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How many quarters after Q1 2016 till Marissa Mayer is unemployed?
1 or fewer
2
4
Her job is guaranteed; what are you even talking about?
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Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

cat botherer posted:

How the hell do those weird nerds think this would go over well?

They're all massive weirdos who live in bubbles of sycophants and drugs.

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Antifa Spacemarine
Jan 11, 2011

Tzeentch can suck it.

cat botherer posted:

How the hell do those weird nerds think this would go over well?

The most important thing in these big tech companies is getting ahead and getting promos or good ratings. Get enough hack project managers and developers who are totally code brained who only think about "how" and never "why" and you see poo poo like this all the time.

Mercury_Storm
Jun 12, 2003

*chomp chomp chomp*
Yeah there are a lot of people in tech, management mainly, that are desperately seeking to justify their jobs. At bigger companies a lot of their "solutions" get cargo-culted around without anyone stopping to think why we would actually need something until it fails. At the biggest companies these ideas often fail upwards for quite some time just because they have the money to waste.

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

cat botherer posted:

How the hell do those weird nerds think this would go over well?

They clearly think it's a brilliant idea that some segments of the population would love. And in fairness, I'm not even sure they're wrong about that? There are some people who get absolutely loving weird about death. I'm sure there's a whole little industry dedicated to selling absurdly overpriced and absolutely bizarre nonsense to people who haven't been able to get over the death of a loved one.

Ultimately, I'm sure the real goal of this was to mimic famous voices and voice actors, and some marketer just repurposed it for a different audience.

Doggles
Apr 22, 2007

Main Paineframe posted:

I'm sure there's a whole little industry dedicated to selling absurdly overpriced and absolutely bizarre nonsense to people who haven't been able to get over the death of a loved one.

Fun reminder that this exists:

https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/1321955644736303104

Tuxedo Gin
May 21, 2003

Classy.

Main Paineframe posted:

Ultimately, I'm sure the real goal of this was to mimic famous voices and voice actors, and some marketer just repurposed it for a different audience.

I bet the original intention was some nerd wanted to give his home automation servant the voice of somebody he is creepily infatuated with.

Shrecknet
Jan 2, 2005


Tuxedo Gin posted:

I bet the original intention was some nerd wanted to give his home automation servant the voice of somebody he is creepily infatuated with.
her was a documentary

His Divine Shadow
Aug 7, 2000

I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
As if this modern day dystopia wasn't bad enough, Google search sucks too
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/google-search-algorithm-internet/661325/

quote:

Afew weeks ago my house had a septic-tank emergency, which is as awful as it sounds. As unspeakable things began to burble up from my shower drain, I did what any smartphone-dependent person would: I frantically Googled something along the lines of poop coming from shower drain bad what to do. I was met with a slew of cookie-cutter websites, most of which appeared hastily generated and were choked with enough repetitive buzzwords as to be barely readable. Virtually everything I found was unhelpful, so we did the old-fashioned thing and called a professional. The emergency came and went, but I kept thinking about those middling search results—how they typified a zombified internet wasteland.

...

Gotta say I've experienced this many times trying to google for something, particularly if I google in non english I often get a lot of worthless sites that are machine translations of some generic low quality english sites to boot.

Blue Footed Booby
Oct 4, 2006

got those happy feet

Yeah, for a while now google has been next to useless for anything that's not on one of the major site-as-platform sites. Unless you're looking to buy something. Whether the latter is because the commerce sites have an incentive to out-optimize or that's just what Google cares about unfucking is unclear. But when I get those trash results I switch to duckduckgo or bing.

Also I have a browser extension that lets me blacklist specific sites from showing up in search results. Otherwise it's loving impossible to find pictures that don't have stock image watermarks, or game walkthrough type stuff the isn't a literal copy paste of the same two sites.

PhazonLink
Jul 17, 2010
lol if yellow pages and some other local physical info gathers become a thing again.

e: somewhat related, I really hate how Amazon has some random letter name company for all their top results, really makes me distrust the website even if I havent been burn by a purchase yet.
Well other than a really really smelly leather wallet.

PhazonLink fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Jun 25, 2022

TacoHavoc
Dec 31, 2007
It's taco-y and havoc-y...at the same time!

Blue Footed Booby posted:

Also I have a browser extension that lets me blacklist specific sites from showing up in search results. Otherwise it's loving impossible to find pictures that don't have stock image watermarks, or game walkthrough type stuff the isn't a literal copy paste of the same two sites.

Googling is failing me (hah!) but I desperately want this extension. What's it called?

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane
Not that other giant corporations are significantly better, but I've definitely started buying a lot more stuff from Best Buy and other companies because of exactly that problem. It's getting to the point that you can consistently find better selections, better prices, and similar shipping times on sites other than Amazon -- the only advantage Amazon has is that they deal in everything, but that goes away if you can't find any one specific thing you want because it's drowned in bullshit.

Parakeet vs. Phone
Nov 6, 2009
Amazon search is absolutely horrible for just browsing and them pushing all their questionable Amazon Basic products to the top isn't helping.

Arsenic Lupin
Apr 12, 2012

This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.


Furthermore, even if you buy name brand goods from Amazon, there will be a good chance they're counterfeited. Amazon's genius inventory system dumps every single supplier into the same bin. So if RandomCapitals is selling [say] Catface Cattoys but in fact is buying counterfeits from China, Amazon dumps RandomCapitals's drop-shipped stuff into the same stock bin as the toys shipped direct from Catface. So Catface gets yelled at for the quality of their goods, even though the real problem is that RandomCapitals is selling counterfeits.

If a big-name brand complains, Amazon may choose to care. If a smaller brand does? Forget it.

So when I combine not being able to find the things I want because there are so many promoted things on the page, the dreadful treatment of workers, and the overwhelming amount of drop-shipped Chinese crap, I, too, look elsewhere if I possibly can.

Neo Rasa
Mar 8, 2007
Everyone should play DUKE games.

:dukedog:

Blue Footed Booby posted:

Also I have a browser extension that lets me blacklist specific sites from showing up in search results. Otherwise it's loving impossible to find pictures that don't have stock image watermarks, or game walkthrough type stuff the isn't a literal copy paste of the same two sites.

What extension do you prefer for this?



Searching for stuff really does suck now, unless I'm looking for something I already know is on like Wikipedia or Fandom or IMDB or whatever I just go straight to the second page of results.

Ulta
Oct 3, 2006

Snail on my head ready to go.

Blue Footed Booby posted:



Also I have a browser extension that lets me blacklist specific sites from showing up in search results. Otherwise it's loving impossible to find pictures that don't have stock image watermarks, or game walkthrough type stuff the isn't a literal copy paste of the same two sites.

Not to point out another small version of tech creating the torment nexus, but I think Snowcrash or something another Neil Stephenson book had corporations who intentionally put bad computer generated articles out onto the internet and then would sell you a subscription to a filter that would automatically filter out their articles.

YerDa Zabam
Aug 13, 2016



uBlacklist works for, well, blacklisting sites from results.

It used to be that you could remove sites from actual google search results about 10 years ago lol

AFancyQuestionMark
Feb 19, 2017

Long time no see.

Adolf Glitter posted:

uBlacklist works for, well, blacklisting sites from results.

It used to be that you could remove sites from actual google search results about 10 years ago lol

You can still remove sites today, just type "-fakescams.com" or whatever in the search.

exmachina
Mar 12, 2006

Look Closer

Ulta posted:

Not to point out another small version of tech creating the torment nexus, but I think Snowcrash or something another Neil Stephenson book had corporations who intentionally put bad computer generated articles out onto the internet and then would sell you a subscription to a filter that would automatically filter out their articles.

Not sure about snowcrash but Anathem mentioned it as something that had happened on the distant past and I think it was in his most recent book too

Ulta
Oct 3, 2006

Snail on my head ready to go.

exmachina posted:

Not sure about snowcrash but Anathem mentioned it as something that had happened on the distant past and I think it was in his most recent book too

That was what I was thinking! Thanks

“Anathem” posted:


“Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.
“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
“Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”
“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”

Jan
Feb 27, 2008

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

Ulta posted:

That was what I was thinking! Thanks

Please don't quote the Ita, I am trying to uphold the Discipline.

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Blue Footed Booby posted:

Yeah, for a while now google has been next to useless for anything that's not on one of the major site-as-platform sites. Unless you're looking to buy something. Whether the latter is because the commerce sites have an incentive to out-optimize or that's just what Google cares about unfucking is unclear. But when I get those trash results I switch to duckduckgo or bing.

Also I have a browser extension that lets me blacklist specific sites from showing up in search results. Otherwise it's loving impossible to find pictures that don't have stock image watermarks, or game walkthrough type stuff the isn't a literal copy paste of the same two sites.

Is this an American thing? Its still just as borderline magical as ever for me. Like i googled the thing he was whining about and got... useful accurate info, suggestions on how to fix it and links to local plumbers?

Parakeet vs. Phone
Nov 6, 2009
Possibly. I checked it accidentally in Incognito since I needed it to read the article and then I checked it again with my regular browser. Both times it gave pretty bad results. The top one was right, to be fair, but after that it seems to match the complaint. SEO articles from general plumbers trying to rank in the engine, a baffling Quora question about someone who likes to poop in the shower and someone on Reddit who was dealing with a phantom pooper.

OJ MIST 2 THE DICK
Sep 11, 2008

Anytime I need to see your face I just close my eyes
And I am taken to a place
Where your crystal minds and magenta feelings
Take up shelter in the base of my spine
Sweet like a chica cherry cola

-Cheap Trick

Nap Ghost

Tuxedo Gin posted:

I bet the original intention was some nerd wanted to give his home automation servant the voice of somebody he is creepily infatuated with.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAa5NJ5N2sI

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

sebmojo posted:

Is this an American thing? Its still just as borderline magical as ever for me. Like i googled the thing he was whining about and got... useful accurate info, suggestions on how to fix it and links to local plumbers?

Yeah, they tend to roll out the worst algorithm nonsense first in America and the rest of the world is an afterthought.

PhazonLink
Jul 17, 2010
Listened to a Radio Lab had a segment today about some guy that thought his cheeky vanity car plate of "null" was just that and some people with the lastname Null have some problems in the modern era. They also mentioned the classic computer science essay "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names".

lol at dumb computer touchers like the Google worker tricked by a chatbot thinking Da Supa Meta Matrix is coming when a ton of simple stuff is still jank as hell.

Tuxedo Gin
May 21, 2003

Classy.

PhazonLink posted:

Listened to a Radio Lab had a segment today about some guy that thought his cheeky vanity car plate of "null" was just that and some people with the lastname Null have some problems in the modern era. They also mentioned the classic computer science essay "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names".

One of Tom Scott's videos is essentially an appeal to programmers to just build forms with a single large text field for names. Lazy or 'efficient' programming causes so many problems when it comes to names. I live in Japan now, where most 'important' things need to have my name registered as it appears in my passport, which is my first, middle, and last names . I can't count how many companies, government organizations, and services I've been unable to register for because my name was too long to fit into the system, or their system was programmed to not accept the Latin alphabet which creates a conundrum - I have to convert my name to the Japanese script to get it accepted, but then when my registered name doesn't exactly match my government issued ID, it is thrown out or service is refused. My bank card has my name cut off in the middle of my middle name because it is too many characters. Things were a lot easier when I lived in Taiwan, when I got my residence card there I had to also register a 3 character Chinese name and everything just worked - Japan doesn't allow that unless you naturalize.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
There's a loooot of ingrained racism and cultural assumptions that become all too obvious when it comes to names. Of course, institutional incompetence and stubbornness also comes in, like it being a crapshoot whether somewhere will remember or acknowledged a name that's hyphenated or has an apostrophe, despite those being entirely normal and common for Western names, even and sometimes especially old and storied names.

Libra
Jan 5, 2011

A lot of forms gently caress me up just because my parents decided to give me two middle names and I guess that's something that's rarely accounted for.

Agents are GO!
Dec 29, 2004

Tuxedo Gin posted:

One of Tom Scott's videos is essentially an appeal to programmers to just build forms with a single large text field for names.

A drop down list for each character.

moonmazed
Dec 27, 2021

by VideoGames

Libra posted:

A lot of forms gently caress me up just because my parents decided to give me two middle names and I guess that's something that's rarely accounted for.

my mom has no middle name and she's had form fuckups her whole life, hosed either way i guess

Inferior Third Season
Jan 15, 2005

My legal first name in the country I moved to is my American first and middle name smooshed together, and with no legal middle name (even though legal documents have a place for it), because American passports don't have a separate entry for middle names - they just have a first and last name, and middle names just get shoved into the first name box. Whoever did my paperwork just made a guess from ambiguous information and guessed wrong, and now I have a new legal first name.

In the long run it's helpful, because I know any mail addressed to Firstname Middlename is garbage spam mail that someone pulled from some public registry somewhere.

Mercury_Storm
Jun 12, 2003

*chomp chomp chomp*
Just having your last name changed at your own job can be a disaster. Any idea on how many systems will suddenly break or not allow you to log in because your email address changed and it wont sync over from active directory properly? At least half of them, and you'll be dealing with broken poo poo or finding new broken poo poo for months, at least.

I'm sure this has nothing to with women traditionally having their last names changed and tech being functionally or actually misogynist either.

Neito
Feb 18, 2009

😌Finally, an avatar the describes my love of tech❤️‍💻, my love of anime💖🎎, and why I'll never see a real girl 🙆‍♀️naked😭.

Mercury_Storm posted:

Just having your last name changed at your own job can be a disaster. Any idea on how many systems will suddenly break or not allow you to log in because your email address changed and it wont sync over from active directory properly? At least half of them, and you'll be dealing with broken poo poo or finding new broken poo poo for months, at least.

I'm sure this has nothing to with women traditionally having their last names changed and tech being functionally or actually misogynist either.

It took our company being acquired for my boss to finally get her email address changed.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Tuxedo Gin posted:

One of Tom Scott's videos is essentially an appeal to programmers to just build forms with a single large text field for names. Lazy or 'efficient' programming causes so many problems when it comes to names.

It's funny that the lazy option here (one big field, no assumptions about anything) is actually the best option by far. Far too many developers get carried away with their own cleverness when it absolutely does not matter, and their solutions are mostly fragile pieces of poo poo that break whenever any of their "flawless" assumptions do not hold, and for... honestly, very little benefit at this point. If you have a system that needs to store the names of every single human being on the planet, and you luxuriate with up to 1kB for each one, that's still essentially a trivial amount of storage required at the server level. Even at the consumer level, ~7TB isn't much any more.

Fighting Trousers
May 17, 2011

Does this excite you, girl?
And all this is why I didn't change my name when I got married.

MechanicalTomPetty
Oct 30, 2011

Runnin' down a dream
That never would come to me

Mercury_Storm posted:

Just having your last name changed at your own job can be a disaster. Any idea on how many systems will suddenly break or not allow you to log in because your email address changed and it wont sync over from active directory properly? At least half of them, and you'll be dealing with broken poo poo or finding new broken poo poo for months, at least.

I'm sure this has nothing to with women traditionally having their last names changed and tech being functionally or actually misogynist either.

Just the other day I had to go in to the validation file for one of our admin pages and update a list of usernames someone had hardcoded in there because someone had changed theirs when they got married and couldn't get in anymore.

cat botherer
Jan 6, 2022

I am interested in most phases of data processing.

MechanicalTomPetty posted:

Just the other day I had to go in to the validation file for one of our admin pages and update a list of usernames someone had hardcoded in there because someone had changed theirs when they got married and couldn't get in anymore.
Hell yeah, love having little bits of overlapping state in various json and source file.

This textfile is pretty good at breaking text assumptions, btw:
https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings/blob/master/blns.json

Precambrian Video Games
Aug 19, 2002



Agents are GO! posted:

A drop down list for each character.

Some financial institutions make you enter passwords on a virtual keyboard by pressing buttons. Now imagine that but with kanji, or any other kind of logogram.

Solution: allow any Unicode character in passwords, and present the options in a randomly sorted drop-down.

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Sagacity
May 2, 2003
Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

eXXon posted:

Solution: allow any Unicode character in passwords, and present the options in a randomly sorted drop-down.
That's insane! Surely you want them sorted. By code point number.

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