wonder, though, how we get a 46-year-old spacecraft to keep working but any electronic device here on Earth is lucky to survive a 12-month warranty.

Programming a nearly 50 year old 64k computer that's outside the solar system with a lag time of almost a day. Simply amazing.
The lag is almost TWO days - 22.5 hours each way. Imagine pressing a key... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dg at 11:49 PM on April 22, 2024

Maybe the publishing model needs revision?

By paying authors less?

Some of it might be the Supreme Court ruling about the tax consequences of back inventory.

So previously, publishers could write down their back inventory that they didn't expect to sell well, and they could keep it around, and eventually it would sell - and they could price it down when they did. So you could buy relatively... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by corb at 10:44 PM on April 22, 2024