221 Comments

My oh my! We are GRUMPY aren't we?

I disagree with almost all of this. I'm 75 years old with a couple of EE degrees and first got paid to write software in 1967. I've spent a long and lucrative career at the border of hardware and software.

Even though I'm also a recent widower, having lost my wife (and CPA) of over 40 years in 2023, I'm amazingly upbeat. It helps that for almost 40 years I no longer drink alcohol or do drugs. Pro tip: do NOT watch any broadcast or cable TV "news." Read things instead, across a broad spectrum of views.

The performance to price ratio of computer technology has undergone something like a million to one transformation over the last 30-40 years. If you managed to get a slower computer for more money something is very wrong. Personally I'm enjoying dirt cheap off lease systems (mostly Dell) with extremely good performance - especially for the money.

And... I'm using a 43" 4K (UHD) TV that cost well under $250 as a monitor. That's mind blowing as is the price for 4K TVs in general.

I should probably mention that I use Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android after having used dozens of systems over my career (which predates the existence of UNIX!). What do I prefer? Windows hands down for desktop and iOS for mobile phones. [I've had cell phones since 1986.]

As for SpaceX - I am shocked if you don't understand how they are already at 1/100 the price to get mass to orbit and will be less than 1/1000 compared to most options when the BFR finally is flying. Good grief, it's only been TWO launch attempts and looking quite good for the third one. "Failure is not an option." is why SLS costs more per launch attempt than SpaceX has spent in its entire existence. Meanwhile it took SpaceX to get the US away from having to use Russian rockets to get to the space station. Not to mention over 200 successful landings of Falcon 9 boosters.

Starlink is nothing less than revolutionary.

As for Mr. bad boy's other main ventures, yeah, he is a seriously socially challenged person (as was Mr. Jobs) but to actually bring a new US based car company into functioning profitable existence is nothing short of astonishing. I have my engineering based suspicions as to how that's happened but I'll summarize it as realizing that designing the system to make the vehicles (or spacecraft) is at least as important as designing the thing you're making itself.

Meanwhile, even though journalists do, I don't give a rat's ass about the sewer that was Twitter or is X. Completely irrelevant to anything that I care about.

As for how web services are funded. If nothing else, going from a few thousand users to BILLIONS has profound effects on what it takes to serve those users. You have to pay for it somehow. I happen to prefer the subscription model to advertising but an awful lot of people will take "FREE" services that bombard them with ads. It appears Substack is showing a profitable path for subscriptions - I'm paying for YOU anyhow (and others).

And I actually do pay Google (for Google 1, for YouTube Premium, and as a Google Workspace user with my own domain). I am quite happy with the functionality I get.

Over in Zuckland, I've curated my Facebook feed into something actually useful - mostly in private groups on technical subjects. I also make heavy use of block and unfollow. Still, I'd happily pay them for a better experience.

Egregious offer: I'm also in the Austin area (NW) and would be happy to advise you at no charge on both hardware acquisition and more effective use of the systems running on that hardware! Meanwhile, maybe you could "learn" me a thang or to about jazz. ;-)

Figuring out how to contact me should not be very hard! Google me!!! Whatever...

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Thanks for a very knowledgeable response. My first experience with computers was in 1965, and we programmed with PUNCH CARDS! Yes, there's been a few improvements since then.

Still, I see the same stupid glitches today in Window `10 that I was seeing years ago in Windows (*). The only improvements that Microsoft is really focusing on is marketing and income generation. True enough, what can you expect for "free"?

But the real evil that Ted is referencing is the deliberate effort by Google et al to mislead people. I find that reprehensible. We might as well be in a totalitarian country where the only information you get is whatever the government SAYS you'll get.

Eric Brown, posting above, discusses how Boeing was ruined by being taken over by McDonnell-Douglas. The company went from being run by engineers to being run by accountants. Ted Giora is making a similar observation about the development of the internet. Availability of information is worse than useless, if you can't trust the people providing it. And, no, I don't trust Google, YouTube, FB, Instagram TikTok or any of the MSM. The people in charge are not engineers. They are not journalists. They are not ethicists. They are marketers. We are being sold to incessantly. I'd say they have the right, but when you look at what they're really selling, we HAVE to fight back.

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Ha! Univac 1100c!

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Ehh... I agree that we live in times where the hardware advances remain astonishing.

But it’s in the software-driven Internet industry where intense abuse and dysfunction exists, and where a brand-new oligarchy that did not exist 30 years ago is very much a dominant force in our culture. Everything this new oligarchy touches turns to garbage. I can only point to the music industry as an exact illustration of my point, and to Ted’s numerous observations about it as background. Cory Doctorow refers to tech companies’ tendency to ruin everything they touch as “enshittification” and I can only agree.

I don’t presently have time to respond to all your points, but are you aware that every major tech company is majority contract workers that are drastically underpaid compared to their wealthier peers, to do the very same work in almost all instances? Your Panglossian view of the tech world occurs because you’re generalizing, persuasively, from your own experience.

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Well said. I'm grateful for everything Ted has taught me about music, but I typically disagree with his sometimes jarringly simplistic analysis of technology.

The average American online time has more than quintupled over that span (https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/01/23/146069/the-average-american-spends-24-hours-a-week-online). Far more people are using the internet for far more time. I'm guilty of it myself, but there is an implicit elitism to much of the nostalgia about the old internet -- the obstacles to using it directly led to overrepresentation of certain kinds of people and underrepresentation of others. There are *way* more people putting stuff online these days, and a lot of that is because of these centralized platforms that Ted frequently criticizes, which have made it easy (anybody can start a YouTube channel) and, for some people, economically viable. The path from "I can produce a thing people want to see" to "I can get paid for it" used to be much longer and murkier. The current creator system is not perfect, and I'm clearly on board with alternative platforms like Substack, but it seems odd to ignore the kind of things that, yes, an ad-driven internet makes possible.

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You put your finger one something I often fail to make explicit: Back in the "good old days" the people that did get online had to be much more tech savvy than users need be today.

So, if you were one of those "certain kinds of people" you were more of an elite. I certainly was!

Now I see geeks from my generation (and even slightly younger) complaining about how much better things were... without all the riff raff seems the clear implication. And/or without all the catering to the riff raff.

I mean... Having to set a modem # of data bits, parity, and flow control certainly was quite a severe filter back in the '70s and '80s. It somewhat intrinsically kept out the unwashed!

But, like it or not, we are in an era where even homeless people can and do have mobile phones and Internet access. That's probably progress.

Griping about changes in Google seems as pointless as being nostalgic for say... AltaVista or hey, what about Prodigy... CompuServe?

In my case, it's more likely to be nostalgia for how you could interact in the early '90s with Network Solutions as the only registrar. Getting domain names and registering name servers by sending them a FAX - eventually supplemented by formatted text templates in that new fangled email stuff.

Also as a guy who ran IT in 1999-2000 for a freshly minted (and soon to fail) "dot com" I realize all too well what it costs to serve an exponentially increasing user base. It has to be paid for somehow.

I think a lot of the "enshittification" of services comes from figuring out how to keep the lights on and the servers running.

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Same age as you, and almost entirely agree. “Almost” because I have learned to use the X “lists” feature to avoid the sewage & focus on the kinds of things that interest me - e.g @culturaltutor (what it suggests) @houghhough (classical pianist) & some guy named @tedgioia. I have lists for art, classical music, culture, law, history, science, politics & literature. No one gets on one of my lists unless I put himherit there, and I can read posts by category.

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Thanks for the comment.

I dipped into Twitter in the very early days and occasionally since then. But the signal to noise ratio was so low I gave up each time. I never got into the lists but that appears to be THE way to curate the mess.

For whatever reason, I learned to turn Facebook (and Quora) into something worth my time but never did so on Twitter (or Instagram for that matter).

The funny thing is that I go back to the days of dialup bulletin board systems (BBS) where I first learned how nasty people can get online. I also was VP of IT for a dot com and dealt with the days of toxic listserv forums.

In any case, I prefer article length things to a running set of short comments. I love many of the long form articles in The New Yorker and in WIRED (of all places).

From my comment to Ted you no doubt see a willingness to go long!

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Space travel isn't a thing yet. It's still way too expensive, and the only way to really get things cheap is to be willing to break things during test.

When you've got passengers or paid cargo onboard, things need to be reliable. But not during testing.

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Yeah came here to say that. The Apollo missions started with experimental rockets blowing up all over the place.

But Google absolute sucks now. It’s increasingly unusable.

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Tell that to Boeing!

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Boeing is the exemplar of the competence crisis. Their merger with McDonnell-Douglas effectively killed the company. Before the merger, Boeing was led by engineers; after the merger, Boeing was led by accountants. While the rot took a while to fully set in, the 787 and 737Max disasters have significantly tarnished the corporate image.

The book _Flying Blind_ by Peter Robison goes into the post-merger history at Boeing and the 737Max disaster. Excellent read.

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What hapeened to Boeing, when led by accountants, is exactly what happened to the music business when led by accountants.

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Even before accountants took over, cigar smoking men with little to no knowledge of music, with big corporate expense accounts, made the decision of who gets signed to the label. They took chances and signed many artists that didn't make it, looking for that one Jackson Browne, Carol King, Billy Joel, that would many times over pay for the artists that didn't make it, as well as his ridiculous expense account, leased Porsche, $500 dollar bottles of wine. As Frank Zappa once explained.

I see tech and the arts simultaneously getting better and worse.

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As Beverly Spaulding wrote and sang in 1975, "The man drives a fancy car and smokes a big cigar, you got a fine shoe shine but mister you want to much sugar for just one dime." The people that the corps. sent down to the club to hear us were taken aback. Needless to say, there was no record deal in the offing.

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Great tip

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Correct. I also think that the use of Gene Kranz’s quote is misapplied here. He was referring to the Apollo 13 in-flight crisis and a directive to bring home the astronauts alive. He was not referring to the idea that there would be no failures when building a space program.

There have to be failures when developing such sophisticated equipment. It’s part of the development process. But we only hear about those failures if there is loss of life. The rest gets chalked up to part of the process.

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Elon loves his prototypes and blowing them up. I guess you learn some things that way.

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I migrated to https://kagi.com/ a few months ago, haven't looked back

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I resubscribed only to post this.

Kagi is what you are looking for, Ted!

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Checking it out and it seems to be good...Thanks for the recommendation!

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This looks very promising. I will definitely look into it. Thanks :)

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I’ve been weighing giving it a shot. Google is just dreadful.

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Thanks?

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Thanks ... I needed that!

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KAGI is a ripoff--100 fee "lifetime" searches and then start shelling out the bucks?

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Right, because it's better to be cheap and use Google so that they can monetize your data and show you things that advertisers want to show you. I pay $120 US per year for unlimited searches, which is a price that's probably not out of the reach of many Substack subscribers. But if you're looking for "free" and a search engine like Kagi, keep on lookin'!

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What do you think of Brave?

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Brave is a browser, not a search engine. Some other free search engines without ads are http://duckduckgo.com and if you want to get AI summaries as well try Phind. https://www.phind.com/search.

Bing also has search with AI but has ads and promoted links.

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Thanks. I am not tech savvy and do not know the difference between a browser and a search engine

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But Brave is a search engine. It's their own in-house search engine. It's one of the search engine apps I use every day

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Way back when - I used to love technology also. You didn't change so much Ted - the use & purpose of Tech changed. It started with (in my mind) SO much hope & wonder & it has, as you say, turned into a Cesspool of Raw Sewage.

Here's the ultimate stupidity of it all (to me anyway) - a few weeks ago I bought a new version of one of my worn out & broken Microphones. Ordered online of course, through a good company I have been dealing with for at least 2 decades. Within mere minutes, suddenly - anywhere I went online, every page was filled with banners of the same Microphone I had just bought. It was everywhere. For several weeks. After awhile the amazing, astounding & fantastic Ai out there seems to have figured out that I am not buying another one right now.

The stupidity to me is: WHY on Earth would I be shopping for or buying the product I JUST bought ? Maybe in 10 or 15 ears Ya, but 15 minutes later ? Before it even was delivered ? I think not.

And that marketing stupidity ,Greed & Utter desperation to sell sell SELL is just pitiful. This is almost all it is anymore ...

Nuff said

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Search engines are shameless. So what I do now and again is search “Hunter Boots”. And most of the ads cheerfully are boots, clogs, what have you. The ads are the least irritating that I could find. Plain white background and usually a single boot or clog will appear. They change colour occasionally. I bought my Hunter boots months ago but the ads are at the very least not very invasive and I can read whatever with minimal distraction. I can’t beat them but I can ignore them.

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Ha!

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It's Marketing 101. If you made a once in a lifetime purchase, they are sure you are going to become a repeat customer.

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Yeah, but they are Hunter Boots.

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Why don't you use UBlock Origin to remove ads?

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I can’t tell you how many ad blockers I have used or am currently using. Almost as irritating is opening a page and being told I must do one of many many things to my ad blockers and any other extensions I may have on at the time. They all say they good they are good/better/the best at ad blocking and other things and yet...it’s always something. Usually at a time when I really don’t want to bother with the fine print. So Hunter Boots it is, until they change their ads.

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Surveillance Capitalism & targeting absolutely is not needed for advertising. It can be completely stripped out of the internet, and the only people who would lose out are those who profit from the Enshittification of the tech you talked about in this post.

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Unfortunately you are right Ted. I changed my default search engine to DuckDuckGo a while back. As you know Google search keeps you on their advertising leash. They are searching you and your preferences. I have to be careful what I say about Google. A friend's daughter works for them. Her apartment rent is $3,800/month for a one bedroom. So you can imagine what her 6 figure income is.

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I've found even DuckDuckGo has problems, such as with censorship. For awhile doing an image search for the Tiananmen "tank man" brought up no results, which I found a bit disturbing. I now use Presearch, which seems to have less bias, less censorship, and less marketing.

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DuckDuckGo uses Google.

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I think it uses Bing by default but DDG is worse than Google for some very specific queries. It's terrible.

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Do you know if Brave is legit?

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Brave is about as good as DDG

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Brave isn't much good as a search engine, but it's a great browser. It's a lot better with privacy.

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I worked at Google, 2005-2017. The enshitification (not a word I invented) had begun around 2012 or so.

There's a lot to agree with here. However, leading with Musk is a mistake. That's not a case of technology getting worse; it's a case of technology being reinvented, cheaper. The only people putting things in orbit back in the day were giant government bureaucracies. There were never any private companies doing it better than now.

You're also right about Google's search results turning into garbage. However, companies never could pay for "placement" and they still can't.

What you can pay for is an AD, which is labelled as such, albeit less and less prominently. You can also pay for an SEO to try to get you placement in the non-ad results, and Google has surrendered in its war against SEO's. I use DuckDuckGo for most searching now.

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And NASA, yet again, has delayed the planned astronaut moon circle and follow-up landing by a year due to technology reliability questions. SAD!

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I watched the moon landing on B&W TV 100,000 chip years ago. I am simply happy that they have gotten off of the pot and are putting people up there again—or at least planning too.

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Really, Doctorow’s post on “enshittification” is far more thoughtful and wise than Mr. Gioia’s piece, since instead of saying that the companies should return to their guiding principles, he gives excellent reasons why the i electable logic of capitalism _requires_ this effect.

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i electable: did you write "ineluctable" and get auto-corrected?

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More evidence for your argument: If you use Outlook (no choice for me, work requirement), you'll know that they have been trying to push a new version on users for at least 18 months. The new version is so bad (missing key features, etc.) that they have to include an option for people to keep using the old one, which I still do. You would think that when you're dealing with paying customers, you'd want the new version to be better than the previous one? The real customer is the enterprise buyer, not the individual user.

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It's unfortunate that Bill Gates was (is) such a corrupt and efficient salesman. I'll note that he left (sort-of) Microstupid at least you don't get three blue screens a day. In reference to your comment about Outlook I'll point out another truism regarding Ted's "upgrades." The company I work for downsized in 2021 and went permanently remote (which is great for old farts like me, I don't miss people coming in my office and interrupting me, or the commute), but adopted Teams as our communications service; phone, teleconferencing, screen sharing, etc. It was "upgraded" about a week ago, and thankfully, after forcing an update, allowed me to return to the original version. The new one literally didn't work. At all. Progress in the new digital age at its finest...

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As always you're a voice of hope in the dark. I miss the era of tech enthusiasts.

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This is illuminating. I've not had the experience yet of a new computer performing worse than the old. Typically the battery stopped holding power or the processing speed slowed down, and the new model was demonstrably better. If that has reversed, it's truly alarming.

But the quality of search results is perhaps the most troubling. I have not read deeply into the causes for that, but it is useful to know that it goes beyond the irritating "sponsored" results at the top of a search. 3x this week I've failed at finding information I was looking for via Google. This may well be the explanation.

Incidentally, I came of age right when DOS-based email was popularized. Juno, Hotmail, and then Google were all significant innovations then. Strange to see the downward arc in my own liftetime.

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The degradation of search engine performance is not ACCIDENTAL nor was it UNPLANNED.

Our mass media serves the interests of their oligarch ownership, not some ideal of well informed plebians who might well be difficult to buffalo into the most profitable belief system.

Corrupting the catalogue and prejudicing any "little people" web search was the easiest way to achieve full spectrum dominance in our information (warfare) centric age. Don't like it? Found your own chapter of "The Librarians Temporal".

https://www.amazon.com/Splendid-Apocalypse-Earth-Cybertank-Adventure/dp/098529566X?asin=098529566X&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

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I thought your comment was amusing but then I checked out your link to “Splendid Apocalypse: The Fall of Old Earth — An “Old Guy” Cybertank Adventure. $5 for the paperback version! I read the first page and I was absolutely agog! Riveting! I knew this would be a treat when I read the chapter’s subheading, “Never believe your own propaganda. It will be your downfall!” MegaHitler 24th century to the present.

So few people write good science fiction anymore.

Damn those oligarchs, eh?

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@HL Gazes

And you have not even got to the red wine, home made guns and genocide!

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Good. I like red wine. 😉

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"The first duty of a wine is to be RED"

"The data is Holy, but the catalogue is SACRED"

On this rock, shall we found our Kingdom?

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The thing about driver-less cars that bothers me is not the success or failure of the technology. It's that the question "Should we?" was not asked, as a society. Technology was applied to an industry that works pretty well to begin with, and more importantly, employs actual people to do the work. Does it always have to be about maximizing corporate profit, or can we respect the dignity of work, and not go out of our way to take away opportunities for people to make a living? I feel the same way about the use of robotics in manufacturing. Sure, it's pretty slick, but what's the cost to our society in the long run?

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Tens of thousands of needless deaths annually doesn't seem like "works pretty well" to me. I think there's huge potential in autonomous vehicles if we can solve a bundle of non-trivial challenges.

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But we are never asked as a bunch of human primates congregated in a society.

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You seem to think that we live in a democracy, where everyone gets to vote on something. We don't. And this is a good thing,

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When I need a good plumber or electrician, I've gone back to the pre-Internet practice of looking in the paper yellow pages or toddling down to the mom-&-pop hardware store and getting a few business cards. If I use the search engines, they will not give me the best local providers, but the highest payers, so I get a company with a large fleet of trucks and tradesmen who are constantly looking for ways to upsell me. Even the yellow pages site gives me results like that. So I've gone back to paper.

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The very best tradespeople I’ve found are from personal referrals, and seldom show up online at all. I agree that a random selection from a paper list is probably better on average than search or online reviews (both just ads biased toward big companies).

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Yelp can help also. But their search functionality has always been awful.

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I've found Yelp to be one of the worst resources.

Once I met a boy with a broken leg, and his mother told me it had been broken at Brazilian so-called jiu-jitsu (a martial art that is basically the half of judo that takes place on the ground). Yelp had shown her two dojos about 45 minutes away, so she chose one on a side of town where savage parents were encouraging their children to become brutal MMA fighters. One small boy used a lock on the other boy that his father had shown him on YouTube, and the victim's tibia snapped. Yelp had not given the mother any indication that just 5 or 10 minutes away there were two safe, kid-friendly Brazilian so-called jiu-jitsu dojos where certified schoolteachers and police officers were doing the teaching, not to mention all the safe traditional karate and taekwondo schools in the area. Or the YMCA.

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Agreed that Yelp has numerous issues. But it is much more useful for local searches than a regular search engine.

I primarily use if for MD searches. If I see an MD with only 5-star reviews than I am suspicious. If I see an MD with mostly 1-star reviews, then I know that person is a problem MD. If I see complaints of the MD not being on time, making patients wait excessively, having poor communication skills, etc., I will avoid them.

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When I read your article I had just finished taking a look at a company on LinkedIn who offer data search content they sell by the seat like CRM software. I had the exact thought in my head... search results lately are just horrible. I can see why it will only get worse. I pride myself in using unique keywords to find good stuff, but results lately are worse then wishy-washy. Not only that, but LinkedIn requires you to scan a QR code with your phone to verify your identity, (managed by Microsoft). It's all out of control and I'm with you, absolutely fed up! Where did all the 'open source' guys go?

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And then there's YouTube. 15 years ago, when I retired and started educating myself about the World, it seemed to have a simple algorithm that put videos that people thought were good at the top of the list. One could make progress quickly. Today, there is so much misinformation and deliberate red herrings.

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Because I live in Thailand, youtube presumes that I read and speak Thai and all the ads are in Thai. I skip them, but it just seems dumb to place them in Thai.

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You are so right! I have been so frustrated in recent years by software updates that make products less intuitive, less user friendly and take away all the best features. And also frustrated by newer products that are a huge step backwards from their predecessors. My Nissan has an interior light that automatically times out (turns off) 30 seconds after it comes on and won't come on automatically again until all the doors have been closed for 5 minutes. Why? Interior car lights have been turning on (and STAYING on) whenever a door is open, then shutting off when the last door is closed since I was a baby (and I'm 66 now)! Nobody has ever complained, nobody has ever had a problem with this that I have EVER heard of! I open my car door at night, get in, get situated, and just as I'm about to place my key in the ignition slot everything goes pitch dark! I then have to feel for the key slot to find it. I come out of the grocery store at night, open the rear hatch and place my groceries in the back, close the hatch, open the car door and guess what? NO INTERIOR LIGHT! The idiotic light circuit started counting down the 30 seconds the moment I opened the hatch, so by the time I finally open the door the light has already timed out! You have to be inept on a whole new level to screw up something as simple as a car interior light (something that was PERFECTED before I was born)! Who thought that something which has worked so well for the better part of a century needed to be fixed? What problem did they think they were solving? And what universe do they come from where ANYONE would think this was better? My TiVo, which was the best and most user-friendly DVR I have ever used (and I've owned dozens) updated to a new operating system that after a year I still have to think hard about in order to do what used to take no thought at all. And I have to hit so many more buttons to do the same things too! I went online and nobody seems to like it. So many people hate it, lots of them include instructions about how to make it revert back to the old operating system. My cable company just replaced my old Motorola cable box/DVR (yes, I have a cable box as well as two TiVos for reasons I won't go into now) and everybody in my family gets stuck on menu screens they can't figure out how to get out of. On one screen you can just hit the EXIT button, on the next screen EXIT does nothing and you have to hit the LEFT button to escape the screen, and the only way to escape other screens is to select the MENU button and hit some other menu selection. Exit used to work for ALL screens on the old box. Who designed this operating system in which the operating rules CHANGE for every screen? Did software designers all get hammer blows to their heads lowering their cognitive capacities or something? And doesn't anyone Beta test anything anymore just to make sure it works before committing millions of dollars to mass producing it? Either they don't, or else they do and ignore what the Beta tests clearly show them, defeating the whole purpose of testing in the first place. My friend has an older computer made by a very well-known company. It came with a built-in disc reader/burner. The company updated the operating system many years back and there was no way to use the built-in disc drive any longer. He had to buy an EXTERNAL drive to be able to play and burn discs--even though there was already one inside the computer! Every time there is an upgrade to ANYTHING that I own, I start to sweat bullets that it won't render a great product a piece of useless and confusing junk. What is going on? Do you know why technology seems to be going so rapidly backwards? I could name dozens of such examples. It reminds me of the scene in the 1960's film of Fahrenheit 451 when Montag's wife Linda throws away his electric razor, replacing it with an old-fashioned straight razor, presenting it as the newest thing. Why are things designed so ineptly now?

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You never left a door or hatch slightly open on an old car? If you did and didn’t notice for a few days, then you have a dead battery, which is a pretty bad experience. lights that stay on indefinitely when no one is around on battery power are a bad design.

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Thanks for sharing the problem they were trying to solve by timing out the interior light. I understand the problem they were trying to remedy now.

But 30 seconds is too absurdly short. 5 minutes would accomplish the same thing and leave the interior light FUNCTIONAL. 30 seconds proves itself to be far too little time multiple times every day.

When I carpool, NOBODY can get in or out before the light cuts out on them prematurely.

And having the 30 seconds start counting down whenever the rear hatch is opened, so the light won't come on at all by the time you try to get into the car is just plain stupid. Totally inept and clearly not thought through.

Even one full minute would be a hundred times more useful than 30 seconds. Somebody must have just picked 30 seconds out of a hat or picked a number at random instead of THINKING about how much time is ACTUALLY needed, and then never bothered to think about it any further.

This was CLEARLY never Beta tested or they would have known it didn't work as intended. But they went into production anyway.

One more example of people not doing their homework. Which seems to become more and more common every day. I guess professionalism among designers and sweating the details has gone the way of the dinosaurs.

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I absolutely want to read everything about this, I'll keep an eye out. But you're for sure right about the community element - no one is really building a community (even if they say they are), they are building a thing they one day want to sell to another thing. Even Substack will eventually sell out to another company when the board decides they need a payday. Then this application will be a subset to another aggregate service.

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