Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”.
That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.
I'm not generally for singling out a person and slinging mud at them, but, I also feel like unless there's a real social cost to acting the way these parasitic executives act, there's little incentive for them to change their behavior. There should be a sense of shame in ruining a once good product for career benefits and short term growth. I think the tone is appropriate in that it conveys that this is not a good-faith effort gone wrong, but rather an executive acting in a cynical and reprehensible way.
I disagree. ratfuck is a specific term, not just a general pejorative. and I think class traitor is appropriate here as well. but i get what you're saying. that's the result, pro and con, of the shift away from edited journalism to stuff like ed's newsletter.
Interesting. In the (US) military, we used this term to describe someone who breaks into the MRE stash and steals all the good stuff, leaving horrid creations like cheese and veggie omelette.
“Private Johnson got caught ratfucking the MREs while everyone was doing PT” etc etc
TIL ratfucker actually means something relevant to the context of the article.
I think you worded my feelings much better than I did. This is a fiery op-ed from a personal blog and not polished journalism, so I should expect some individualism on writing tone.
Agreed - I can appreciate the sentiment and the history, but the ad hominem is not really necessary to prove the point and undermines the credibility of the post.
I still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to what I want.
Calling someone a name is only an ad hominem fallacy if you try to use it as an argument. Here it's just used for style. Since the author has plenty of valid arguments, the name calling - which is not an argument - can be dismissed without weakening the actual argument.
In any case, it is not sound reasoning to reject the entirety of an argument just because one of the subclaims is not a valid argument. Doing so is the fallacy fallacy.
In this case, it's true that name calling weakens the credibility of the post for a general audience. But I contend that we might not need need to care. It only weakens the credibility of the post for members of the audience who make the fallacy fallacy, and refuse to evaluate the other claims on their own merits.
Convincing or not convincing such an audience might not be a concern to an author focused on truth, since such an audience is persuaded by fallacies.
Another thing is that if a person is actually a bad person, calling them bad names describing how they are a bad person is actually a true statement and not an argument "to the man". In this case the actual claim that is being argued is the fact of the person's moral insufficiency. Calling them the bad name is just the conclusion of an argument.
The main snafu of calling someone names as a stylistic or concluding aspect of an argument is that it lacks the decorum. If the debate forum requires respectful decorum then an argument can be disqualified on these grounds.
However in this case the forum is the author's own blog. The author has clearly chosen to speak to an audience that can evaluate arguments without being set back by insults - presumably an audience who is already very upset at Google and wants to know which person they should be upset at specifically. In this role, I found the insults were actually rather enjoyable and funny!
> In this case, it's true that name calling weakens the credibility of the post for a general audience. But I contend that we might not need need to care. It only weakens the credibility of the post for members of the audience who make the fallacy fallacy, and refuse to evaluate the other claims on their own merits.
Strong disagree. The intentional usage of fallacious reasoning or histrionic name-calling weakens the credibility of the author, not of the post.
I argue that insults are only fallacious reasoning if you don't have good reasons to back up the insults.
If someone screws you over, you lay out the reasoning for why you're angry at them and then you insult them. The insults are not the argument. They are the conclusion of the argument.
Once again if you see an insult, conclude someone is being histrionic, and refuse to see their actual sound arguments, then you are making the fallacy fallacy, and throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
You are also making an ad hominem against the author - arguing against the personal credibility rather than the credibility of the actual argument. That specific kind of ad hominem is called tone policing.
I agree, but all of the alternatives are no better. Bing and Duck Duck Go are okay sometimes, but truly terrible other times. Google is consistently worse than it once was, but still better than the competition.
I know search is hard to do well, but if Google is truly floundering where is the startup that for it better and not just better for a very specific niche area, but truly better across the board?
I've used the duck duck Go for over 90% of my searches for The last 5 years, as a part of a boycott against Google. I estimate I have withheld about 75,000 searches from Google in that time, or about $8,000 in revenue.
I fall back on Google only when absolutely necessary. And these days I almost never have to fall back on Google (<1% of searches).
When I do fall back, the results are invariably crap. Quality has degraded so much that it almost never gives me a better result than duck duck go did. Often when doctor go fails I don't bother with Google at all.
Even GPT4 driven Bing queries will give better results than Google now - mainly because GPT4 can filter spam, and has gotten a lot better about hallucinations.
Maybe because when I started fiddling with computers (around 2009), I only got like 1 or 2 hours of internet connection (cybercafes), so I had to find books and other types of offline information, I’ve never relied on Google Search or others that much. Even today, I treat them more like a bookmark database. If I can’t remember some specific terms to get to the page I need, I don’t even bother searching for it.
I’ve also started to hoard a stash of links and pdfs. And I have Dash for languages and framework documentation. Too many SEO farms for Python and HTML/CSS/JS.
Consider using zotero to expand and organize your library of references, if you don't already use it or something like it. It does great for PDFs, but it also captures and stores local copies of websites. Also lets you create bibliographies.
I like Kagi. It's not great for images or videos at this stage, but it is good for general search because you can personalize the rankings of the results. And they are introducing improvements all the time.
I use Perplexity (mainly a legacy of wanting access to Claude when it wasn't officially available in my country, but Perplexity offered it & was available here). Search definitely wasn't my use case, but I accidentally discovered Perplexity is a much better search engine than Google or Bing in many cases (and I don't mean that in the sense that people who don't know how anything works will attempt to use ChatGPT as a search engine). Perplexity is actually really good at this & consistently brings me useful results when 2024-vintage Google can't.
Google is still really good with image search (while duck duck go is awful at it), I guess the ads team don't really care about image search that much to try to min-max it to death.
Good point. Replacing with pejorative would likely have been better wording potentially to get my point across but simply having held a role in the past as a person does not automatically associate you with all the sins of anyone ever in that role, so I see it as a personal attack unrelated to the point of the article.
Yeah, the pejoratives were not the argument. They were clearly put there to make the reading /freaking hilarious/ for anyone on board with "Google Bad".
But I wonder if there was a deeper strategy: were the attacks put there so that Google gatekeepers would ignore the article's insights?
It could have a similar effect to Cory Doctor's concept of enshittification. I don't know if it's intentional, but the vulgarity of the term seems to prevent committed enshittifiers from reflecting critically about enshittification and how to stop in time to avoid a collapse. After feeling the insult, enshittware supporters seem to conclude enshittification is a non-existent category.
It would be fun to learn these are intentional choices, designed to sabotage the criticized party on an epistemological level!
This is going to sound crazy, but do you know what the web really needs right now in 2024? A new, searchable directory. Like the old Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ. Just a carefully curated list of trusted sites that are made and managed by humans and for humans.
Reddit is usually very bad, because it's heavily astroturfed and trivially easy for marketing firms to game. Something else is required.
GNU has a really concept called the GNS for Gnu Naming System. And what it was was that each human or org would have their own tld directory, and we could navigate the web through other actors, and they could pass trust for zones on to others. So, for example, I could resolve the same page as somepage.ninjaa.site or someotherpage.adept.site. This way you could create a trusted internet by just trusting the published link tld directory of people & institutions you know.
refdesk.com was the very first website I visited in the earlish-90s. An awesome curated collection of websites.
...and looking at it today, it may not have changed much.
Thank fark for Fark.com and I guess refdesk.com. Classic Intertubes.
reddit has become nearly unreadable. If it isn't puns, bots, bots reposting puns, it's some awful "no shit" relationship advice thread, etc. (no, I don't have an account so yes, I do look at /r/all).
Get information from llms after learning how to prompt them so that they won't hallucinate. Get information from searches by using llms to filter through the crap results. Get information from scientific papers on Google scholar and the arxiv. Get information from textbooks on the library Genesis. Get information from audiobooks on the audiobook Bay. Get information from peers trained in specific domains. Get information by reading code and documentation belonging to open source projects. Get information by performing experiments and trials. Get information by compiling reports and essays.
There are still many sources for information. And it's okay to work hard for it.
> Get information from llms after learning how to prompt them so that they won't hallucinate.
That is structurally impossible, because LLMs have no mechanism of knowing which answer is right or wrong. Please provide information how this prompting is supposed to look like.
The mechanisms include examples/in context learning (ICL), feedback and validation loops/tool using, backtracking/conversation trees/rejection sampling, editorial oversight/managerial correction, document assisted reasoning, and having well defined and well documented high level processes, workflows, and checklists.
So basically the same things you need to do for managing other people while covering your own ass.
You are still very much in the loop, and you never ever use output you don't approve and fact check. But you also give it the references and examples it needs to improve its accuracy, and give it feedback/iterate on problems until they're really solved.
Modern LLMs like GPT4, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini 1.5 no longer have the cascading hallucination problem. If there is a hallucination/mistake, you can backtrack with a better prompt and eliminate it, or just correct it in context. Then, unlike with GPT 3.5, there's a good chance it'll run with the correction without immediately making further mistakes.
Work with it the way you would work with a junior subordinate who can do good work if you help them, but doesn't realize when they do bad work unless you help them a little more. Ensure that it doesn't matter if they make mistakes, because together you fix them, and they still help you work much faster than you could do it on your own.
I think the tone is warranted given the scale of the problem. I don't think we should mollify complaints about products that literal billions of people depend on just because they're not nice.
Nah as someone who spent years getting beaten by wordpress admins with barely enough neural complexity to be called vertebrates in search results I'm going to concur with the author-- Prabhakar Raghavan has been waging a war against humanity's greatest communication medium and worse -- he's winning. He deserves all this contempt and more.
He's at least earned the equivalent of the Ajit Pai FCC chair treatment but because John Oliver and his audience can't understand this sorta complexity without a massive concurrent media literacy push it will never happen.
I have been using Google search for many years now and for the past few years have been wondering if the search has really gone bad or is it just me. I remember the days when searching for something used to bring up a few sponsored links separately and I could go page after page with different results on each page allowing me to access a wealth of information and extending my reach deep into the internet. Now, it is all sponsored links and the same ones page after page. It is so sad to see and the worse part is that I am not seeing any alternative. Bing is equally bad, DDG only marginally better. I hope there comes an alternative soon but I also realize coming into this space is certainly not easy.
Until Kagi becomes popular. Then the same "SEO" bullshit that plagues Google will bite Kagi too. Right now Kagi is too small to make it worthwhile to spend resources "optimizing" for it.
Perhaps, but isn't the value of Kagi that it's user-tunable? If you open a page and it's distasteful to you, you can remove it from future searches, and you can uprank the sites you find useful. Related, no idea if they actually do it, but presumably, Kagi is getting signal from that about what people find useful, and integrating that into their rankings.
If I run into SEO crap on Google, I'm not sure they ever know I hated it and went elsewhere. They see that I searched and I clicked, and they got their money and don't care.
The alternative is using tool enabled LLMs. GPT4 can drive Bing and filter results better than I can, and it hallucinates less than I do when pile driving through spam.
If you haven't read up on modern prompting strategies and still feel LLMs are stochastic parrots, you should read the foundational prompting papers (chain of thought, react, reflexion, toolformer, etc) and update your views about llms. They're very close to being the kind of autonomous search agents that the characters in classic cyberpunk novels would unleash on the real world to compile results.
It's actually made me excited about information retrieval again, for the first time in a decade. And the cool part is that autonomous search agents might become free and open source before the corporations manage to enshittify the experience.
> That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.
I just want to point out that there are other search engines out there. I use search.brave.com and like it far better than google.
I am dreading the day when reddit becomes full of hot posts. I don't know what filter will I use then. I guess HN? But even I don't think we'll be safe from the GPTs here either.
Huh, I would have thought the opposite. Companies at Figma size are easily able to hire talent to maintain a core part of their engineering stack. On the other hand, they retain no control of Citus decision making. Those tailwinds could easily have been headwinds if they went in a direction that did not suit Figma.
I think this is true for things higher up the "stack", but doesn't necessarily apply to tech like Postgres [and Citus, IMO].
The line separating "build in-house" vs "use OSS" exists, and it's at a different layer of the stack in every company. IMO, for most companies in 2024, the line puts Citus on the same side as Postgres.
FWIW, I would have assumed that Citus would be on the other end of the line, until I had to look into Citus for work for a similar reason that Figma did. You can pick and choose among the orthogonal ideas they implement that most cleanly apply to the present stage of your business, and I would've chosen to build things the same way they did (TBH, Figma's choices superficially appear to be 1:1 to Citus's choices).
When a doctor messes up, their patient gets hurt. When we mess up, millions get inconvenienced. You can’t really say one is worse than the other. Take Twitter for example. You could say “so what, people can’t tweet for a while” but among those millions of users are a couple (like the Japanese tsunami twitter account) where lives can be lost if your service doesn’t perform adequately.
I work in financial services — if my bug causes a million people to lose money, what percentage of that million were on the border of suicide and my bug tipped them over the edge? Even if that number is 0.1 person / 1 million that means I can commit 10 such bugs in my lifetime before I’ve statistically taken a life.
Not saying this line of thinking is right or healthy, but it’s just not as black and white as “doctor can kill people, we can’t”.
I believe we are in complete agreement though, if you read through the entirety of the post? :)
My main point was indeed: "While we may not have as immediate and visible impact on people's health, we can and do have significant impact on people's well-being, and should think more consciously on such connections"
I strongly disagree. First of all, in normal situations, you can't "threaten" a billion dollar company as an individual. The power balance there is so asymmetrical that any logical person's first thought shouldn't be "the individual has threatened the billion dollar company". Sure there might be exceptions, whistle blowing, etc. but overwhelmingly, this rule holds.
It is clear that Christian was asking Reddit to buy out Apollo. It was a business proposition. Pay me 6 months, and I'll shut off my app, which is what Reddit wants. They want more users on their official app so they can make revenue. The language he used was clumsy, but it is clear, and it was clarified afterwards. The natural easy response is to say no, we are unwilling to pay, end of conversation.
The problem here is that Reddit seems to be litigating free-flowing language from part of a conversation as part of its defense for its changes. That is not only ridiculous, but wildly inappropriate.
To be honest, reddit has all the justification it needs to do what they're doing. Do I think they're making the right decision? No. But they're free to raise prices however they want. It's their API. But a billion dollar company accusing an individual of threatening them and then continuing to litigate the words used even after clarifications have been made is indicative of a catastrophic leadership failure on Reddit's side.
> But they're free to raise prices however they want. It's their API.
They may not be. According to Christian's post, they told him they will not do that in 2023. Were he inclined to sue them, he might be able to hold them to that.
I believe what's happening here is that Reddit leadership feels like they've been threatened, and are acting accordingly without seriously considering the actual power imbalance. People under privilege rarely, if ever, actually consider their relative power when disagreeing with people in less power than them and have exaggerated responses when people in less power than them try to gain any leverage, such as an app developer trying to negotiate with the platform the app runs on. You can also observe this when people get very upset about $perceived_thing_that_people_less_well_off_than_them_get. I'd list exact examples but I fear I'd distract with people getting angry, lol.
> Is it baked into my (high) rent and apartments pay out?
Yep! The parks, the library, the sprout social, and all the public areas are a mixed ownership between the City, the landlords (UDR, Avalon, etc), UCSF, the State of California, and Union Pacific. Also, because a decent portion of Mission Bay is owned by UCSF and Union Pacific, CHP and DoT can technically lay state and federal charges overriding local government - which is why the very few homeless you see in Mission Bay squat around the library and the community center (it's definitively City of SF land).
That’s really cool! Thanks for sharing. Living here definitely is a bubble, and in a good way. I feel 99% safe walking my dog late at night, and I’m generally not on edge here. And I’m still able to enjoy everything SF offers.
Agreed! I lived and help organize in Lower Nob Hill for several years, and it was a nice experience, but Mission Bay just has a better ambiance and quality of life (assuming you can afford it).
I know some people hate on it for being quiet, but it's only like 10-15 minutes away from other bustling parts of town like North Beach, Chinatown, Mission, etc via public transit or Uber - so honestly idk why people hate on it. I guess it's those 90s rage against the machine types.
I had thought, from the way the article was phrased, that the student was in an active dialogue with his school, and this makes me think they should've just kicked him out
The students are learning about lists, sets, and maps. These are so common that misusing this stuff can lead to big consequences during engineering design.
Hi, I used to TA for 61B. This isn’t an online course though. You’ll notice a small detail at the top “245 Li Ka Shing” which is the lecture hall used.
Granted most students don’t attend because the lectures are diligently posted online on the website.
What’s not captured on the website are twice a week discussion small groups where one TA to 20-30 students work through problems in a group setting. There’s a lot of collaboration and interactivity here. Then there’s the once a week lab, where about 20-30 students go to a computer room and go through an interactive lab exercise.
Then, there are the projects. Every CS 61ABC course is defined by their projects. These projects are the opposite of traditional learning. And 61B has done some of the most innovative projects I’ve seen in an educational context. For example, we had one semester where students grouped up and designed a rogue-like from scratch. There was a minimum rubric, but students were given the time to be extra creative, and we definitely saw that shine. It was a nightmare to grade though, but it was experimental and cool.
So this website is just a small fraction of what the students experience. It’s really just a schedule + lecture directory.
I got that, and it's great that it's public. That has a lot of impact, a lot of it auxiliary.
The key question is suitability-to-purpose. Without the small group work and the collaboration, a web site like this isn't what I'd like to point strangers on the internet wanting to learn algorithms. Without that, something more is needed. Two decades ago, we were figuring out what that "something more" ought to be so learners can be successful independently online. Today, we know.
I'm not asking Berkeley to do that additional work. It's a ton of work (probably a half-million dollars in human time). I'm just surprised no one has done it.
To make an analogy, if someone needs a car, giving them plans to build one is less than constructive. But that doesn't take away the merits of having an open-source car. It's just a different purpose.
That’s fair. I don’t think our 61B is optimized for public consumption nor is it designed to do so. I would not recommend learning DS by just watching the lectures posted on this website. But making this website public gives people at least the option, even if it is subpar. So I think we’re in agreement here!
Once again, YouTube’s copyright system is harming creators, this time one of my favorite channels — EckhartsLadder. Can someone at YouTube please fix this insanity?
That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.