Google search results now are nearly unusable, most look like this:

- Top of the page is slow loading AI regurgitation of deeply buried real web results, but often wildly inaccurate. No thanks.

- Next are a bunch of YouTube videos you don't want to watch where you have to wade through dozens of ads and hours of content to get the 3 seconds of information you're looking for. No thanks.

- "Related search" nonsense that nobody ever wants to see but if you click on those you will get more of the above. No thanks.

- Some useless unrelated shopping links you almost certainly don't want. No thanks.

- Way down at the bottom, 2-3 real web search results, non-keyword matched, and only from major mainstream outlets that are part of the Trusted News Initiative (Orwell?!) that have turned into glorified content farms which spit out non-expert written content on every conceivable subject for Googlebot (and now most of this content is AI written or from the cheapest possible third world contractors). No thanks.

Those "real web search results" used to be independent publishers that are referenced in this article, which were often topical experts with deep knowledge on their respective subjects, and those people and businesses have been destroyed over the last few years by Google updates that clearly prioritize their own slop and their "trusted" corporate ally content farms over the independent web.

They also disappears tons of content, and anything critical or outside of the mainstream acceptable narrative is nowhere to be found, sort of like searching for "tank man" from inside China, something everyone in the west used to poke fun of and point to as an example of digital totalitarianism.

If I were running Google search I would immediately roll back all of their search changes to somewhere around 2014-2016, which was roughly the last time you could find true keyword matched web results from a hugely diverse array of expert sources, and then very cautiously reassess. Obviously they would never do that, so I am not sure they can recover from their own demise.

BTW I don't find DuckDuckGo or Bing to be much better, they seem to just mimic Google results. Search is in real trouble.

I'm curious if you have a specific query I could type into Google that's instructive of your claim that information has been disappeared. (honest question).

10x-15x+ price to median income is common in many desirable areas. Completely ridiculous, but also what you might expect after a decade+ of QE, asset inflation, and the last four years of core inflation.

That's because "desirable" areas aren't fixed over these timescales. Today's gated suburbs in the Bay Area were literally dust bowl farms in 1950! Like, literally Steinbeck wrote a famous novel about it.

Steinbeck's books were mostly late-30s, no? Which one are you thinking of? Grapes of Wrath is mostly around Bakersfield, Cannery Row and East of Eden are Monterey/Salinas Valley. I'm not sure of anything set that far north.

I have family photos from back in the 50s showing lots of good orchards in the Bay Area. Certainly no dust bowl stuff. If I remember correctly, my grandparents bought their 5BR tract house in Santa Clara in the mid-1950s for somewhere around $15 or $16k, which was ~40% more expensive than the median California house back then. The Bay Area has always been expensive!!!

Ooph, HN is being HN. The point is that California was not remotely exclusive or expensive in the mid-century, it was a target of emigration from the rest of the country for its relative affordability and low density. The point to citing Steinbeck wasn't to claim he wrote about Silicon Valley in particular, it was to show that this effect was well-known to basically everyone at the time.

I mean, no, "good orchards" aren't desirable homes, by definition. There's at least an order of magnitude delta in real estate price between the two! And sure, your family found a very nice neighborhood in the south bay. That doesn't mean that South SF wasn't a dump or that Fremont wasn't completely uninhabited.

Because my upthread point was, and remains, that you can't look at the history of "desirable homes" over a 75 year scale because by definition desirability changes much more frequently.

To say nothing (apparently) of decades of allowing the wealthy to absorb most of the created wealth of the last few decades.

I think about this and wonder if it's supported by data.

I wonder because no one speaks about the poverty created by the last few decades, which might contradict what you wrote, or might not. I also wonder where one could track creation of wealth and creation of poverty.

(living outside income, for example, i think of as creating poverty)

Still not that bad comparing to other countries, like those in EU.

Ollama is so easy, what's the benefit to Llama.cpp?

If you're satisfied with ollama, I don't think there's a point to go "lower" and use llama.cpp directly.

Unless you want to tinker.

> Shouldn't it be alarming to everyone that Jack Dorsey distanced himself from Bluesky?

Well, I mean, depends how you feel about Dorsey, surely?

The "why" is often habituation

That whole conversation is worth listening to

> Twitter fundamentally offers no killer feature.

Less censorship is a pretty important feature

Twitter is all about censorship. That's its core feature now. Intimidation has been engineered into the platform. Suppression of unpopular or marginal opinions that don't align with the owner has been systematically added to the platform. Try typing the word 'cis' into the platform.

Censorship isn’t absent from Twitter. Quite the opposite.

When people say censorship in regard to Twitter they just want to be shitty to people. Just post on 4chan what’s the real difference?

Twitter is a cesspool.

Post "cisgender".

Bluesky also has the "less censorship" feature :D

A really killer feature for me is not being bombarded by racist, sexiest, homophobic, and transphobic drivel. Twitter doesn’t support this feature; it’s all but impossible to avoid all that crap on that platform.

> "We see right through the unshowered soul living in a car by the beach, or by the Walmart, or by the side of the road. But he’s there, and he used to be somebody"

Do we? No, we don't, not at first, not until we see it enough times to become desensitized to it, and we eventually realize the state/city/population ultimately doesn't care about these people, so we adapt those beliefs too, whether we want to or not.

I watched that happen to many colleagues, friends, family members, and even, regrettably over time, myself.

If you mention the homeless crisis to many people, many of the typical urbanites and suburbanites that populate every major city that is overflowing with homeless and open drug camps, the same people who vote for it to continue and for it to get worse and worse, the ones who vote to fund programs that clearly are making the problem grow and worsen rather than improve, they get very defensive, almost angry that you're bringing it up. Why on earth are you bringing up this topic? Quiet! And if you do talk about it, you better share the acceptable opinions on the subject, anything else is verboten. It's a strange social pressure, completely devoid of humanity.