I just signed up and used it at Whole Foods. For me, and for that use case only it removes a step of loading the Whole Foods app to scan a QR code for my account.
But have no idea why anyone else would adopt this.
I have PTSD from Google Protobufs. Sometimes the cost of a less-efficient protocol or traditional REST is worth it over an overengineered solution. Protobufs can be fine, but it's largely overkill. Debugging with protobuf was the price we paid for an "efficient" protocol
Yes… It’s even crazier with bread baking. While cakes and cookies are generally the same everywhere with the exception of high altitude baking, bread baking is some of the trickiest skills to master.
For example, hydration of the dough will dictate the final outcome of the bake. Every flour hydrates differently depending on protein, ash content, milling, and so on. So even if a recipe calls for generally 70% hydration, it may be more or less depending on the “feel” of the dough if you switch flours. Croissant dough detrempes need to be hydrated at a very low percent, generally under 60%. The flakiest croissants tend to be made with a very dry stiff dough hydrated at 50%.
And beyond the choice of flour—temperature (proofing, desired dough temperature), climate, kneading/mixing, yeast or wild starters, salt will drastically change the substance of the bread.
We haven’t even talked about gluten formation (especially with regard to autolyse and dough folding) and fermentation techniques… and how the raw dough is loaded into an oven and at what temperatures (deck, convection or fan-assisted, with humidity, Dutch oven, etc).
I am not sure if there’s evidence. But reading more about physics and the cosmos and the events of the universe happening 13.8 billion years ago only increases my faith that there is more to our “random” existence.
Too little science leads away from God, while too much science leads back to Him". So said Louis Pasteur.
I think many of the comments in opposition to this are coming from people that do not have children. Many of those in support do. I speak as a parent of a child, and I think “parent brain” will affect your thoughts on this. Having said that, I grew up on dial up and very low tech HTML. Not social media which is an entirely different beast.
There is a book called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. NYU Prof. Jonathan Haidt argues that the rise of smartphones and overprotective parenting have led to a "rewiring" of childhood and a rise in mental illness. Suicides for both teenage girls and boys are up.
I’m choosing to send my kids to a school whose parents have also agreed to remove or drastically curb the use of social media. Not eliminate the creative sense of electronic tinkering.
I think it comes from the "I tinkered with tech as a kid!" mindset. It ignores the fact that smartphones are about as low-friction and consumption-centric as it gets when it comes to distracting material. If you want kids to learn about tech, then do it in a higher-friction deliberate context like a desktop computer.
Totally agree. I regularly hear that students should use tablets at school as it gets them used to technology they will use in the workplace. This is technology designed to be easy enough for an 80 year old to pick up and use, no training is required! Much better to be teaching them real work based activity & creative problem solving.
As a father of a 4 year old boy, I plan to remove smart phones and pads from my son for as long as possible. He can watch TV or play console/PC games but absolutely no mobile games for as long as I can. He will get a dumbphone maybe with a snake game when he grows up a bit.
In the mean time, I'll try to bring him to hiking, camping and other outdoor activities. If he is very into electronics then I'll introduce gaming and programming.
I'm also considering a no smartphone policy for myself. I cannot persuade my wife who is deep into scrolling hell already, sadly.
That's something I have in mind. Is 6 years old a good age? My father exposed me to games like Alley cat and Bigtop when I was 6/7. He gave me 30 mins every weekend day. I might do the same to my son when he reaches 6.
Haidt is a reactionary who makes grandiose conjectures about the Kids These Days with little real scientific evidence to back them up. He's the same guy who threw a fit over safe spaces in colleges and made them out to be a way bigger deal than the were/are.
At least you have a choice. Other parents have little choice but to send their kids to the same school as everyone else in the neighbourhood. London-based academies are not going to be as exclusive as independent (private) schools.
IMO the problem with that argument is similar to the problem with arguing stopping the kids from touching a whirling sawblade is overprotective - you can let them learn that way, but there is a nontrivial chance they will suffer extreme lasting harm before learning their mistake, so the calculus becomes avoiding the cases where the probability of irrevocable harm is significant.
I'm all in favor of letting kids make mistakes rather than trying to stop them from doing everything, and that past a certain point, your attempts to filter what they consume are doomed in most environments.
But to the best of my ability to judge, not exposing children to unfiltered 0-friction instant gratification for some number of years is going to be somewhat practically necessary to allow them to develop enough experience with longer-term reward seeking to make such decisions based on actual information about the rewards versus just picking the easy button every time.
Otherwise, we've all seen the portrayals for many centuries before cell phones of what happens when you have people who have never had to do long-term planning for significant rewards, and are bored of the lack of texture in just taking the easy hit every time. Cell phones have just commoditized failing the marshmellow experiment.
Everyone’s definition of overprotective parenting is different. But we do know the harms of smartphones. Many of us have decided to curb it as much as we can, just as we want to mitigate pre-adult drinking and marijuana consumption (or at least demonstrate an environment that produces the least harms).
For me I don’t mind her running around in a forest school or climbing on trees. Modern playgrounds are surprisingly sterile and overly safe.
100% agree. My daughter's school in Blackheath has special Faraday cage pouches for each student. Children deposit their phones in their pouches and upon crossing the school gate the pouches get magnetically sealed until the student leaves school for the day. Parents are loving it.
I believe it is Haidt himself who said bringing phones is analogous to a kid in the 90s bringing in a portable TV and putting on a show during class, and no one thinking that it is out of place. Of course it is! As a society we've made the determination that personal TVs and music players are unacceptable in the classroom, but phones, the single most addictive device ever made, is OK?!
My oldest is only 7 right now but I'm also seriously considering middle and high school options for him that severely restrict phone use. We play Minecraft on the weekends, he does MakeCode Arcade coding tutorials, and occasionally gets (heavily supervised) YouTube time. I don't think he's missing out on opportunities to become skilled with computers.
Do you have kids? I have a 4-year old girl. And while parenting is so much harder without iPad and iPhone, my daughter is genuinely more interested in the world and imagination play than looking at screens. At age 2, was curious about the other kids with iPads, but now she shows no interest in screens. And we’re doing fine with static or minimally electronic toys. She has a whole adolescent/adult life ahead of her of screens.
This is about a developing child’s mind and the precautionary principle of knowing with the evidence we have now that social media is extremely harmful to mental health, especially to adolescent girls. This is not the same as outlawing alcohol to grown adults.
Myself, I grew up with a Commodore 64, whose user manual didn't only teach me to code, but was even part of me learning to read.
But everyone is different, what worked fine for me isn't necessarily even a good idea for others.
> This is about a developing child’s mind and the cautionary principle of knowing with the evidence we have now that it is extremely harmful to mental health, especially to girls. This is not the same as outlawing alcohol to grown adults.
Sounds like you agree with me that much of the current stuff is bad. I'm saying that some of the rest is both harmless and helpful.
I had a computer growing up. It wasn’t always connected to the Internet. I had dial up occasionally. But I cannot imagine my child growing up with social media is a good thing. Facebook, MySpace, Instagram, TikTok didn’t exist when I was a kid.
And while the genie is out of the bottle, I want to minimize the exposure of social media. The smartphone experience is shrouded in social media. I want to do everything in my power to put her in an environment with other parents who have agreed to modify their environment. We’re looking at San Francisco Waldorf School. They even have a “computer lab” with designated screen time in the later grades.
There's a reason I was comparing social media to hard liquor (and, if you read between the lines, gambling) — we are basically agreed on the harms side of the equation :)
Right, as they get a bit older, a wholesale screen ban is generally not the answer, we have a ban on consumption-oriented devices, but they have free rein to a raspi 400 with raspbian on it, and kidpix+dosbox/tuxpaint/scratch/other creative software.
There are so many ways to teach kids to code and read that a smartphone/tablet is totally unnecessary. I refuse to believe for a second that my kids are at any disadvantage for not having screen time at home.
Google today feels nothing like the Google 24 years ago. It was magic and reliable and no nonsense.
I understand technology needs to change with gamification of SEO but I get so much frustration in my searching and often have to use Google in combination with site filtering keywords (e.g, site:stackoverflow.com). But it would be even more difficult to use if I didn’t even know what sites were trustworthy ``authorities.''
I just wish somebody would disrupt Google like Google did with search and email 2 decades ago. Searching on Alta Vista or Yahoo was a nightmare until Google came into our universe.
I joined Facebook pretty early on, back when you needed to have an email address issued by a university to join. My posts from back then are pretty wild, all very personal stuff and conversations with friends.
I logged in today, not a single mention of a friend in any way, shape or form on my feed. No posts from friends. No comments from friends. No "here's what your friend liked."
Half of the content wasn't even stuff I was following, it was posts that were "similar" to something I liked or to some group I was in.
It's amazing what a bait and switch these companies pulled. They really leaned into it. Google barely resembles a search engine now. Facebook is basically just a billboard.
It's immensely frustrating, as if you're of a certain age (I am), a non-trivial amount of your formative young adult relationship-building took place through Facebook. I remember having the prescience to lament that this wouldn't allow old relationships to fade away quietly, but instead, through the magic of social media, rot slowly. Joke's on me, it was that and worse.
Zuckerberg and co. muscled their way in and extracted value out of the dismantling of traditional social dynamics and cohesion, and left us with a hole where the scaffolding of youth should have been. Very Uber-esque. Actually, it describes any number of start-ups from the last 2 decades. Maybe "disruption" has a negative connotation for a reason.
I think we just grew up. When I joined Facebook as a teenager in 2008, we essentially had no filter. Every thought, every photo, every relationship update - all of it was immediately shared to Facebook because at the time it was fun and novel and innocent.
For better or worse, millennials have become much more discretionary in what they post online than they were 15 years ago. I imagine Facebook had organic content from your real friends to show you then it probably would, the well's just run dry.
Those in-the-know use private group chats as social media. No "useful" recommendations that tend towards selling you stuff. No trolls swooping in to derail conversations. No capricious design changes. Just simple human-scale interaction.
You used to have niche, semi-public forums. This had the combined benefit of a sustainable culture and moderation for those in the conversation, and an accessible knowledge-base for everyone else. Discord et al. are not a replacement for this.
Been using it for a year and I hope I never have to go back. It is so much better in every way. It’s amazing how many nice features can be added when there isn’t any worry about how it will impact ad revenue.
I got tired of poor search experience on Google and switched to DDG, used it by default for a couple years (resorting to !g maybe 10-20% of the time). But for the last 6? months with Kagi, it's literally 0 times I've even been tempted. Paying $5/mo to be a customer and not the product, having my privacy respected, and enjoying consistent access to excellent search results is IME equivalent to switching from browsing without an adblocker to using ublock plus, or trying reader mode for the first time. It's transformative.
I started using it 2 years ago. In the first few months I would flip to Google when I wasn't getting results out of Kagi. However I now have enough experience with Kagi that I trust if a query returning nothing useful on Kagi then it wouldn't on Google either. I have no reason to ever return to using Google search.
Same here, ~7 months with Kagi and replaced Google search 100% for me. Felt weird at first to pay for it, but after trialing it for a month or two, I now feel like I'm proud to pay for it, to ensure long-levity and sustainability. Best feature for me is probably the ability to rank domains up/down as I wish.
I have high hopes for Kagi precisely because they're not trying to disrupt Google. As long as they stick to their current niche, they can do things to filter out the nonsense and surface good content without ever running the risk that their algorithms become the game that every website must play to compete.
Yet another vote for Kagi. When I was on the free plan it felt like a secret weapon that I pulled out for tough searches. Happy to pay for it now. Now, they do have a similar AI summary feature, but it actually links the sources it used to come to its answer so you can check its work. You can turn it off too. I've also found Kagi staff to be fairly quick about bug fixes, though I've only reported one bug.
The garbage web today is partially Google's own doing. They're the ones who created the incentives for websites to have cruft to satisfy the Google bot. They're the ones who capture all value from news outlets by aggregating and summarizing articles so people don't need to click on links.
Google isn't some dainty little startup. They're the dominant interface (search and browser!) through which most of the planet uses the internet.
Web pages are optimized for the most popular search engine.
If any of Ask Jeeves or Lycos or Webcrawler or AltaVista had risen to the top of the heap instead of Google, then web pages would have been optimized for that respective bot instead.
What you say is true, but it doesn't excuse Google for failing to take steps that mitigate what we're seeing today. All it would have taken was some restraint: some combination of being less dominant in the market (i.e., optimizing for a 90%-market-share search engine is different vs. 60%-market-share) and giving users more control over search results (e.g., allowing users to blacklist entire domains for themselves).
We have a garbage Google-specific web because websites didn't have to satisfy anyone else; not other search engines, and not even the users themselves. Instead of Google delivering customers to websites, Google positioned itself to be the only customer.
While it would be absurd for me to say that an advertising behemoth like Google has no influence on the decisions of users, it would also be absurd for me to say that Google is somehow empowered to force users to do...anything, at all.
Free will still exists. Nobody from Menlo Park has put a gun to anyone's head to make them use Google to search the web instead of Bing or DDG or Yandex or whatever.
> All it would have taken was some restraint: some combination of being less dominant in the market (i.e., optimizing for a 90%-market-share search engine is different vs. 60%-market-share)
So, let me get this straight: The idea is that Google Search sucks, and the suggested cause for this level of suck is that it is so popular that it causes many publishers to deliberately poison the well using Google-optimized SEO. (Or, more simply: That Google has reached critical mass, and that this is problematic for Google users.)
And, well: I don't disagree. That does appear to be the state of things.
But the apparent proposed corrective action is for it to somehow make itself less popular? By doing what, exactly? Sucking harder? Does it not already suck hard enough?
What a confounding paradox.
Wouldn't a simpler and less paradoxical plan of attack -- that anyone can accomplish completely and absolutely, starting right now -- be to just not use Google search at all for one's own dealings in life?
I agree, but I remember when I was a university student I was easily able to search for answers for my queries. I was actually reliving some of my past and I tried to find the same info for a useful epiphany from many decades ago, and I couldn’t find it (even though the same engine gave me the answer decades ago)
Very much this. It kills me when I search for something that I know for a fact still exists on the web, and there is no way of finding it through google. I used to comb through page 10+ regularly for hits for things related to my search, and now I’m pretty sure google doesn’t even compile hits after the first few pages.
One of them was looking at my old AP US History tests. I don’t have the exam question right in front of me, but I remember getting the answer wrong. I found the correct answer on Google pretty quickly. It was on an obscure fact of some former president. I didn’t find the answer in the first several search result pages. I remember getting the answer within the first 3-4 results when I had looked up why I got it wrong 22 years ago.
AltaVista was actually pretty good if you knew how to use its search operators. Google just enabled search for the masses so to speak. A bit like the iPhone of search engines.
AltaVista was great until they quit running the crawler for a few months - I gave up when I searched something and the first 10 results were dead links. I'm told they got it running again just after I left, but I never looked back to see. (there is a lesson here)
I actually remember the first time I begin struggling with Google results and it turned out that Google was simply switching to an answer machine instead of a search engine.
As a long time Google user, I was used to search for phrases that might be written in articles related to the stuff that I’m looking for. I had to switch my mental model on how Google works, so instead of typing what might have been written in an article about the stuff I’m looking for I had to type my question.
Maybe it’s time for another unlearning phase and learn how to use the LLM dominant Google? I’m not sure yet, LLMs seem too unpredictable.
Google won because it was simple. Just type in the text box. Yahoo was a page full of junk and alta vista had a difficult to navigate search results. If I remember, it's been a while!
I'm not sure we can. In 2000 everyone had a homepage that they (poorly) maintained with links to places they found useful. This gave google a large set of data to mine for places that are useful and worth searching for. Not such things are not common and so google can't find the signal as easily. (people share links on social media but that isn't google searchable)
You used to be able to see Twitter results in real time on Google. Facebook, too, early on, IIRC. Google could pay them to get access again, but... won't.
I suppose Google would have to somehow exit the personal data broker business to pull this off, too.
According to this article [1] last month, Google deliberately made search results worse in 2019 because they get more ad revenue from the spammier sites.
I think what the writer means to say is there is a cultural aspect to language for words that don’t have direct equivalents in other languages.
Interestingly, Chinese colloquially refers to languages as the same as culture. For example, Chinese is 中文, literally Chinese culture; English 英文, English culture; Japanese 日文, Japanese culture. The suffix 文 signifies culture.
There is also the word 語 and 語言 to signify language; this is more formal but without the connotation of culture. But my point is culture is indelibly tied to language.
I hesitate to nitpick on you given your surname, but I haven't seen 中文 (or any other _文) referring to culture specifically, as opposed to language.
My understanding is that 文 (in this context) refers to the written language, whereas 語 and 語言 refers to the spoken language. Which is why we say 寫中文 instead of 寫中語. 語 and 文 often gets mixed up, but the nitty-picky-correct way should be what I described.
FWIW here in Hong Kong we have a term "兩文三語" which means two written (Chinese and English) and three spoken languages (Cantonese, Mandarin and English).
