There is no royal road to changing one's mental behaviors and habits. It's a metacognitive skill and can be developed like any other skill but you'll have to put in the work to develop it. Start by developing an exercise routine that you can stick to, preferably cardio. Then make sure your diet is not full of junk calories. If you manage those two then you'll be on your way to developing higher level cognitive skills and might resolve whatever issues you have with your OCD.
Chocolate is better and cheaper than coffee, and might even be better for overall health in the long run than coffee. Whenever I'm at Trader Joe's I make sure to buy whatever is on sale and is as close to 100% dark chocolate as possible.
Because that's the correct intuition. The contemporary world is not designed for sane people. All the systems around us are designed to alienate people from each other with artificial intermediators like money, status, fame, and just generally useless toys and gadgets. To succeed in such a world you have to have sociopathic tendencies. You have to value material goods and possessions over people which is kinda insane when you really think about it.
> The contemporary world is not designed for sane people.
Sanity is defined by people who want to control the masses. The world is very much designed to contain sane people. Or people who can work in the world are declared sane. Something like those.
Correct and if you deviate from the standards then you will be medicated until you are subdued and willing to work for the machines destroying the habitability of the planet.
They did that right when they chose the advertising model. It was never going to work in the long run and the founders knew it. They just thought they could build an AI system before that happened and it turned out they were wrong. Useful AI that could distinguish real knowledge from SEO optimized spam was much further away than they thought/imagined.
It's already dead. Google mined all the links that were curated by the initial internet communities for all it was worth and turned them into profits for Google's earliest employees and shareholders. Now that no one is curating useful links anymore their search quality, unsurprisingly, is deteriorating. Without human curation there is no signal for Google to use anymore and whatever signal is there is just SEO spam that is optimized for serving ads. It's like an ouroboros eating its own tail.
It’s not just the links. After the links, google mined facts, like “how much does a german shepherd weigh,” so no on gets those clicks, and the incentive is gone there too. They’re even mining the snippets of the content, lowering the incentives for creating that too.
It's essentially a machine for printing money and people don't really understand what they're giving up in exchange for "free" search results. Google is beholden to market forces, it's no longer in the business of indexing useful information because the market doesn't value useful information, it values ad revenue.
This is a structural problem and anything that gets large enough will succumb to the same forces. If the incentives are for optimizing ad revenue then that's what all corporate machines will do at scale, regardless of their initial motives and incentive structure. It doesn't help that Google is also an ad network, hence the ouroboros aspect.
You say it's a machine for printing money in a topic about people complaining that it doesn't work any more. It may have been but it won't be forever if things keep going the way they're going. Quality content is already being locked away.
We're in agreement. I don't think quarterly earnings are the right way to design and build products. Maximizing profits is not correlated with value and is often inversely proportional to it. Google was so successful that they changed the incentive structure of all content on the web. Now they're like the yeast drowning in the byproducts of their own metabolic processes. They exploited whatever nutrients were available (hand curated links) to make them initially successful and now there is no more worthwhile content being generated that is not designed to rank highly on Google (which is not the same thing as quality content and is instead content optimized for generating ad revenue from the Google ad network).
It's the same with social networks, upvotes and likes skew the the type of content that is generated to be liked by the people liking and upvoting instead of being insightful. Popularity is not the same thing as insight so the social web is full of mostly useless but popular content.
This sounds almost like Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Google made links on the web the measure of how good a page was. That became the target of everyone trying to do SEO. As a result, it stopped being a good measure of how good a page was.
But in the long run, nothing will work in that environment, because every measure will be gamed as soon as people figure out that Google is using it. Google's only choice is to try to stay ahead of the SEO crowd, and I'm not sure they can do that (well) for too much longer. In fact, if the article is to be believed, they're already starting to fail.
Yes, it's very similar with the added caveat that Google has an interest in serving results that have ads from their own network. This is why Google's metrics can be hacked. Anything that is barely above being classified as spam but serves ads from Google's ad network will be prioritized over other results simply because they have to hit their quarterly revenue targets. SEO hacking is not possible if a search engine is just a search engine but Google is also an ad network so they will always be susceptible to being gamed.
This is also the case for social media platforms. They're incentivized to surface content that generates engagement and ad revenue. Basically ads are at the root of all problems when it comes to the internet and the content on it.
Here and further down this thread you repeatedly allege Google upranks pages if they participate in their ads program. Google explicitly says they do not do this [1]. Do you have evidence to contradict this?
> SEO hacking is not possible if a search engine is just a search engine
Uh, yes it is. If the owner of the site being searched is generating profit from that site being searched then they will game the search engine's algorithm to get them the most clicks.
I'm not interested in a pedantic argument. If you didn't understand what I meant then you should have asked for clarification. A search engine designed to surface useful information is not gameable if it is not in the business of generating quarterly profits from its own ad network. A site designed to drive traffic to itself can still try to hack the system by generating spam but without Google's incentives for surfacing such content because it serves ads from its own network there will be fewer such sites and useless content to go along with it.
At the moment Google is incentivized to uprank spam because the spam comes with ads from its own ad network.
A search engine finds 50 pages that are exact matches for the search. Which one does it present as the top of the list? How does it decide? Unless it decides literally by a random number generator, however it decides, someone will try to discover the algorithm, and exploit it. This is true whether or not the search engine allows or displays ads.
> I'm not interested in a pedantic argument. If you didn't understand what I meant then you should have asked for clarification.
I don't think it was a pedantic argument or a misunderstanding. I think Lascaille understood your position and disagreed with you, not just pedantically but over the substance.
This is actually what google does. They find the 50 sites for your query and then do a multi-armed bandit test to see which one gets the most clicks but with a bias towards sites that serve ads from the Google ad network. A search engine without that bias is not gameable because it will converge on the results that is most popular for a given query and not because it also serves ads that affect the search engine's bottom line.
Popularity is gameable but not the same way as Google is currently gameable because as soon as a site becomes popular and starts exploiting its ranking it will be easy enough to add a decay factor to prevent such sites from dominating the top results during the multi-armed bandit stage of ranking.
In any case, the logic of why Google is going to shit is obvious. Arguing about fixes is not going to change their underlying business model and why spam is dominating their results. As long as they are a search engine, an ad network, and a corporation that must maximize profits their results will continue to deteriorate until the top results are all just spam.
> I don't think it was a pedantic argument or a misunderstanding. I think Lascaille understood your position and disagreed with you, not just pedantically but over the substance.
Then that wasn't clear and seemed like a pedantic point since it's obvious that any algorithm is gameable and I should have made it clear that I wasn't talking about a perfect search engine but one that was not susceptible to profit driven spam (which is currently the reason that Google results are going to shit).
In my mind, if the web page tries to exploit knowledge of the search engine's algorithm, that's "gaming". This is done by the web page, without the deliberate co-operation of the search engine.
If the search engine is the one doing the funny business, to increase their own profit, to me that's beyond "gaming". That's... "corruption" might be the right word.
That's reasonable. Substitute "corruption" wherever I used "gaming" when referring to maximizing profits at the expense of serving useful search results.
>I don't think it was a pedantic argument or a misunderstanding. I think Lascaille understood your position and disagreed with you, not just pedantically but over the substance.
Yes, I was a bit disappointed with the reddity response. The sites admin has an incentive to have their site appear first. The quality of their content may not suffer but they will additionally try to identify how the algorithm works and 'game' it.
I honestly don't think this is the problem, like at all. There are human websites made by humans, still. There's more crap, sure, but the good stuff is largely still out there.
The problem begins and ends with the conflict of interest that Google both sells ads and selects search results. If they didn't have a vested interest in people visiting sites with their ads on them, they could decimate the number of spam results.
Which websites are shown in the search results is not influenced by whether Google has ads on them.
The only thing that influences Google search results is Google's desire to keep as many people using Search as often as possible, since nearly all of Google's money comes from showing those text ads at the top of the Search results. This is all public information, you can read it in the 10K etc.
So if Search sucks, it's not because Google has the wrong incentives but because they can't solve the problems Search faces.
Hard to proof this but anecdotally lots of energy that used to go into people's hobby or passion websites now is going into digital platforms like reddit, pinterest or Twitter, or if lucky substack or Medium. Some of those are walled gardens and Reddit as discussed here is where people now search. Much less out on the actual net
Well, since I actually run a search engine looking for this sort of stuff, I think I'm able to demonstrate that a lot of what was out on the net is still there, just exceptionally hard to find on Google.
Hah, I didn't catch that I was responding to you. Definitely would defer to your experience. Love your search engine btw. It brings the fun back to the web!
If anything I think I'm only scraping the surface, since a lot of my methods involve ruthlessly discarding data that doesn't live up to a fairly blunt set of criteria. I think with something like a headless browser (and a lot more processing power), I could probably use laxer standards and find even more good stuff.
Right, but that's pretty trivially identified. I've had great success doing that with my search engine. Here's a thousand domains that are low in farmed contents in no particular order:
So why do you suppose Google doesn't surface the domains and results you presented? For example, I searched for "game reviews" and gameboomers was nowhere to be found.
I have no insight in their search engine, but I do know it would hurt their ad revenue to surface results that have no ads. Lends itself to speculation. But it could just be some confluence of other factors, of course. They seem to aggressively favor recent content (I do the opposite).
Which is why I said it's an ouroboros eating its own tail. The scale it operates at and given that it's also an ad network guarantees that whatever results it finds will favor its own ad network. It doesn't even have to be intentional since all they're doing is optimizing some metrics and running ML algorithms. There is no single person that could be blamed for the deterioration of the results. There is no way around this conflict of interest and they will continue pushing the envelope to increase their own revenue at the expense of useful results for as long as possible.
If a site is hosting ads from the Google ad network and is barely above being spam then Google will prioritize it over other results in order to maintain its quarterly revenue predictions.
That's a reasonable analysis. I do think Google has grown about as it can legitimately grow, which means the only way it can maintain an appearance of growth is by cannibalizing itself. The increasingly aggressive use of search ads are probably an example of this.
When are you going to have a VC fork over $10,000,000 and start your empire??
I use your crazy search engine all the time, and it's fucking great. Last time I checked, though, you're getting like $30 a month from Patreon and that's it, haha.
You're too much of a well-adjusted normal human being, that's your problem. You need that touch of Zuckerwellian sociopathy to get to the next level
Well I'm actually up to a $100 now, which is about twice my burn rate, so you might as well say I've broken even already. To the moon, baby.
To be serious, it's notoriously difficult to actually make a profit off search. I guess we'll see if Kagi will be able to eke out a market for itself, that may change things. Right now, I think investors will look at Bing and go "yikes".
Doesn't go to say I couldn't build a fantastic search engine with more resources than my current shoestring budget, the hard question remains: Why isn't this just a waste of money? Would take one hell of a sales pitch to gloss over that concern.
Wonder how we could set up an alt-web without the incentives that cause this problem. Delist any for-profit site? How would the sites keep the lights on without ads?
To me it's more a sociological problem than technological. Also networks have changed.. somehow the decentralization idea is spreading fast. For ideological, technical, cost .. or other reasons. Some people start neighborhood wireless networks etc.
It also seems to me that internet has somehow became a middle man and is not providing human deep enough interactions, especially outside chat-like website (basically any exchange, business)..
I could envision a whatsapp like system with quality control for producers and transparent transaction/tracking/accounting management offered by the network so people spend less time on side-loads and just focus into helping each others and doing what they need to.
> Making them turn off the lights is the goal. Good riddance I say, once we get there.
I wish there was some middle ground. Think of all the useful Youtube videos showing how to play an instrument, do woodworking projects, fix cars... there is a vast amount of knowledge there. Maybe YT should be nationalized :-)
Youtubes early success was due to being a free video hosting platform, the monetization just led to the rise of 10:04 long videos. In any case most larger creators will put sponsorships in band like the good ol days. I’m hoping decentralized alternatives can take over like Peertube or Odysee, but I do also appreciate the more traditional business model of Vimeo.
I've had no problem finding sites to index with my search engine. Like it's tiny compared to Google today, but it's about the same size they were when they first started out. Leads me to think there's probably as much, or more now as there ever was. There's just more noise to go with it.
Yep! There's a massive amount of useful content on the web. A lot of it is just a pain to find right now, because the quality of search is bad and the amount of garbage is a thousandfold greater.
It's true that walled gardens have been eating up useful information and that is a real shame, but make no mistake: there's still a ridiculous amount of good stuff on the open web. They're not playing the SEO optimization game so they get buried.
That actually has made me feel a lot more positive than I would have imagined.
I have sort of got stuck in this bubble of reddit and not much else and... the way people behave has really sapped my desire to contribute anything to the world. I'm looking around me at the opinions a lot of people are expressing and I think... no, these people don't deserve nice things. It seems sometimes like the whole world is full of venal, bitter and divisive people that do nothing but snap bitterly at the heels of anyone that makes something of themselves or strays too far from safe consensus.
Federation is the only reasonable solution at this time but the technical overhead of federated search is high enough that most people won't use it so it won't benefit from network effects like Google did in the beginning. There might be a combination of blockchain juju that could make federation viable but all the thought leaders in that ecosystem are too high on their own supply to realize they could use blockchains for anything other than gambling.
There’s no better solution - you either have ads or a paywall, which will result in few users.
If there were a better solution we’d all already be using it. Certainly you can rely on savvy people to produce free stuff, but the total amount of content will be drastically lower and therefore fewer consumers.
The best thing is to just use bookmarks and your favorite sites’ own search.
During the pandemic Joe Biden and his friends sent me a check by direct deposit into my chase checking account. We already have a digital dollar. If you have a checking account at one of the main banks then you're already hooked up to the monetary panopticon. If you think Bitcoin solves this then you don't really understand how money works and you are replacing one narrative fantasy with another one.
If you write software then you need extended periods of focus. This is not possible in an open office. Open offices were designed to save money on building costs and then sold to office workers as better ways to collaborate (which turned out to be false).
It's only going to get worse from here on out. The weather models have consistently underestimated second order feedback effects. We're going to blow past 2C and there is very little anyone can do at this point.
I agree it's never too late to stop making things worse but global CO2 output is increasing so it's only going to get worse. To make things better would require large scale changes to the economy and consumer habits which is not going to happen. Ask a random stranger on the street what sacrifices they would be willing to make for improving the habitability of the planet for future generations and you'll realize how far we are from doing anything about global warming and its consequences.
At some point food production is going to decrease because of increasingly violent and unpredictable weather patterns and historically that has never been an indicator of good fortune. For examples of what global warming is already doing to large human populations one only has to look at Madagascar and Afghanistan. What's happening in those places is going to become much more common in the coming decades. The major world governments are not prepared to deal with mass migrations and food shortages and given the nature of politics they won't do anything about it until its too late to do anything effective.
Some people think techno-optimism is the answer to these problems but given the scale involved there is no way to fix this with a new app or gadget. It will require major investment and cooperation across public, private, and commercial institutions which will not fit neatly into existing profit driven market dynamics. The entire social stack needs to be reconfigured and tech can't do that, it's fundamentally a social problem. The idea of an exponentially increasing prosperity through exponentially increasing economic growth and consumption was always a swindle, it's amazing it has gotten us this far but it's no longer a viable ideology for what's coming and too many people still believe in the old model and are unwilling to change their consumption habits.
Hm - ok, for the sake of argument, what sort of sacrifices are you suggesting? I keep hearing politicians saying we need to do something, and it's going to be a lot, but never what it actually is.
Consume less in general and develop cooperatives that utilize local resources as efficiently as possible. This is going to become a necessity in the coming decades and the communities that start now will have a head start on the changes that will be required to survive in a much harsher world. This is why I said it's a social instead of technical problem. The neighborhood I live in is extremely affluent but other than churches has no other collective organizations. Places like that might weather the first few waves of instability but will eventually have to develop cooperatives just like everyone else. Resources are going to become more and more scarce so the communities that develop the skills to properly ration whatever is left to maximize the well being of their members will thrive, those that don't, well, just look at SF or other metropolitan areas, it ain't pretty.
That sounds more like prepping than staving off environmental disaster - I'm learning how to grow vegetables on the off chance civilization collapses and I'm left to provide for my family on my own, but... no, you're right, I'm not willing to live that way permanently until I have no other choice.
The #1 most important one is "whatever politicians and ideologies are holding us back or even slowing us down". Pragmatically speaking in America today that means anyone to the right of Bernie, and the ideological/zealous-religious-belief that the govt can't solve problems, that they must be solved via individual consumer choices in a market. This also includes the ideology of "centrism", which is simply the american word for conservatism. If nothing can be done until it is bipartisan, then that simply gives the side that doesn't want to do anything a veto over everything.
I could keep going with 2, 3, 4, etc but its incredibly rare for anyone to get past #1. In 2016 you could point to Bernie's climate plan and Hillary's and they were off by nearly a full order of magnitude. "Centrist" and "moderate" dems chose Hillary instead. In 2020 we had a very similar choice between Bernie's plan and Biden's. The "centrist/moderate" crew chose the guy with the weaker plan, and then a year later destroyed that too.
So it really is this simple. If we're ever going to truly address the problem, we need to elect the people proposing to actually do it. We consistently do not because everyone has their <pet political issues> that they will prioritize over a collapsing biosphere.
"aaand there it is" skepticism in the face of blatant reality as a defense mechanism from admitting wrongness. Has anyone from the center or the right even campaigned on the issue? no. You can wish things were different, I do, but they're not.
I mean even just campaigning on an issue isn't enough, we need to drive enough of the people who campaign on it into office so that they collectively wind up having to actually do it, not just talk about it. So really when I say "Bernie" I mean "Bernie and 61 senators and 218 congress people".
Thats the system we live in. Those are the votes you need to enact meaningful policy, and climate change is so massive a challenge that it requires meaningful policy backing to be addressed at the requisite scale.
To put this in context, the US Military budget is around 700B a year, and the estimates of what it would have cost if we started ini 2016 to do the necessary domestic transition to do our part in avoiding 1.5C was about 1.6T/year for 10 years. Obviously that ship has completely sailed, but it doesn't meaningfully change the cost, it just means we have to spend around the same amount now to try and hold the line at 2.0C.
There are no other budgets or policy proposals that even come close. By all means link me to one if you think i'm wrong.
Is global warming the thing driving the western megadrought?
I would suspect not. "The worst in 1200 years" implies "it was worse 1200 years ago", and we're pretty sure global warming wasn't driving it then. There's more at play than just CO2.
All of them. The science is clear on this. Anthropogenic global warming is real and is currently a major existential threat that is not being properly addressed because people are in denial about what's coming and ignoring what's already here.
The only model coming close to being accurate was the INM-CM4 model, which predicted a mild 0.1C increase per decade.
All of these models have done a poor job of predicting cloud cover albedo and sensitivity. There is no good model for predicting cloud cover over decades of time and it turns out it's one of the most critical factors in the climate system.
The science is not saying anything like that. I am the one saying things will be worse because the models have consistently underestimated second order greenhouse effects like ocean acidification and the collapse of the transatlantic currents and general slowdown of other ocean currents along with their effects on global weather patterns.
And yet they haven't. The past two decades haven't been indicative of runaway warming with feedback loops, but just a paltry 0.1C/decade trend.
If what you say is true, you should be able to pull up a model published in 2002 or 2012 and analyze its predictions from the observations.
That's science. A model is only as good as its performance against reality, and the truth is, 98+% of the models in the IPCC analysis from one and two decades ago overshot in their predictions.
