So you could be angry at web scrapers, but not at RSS readers making badly formed requests every 5 minutes?
Making it painless is letting readers use the options available, supporting the commonly used standards and maybe fixing small problems (I'd probably space trim that URL for example). It doesn't mean supporting systems that are sending poorly formed or badly controlled requests, regardless of the impact it has on your tech stack.
This is an interesting idea, but like most things it's just going to age.
checking nownownow.com for people in the UK with one, the first 2 I picked were updated in 2021 the next 2023. Then I had two that were this month and last.
TBH linking to a twitter or equivalent social media might be better. Or make now now now a more automatic system.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, unless the content of the page was something like "eating a sandwich" which, afaict, is not the purpose. The article author wrote:
> So in 2015, I made a /now page on my website, saying what I’d tell a friend I hadn’t seen in a year.
So the 2021 pages are probably a little out of date, but I think the 2023 and more recent ones should be fine. I think /now is less a Twitter clone and more like an 'About Me' with only the most recent interesting thing you want to say.
> The majority of people on the planet already have a "now" page, and that is their social media profile.
You might be right but the people who have personal websites/blogs with enough passion to add a now page are likely to be in the opposite camp, the minority who dislike social media
I think I looked at about 6 from the UK and 4 of them had huge headshots at the top which pushed all the information below the fold. Think maybe only two of them were actually had "now" kind of information as well.
This is like a second law of thermodynamics for communication. You take something that's already pretty low signal and then extract whatever from it and republish some slop you generate from that using a model. Models are then trained on published media and thus the circle continues, with everything trending to sludge over time.
"Apple was a far smaller, less significant company in 2001" != "Apple were small and insignificant"
If you were into computers in 2001 you'd have heard of Apple, for the general population I'd bet a reasonable percentage would have had little knowledge of them then, and key to the argument here - far far less knowledge or interest than people would today.
Regardless of their significance at the time, there's no way a bit of Apple memorabilia would have commanded the same price or interest then as it would now. Be like selling an autographed John Oliver photo in 2005. He was hardly insignificant on the UK comedy scene at that time, he had a radio show, was on TV shows. But he was _far less significant_ than he is now
I've often pondered the optimal book organisation, sorting and inserting system. Organising by subject seems a good start, but then you have size to conser. Then you also tend to arrange by space - i.e. you might put two subjects together based more on similar size or shelf capacity then logical subject grouping.
For inserts a reverse-sorted inserting-from-the-back makes most sense to reduce moving of books, but I suspect there's probably an optimal 'free space' value to allow for easier inserting.
> I've often pondered the optimal book organisation
Let me introduce you to an option I recently found. I went to get a book from our (large) bookcase and found they’d all been reorganised based on cover colour.
There's a CMS I use that has a photo search option. It loads in images in a column ordered masonry layout, which when you scroll down adds new images to the columns, so all the pictures move about and you've no idea where you are.
That's mentioned briefly in the optical compensation bit - visual center is what looks like the center, mathematical center is just the middle of the bounding box. Triangles are the obvious example, but even more annoying is logos where you have the ® or ™ at the end, which have very little weight but are included in centering math on badly cropped logos.
It does sound kinda sketchy, but the preceding sentence to your quote mentions it 'has been shown in earlier work' so presumably there are some studies somewhere showing the experiment, links and how much we can learn from it etc.
It still might have flaws, but it's not like they just got people to draw charts and interpreted it as 'collectivist' and 'individualist' for the first time in this study.
> ... Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell [1945–1950], I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this—I don’t remember it in detail, but it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do, A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A. I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person—to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A—and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control. She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1935 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens.
It is not so anymore, psychologists are taught to design experiments showing that changes in an independent variable correlate with a dependent variable. I'm not sure when the change came, but I'd guess that in 1970s it was so already.
*taps finger to forehead* You can't have a replication crisis if every paper is a new thing without retesting old conclusions. :p
From my brain's obsessive make-a-fun-analogy circuit:
1. Our research shows we can count umbrellas in aerial photos to predict future rainfall. This Predictive Aggregate Umbral Coverage will revolutionize climatology!
2. Our new research using PAUC [1] shows the country of Elbonia will become a desert in a decade.
Their first paper on rice theory was cited like 2000 times, so you can check if anybody debunked this theory. I haven't.
I was also surprised to see that this theory has been published in reputable journals (like Science and Nature Communications). So, odds are that critics haven't made strong arguments on this theory so far.
A) Advertisers request content changes before showing advertising is not forcing you to not have that content, just saying you have to do that if you want their advertising. Why support Google's ad business?
B) Here's a spreadsheet of complaints - if we look at this one last entry, it's not right therefore "Google's demand is capricious, arbitrary, and demonstrably false" is quite the hilarious leap.
Based on it's own logic I think I now have more than enough bad faith argument examples to consider this site "capricious, malicious and demonstrably false"
30 years ago all respected news organizations had a strict separation between ads and content. The ad side was not allowed to tell the news side what to publish. either you buy an ad, or you don't, but never would the ad side tell the news side why someone pulled ads.
Manufacturing Consent appeared almost 40 years ago, and it complains about the exact same kind of influence. News organizations have always been highly dependent on ads (at least the ones that weren't dependent on being some magnate's vanity rag), so the reality is that they have always been deeply aware of how to avoid making the ads people too angry with the news they publish.
Maybe today they are more brazen in this intermingling, but it has always been there.
The real difference is back then they would push back: do you want to reach the people who follow us or not.
Of course back then ads were sold in house. You didn't have the powerful middleman who could afford to say no to just you. (there were such middlemen, but they were not as powerful as most ads were in house)
I had the same initial reaction as you, but steel-manning I think it makes sense that they wrote it awkwardly. I still think they're being overly dismissive and reactionary, but given this affects their income they are probably a little justified in receiving this bot-driven algorithmic bad news poorly.
I'm guessing they mean something like, "let's look at the case with everything in the book on it and see if it's valid. It's not valid, therefore this is capricious and arbitrary". For that to work, I'm also assuming that they aren't software engineers and don't understand how ML and Google work. They might even be thinking that there is a human reviewing their site and giving that determination. If you think that it was a human, I could definitely see where you'd find it capricious and arbitrary.
But on that note actually I just touched one of my own nerves. Maybe we should be holding them to the "human" standard. I am abolutely sick of living in the algorithmic world where some algorithm makes a decision about me and I'm stuck with the fallout of that decision with no recourse. I think we need to start considering bot activity from a company as the same level of liability as a human.
> I'm also assuming that they aren't software engineers and don't understand how ML and Google work
NC has superior tech journalism to most dedicated "tech journalism" outlets. Yves et al have been sounding the alarm on algorithmic rulemaking sans human intervention for some time.
>But on that note actually I just touched one of my own nerves. Maybe we should be holding them to the "human" standard. I am abolutely sick of living in the algorithmic world where some algorithm makes a decision about me and I'm stuck with the fallout of that decision with no recourse. I think we need to start considering bot activity from a company as the same level of liability as a human.
I sometimes take on a very uncharitable view of Big Tech and its focus on scale: they want all the power and profit of technological force-multipliers, without extending any responsibility and humanity for what it brings. I don't think it's unreasonable at all to expect well-resourced organizations like Google to invest in mitigating the externalities and edge cases their scale naturally imposes on the world. The alternative is basically letting a sociopathic toddler run wild with a flamethrower.
