Azure AWS and cloudflare will survive, then everything else will pay them for protection; when all of the internet is captive, they will lobby for regulation to reduce the costs.
It would be better to get the regulation set up before stronger gatekeepers are created
You can turn off personalization. (Operating under the assumption that most people search for facts, I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results.)
Location based personalization is pretty useful - if I search for 'Bob's Discount Linguine' I want the one in my neighborhood.
Lots of niche things (like programming) also reuse common english words to mean specific things - if I search e.g. 'locking' it's nice to get results related to asynchronous programming instead of locksmiths because google knows I regularly search for programming related terminology.
Of course it's questionable whether google does a good job at any of this, but I absolutely see the value.
I expected to be “personalized”. I’m definitely more into programming than dancing. I see 0 personalization tbh. And I tried a few different peoples phones.
Oh I see, locking in the programming sense, yes. Either not every search term is personalized for your context, or else this particular search is being applied to some other demographic. But that's weird because "locking" doesn't also show door, windows, filing cabinets.
Anyway if you search for "programming locking" you get relevant results.
Google didn't used to do this. Anyone got a rough idea when this started?
I often find myself searching for information that's not from my locality. This sort of 'location personalization' frustrate such efforts so much that I rarely 'google' these days. What's the point of having access to the internet if that access is going to be restricted like this without consent? If they want to make my search experience more relevant, they should provide me an option to limit my search, rather than callously assume my intentions.
It's much more egregious on the Android play store. Many apps like banking, transportation and online shopping apps are geolocked for installation, sometimes even without the developers' request or knowledge. What if I'm flying over there in two days, or just want to help someone who's already there? And even when I'm there, I have to prove my presence by supplying the local credit card details! Nothing else is enough - not GPS, not cell tower IDs, not the IP ranges or whatever else.
This is just outrageous because I can't even get a device that I paid for, to work for me. This is just sheer arrogance at this point - a wanton abuse of their co-monopoly privileges. However, I'm not under any delusions that they're here to improve my digital experience. These corporations profit by restricting their "users'" experience on an otherwise fully open internet.
For the better part of a decade it seems that every verb or noun I search for, all the top search results are some movie or TV show named after that verb or noun. And I've watched exactly two movies in the past two decades (Star Wars VII when it came out, and Alien just last week).
Sometimes I consider actually enabling personalized search just to get to the things that I'm actually looking for.
I won't bother defending Google-style personalization as it exists for their search results, but since collisions in terminology across fields are common, it's not that hard to see how actual, thoughtful personalization could be useful. Someone searching for "Kafka" is going to want very different results based on whether they're thinking of software or literature. Opinions may also differ over the usefulness of sources, even for people ultimately interested primarily in facts; I find Kagi-style personalization (make your own domain list) very useful, but across Kagi's userbase Reddit is simultaneously one of the most lowered, most raised, and most pinned domains: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
Anecdotally I find myself appending 'reddit' to search terms very frequently. It's effectively shorthand for "I want to read about peoples direct experience with this thing", and reddit is huge and well crawled by search engines. It's astroturfed to hell especially around political topics, but I feel like it's easy to tell when discussions about random products are authentic.
> I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results.
The same short combination of words can mean very different things to different people. My favorite example of this is "C string" because when I was a kid learning C I was introduced to a whole new class of lingerie because Google didn't really personalize results back then. Now when I search "C string" Google knows exactly what I mean.
Some people search for shopping, or business details, in which case personalization can improve (or disimprove) result relevance based on knowing where you currently are, what day and time it is, what you tend to order etc. etc.
And some people search for songs/images/videos/books/articles.
Note: Apple restricts apps uploaded with Xcode, (depending on how it is signed I believe) to 7 days or 1 year. adb currently doesn't have this limit.
But what if they find that somebody made 'sideloading' 'too easy' again. E.g. somebody could come up with the idea of running adb or an adb emulator on another phone, or even a small hardware dongle, integrating it with a pretty UI that looks like a regular app shop. Then their currently proposed new rule would become ineffective and due to whatever thought process they arrived at their current conclusion, could place similar limits on adb.
> E.g. somebody could come up with the idea of running adb or an adb emulator on another phone, or even a small hardware dongle, integrating it with a pretty UI that looks like a regular app shop.
That idea already exists and is called Shizuku. You don't even need another phone, because ADB also has a mode for wireless debugging via the network, so you can just use that to locally connect to the ADB daemon running on your own phone.
Not talking about Trump here, as I very much doubt he cares about jack shit. Some conservationists are happy that the project was canceled. Sure, the best place to put solar is probably on top of existing structures, not in "one of the most intact landscapes remaining" in the area (if that is even true). But what if just roofs isn't realistic, or just not enough? Could they have chosen a better site from an ecological perspective? Did someone deliberately choose the site to pit one kind of environmentalist against another kind of environmentalist? When you try and think like a politician whose only objective is to "look good" to different camps at the same time, it doesn't seem that outlandish an idea. I'd just like to tell the conservationists that mining coal or oil isn't exactly great for the landscape and animals in the mine's area either, and burning it is bad for all kinds of ecosystems around the world.
I personally think one or more of the following should just be made illegal:
- Infinite scrolling
- Use of recommendation algorithms
- When feeding a recommendation algorithm, taking into account how long a user viewed a certain post without otherwise reacting to it (also disregarding users starting to type a reply that they end up discarding, etc.)
The concept of "web standards" is odd because new "standards" keep getting added. And what's more, they're being added rather promiscuously by an entity with almost unlimited resources, who is also the primary competitor. ;)
I abandoned Firefox because it was dragging its feet on some vital web standards such as WebGPU and import maps. The former is obvious. The latter is such a massive quality of life improvement for devs (makes build systems obsolete) that I simply could no longer care for Firefox which ignored it for the longest time.
That's literally the process. TC39 in particular requires two real world implementations to exist before some new feature becomes a formalized part of the standards.
Several proposals backed by "the primary competitor" failed to get through the process, or were radically changed to make other implementors happy.
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