Alternatively we can have a committee distribute attention over things that are useful to the country/humanity/the economy etc.(can't think of the right word) Say, if someone next door is looking for an employee with exactly your expertise and experience and they are willing to pay for it the job offer is worthy of being at the top of your feed.
That the person might not like seeing the perfect offer is less important than filling the hole in the economy.
The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search.
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.
We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
This resonates with me. I record every purchase I make and every bill I pay in a budgeting app. 90% of the process is automated. So, there's very little I have to do once the budget categories, the goals and limits are set. The system works for me, it gives me certainty and peace of mind with very little effort. Yet, every relative and friend that hears about it treats me as a freak despite them being the ones complaining about money and not knowing "where the money goes every month". It's a lost cause.
Pairs up with my EU and Revolut bank perfectly, auto imports transactions, most of which you can set rules that auto assign to categories. And as they said 90% is automated, I just categorize a few transactions a week manually.
I tried something like envelope budgeting before in excel but didn't work really since I was lazy to manually add transactions, this is much easier. Budegting for a house and a USA trip without worries now :)
Users have to see the value of it. Some never grow up to organize their things but we can do a lot automatically. I think as the volume of things grows you first want
- a flat list of items, then you want
- folders (or categories), beyond that you want
- tag clouds, beyond those you want
- keyword and strong search, beyond that you want
- natural language queries.
Or any combination of those.
(There are more ways to organize/sort but I either don't know where to put them or they serve a specific type of data. I like the file system representation where each file and folder is a box the size of its size.)
Doing some of it by hand allows a workshop with more tools while preserving sanity.
The actual goal is actually really simple. There clearly is an agenda to get rid of any and all user generated media asap. Anything that works in the opposite direction will help reclaim the users executive function.
When creating a software or other products I always jokingly ask myself what kind of people I want to target and what I want to make them into. The joke is the limited room.
Building your own library should obviously be more awesome than borrowing. It might take the user a decade to see it but when they are old those child hood activities are a joy to be reminded of.
That and google had a major interest in killing bookmarks. Bookmarks were actively competing with google search traffic, so they put in a lot of effort to get you to stop using them. Why bookmark something when you can just search for it.
Eh, it's true that Google's incentives aren't really aligned with bookmarking tools, but the magnitude of the effect is much less than you're thinking of. Basically 100% of Google's revenues come from commercial-seeking queries, cases where the user has a purchasing intent before they came to the search engine. All of the non-commercial uses - coding, random facts, research, education, navigational queries, etc - are just loss-leaders so that your fingers automatically reach for Google when you're searching for lawyers, contractors, home-improvement fixtures, apps, furniture, flowers, restaurants, consumer electronics, etc. Google (of the 2010s certainly, but also true now) considered Amazon to be its primary competition, not Yahoo or del.icio.us.
They put precisely zero effort into killing bookmarks. I know because I was there, and probably would've been tasked with doing it. Well, that and because bookmarks still exist and I can still use them. They also put zero effort into improving bookmarks or making them easier for you to use, but it's death by inaction and consumer choice, not by anything Google did.
I don't really understand why they were able to exist as they do and not lose users. I have not had Chrome for over a decade, I use Gmail exclusively for my actual real identity, which I don't recall the last time I used - I can only access my Gmail from a tablet I never use. I used to use Google search, when all other options failed - but these days, google is the first to fail, I literally do not remember the time I used it.
It is a genuinely novel experience for me, to see any sort of ad on the internet - that is not hyperbole.
I am not as capable as so many of the people who frequent HN, tbh - very little of what I do is hard, why do all of you live as you do??
I don't understand at all.
Think of some very fringe group of 0.1%, which you question from time to time how they function/exist/for what purpose. That’s basically how general populace looks at people who go through efforts of de-Googlifying. Stuff that matters to you (privacy, owning your data and etc.) does not matter to super majority of the people, especially outside of the tech circles.
I’m somewhat in-between of two extremes, but in grand scheme of things I don’t really care, as I have completely different priorities in life. Convenience services enable me to focus on those priorities, and I don’t really care about all other stuff to a specific degree.
I’ve been lucky enough to see how people from every walk of life interact with the Internet, and realized the way I function is extremely different. To them, I am the “flat earth weirdo and do stuff differently than the others”.
To give another example - I’m expecting people in HN type about 100 words per minute on average because of our general exposure to coding, typing, internet and etc. That puts us to 99th percentile. Average person does not live like us, nor cares about it.
Frankly I just don’t care that much, I hate Google and llms have mostly replaced the search but after work I want to spend time with family and do hobbies and degoogling is a nice to have that is nowhere near the top of my priorities list.
I don’t know if they did or didn’t try to kill bookmarks.
But on the commercial incentives, it does make sense for them to kill it.
Companies pay good advertisement so they show up first on the search result when a user want to find them.
Eg you want to go to carglass website: you type carglass in google and the company will most likely pay Google to show up first in the ads section because competitors are trying to sway away customers from them. If they didn’t outbid their competitors, even though the customer want to go to carglass, he will click on first result and may end up buying from their competitor without even noticing.
That wouldn’t happen if people had put carglass.com website in bookmark.
Google doesn't show ads on navigational queries because of the potential trademark-infringement legal issues that could result from recommending a competitor when somebody searches for a trademark.
Search for [carglass], no ads. Search for [facebook], no ads. Search for [spotify], no ads. Search for [american airlines], no ads. All of these would be very desirable queries to advertise a competitor on.
(IIRC they've gone back and forth on this depending on what the lawyers thought they could get away with; ISTR when Bing launched Microsoft would run ads on [google] that pointed to Bing. It's been a long time since I've seen an ad on a navigational query though.)
A "navigational query" is a query with a certain website in mind. So like if you search for [facebook], 99.99% of the time you are looking to go to Facebook, if you search for [hacker news] 99.99% of the time you are looking to go to news.ycombinator.com. Basically it replaces the address bar for people who don't know what URLs are. You aren't looking for information about the business, you want to go to the site/business itself.
This a search domain term that means a search query where the user is trying to find a specific destination/product. I don't know how Google search works, but often a search will first go through an intent classifier and then use a different model based on the query type.
As a counter example, a couple days ago I was to install DaVinci Resolve on a new windows installation, so I searched "davinci resolve." Since I was used to having adblocker, I just clicked the top result, which is titled "DaVinci Resolve" but actually takes you to some awful shady thing like wondershare or softonic/uptodown, I forgot.
I feel like, navigational queries or no, Google should be held liable for allowing scam sites like that to advertise. I think there was a trending HN post recently on that front.
> As a counter example, a couple days ago I was to install DaVinci Resolve on a new windows installation, so I searched "davinci resolve." Since I was used to having adblocker, I just clicked the top result, which is titled "DaVinci Resolve" but actually takes you to some awful shady thing like wondershare or softonic/uptodown, I forgot.
I just tried this query on chrome / android.
This is the first link on the page at the very top:
When people tell me this stuff about their Google searches it drives me insane, I want to know why our experiences are so different. It is regional? Is it OS, is it browser, is it something else? I want to know!
You know your search results are personalized right? If I google something and my girlfriend googles the same thing, on the same network, we get different results.
>You know your search results are personalized right?
Of course.
But these results don't seem to change on a degoogled chromium on desktop, with no google account login personalization, no account logged in, in incognito, using: Ublock origin lite, User Agent / OS Randomizer, Privacy Badger, and using a VPN to other locales.
That's why I want to know, I've been curious about this for years, and nothing I've looked at seems conclusive.
My biggest guess is country or native language, but it's been hard to pin down. I think that may be the biggest factor (with local laws contributing maybe to how search results get displayed).
I'm curious! I want to know the driver behind the bad experiences people are having with it. (I've been using it literally since it was released.)
In my experience, those commercial seeking queries are what google can't do. Many stores in the result ship to USA only, and there's also no good way to compare prices and features.
Are you sure you don't have any privacy protections enabled?
With my normie setup (logged in account, granted location permissions, no PiHole, no particular anti-tracker mechanisms beyond classic ad blocking), I get decent local results on Google, in contrast to basically any other "privacy focused" search engine.
Chat GPT and Claude seem to be struggling a lot more. I suspect this is because OpenAI and Anthropic aren't talking to the local companies here, and they may have some robots.txt shenanigans going on.
> My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first.
Yes, as kids probably always did since the invention of the children's room. The usual solution was to educate - and push - them until they hopefully started to understand the benefits that an orderly room can give you and maybe even had some fun thinking of a good ordering scheme by themselves.
Only in tech would the response to kids being too lazy to clean up their rooms be "oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy".
I remember that, back when we were in school, we would actually spend a lot of time structuring the bookmark folder, making elaborate menu hierarchies. Doing this the first time was fun.
The problem was, this lasted about until the first time the PC had to be reinstalled or someone switched the browser or something else caused the bookmarks menu to be lost. Redoing all that stuff after it got wiped was much more of a chore than doing it initially.
But this would be my takeaway here: If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do - and for the love of everything, threat the resulting bookmark trees, settings files etc as critical data that has to be synced, backed-up etc. If it has to be redone after a few updates or a crash, then no one will use it.
(Incidentally, tech companies have absolutely no problem "educating" their users if the behavior is something they care about. I'm pretty sure, no product or marketing person ever said "oh well, it sure would be nice if all our users made accounts or installed our app, but they're far too lazy for that, so that's a nonstarter...")
>If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do
This is akin to telling parents that if they want to their children to clean their rooms, you should make it easy and convenient to do. Obviously this is non-sensical: if you make a mess it might be hard and inconvenient work. Thats why kids don't do it!
I find some tech criticisms to be simply inane; the tech companies are not going to absorb the costs of educating users or fixing unworkable strategies. Not because Bezos needs to buy another yacht, but because the companies that try to do that all die before they get big. There is a giant graveyard of startups who have tried to be the "responsible and patient parent", and they have all died. Users don't want to put up with it, and if given the option will run to the company that just handles everything for them with a subscription fee or reselling their data.
> This is akin to telling parents that if they want to their children to clean their rooms, you should make it easy and convenient to do. Obviously this is non-sensical [...]
Doing exactly that, by coming in and helping them with it (initially doing most of the work) as they get into the habit if it being a regular task, actually seems to work pretty well (at least, in the n=1 experiment conducted with my son).
Not sure what the basis for “obviously non-sensical” is, other than the (very common) fetishization of struggle.
Yeah, imo the only way this is changing at all is if for some reason organization is inherent to the value offered. I guess Notion kinda did that, Obsidian too.
Organization (like other hard / unpleasant things) is something that people will do if 1) it helps them and 2) there's no other way.
What tech companies understand well is that if a competitor takes away people's pain and you don't, people will use that competitor.
It was technically possible to copy mp3s one by one to a USB mp3 player, and many people did if they had no other options, but marking an artist in iTunes for sync was a lot easier, so consumers preferred iPods. And managing syncing and purchasing itself was a chore, which Spotify proved was entirely unnecessary to the music listening experience for most people.
Sure, there's a small but loud minority for whom the process of purchasing / organizing music itself is enjoyable, and that minority will often try to push their views on everybody else, but the majority of the population wants a "magic box" where they can type "Taylor Swift" and get Taylor Swift music to play. Or they just want "radio, but without the battery drain, commercials, useless yapping and inability to skip songs they don't like."
> oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy
Volume makes all the difference. If you could only visit sites you bookmarked first and you had only say 200 bookmark limit, you’d keep your bookmarks in perfect order.
That’s an occupant completely ridiculous proposition in 2024; in 2027 you’ll only need to bookmark the AI chatbot services you pay for, because the rest of the internet will become completely unusable by humans.
I don't use bookmarks because what's the point in saving a link to something.
Am I going to scroll through and find it later? Barely functions with text search due to only minimal metadata (maybe a title).
Worse still, I used to use bookmarks for things I wanted to return to, but now they're all dead links pretty much.. so now I have to go through and get disappointed because something interesting has now gone.
I have an obsession with record keeping and sorting and categorization. Problem is, I don't actually have the patience to categorize because its often multi dimensional and analog versions of categorizing only allow for single dimension (you cant put a document in more than one folder for example)
Now I have LLMs build me tiny apps that let me upload docs and images with local processing and human verification.
But categorizing is fine if you can put multiple categories on things. That's the whole difference between flexible tagging and rigid folder, i.e. the one thing GMail got right vs. the real world analog of a folder.
The real world solves it too btw. in the same way a relational database did: Indexes ;) Tagging is nothing but different indexes of the same underlying thing. Be it a book or an email or whatever else.
And this top level comment is actually weird to me. Maybe I'm just a non-Chrome-user? I use Firefox. I never bookmark anything any longer. I literally just know what to type to get to what I need to from the history. Like HN. I literally just type n into a new tab and HN is the first suggestion based on how often/recently I went here. No manual bookmarking or anything non-local needed.
Similarly at work I just know how to find certain things by typing into the search bar. And it even learns from recency. Our app URLs recently changed and I had to start typing the new unique parts of the URL recently for a few tries until it went up in the recency bias calculation. Sure like I had to scroll down a few entries in the history search a few times. Now I just know what to type to get where I want to again.
I see others struggle with rigid bookmark structures that they can't find anything in like ever on the regular though (URL change or not) :( And (at least with firefox) those bookmarks would even get searched too! Of course, unlike history they would have to manually update bookmarks. I really don't get it how people even still use bookmarks any longer.
I personally dont usually use bookmarks unless its something truly obscure that I may want to refer to later (like an article or something.)
I like the concept of indices but a lot of indices i see (like in textbooks) are incomplete. I have to think "ok what might be related to this?" And it certainly is not an easy problem!
That's not the problem of the concept of an index. It's bad implementation. If your index only indexes as if it were a static folder structure, then you have to think exactly like the guy that built the index. If you instead allow multiple indexes/index entries for the same underlying thing, then you have tagging.
Bookmarks are folder structure. Theoretically you can bookmark the same thing under a different part of the structure of course. I've never really seen people do that though, except accidentally because they found something the liked, bookmarked it in on place, later found it again, didn't remember they already bookmarked it and bookmarked it in a different part of their folder structure. In a way they also "tagged" except that the actual bookmark, the thing is not the same. It's a copy. If your bookmark goes to some address that might change while pointing to the same actual thing, you'd now have to update (and first find) a multitude of bookmarks in your folder structure. A file system that has hardlinks could implement "tagging" too :)
There are aptitude tests for those two traits: Analytical Reasoning and Ideaphoria at Johnson O'Connor. You, like me, probably will score high on both.
i had invested a lot into del.icio.us and other similar systems but what really killed bookmarks for me was the instability of URIs and how hard it was to search for the right page based on a title or bookmark name and not the contents. At the time, google was really really effective at search.
Same reason an ATM gives you the card back before the money because too many people would forget to cleanup (picking up the card) once they reach their objective (getting money).
As an alternative to Gmail can I recommend Hotmail? I recently created an account and a nice feature is that all new email goes into the Junk folder by default. It was obviously designed by a misanthropic hermit, but the benefit is that your emails drop to almost zero. It's a bit of a bummer if you had a job opportunity or a friend tries to contact you, but on the other hand, fewer distractions.
Same. My very first email with them was deleted, because I was using it via POP3 instead of logging into the site. I should probably just self-host an email for junk, then I can remove the very last Microsoft thing in my life.
> most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.
Yes, and that's IMO perfectly understandable. What was that greeting card text? "A clean apartment is a sign of a wasted life."
Not from the US, we didn't have "balancing the checkbook" over here, but watching my parents and grandparents, and trying to mimic them growing up, I have a distinct impression that all that bookkeeping - from budgeting to gas refills to blood pressure measuerments (which my grandfather did diligently in his final decade of life) - was done as much of immediate necessity as it was of habit.
People did their book-keeping by hand because there was no external authoritative source to track it for them, but also because they needed to know - there were consequences for not knowing some numbers or their history on-demand. As soon as either becomes false, people stop. Very few people I know "keep books" for their individual spending - and it's not because auto-pay, it's because the bank gives you that information for free, effortlessly, in near real-time. The bank is now the authoritative source of how much money you have.
(That's the "external authoritative source". Auto-pay is a masssive QoL improver, but it's a consequence, not cause. The cause here is achieving "not really needing to know" by keeping your earnings higher than spendings. Then you literally don't need to care about money day-to-day, and only check balance when you're planning larger purchases - and only then, manually paying bills becomes "a sign of a wasted life".)
> A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
That's a problem - but zooming out a bit, back to "bookmarks", the problem is that sometimes you need to do some book-keeping yourself - you may have your own reasons to need to know, and there is no authority other than you. Unfortunately, it turns out, modern software is then useless, because it doesn't stop at not requiring users to keep things tidy - it purposefully doesn't ship the necessary tools and affordances to keep things tidy.
I think bookmarks, files, and folders (to nostrademons point) is too coarse an abstraction for different organization domains. Music ks a good example. Most people want to organize by album, artist, year, genre, or song title. Files and folders or bookmark trees can mimic that structure but can't replace it. I like to order my photos by outing or by subject.
In either cases while you can reify your organizational system into files and folders it's just inferior to a personal classification system.
I think the best approach is still files with embedded metadata (eg. EXIF for images/videos, ID3v2 for MP3s, resource forks in classic MacOS apps). That way you store, organize, and move around the content as a unit, and then you can display it in whatever way you want. And you can write new apps to display things differently as consumer tastes change.
Personal classification is key, I guess, because your two examples are alien to me.
> Music ks a good example. Most people want to organize by album, artist, year, genre, or song title.
I assumed this is because that's what software is limited to, and people cope, and the only people who really organize like that were the record stores owners. Because personally, this in no way even resembling how I think of my music collection, or how I pick what to listen to.
For me it's usually by theme, personal "feels like they belong together" connection, causal relationships (e.g. music from the same trip I went to in high school), or artist but defined loosely, I.e. tolerant of the fact that artists collaborate and perform together.
> I like to order my photos by outing or by subject.
Outing, yes, but by-subject is alien to me. Most of my photos have exactly zero people, or anywhere from 2 to 20+. Single subject photos are oddity, and I rarely feel the need to organize by them. Events, then by date, then maybe by location.
In both cases search turns out to be the answer, but with photos it's phenomenally unreliable due to vendor fucking with or stripping metadata.
Apple really got the intuition that files and folders aren't the "natural" way to organize things for most people.
For Office-style documents, there's no better way (except for search and recents), because everybody has different needs and deals with very different kinds of documents. For things that are more standardized, like music or photos, people want to think in terms of artists, albums and playlists, not in terms of some meticulously-maintained folder hierarchy.
Folders have some nifty properties, like good deletion handling, permissions management and intuitive movement from and to different drives, but they don't outweigh the advantage of specialized entities for most people.
I strongly disagree with this. In fact, of the many sins of Apple, removing files from iOS as concept is probably my largest pet peeve.
Most people don't have a problem with files. You learn what a file is in your first computer class day and you're done with it.
Files are not just about organization, primarily, they are the fundamental unit of information. They decouple data storage from processing, transformation, and transfer. It's how we give physicality to information. They give the user freedom in multiple ways:
- Freedom to open the file with whatever program I want, allowing me to experience it however (with a player), but also to create derivative works (in an editor).
- Freedom to store the file wherever I want, both locally or remotely.
- Freedom to share the files with others, via whatever mechanism I want.
Without files, computing is just about individual consumption. You don't own anything. That song you bought? You don't own it, it's some kind of abstract entity in Apple Music. The only thing you can do with it is press play. Living in an OS without files is like living in an universe where everything is liquid and containers of any kind are forbidden, all you can do is open the tap and drink straight from the stream.
Even if you create something? It's locked in some kind of vacuum that Apple controls. Wanna back it up? Pay Apple for Apple cloud. Wanna share it with someone? Figure it out, probably step one is to ask them to buy an Apple device.
I laugh whenever people say that Apple is "easier". The contortions I've seen people do just to get stuff from one device to another even within their own ecosystem.
The tragedy of all of this is that people that live in mobile are becoming less capable with technology over time. People talk of "the digital native" generation but kids these days know way less capable with machines than their parents. It used to be that everyone and their cousin knew how to use a P2P program, to burn a CD, to use external drives. Now you ask someone to send you some trip pictures and they'll just WhatsApp them to you. If you ask them to send you the high res originals they look at you with amazement: files? formats? compression? what's that???
Same! When I started driving I continued the trend until I got an app that did it for me, then cars started doing it for me, then I switched to an EV and it does some calculations that I never bothered trying to understand.
No, I was the kid over there playing librarian and sorting all my books and games by author and year. Legos and Knex were also prime sorting targets, but the real joy came from getting random jars of buttons or beads. Getting one of those shelves with 100 tiny drawers was like a recipe for heaven.
Isn’t it more optimal, from the perspective of play, to have them spread out?
I can see the argument that if you clear your desk, you’ll be more inclined to draw because you have the space. But if I didn’t impose that value, they wouldn’t necessarily draw. They’d just play with something else.
I don’t track my fuel usage. I did once. Economically, I don’t need to. The car tells me my MPG anyway, literally, if I care to look.
Accounts are harder to track now, with fewer physical assets and more renting and subscriptions.
The point you make seems to be that rigidity in the system would bring value. But I think the values people have often exist outside the system. The system is imposing an idea of what is worth tracking or organising in the first place.
Oddly, I think LLMs are quite intentional in their current incarnation. You start with an empty input box, state a curiosity, and go looking for information. There’s very little imposed structure around what you should care about.
That changes once OpenAI et al. start tracking what you do and recommending what you should be looking at before you’ve even formed the intention yourself.
Its better for them to put away Toy A before breaking out Toy B. If you dont teach them this habit, you will spend your entire day cleaning up Toys A-Z strewn all over the place. Children need to learn to clean up after themselves, its a failure on the parents part, especially if they force the other older siblings to be the clean up crew.
I gave up on my book because after a couple decades I didn't have a good answer. Sure I could brag about the one full-up where I got 57mpg, and I knew about the one where it was only 36 - who cares.
Back in the 1930s the book was probably useful because changes in mpg were a sign you needed to do a tuneup early. But back then everybody knew a tuneup was every few months and once in a while something went off in between. Cars are a lot more reliable.
That was the main one, and also in case you ever ended up with car trouble you had a record of every place you had filled up and every time you had the car serviced. It was also financial: you could tell how much you were spending on gas, whether gas prices were going up or down, which stations had the cheapest gas, etc.
Nowadays a lot of this is recoverable from your credit card statements (though again, I don't know anybody who actually does this), but in the 80s you would usually pay cash for gas.
A friend of mine in high school (2012) was required to add to the notebook his parents kept in the car whenever he got gas. I wonder if his parents still do that kind of record keeping now that the car tells you its MPG, gas price historical data is easily accessible, and card purchases are tagged as "Gas" automatically in the banks that I use.
I do actually audit each transaction in my card statements each month to look briefly at the categories of spending I use most. Gas is a category, but that number doesn't really change my behavior. It's just a data point.
I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of all my fillups. Mostly because I was curious about my monthly spend on gas with it having gone up so much. But it’s been interesting to see the mpg over time.
1. To monitor gas mileage primarily. Any sudden decline in gasoline mileage can warn of impending engine component failure. [I haven't experienced it but I suppose it could also warn of a repair error, e.g., if you failed to put a new air filter cartridge in to replace the old one (a major oversight but nonetheless possible) then it is likely that your mileage would go up suddenly. One would have to question whether the better mileage was b/c, say, you just switched to Shell gasoline or instead did something wrong when you recently changed the air filter?!]
2. keeping receipts ensures that if there is a problem and your engine is damaged, then you can show where you bought the fuel, oil or component and get recompense. This is rare but does happen and it can be a costly repair. Examples are:
- bad gasoline - usually debris or water. Can stop fuel flow and cost you replacement of a gas filter at the least.
- incorrect oil change - you pay for an oil change but they don't put on a new oil filter or they add the wrong kind of oil or they add too little oil or they add too much oil. Don't discount the last one: too much oil can damage some engines seriously. I once had a dealer change my car's oil. Prior to service I explicitly warned the mechanic that the engine was a rare model and required less oil than most. Nonetheless he overfilled it. Luckily I spotted the difference immediately b/c the engine ran like shite right out of the garage. I made a freeway U-turn,drove back in, re-explained the car's needs and insisted they drain off the overfill and let me check it. The mechanic tried to cover his ass by treating it as another "crazy customer" but I just told his companions that
a) he'd fucked up and
b) I had specifically warned him about the problem earlier so
c) they'd better keep an eye on him - he wasn't as good as they were.
3. If you sell a car, buyers love getting the records proving that you bought good oil/gas, performed maintenance, etc. FWIW most buyers do not continue to maintain such records in my experience.
I don't maintain a log book and I know only one person who does. But I file receipts for gas, parts, fluids, filters and major maintenance for each vehicle.
It might appear that all this is good reason to buy an EV but you've got the same problems as do ICUs. Suppose you pull into a facility in Kansas for a recharge as a thunderstorm rolls in. While you're eating lunch the facility is struck by lightning and the transient currents fry one or more parts on you EV. The recharge station is unlikely to be willing to pay your repairs unless you have proof you were there during a malfunction.
I did this for a couple of years but after my mileage didn't budge regardless of summer/winter/car age/mechanical work I got bored and stopped recording :-)
These apologetic “no fan of musk”, “before Elon became crazy” are tiresome.
You got a Tesla, just own it.
We liked the guy when he started that electric car thing, now it’s different but he’s no mass murderer.
I'm not apologizing for having a Tesla, I just want it to be clear that I'm not an Elon fan boy. You don't have to go far on the internet to find people praising Tesla cars for things that are not really that impressive. When Cybercab launched there were people who were making memes that cybercab was the "cool" robotaxi because there weren't sensors everywhere like Waymo.
But it's also important to not let fanboyism cloud judgment. Tesla has great software.
The "www" browser still compiles without errors today along with an assortment of other utilties. I use these with a TLS forward proxy
I use the W3C programs to retrieve HTML but not to view it. For reading HTML I use a contemporary text-only browser
"www" is a 671.0K static binary for me
I'm a text-only browser user for 30+ years so I'm probably biased in favor of text. I routinely save HTML pages from webites I find useful, almost always as plain text. No resources. This makes sesnse for me because plain text is how I search and consume information. Firefox and other popular browsers generally do not save pages as plain text, they have always attempted to save as HTML along with page resources. But I'm not interested in images, fonts, CSS, Javascript, etc. Today I notice some people writing headlless browsers, like h5i, now output pages as markdown or some "machine-readable" format
W3C's Amaya browser [1] was as much an editor as it was a browser. Production and consumption were supposed to be symmetrical. This was the promise of the web.
Instead we turned it into a worse version of television, where you still only consume passively what is fed to you while being watched and analysed.
I just discovered https://hister.org/ (I think from a link here on hacker news) ... it solves the full text history search really really well.
- Local go server to index everything into sqlite or postgres
- browser extension to send the DOM for indexing.
- This happens after each page is finished rendering, so client side rendering doesn't break, and it doesn't require fetching the url a second time on the back-end.
- Filter rules to control what gets indexed (basic url regex patterns, nothing too fancy)
- Text-based query interface for terminal dwellers like me.
- Local file indexing that actually works well so that you can search your history and your documents in one place.
- Custom extractors for understanding specific sites and file formats.
It's really great, just about perfect for my needs.
I tried it after seeing that link here and it's been really useful. I happened to find myself in the type of situation where I'd need such a system after a couple days and it managed to keep the (volatile) info I wanted. Good stuff!
Back in 2012 I switched almost entirely from bookmarking to web clipping into Evernote, which has been great. Evernote itself has gone downhill, and at some point soon I'll probably migrate my collection to Obsidian (which has its own web clipper), but I'm still a big advocate of the general practice. It is indeed great to have a searchable record of stuff you've bookmarked vs just a tree of links that you'll soon forget exist.
I have a wallabag setup for my interesting bookmarks, and it downloads and indexes the contents of these bookmarks.
I read the contents later in a PocketBook, free of distractions from the normal devices.
It is a bit of setup work, but just totally frictionless after it was setup.
Firefox also has Pocket, which I used before switching to wallabag.
Browsers should've had tab groups decades ago, and bookmarks in a group should've gone into that group's corresponding bookmark folder by default. Voluntary tab groups use time at the user's convenience, while organizing bookmarks into folders tend to be a distraction or chore.
I have this with websites I read a few months ago, stuff from 1993 that is still alive is pure luck at this point. Nothing more frustrating than wanting to share a link with a colleague that you have seen recently and remember a couple of cribs from but that doesn't stand out enough in the history to ring a bell.
I am pretty sure early versions of the Safari browser (in the 2000s) did in fact store a full-text version of every webpage in the history and allow you to search that. I even remember looking at the plist files where Safari stored all the extracted text.
I relied on that a lot until one day a random system update deleted all my old browsing history.
I use my bookmark tab. I am not particularly interested in storing a copy of almost any of the links I have in my bookmark tab (why would I want a copy of some Grafana instance?)
I do get that for some people it's about research and collecting documents. For me it's basically "quick access to the most recent version of the thing at this URL"
Your chain of thoughts is dangerous, because once you realize that can you can cache website content locally, you might also want to share this cache with your friends so that traffic is reduced ;)
It can be optional. The owner of the website should get to decide what people do with their stuff. They can provide a tracker and (as long as it is alive) chose if to burn its own bandwidth or point you at a seed. [Dynamic] ads can still be inserted and blocked as usual. Should be funny to make money from a website that you don't even host anymore. Default browsers can also respect legal take down orders if they are published on the website.
A whole different world from posts vanishing into the social media memory hole.
But what if they update the webpage to something completely different from what you bookmarked? Wouldn't you like to have access to the most up-to-date version always? /s
The normal approach is to compromise across topics.
Maybe one should have a finite number of winning votes in a period. Then the majority might want something (or not want) but wouldn't consider it important enough to spend their vote on.
I think that would reduce the sense of urgency where there is non, equalize involvement, foster debate with the barely involved and ofc create a focus on things one wants rather than things one doesn't want.
Who knows, maybe one should be able to spend more than one vote per topic.
> . Then the majority might want something (or not want) but wouldn't consider it important enough to spend their vote on.
Rule of the thumb: everyone will not 'just' [1]
The majority is not a single person that will somehow behave like a rational being that will count their votes and vote only for "things that matter". People view very different things as "things that matter", and the system is easily gamed. Run a few popular, but pointless votes, exhaust available winning votes for the period, then try to pass a meaningful legislation. You will have riots form people who have spent their votes, but still want to vote for something truly important.
And that's before we start talking about whether people should directly vote on removing building code regulations for example. Or whether or not measles vaccines should be mandatory.
I'm just playing with the puzzle. It's not like I deeply thought about it and this was my conclusion.
Votes per period might not work. You could in stead accumulate votes over time.
Of course the proposals could repeatedly go against a specific group. Not sure if you could create a unit of accounting for it or have some kind of independent jury examine the gaming.
I also wondered if the price could scale with the % victory. Like, if 100% votes A it costs zero votes. 51% would be the most expensive.
Maybe give the proposal makers a bunch of tokens, filling a proposal costs x, each vote against it costs y.
The core thought is basically, if people are overly attached to something they will get it but will have reduced influence on everything else.
The only good clue I have for a new or modified system is that it has to be simple enough for the voter to understand it. The single transferable vote is technically great but the name doesn't explain how it works. You have to make up for that with education (which seems doable)
I wonder how similar the result would be if the voter could cast one vote for something and one against. This seems less complex.
It has other advantages. A large election budget shouldn't automatically convert to votes. Doing a pis poor job should probably cost more than a few votes.
There is another niche if you make them several miles long and width. Then can use more conventional construction materials like a concrete shell. (We are of course not ready for that)
We should first build the floating cities. Some old ships welded together surrounded by styrofoam in nets with mud on top and Mangroves, lots of Mangroves... Neptune's park.
If you already had a hand crafted codebase, a ton of miles on it, no real issue for a long time and customers who value some metric of quality then it might be worth crafting things by hand — if only for the bragging.
Imagine, eventually, a large ever growing library full of unread books. One could roam around forever and discover new things.
Might be possible to generate a 3d world using some taxonomy estimate the amount of titles and generate the books as the area is explored.
Like the manuscripts in Sakya Monastery in Tibet and like the millions(?) of cuneiform clay tablets. Vast amounts of data that may contain information.
Today search results are a page full of ads. They can't get away with that unless they completely corner down the LLM market.
I forget the name but I see one LLM chatbox that looked like one of those old world news media websites plastered from top to bottom with jumpy obnoxious ads. It did offer some good models for free. I honestly might even consider using it if I could remember what it was called.
If they turned Gemini into that today I think people would just laugh, shake their head and close the app.
Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%
The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product?
Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?
These bug me so much. Those 20+ minute ads do nothing but piss me off. I have to grab the remote or switch tabs or whatever to get past them. To the point where I'm on the verge of adding YT to the permanent block list along with Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.
Serious question: Do you watch a lot of YouTube? Why not just cough up the $16 for YouTube Premium? Creators actually do get paid more for Premium users' views than they do from adsense. You get to see none of these ads that piss you off.
Look, I run UBlock Origin myself. But that's because there's zero other way to look at any Web content without going insane with videos and other garbage popping all over the place, and even when sites have memberships, I use too many distinct ones anyway, and the memberships may not remove the ads and junk.
But when it comes to sites like YouTube that let me choose between "ads" and "non-ads" experiences... I guess I'm just saying I see a ton of ROI on the $16.
You won't pay for something because of inflation? How do you survive, since everything's affected by inflation? Ever buy gasoline for a car or a transit pass? rent? food? What else can't you pay for because they price will go up in the future?
Inflation helped me kick my junk food and fast food habits. I still buy groceries of course but when prices rise, luxuries are almost always the first items to go.
You expect Google to serve thousands of petabytes per month (costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in raw bandwidth) for absolutely nothing in return?
I have zero expectations of any business. If they have an expectation to be paid then they need to offer something of value. Their costs to operate are not my concern.
Well this discussion about getting YouTube premium is clearly aimed at people who use YouTube but without premium, not people who don't use YouTube at all.
It is giving me 1+ hour ads now based on my view history (I think) and it is actually hilarious. I've watched two till the end. To keep someone engaged for that long you better bring something interesting to the table.
I could call them, tell them I see their ad, ask questions then call again and again and again and again. I just read one may call a company as often as one wants.
Before the ad, you had no brand awareness at all of Liberty Mutual. Now, you know their name enough to call them out specifically in a Hacker News comment. Your propensity to buy has improved a lot just based on that fact, regardless of whether you consciously want to avoid them now.
Sometimes they put one at the start then again 1.5 min into a video and again around 4 minutes. If I don't skip them I may not even remember what the video was about.
> It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%
This is the opposite of resourcefulness - unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.
PS Genuine question: where is the fraud in a 20 minute ad?
Steve Balmer explaining his take on how local governments of the US work was a hilarious ad offering on my non-adblocked device the other day - I’m struggling to see vectors for fraud.
I couldn't imagine someone running campaign like that intentionally but it's apparently cheap to do so. 20 minutes of my time is apparently worth 3 cent. Those 5 hours watching the same ad again and again probably cost the spammer 2 euro.
It's not fraud, more like a cheap ass dystopia. It's some how worse than HP and MS combined.
> ..unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.
You are not wrong but all work and no play... I will seek entertainment elsewhere. My apologies in advance HN :-)
That the person might not like seeing the perfect offer is less important than filling the hole in the economy.
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