Everybody is blaming SEO, which is true - but Google is also hamstrung by walled gardens.

Before Facebook, most content posted to the web was open. It could be viewed by anyone without logging in. Reddit even uses this paradigm.

But then Facebook started putting everything behind their account login and suddenly, Google can no longer spider a significant amount of the conversation going on on the Internet - and it can’t link you to it either, because the link would be dead if you weren’t a logged-in Facebook user. And of course it’s not just Facebook.

This is why appending site:reddit.com has come into fashion in the past couple years. Reddit, being open, viewable without a login, is a fantastic source for finding people who are talking about exactly what you’re searching for.

And it’s another reason why Meta is cancer: all the conversations going on about whatever problem you are experiencing that made you do a search in the first place, if they exist in private groups on something like Facebook - they are useless to you and useless to anyone but the members of that private group. We are losing our giant public knowledge base because capitalism.

I’m sorry, which editor allows you to exit easily with escape colon q bang enter?

Uh huh. That’s what I thought.

Yes and this is what Starfield doesn’t do. Starfield doesn’t actually have whole planets generated by a shared seed. Planets in Starfield are just unlimited sources of randomly generated playboxes. Since the planets don’t actually exist, they can’t properly be said to be explorable.

For anyone interested in this topic, there is a super great video that explains the difference between procedural generation and random generation and how a tiny amount of data can be used to generate extremely complex things.

But I don’t think they can grab that explorer fanbase again, they are just against procedural generation in general, they probably wanted Outer Worlds but bigger.

I don’t think that’s true. Elite Dangerous is one of my favorite games and it’s procedurally generated. I think the issue is that that’s not exactly what Starfield is.

When you “land” in Starfield (outside a handcrafted city or similar), you land in a procedurally generated box made just for you. It isn’t repeatable by anybody but you. Other people who “land” in the same spot will not see what you saw, they get their own procedurally generated box. The contents of the box are similar (the terrain is the right color, the flora and fauna are the same). If you were to see something particularly cool in your box (although I never did when I was playing the game) - ie: “unusually tall mountain range” or “unusually deep valley” - you can’t tell someone “hey go to coordinates x,y and check this out!” You CAN do this in Elite Dangerous. All worlds, all settlements - everything is the same for everyone, and if you explore through it all and you find something interesting, you can share it with people.

In Starfield, your box always contains an uninteresting/unremarkable patch of terrain and magically, literally everywhere you land, there are structures and ships within walking distance - none of which anyone can get to but you.

There is literally no WAY to explore. Everywhere you land, it’s just another box and it will always contain the same variation on the same things. That isn’t exploration. Exploration implies things that exist whether you are there or not and which can be found by someone if they look long enough.

I hate an open catbox. I also don’t want to directly pick it up, bag or not. So I had to unclip the top and use a scoop, and I had three cats so I did it every day and I just effing hated it.

Did you have the large one? I have a 17lb long-haired Maine Coon and he has no issues with it, but I do have the large one.

This is going to sound like hyperbole, but this thing changed my life and I always love it when I get a chance to share it with somebody. It requires no electricity, it has no moving parts and in the 11 years I’ve been using one, it’s never broken. I give you: Omega Paw.

It requires clumping cat litter, so if you use that you’re golden. When it’s time to clean, you roll it - and as you roll, the loose litter flows through a grate, but the clumps and waste stay on top of the grate. As you continue to roll it, the waste falls to the ceiling. When you roll it back, the waste all falls into the drawer, which you pull out and dump. Cleaning the litter box takes literally 10 seconds. It’s awesome.

It’s worse than that even. Most of those ads are for “Medicare Advantage,” a criminal scam that Congressional members of a particular political persuasion cooked up to allow corporations to be a middleman between you and your Medicare benefits. When clueless people call and sign up because they think they’re going to get free money, they end up getting fucked out of as much of their benefits as the company can extract, up to 20% according to the rules, but who pays attention to if they play by the rules? You probably guessed it. Oh and just as a cherry on top, once you sign up, you can’t change your mind and go back, you’re off Medicare for good.

equivalent to the energy of a golf ball travelling at 95mph

So I am curious about this comparison. If this particle had hit you square on the top of your head, rather than the array they built to detect it… would you even know it? Would it kill you? Make you uncomfortable? What?

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I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Chinese buffet sheet cake? On what planet?

I’ve found this to be kind of subjective. Bing/Bard is more current than ChatGPT but yet I just find ChatGPT to be better. It’s snappier and more conversant with context. It seems to understand you when you chide it for not quite doing what you asked it to do, and it responds in kind. I mostly use it for programming to be fair, but even for other stuff, ChatGPT just somehow feels more… real? I can’t quite put my finger on it.

There was a short time where Bing chat was kind of frighteningly real. Took them five seconds to nerf that shit and it’s never been anywhere near the same.

Edit: I expect this answer to be out of date within 3 months. Things keep moving.

I use ChatGPT every day too. Because Google is being such a shit about YouTube I am in the process of moving away from Google altogether. I use DuckDuckGo for search, which indirectly uses Bing. It’s mostly OK. Sometimes I’m forced to try Google, it usually doesn’t help. But for programming, yeah, StackOverflow feels downright regressive now.

I’m honestly kind of surprised about this news, considering how horrible Google’s results are now.

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Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere.

👍

My attention is all the currency YouTube will ever get from me - and it should be enough. If I post videos to YouTube (for nothing in return) and I talk to people about videos I saw on YouTube or link them to videos - then I am a net gain for Google and they should treat me as such. If anything, they should be working (nicely) to try to get me to want to pay (or view ads) and just be thankful I’m there if I don’t pay (or view ads). Instead they’ve chosen to work at ensuring everyone is so goddamn pissed off at their bullshit that they’d rather make it their full-time job to never give them another dime. Good job, Google! Smart!

Edit: Oh look, half a dozen lectures about how Google has to make money somehow. Hi there YouTube shills, I thought I would see you here.

I’ve been doing this with LibRedirect, but for some reason this past week, both Invidious and Piped are having problems showing video for me.

I’ll say it again: Google pays 5-year-old “influencers” millions of dollars. They have always harvested your data to provide these free services - selling ads was just icing. They still harvest your data and sell ads and they still make the same money they’ve always made - only now they are insisting that everyone watch ads or pay for it as well. And of course, eventually YouTube will insist that you watch ads and pay for it. This is the equivalent of “network decay” for streaming services. This is unreasonable and while there are exceptions to the rule, most people have the same reaction to what Google is doing here: surprise, and dismay, if not outright anger and disgust.

Yet every single thread about it on the Internet is utterly overflowing with people lecturing us about how we shouldn’t expect something for nothing, as if we aren’t fully aware that this is the most transparent of straw men. These people insist that we are the problem for daring to block ads - and further - that we should be thrilled to pay Google for this content, as they are. And they are! They just can’t get enough of paying Google for YouTube! It’s morally upright, it’s the best experience available and money flows so freely for everyone these days, we should all be so lucky to be able to enjoy paying Google the way they do. And of course it’s all so organic, these comments.

Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.

This looks like a great game, but “can we do this? Is this even possible?” I mean Super Paper Mario did it in 2007.

This is very possibly a Google employee, every big company in the world now has rooms full of people constantly astroturfing this shit and it works very well. It works so well that this comment will be downvoted to oblivion. It’s also virtually guaranteed that it will be responded to with a condescending, paternalistic post about how “lol bruh everybody who thinks different than you do must be a shill” or something similar - also not unlikely to be paid for.

Edit: Predictable, but not entirely unexpected. For anyone reading this, use LibRedirect browser extension to point all your YouTube links to a different front end.