Brit living in Belgium and earning an income from building interfaces. Interestes include science, science fiction, technology, and European news and politics
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The deterioration of Google

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This post announcing the closure of Giant Freakin Robot set me on a bit of a journey into the state of Google.

“The End Of Independent Publishing And Giant Freakin Robot”

GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT isn’t the first site to shut down. Hundreds of independent publishers have shuttered in the last two years, and thousands more are on the way. I’m in communication with dozens of other independents focused on different topics. None of them are doing well. They all expect to be out of business soon.

I went to Google directly, on their behalf, and told them about the problem. The message I walked away with, was that they do not care. Our industry is done.

What I discovered was that web media companies can’t count on any of the traffic coming from Google or Facebook any more. Very few, even one that are frugally run, are capable of surviving on the traffic that remains.

The problem doesn’t seem limited to a few sites. What seems to have happened is that Google tried to “fix” their search engine results by using machine learning to rank sites.

From What we can learn from the Google creators summit for HCU impacted sites:

We know that the helpful content system was a machine learning (AI) system. Machine learning systems are trained by seeing good examples and bad examples. They then work to figure out the characteristics they can consider and how much weight to give them so as to predict whether an unseen example is a good one or a bad one.

But this does not seem to be working properly. Anybody who has used Google for search over the past year knows that it lets a lot of LLM-generated spam through and blogs and small sites have basically disappeared from most results. Those sites have effectively been delisted by the machine learning model and nobody seems to know exactly why.

Some have been hit hard. From “I Drank the Kool-Aid at the 2024 Google Web Creator Summit”:

I’m 44 years old, luckily I don’t have a mortgage, I barely getting by, I’m eating at the food bank now, I had grossed $250,000 last year and I just don’t know where to go from here my traffic is down 97%

Even if your first reaction might be “good riddance” these are all people whose work Google wants to see in the search engine results. That’s why they were invited to the summit.

An exchange on Twitter, which I usually avoid but is where this crowd seems to still be congregating, describing a scene from the summit captured the situation perfectly:

Lily Ray: I’m still stuck on “your content wasn’t the issue.” What?

Morgan: So, so many times they said this. Literally Danny hand picked us because we all create helpful and satisfying content. They just cannot get the algorithm to understand that. They are actively doing query debugging based on examples sent by our group.

Morgan: Literally Danny said he sat with an engineer team with examples of people in the room and said why aren’t they showing up and they did their “debugging process” and couldn’t figure it out.

Morgan: the robots are winning.

The “algorithm” seems to have become a black box even Google engineers can’t figure out

The fact that over a year ago ML experts at Google (El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi at least, if I recall correctly) who have since left warned that LLMs should be avoided because they made products chaotic and hard to control seems relevant.

As is the fact that around the same time others also warned that one common consequence of mass layoffs is they tend to turn internal systems into black boxes because everybody with a deep understanding of them has left.

But, fundamentally, what lets this deterioration continue is that it does not affect business outcomes at Google in any way. They are a monopoly and monopolies are extremely effective at capturing whatever value happens in their vicinity, even if the utility of their products declines.

And, given the political situation in the US, the tech industry monopolies and oligopolies are only going to be strengthened and the actual productivity, performance, and effectiveness of their products will be less and less important to them.

Because they know that most of us will not have any real alternative.

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PaulPritchard
18 hours ago
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Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do | Rebecca Solnit

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Americans will be stuck cleaning up after Maga’s destructive streak because men like this never clean up after themselves

Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler. Our mistake was to think we could row this boat across the acid lake before the acid dissolved it.

We knew what the problems were, and we wanted to fix them. The principal problems that got us to this bleakest moment in American history are intertwined. They are the crisis of masculinity, the failure of the news media and the rise of Silicon Valley, and in a way they are all the same problem.

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PaulPritchard
18 hours ago
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Brewers to EU: When all else fails, try beer

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BRUSSELS — A Brussels brewer has just the thing for Eurocrats drowning their sorrows over Donald Trump’s victory in the United States election: A brand new “The Future is Europe” beer that uses Ukrainian hops.

“I think there’s a huge deficit in the feeling of belonging to the European project, which became even more prevalent during the last [European] elections [in June],” said Sébastien Morvan, co-founder of the Brussels Beer Project company that initiated the project.

A group of 12 breweries from 11 European countries, including Latvia, Denmark, the United Kingdom and Portugal, are involved in launching the new beverage.

Named “The Future is Europe” in reference to a famous mural in the heart of Brussels’ European quarter, the beer — described as “hazy, tropical, pro-Europe” — is a collaboration to celebrate European unity and multiculturalism in Brussels, Morvan added.

The recipe for the beer was created mixing European ingredients, including hops from Ukraine. | Brussels Beer Project

The recipe for the beer — a fresh New England IPA, in case you were wondering — was created mixing European ingredients, including hops from Ukraine, and techniques from all the collaborating breweries. People can expect notes of mango, pineapple, coconut and grapefruit in the slightly bitter drink, Morvan said.

“Often in Europe, we’re lacking a little sense of pride and ambition,” Morvan said. This beer aims to show that Europe can be “collaborative, innovative and fresh,” while promoting European entrepreneurship, he added.

It’s also about regaining a sense of pride for the European flag, the Brussels brewer said, explaining that the project tried to “associate a popular product” — beer — “with a project that is often seen as elitist” — Europe — “so that when you think about Brussels and the European flag, you don’t only think about regulation.”

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PaulPritchard
22 hours ago
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Left, right, Harris, Trump: all prisoners of political nostalgia in an era few understand | Rafael Behr

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The digital age has turbo-boosted extremism, and analogue democracy is struggling to keep up

Donald Trump’s record of refusal to concede defeat after the last US election should have disqualified him from running in this one. His criminal indictments should have meant banishment from mainstream politics. His campaign rhetoric – a rambling litany of bigotry and spite – should not have carried beyond the paranoid fringe.

But what use are should and shouldn’t against the brute force of can and does? Things that are supposed to be self-evident in a constitutional democracy have ceased to be obvious to millions of Americans. We don’t need to wait for all votes to be counted to wish for a stronger cultural inoculation against tyranny.

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PaulPritchard
1 day ago
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How can I vote for Kamala Harris if she supports Israel’s war? Here is my answer | Bernie Sanders

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Trump says Netanyahu is doing a good job and Biden is holding him back. Even on this issue, Trump is worse

I understand that there are millions of Americans who disagree with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the terrible war in Gaza. I am one of them.

While Israel had a right to defend itself against the horrific Hamas terrorist attack of 7 October 2023, which killed 1,200 innocent people and took 250 hostages, it did not have the right to wage an all-out war against the entire Palestinian people.

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PaulPritchard
8 days ago
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The big idea: how games can change your life

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To get the most out of play, we should embrace it for what it is, not as way to hone skills or train our brains

A 93-year-old woman sits in a hospital bed. Facing her is a figure in a full hazmat suit, complete with goggles and latex gloves. Between them lie some cards: they are playing a game. It’s July 2020. The older woman, a grandmother, has Covid. She also has Alzheimer’s.

Her move from a nursing home to the isolated ward at the Sahmyook medical centre in Seoul has left her exhausted, confused and lonely. Her only human contact since her arrival has been with the nurses who bring her food and check her vitals.

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PaulPritchard
8 days ago
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