It makes me sad because Google used to be great. The main feature that made Google great was the click rejection. Basically the search would know when you clicked on a link and didn’t come back to the search results. This action would add weight to that result as “this probably has the information that was being searched for” so it would be nearer to the top later when others made similar queries.
This was their killer feature, it basically crowd sourced the correct information. After a small amount of time, the correct results would kind of float to the top so subsequent searches would put those results near the top to help satisfy queries faster.
Now? They seem to want to give you results that satisfy their partners, and keep you tied to the results page as long as possible. The focus seems to have shifted from being a good search engine with accurate results, to a meme of how to make money.
Never before has this shift been more clear to me than right now, directly in the wake of I/O 2024; an event my friends have taken to calling AI/O. Pretty much every single presentation was about Gemini and AI generated garbage, but this isn’t what made Google’s new direction clear to me. In the last 20-30 minutes of the event it was made perfectly clear what they were doing with I/O. And to drive the point home, every I/O has showcased stuff you can’t use yet, stuff they’re working on, and other cool shit. Some of it cost money, but there was usually some stuff that was just done because it could be done and it would be made available at some point, a nontrivial amount of it was free. At AI/O, the entire focus was on AI, with little to no non-AI stuff in there, at all, then at the end, they kicked everyone in the shorts. Here’s our prices to access this shit. Buy it. As far as I’m concerned AI/O was a gigantic marketing circle jerk to sell their AI.
It seems that Google has entered the final phases of enshittification.
Saw an article that said that some execs demanded for search to have better user retention. I.e make the user search multiple times to find what they’re looking for, so they can be shown more ads.
Just in case you’re not just satirically listing things that are already awful;
Supermarkets increase their “retention” by limiting signage to keep you wandering and avoid “just get that thing and go” shopping. I don’t know how common this is, but when I was a kid the major supermarkets had long lists of what items were in each aisle, plus highly visible signs in the aisle to show exactly where each category was. Now days at the major chains those in aisle signs are completely gone, and the categories have been whittled down to a few major categories; most products aren’t represented on the sign at all e.g. you have to assume “cake mix/decorating” are in the same aisle as “flour”.
Unskippable ads on all pumps are absolutely a thing that are getting more popular. Mobil is particularly bad for it in my experience.
The square button second from the bottom mutes the audio. I’ve taken to carrying a marker in my car and writing “<— MUTE” next to them. Alternatively, a small screwdriver between the speaker grating.
It’s frustrating because it’s all done by people. Like if a volcano erupts you can’t really get mad at it. It’s just physics stuff. But all of this? People are making these choices. People made of meat and bone. Like, you could find the decision makers at Google who decided to shit up their product and kick them in the junk.
What if peoples relationships create a superstructure no single human can control, and we need active collective effort to supercede it?
If a single human refuses from a moral standpoint, a humongous amount of money to do something crap as CEO controller of whichever crap company, boards will replace them, and some other human will, because material condition dictate it has to be done. No one is really in control. The boards are all just optimising for profit, because if they’re not, someone else will.
How to break the capitalist cycle of control over peoples will?
Supermarkets already optimise many things, products with lower margins are at the bottom in aisles, and all the junk food or cheap liquor is next to the cashier.
Supermarkets maximizing profit: put ads everywhere and hide the most commonly bought foods!
Many supermarkets already do things like putting the milk and bread at opposite sides of the store, so you have to walk through the whole store to get both. You’d often be walking past the end caps while doing so, which are essentially ads (companies pay to have their products displayed at the end caps)
This is possibly something you could implement in a meta search engine like SearXNG, though there are some privacy concerns.
Maybe it could locally store which domains you personally tend to click (and stay) on. Then automatically raise those domains when it sees them somewhere in the output of the underlying engines. This isn’t perfect because you wouldn’t get data from other users. But I think it could do a lot to improve search results.
I might actually clone the repo and see if I can get somewhere soon
The thing with Google was that the data about click through vs click back was supposed to be anonymised. Whether it was or not, inside of the black box that is Google’s algorithm, who knows?
Either way, I’d be interested if you get any progress here. I’ve never tried to self host a search engine, but I might consider it.
I remember how people used to joke about the second page of Google results being a desolate wasteland where no one ever looks, now I just instinctively scroll down a bit because I know the first page of results is going to be trash.
Fuck Nigel Frog face Farrage, The Haunted Victorian Pencil Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lord David Pig Fucker Cameron, Maybot, Boris I don’t care where I stick my Johnson, and all the rest of the Tories who either actively supported this or were to self interested to not rebel as their leaders doubled down on their Brexit folly again and again.
My wife and I still laugh about this one time, when we were dating in college more than 20 years ago, we were rudely awakened by some pitiful sap wailing out his window, “anyone wanna hump? C’mon, anyone? Wanna hump?” He just sounded so despondent. No pity from me though.
Not to talk shit about Mac users, but in this day and age with how advanced technology is, you have to be insane to buy a Mac. What kills it for me is that nothing is upgradeable on the damn thing, like zero. If your internal drive dies, you’re SOL. And if I got this correctly, they now have the bios OS on the same drive, the Internal. So, you won’t even be able to get to your bios. You won’t be able to install the OS on external hard drive in case you needed to. This is insane and I can never understand why anyone would buy into this shit.
I’ll tell you why: the best hardware and software that just works with it. No need to deal with drivers or any of that shit.
I still use my MacBook Pro 2011 and I can’t find a reason to change it. It just keeps working. And I say that with a 2023 MacBook Pro M2 sitting right next to it (work laptop). Sure, it’s faster, but that’s it.
I guess that’s reasonable. I personally can’t see myself ever getting one for the reasons I’ve mentioned. But hey, everyone does what makes them happy.
Nothing to do with gaming. He’s trying to refer to the bug with the screen refresh rate (not fps) when upgrading between 13.6 and 14 or something like that.
It affected MacBook Pro (not any other) machines which weren’t set to the default promotion refresh rate.
I understand, and it’s a bug, like the Mac OS is the only piece of software with a bug. Shouldn’t be a reason to despise an OS.
I still don’t see why you’d change the fps if not for gaming. Maybe I’m too old to notice any difference between 30 and 60 fps when scrolling through a website… IDK.
Even my 68 year old mother can tell the difference between 30 and 60hz while scrolling Facebook so I think maybe you have some other medical issues or you’re just in denial.
It’s for the same reason we went to 120 FPS on phones. It makes the interface feel significantly smoother and more responsive, especially scrolling. Benefiting games is just a side effect. It gets to the point that 60 FPS systems feel slow to me now.
FPS is not refresh rate. stop saying fps. Fps is internal generation, which you then sync your refresh rate to, if you are so inclined (THAT is a gaming thing).
I get the fast and the battery life and all that, but by principle, I just can never own one. I also never buy any windows laptop that is not upgradeable. I keep them for a while and want to be able to upgrade them. That’s why I’ve been thinking of getting a framework laptop.
Mac users, and actually most laptop users, don’t give a shit about the things you mention. They buy it, use it for some 2-5 years, then sell it and get a new model. Upgrading hardware is way too complicated for most people. They don’t know or care what a BIOS is. It comes with the OS installed and that’s the only thing they would ever want. Turn it on, use Safari, outlook, and office 365, maybe some tool like Photoshop/Ableton/etc, that’s it.
I mean iPhones are the same right? They lock down everything so it’s idiot proof and they control the environment exactly so they can maximise the smoothness of the experience.
I have to use an apple phone for work and it’s sorta annoying to use. Like sure it’s fast and snappy but there’s no back button and it isn’t as intuitive as Apple users want you to believe it is.
The problem with Apple OSs is that Apple decides how you are suppose to use the device.
They decide that a phone/tablet/laptop is suppose to be used in a certain way and if you try to use them like a different computer form factor, you are left confused and frustrated.
I have been a long time user of Linux, Android, and Windows. I have no Apple devices and never will because every time I am forced to use one I can’t figure out how to do the simplist things that is trivial on every other OS I have used. Not to mention they won’t let you customize the device how you want to use it.
They do have a fantastic aesthetic and OS if you want a phone/tablet/laptop that does the simplist low-effort use, but I am always lost when trying do do anything outside of Apple’s groove. They are all looks and no substance.
I have to use an iPad for work. I was also forced to use one of their phones as a while back. I have unhappily used the iOS system for about 7 years now.
A few additional things:
I have attempted to use multitasking on it. Every update changed it’s behavior and they are all unintuitive. I gave up and use my phone for the second task.
The settings menu can burn in hell. It’s an absolute hot mess that’s worse than anything else I have seen.
I use a Bluetooth keyboard at times. In order to use it I have to leave an annoying floating “accessibility” circle on the screen when it’s not connected. In order to turn it off, it’s buried somewhere in the hellish settings menu.
Apps crash about 2x more often on it than on any other system I have used. Especially after an update before the inevitable small fix comes out a few weeks later.
The updates go through an endless cycle of adding bugs then killing bugs then adding new bugs. One of my favorites bug was when I had the phone years ago. They somehow broke the search functions in contacts and took them 4 months to fix it. My company had loaded 3,000 corporate contacts Into the phone… Fun times.
Then there are all the hidden gestures that are completely illogical. I turn gestures off on my android phone for a reason.
That f-ing settings menu. Want to change the settings of an app? You don’t change it within the app like you’d expect (and is same), no, leave the app, go into the ‘Settings’ app, scroll around the unordered list of apps, find the one you want and change it there. Who the heck is that a sane way of changing settings??
It’s just what people are used to. I find a few stuff annoying when I use my android phone for work. Also, you can swipe left anywhere to go back. Didn’t feel the need for a button
I half agree but the idea that Macs aren’t as expressive or versatile as any other laptop is so antiquated now. More than half of the software engineering industry is using macs as primary machines.
Why? Because the software and hardware gets out of the fucking way and let’s you focus on getting things done. I remember a time before Macs were the popular choice and I remember everyone spending 25% of their time fighting with drivers or obscure machine-specific software install or development build issues.
Even getting rid of the bloat is easy. Highlight apps, drag them to recycle bin, done. And as you said, a 3-5 year upgrade cycle makes the premium far less of an issue.
I certainly have family members that use Macs because they are tech illiterate, but that’s further evidence of their versatility.
There’s so much to shit on Apple for, but the myth of Macs being in some obscure home computer niche needs to die.
I’ve been using windows PCs for 25 years and struggle with the damn Mac at work. The usability of the thing is just utter garbage. Nothing is better but everything is different just… because. I’ve wasted so much time learning the fucking thing and still nothing just works.
Want to take a screenshot? Press 3 keys. You better remember them because it’s the most random fuckery imaginable. You like the cut & paste shortcuts of windows? We’ve something similar except it doesn’t work everywhere for some reason. This shit goes on and on.
I don’t know why Apple hates a proper Taskbar. I miss it everytime I struggle to find one of my open applications. Which is always.
This is because you’re stuck in a very specific mental model of computing, so using anything that isn’t Windows will feel frustrating if you’re unwilling to adapt.
I’ve been using Windows for 30 years this year (3.0 gang!) and building PCs for almost that long. I had a similar reaction to Linux when I first started using it. But I persisted and realized there were tasks I could perform faster and, importantly, with more safety on Linux than on Windows. So I stuck with it and now I use headless Linux almost as much as macOS and Windows
Also, if you’ve really gone full Pavlov on Windows modifier keys, you can remap cmd to Ctrl in system settings.
I was complaining about MacOS and you brought up Linux for some reason. I am aware I can do anything on Linux I can on Windows. I’ve used it briefly from time to time and it has a very windows-like work flow for basic stuff. MacOS doesn’t.
I couldn’t imagine buying any laptop other than a Mac because the performance to battery life ratio on everything else is awful. Plus if you want a UNIX system, it’s an easy buy.
After owning an Apple ARM laptop I’d never go back to anything else.
hear hear, if it has problem then I take it to apple store for service. I don’t wanna waste time fucking about on my laptop. I’ll do trouble shooting on desktop but I just want long battery life and apple silicone beat the fuck out of anything else.
I have an M1 Macbook Air (under half price secondhand thanks to a superficial dent on a corner) and while I agree I love having such powerful hardware that sips battery so sparingly, MacOS can go eat a whole bag of stale dicks. Homebrew makes it… tolerable, but I’m holding out hope for that new Qualcomm ARM laptop - the recent benchmarks beat Apple’s chips handily.
What do you hate about macOS? From my perspective, it beats out Windows in ease of use, performance, likelihood not to break, and being *NIX; and it beats out Linux by having things working out of the box without needing to spend a decade tinkering just to get things almost working right.
I use Windows for gaming (and work, unfortunately), Mac for general computing and programming, and Linux for servers and vms.
Those are both serious blockers for me tbh, I like to take it out away from home and watch YT / Nebula vids. I’m keeping am eye on Asahi’s progress though.
Yeah, the speakers don’t bother me too much since headphones still work. Deep sleep not working really sucks though since on macOS I’ve had it last for weeks without opening it and still having battery left.
M1 and M2 Macs have some of the worst pre-boot and recovery options I have ever seen.
If a BIOS update fails on them, they don’t have any redundancy to fail back to a working BIOS. This has been standard on every business machine for at least 5 years. On any Dell or Lenovo machine, if your BIOS becomes borked, it either auto-recovers from a previous BIOS that is stored on your HDD/SSD, or it allows you to insert a USB drive with the BIOS on it and recovers from there.
The Mac BIOS can update during a standard OS update without indicating that you’ll brick the machine if it powers off for any reason.
I had someone with a failed update on an M2 Mac that left the machine without a BIOS entirely. To recover, you need another Mac machine with USBC so you can plug them into each other and run Apple Configurator 2 to start a complete redownload of the OS to recover from.
It’s at least an hour long process for something that should take 5 minutes to fix. Also, it requires another Mac, you can’t run the recovery from any other OS.
The Mac BIOS can update during a standard OS update without indicating that you’ll brick the machine if it powers off for any reason
I hate Apple, but my Lenovo does exactly the same. It fucking installs BIOS updates automatically without any warning. Once, after a reboot it was hanging too much on a black screen and I thought it just froze, so I forced a shutdown by long pressing the power button. Luckily the BIOS restored via the fallback, but that wiped the TPM for some reason and because windows 11 on laptops automatically encrypts the drive with bitlocker I might have lost everything (luck again, I’m part of the 1% of the bitlocker users that actually keep an offline backup of the encryption key)
At least (I’m guessing, never bought any M1 Mac and will never do it) apple should be smart enough to disable the power button during BIOS updates, and maybe postpone the update on a low battery, leaving the danger only to desktop users
That’s not necessarily a lenovo specific thing, windows can update bios if enabled (has been enabled by default of every modern windows device I own). When vendors push a new bios to the update catalog it’s going to get automatically installed by default. Look for a setting in the security panel of the bios to turn this off, can’t remember exactly what it’s called.
Well I appreciate that, but since you said “steakhouse district” it sounds like you’re talking about the US, so I might have a hard time getting there. I’m sure someone can make use of the info :)
Sushi doesn’t last long after its made. But I don’t like food waste so looked up ways to make it taste okay after it’s gone stale or the avocado starts browning and getting mushy. Cut it up with scissors and pan fry it in some oil. It’s not bad. Add veggies or whatever if you want.
Yeah, no kidding. You don’t get to act like a red hatter, acting like your decisions about what constitutes “freedom” disqualifies all others, without being called out for it.
I’m getting so sick of Lemmy… It’s just like the worst parts of Reddit now. No opinion, other than the hive mind. No discussion, besides name-calling and finger pointing, and yeah, they did it first. This place is for children.
Well, it’s just capitalism, ain’t it. The goal of the company is to generate as much revenue as possible. That is why we need to regulate the market and everyone who says else is probably a rich asshole who does not care about others.
The only food mentioned is the little kid fishes and bread. If it were more, pretty sure they’d mention it as well.
The whole point was that they were far away from the nearest place to buy food and money for feeding about 15k people would exceed even a yearly salary
Literally there was not enough food in the whole group for a “potluck”
Jesus made a speech, they passed around the baskets his group had for the meal, and suddenly they more than enough
Do you think they had grocery stores? That they catered events? That they even had a salary, and carried money instead of food?
I don’t even know where all these numbers and money focus are coming from, but they weren’t in the text
Everyone shared their lunch… That was the whole thing. They shared the food they were initially unwilling to share, and when everyone was full (including those who came with nothing) they had baskets of leftovers
When they’re asking genuinely, I don’t mind giving a genuine reply. But when it becomes clear they’re doing the online equivalent of filibustering? “You, you specifically are going to pay for it, and I hope it makes you go bankrupt.”
when the far right says, “Who’s gonna pay for it?!”
It’s funny, the obvious answer is “rich people who have magnitudes more money”, but plenty of poor stupid people respond “BuT tHeY aLrEaDy PaY mOrE” as if someone with 100000x as much money as you should get off paying maybe pays 100 or 1000x when you’re paying 25% and they’re paying 5 or 10% of take home.
Look brother I don’t agree with your lifestyle but I will defend to the death your right to rawdog seventeen other anonymous partners in the local motel 6.
Problem is, you can only have one bookmark for each url. So if you want to have readling list bookmarks, you better not use bookmarks for anything else.
There’s a workaround, sure, add a # and some gibberish to the URL’s end, but that’s not really a solution
What I wanted to mean is that if you use bookmarks as a reading list, you are better off not using them for any other purpose, like saving articles by categories for later reference.
This is because each bookmark can only be in a single bookmark folder.
Additionally, if you have an addon that makes bookmarks, and it creates a bookmark for a site you have already bookmarked (let alone mass creates such bookmarks), the old ones will be lost along with their tags.
Oh I see, that’s true! Firefox bookmarks are a bit suboptimal in my experience too, for me it’s because they don’t have a description field so it’s harder to search for them (unless you put the text in the title, but all these kludges are annoying)
But yeah I don’t have hundreds of tabs open. It is incompatible with my workflow. Only the “tabs” directly relevant to whatever is currently happening in the current workspace are kept open.
A link either gets read or it doesn’t. If I don’t have time to read a link somebody sends me personally, I just tell them that. I don’t string anybody along about a link I know I will never read. I can’t allow for any link backlog. That leads to . . . dark places.
Also, I don’t really use bookmarks either. When I disable search suggestions and use firefox suggest, it leave more space for history. It works so well I don’t really need to bookmark anything. Frequently opened sites make their way to the top on their own.
Samsung still doesn’t allow for unlocking the bootloader in the US, so after 7 years, the phone basically becomes ewaste due to lack of security updates. Repairability, I can’t speak on, but they probably still glue their screen.
That’s not even counting the fact that SoC vendors put these unmaintainable amount of patches on top of the Linux kernel instead of contributing to upstream Linux, so that their device can use a generic kernel. This leads to the use of ancient Linux versions on embedded devices with no room for upgrade without a third party porting mainline Linux.
“Smart” TVs/IoT devices have the same issue, but often times worse. You’d be lucky to get a new Android version on an Android TV, let alone a new kernel version, or the ability to run a custom OS, with documentation on how provided by the manufacturer, along with stock firmware.
There’s also the problem of companies (mainly ones based in China) not releasing source code for the GPL-licensed software they use, such as the Linux kernel. Very common issue, especially with Mediatek products.
That’s the thing though, you can get devices from other manufacturers and you can get unlocked devices with Android. Those things aren’t even options with Apple.
Apple is so locked down I fail to see what the appeal could be in the first place, there’s very little customization, only one hardware manufacturer, and they’re more guilty of anyone else in the market of planned obsolescence.
iPhones historically have lasted 5+ years while android manufacturers tend to support a phone for maybe 2 years.
Only justnow are companies promising 7 year support for Android, but even then Google has been full of shit lately like their pixel subscription that they cancelled right when users were beginning to be eligible for a new free phone.
You can complain about the headphone jack, but Apple devices last far far longer than comparable devices. That goes for Macs too where the hardware lasts 10 years, and Google and Microsoft just tossed millions of devices in the trash by dropping support.
Linux has longer support than anyone, which should serve as a model, but of the tech companies Apple is the least guilty of planned obsolescence.
You mean except for when they got caught slowing down old models, or how their support will tell you to go to a store and the store will tell you to call support and nothing gets fixed. Or how they break Australian Consumer Law by saying that any ex-displays don’t have any warranty despite that legally your warranty starts when you buy the phone. Can’t fix anything just spend more money for latest version
The ecosystem is the thing holding me here. Everything works so seamlessly and the products are very good (imo). I don’t have to worry that my watch and headphones might not work with another company’s phone, or at least not as good. If there are headphones and watches that would work as well, seamless and long as Apple’s, I’m open to suggestions. Apple might be behind with innovations, but when they implement something, it’s done right (usually)
Havent had any issues with my headphones conncectivity wise.
I turn them on, they boot and play music.
No connection drops or anything else.
Only pairing wasnt fully automagically.
I suppose if you’d buy 1st party brands, you’d get even that but that’s only a one time thing anyway so whatever.
The true magic is how seamless they immediately switch between phones and laptops. If I’m listening to a podcast on my phone but need to join a teams call or want to watch a video on my computer, I don’t even need to pause the podcast. The switch is immediate and automatic to the new audio source.
Also audio sharing with other people with AirPods works really well.
More importantly, I am a middle aged software developer who doesn’t want to customise his phone. I am happy to have a handset where I am limited. Gone are my days of geeking out and customising everything. I just want something that works for me.
Ah yer late on that thar joke yee laddie, now off on that wagon wit yee and I’ll boop ye on yees head and make yee sleep, I know yee we’re trying to cross the border and walked right into that imperial ambush…
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