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The core query softness continues without mitigation
Edward Zitron has been reading all of google's internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ's antitrust case against google.
Zitron concludes that Google Search died on February 5th, 2019
Zitron concludes that Google Search died on February 5th, 2019
By Amun, it's full of stars
Enclosed within its rugged mud brick walls the temple precincts at Dendera seem to be an island left untouched by time. Particularly in the early hours of the morning, when foxes roam around the ruins of the birth house or venture down the steep stairs leading to the Sacred Lake. Stepping into the actual temple is like entering an ancient time machine, especially if you look up to the recently cleaned astronomical ceiling. This is a vast cosmos filled with stars, hour-goddesses and zodiac signs, many of which are personified by weird creatures like snakes walking on long legs and birds with human arms and jackal heads. On the columns just below the ceiling you encounter the mysterious gaze of the patron deity of the temple: Hathor.It might not have the iconic status of Giza or the Valley of the Kings, but the Dendera temple complex north of Luxor boasts some of the most superbly-preserved ancient Egyptian art known, ranging from early Roman times back to the Middle Kingdom period over 4,000 years ago. Most breathtaking is the ceiling of the temple's grand pronaos, which is richly decorated with intricate astrological iconography. But you don't have to travel to Egypt to see it -- thanks to photographer and programmer José María Barrera [site], you can now peruse an ultra-HD scan of the fully-restored masterpiece in a slick zoomable scroller. Overwhelmed? See the captions in this gallery for a deep-dive into the symbolism, or click inside for even more.
“members of the Voyager flight team celebrate”
NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth reports NASA. After pinpointing the issue with the space probe, the mission team have devised a workaround. Previously, previouslier, many more previouslies.
"Not-pleasant! I am causing you not-pleasant!"
The short science fiction story "Hello! Hello! Hello!" by Fiona Jones (published March 2024 in Clarkesworld) begins:
I express greetings and most joyful salutations!
I do not mean to interrupt you if you wish to be without company. It is only that I noticed you have been drifting alone for six flares of star-home-past-great-star-birthplace, and that is many flares! Your movement has been aimless, and I express concern!
EPIC indeed
Simply put, there is a *ton* of fascist-chic cosplay involved
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.” [...] “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said [last October], after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts.TNR: The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco: "If Balaji Srinivasan is any guide, then the Silicon Valley plutocrats are definitely not okay."
Passersby were amazed at the unusually large amounts of synergy
G/O Media, the much-reviled owner of such internet landmarks as Kotaku, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, and The Root, has been selling off their assets recently, including ClickHole (sold to Cards Against Humanity), Lifehacker (Ziff Davis), Deadspin (gutted), Jezebel and the AV Club (Paste). Latest on the auction block is The Onion... who ended up with a surprising buyer: Global Tetrahedron, a name that might ring a few bells for longtime readers. But what does the advent of this ominous conglomerate mean for America's Finest News Source?™
Ukraine war heading into third summer
As Congress has finally passed the Ukraine aid bill, hope is returning to the frontline, where Ukrainian troops are increasingly struggling to hold out against a numerically superior Russian force that also has a lot more ammunition to spend. This post has some status updates and commentary on the war at present.
“Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle.”
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.” "It was 2017, and a YIMBY activist invited me to talk about my book Nixonland with his book club, which also happened to be Marc Andreessen’s book club."
Realistic is not necessarily the most convincing
Emil Dziewanowski is a technical artist in the gaming industry who excels at using inventive techniques to create compelling visual effects. His latest blog post, Flowfields, walks you through the process of animating the complex whorls and vortices of Jupiter without using traditional fluid dynamics, using lessons learned from such prior art as Contra's color-cycling, frame-by-frame animation, and the trippy lava effect in Quake, ultimately using a combination of clever tricks to design a "universal" flow simulator that can render appealing fluid effects in just half a millisecond.
That mysterious font is Festive, not Stymie
"One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea"
When you often notice people "why-don't-they-just"-ing their way into a proposed solution to a gnarly problem, you might turn your criticisms into a checklist. "Your post advocates a [( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante] approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work." These templates often offer a summary of the problem space and a glimpse of experts' frustrations. Solution rejection checklists exist for fixing the housing crisis, beating the CAP Theorem, protecting against DDOS attacks, improving pharmaceutical drug discovery success rates, creating new programming languages and distributed social networks, and (MeFi comment!) saving journalism.
Examining What "Never Again" Means Through the Lens of Magneto
Writing for Defector, Asher Elbein talks about the evolution of the character of Magneto, who is (yet again) back from the dead and the shift of meaning in "Never Again," from inclusive aspiration to its violent modern application.
Ad Maiorem Gloriam Concreti
I guess I have no choice but to love this song forever
Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It's strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we're unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we're old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences. The pervasive nature of music paralysis across generations suggests that the phenomenon's roots go beyond technology, likely stemming from developmental factors. So what changes as we age, and when does open-eardness decline? from When Do We Stop Finding New Music? A Statistical Analysis
Our Man Bashir
“ So my editor, and I, would like me to bring Garak into this.” - “ That’s interesting. There is an interesting angle for that.” -
Star Trek’s Alexander Siddig interviewed for Arab-American Heritage Month
Life After Running
Life After Running Athletes are often defined by their physical strength. Who are they when they lose it?
It is not a replacement for running, but to live with a chronic condition is to become an expert at negotiating between one’s wants and one’s capacities. It means constantly hacking away at the richness of one’s life—there is nothing casual about it.
If only your economy room included an escape pod
Little Workshop is an award-winning French studio specializing in high-quality immersive 3D experiences for the web. Their portfolio contains many charming and fun projects you can try out yourself, including endless city generator Infinitown, cute procedural dungeon crawler Keep Out!, pulsing geometric music visualizer TRACK, and Arde Madrid, a multi-scene recreation of Ava Gardner's home in Francoist Spain. Their latest and most ambitious project: EQUINOX, a slick, stylized adventure game set in a failing starship in deep space, complete with a full soundtrack and voice acting in a mobile-friendly interface. Read the case study on their website, or check out their other projects (including the dearly-departed Mozilla MMORPG BrowserQuest).
An emerging new picture of animal consciousness
The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness , signed by 88 researchers, asks us to consider more non-human creatures as capable of subjective experiences.
No One Buys Books
Elle Griffin's report on the testimony from the Justice Department's 2021 antitrust lawsuit to block the merger of Penguin Random House with Simon and Schuster reveals a disheartening truth: practically nobody buys books.
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(Apologies, this got long)
Oh this hits so close to home. Not for me, but for my wife. We both came to running later in life (I was 35, she was ten years older than me and started a few years later when she was almost 50). When we were first married, running meant running to the store to buy a pack of cinnamon rolls to split.
But after we... [more]
posted by gmatom to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 6:22 AM
317 users marked this as a favorite
posted by gmatom to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 6:22 AM
317 users marked this as a favorite
Here are pictures of our last 5k costumes, and our 5k in Juneau. [view]
posted by gmatom to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 8:20 AM
96 users marked this as a favorite
posted by gmatom to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 8:20 AM
96 users marked this as a favorite
As all the search engines fail into enshitification and needless AI wackiness, Yahoo! sees their opportunity and blows the dust off their old web directory that's been sitting in a closet forgotten. [view]
posted by Clever User Name to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 12:09 PM
67 users marked this as a favorite
posted by Clever User Name to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 12:09 PM
67 users marked this as a favorite
i await the cleansing fire
i'd be happy just making these fuckers pay their taxes [view]
posted by They sucked his brains out! to MetaFilter on Apr 27 at 12:44 PM
67 users marked this as a favorite
posted by They sucked his brains out! to MetaFilter on Apr 27 at 12:44 PM
67 users marked this as a favorite
"Man of Indian descent, man of Chinese descent and unwillingly-outed gay man allying themselves with the extreme right in well-thought-out scheme" reads like a modern version of an old Onion headline. [view]
posted by mhoye to MetaFilter on Apr 27 at 12:48 PM
58 users marked this as a favorite
posted by mhoye to MetaFilter on Apr 27 at 12:48 PM
58 users marked this as a favorite
The only thing that's costing lives is the war continuing. Russia's shown it's happy to grind up whoever Ukraine sends to the front for however long it takes for Ukraine to sue for peace.
Cool, so let's give up and let Ukraine get steamrolled. At least more people won't die, right? Because, you know, people in Russian-occupied Ukraine... [more]
posted by Method Man to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 12:27 PM
56 users marked this as a favorite
posted by Method Man to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 12:27 PM
56 users marked this as a favorite
MetaFilter: the room full of old nerds [view]
posted by hippybear to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 1:49 PM
52 users marked this as a favorite
posted by hippybear to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 1:49 PM
52 users marked this as a favorite
gmatom - I just want to thank you for sharing that with us. With me. I don't have the presence of mind to unspool all the ways in which it's connecting to me but please just know that it's beautiful and this internet stranger is sitting in a coffee shop feeling very emotionally full. Thank you so much for this gift. [view]
posted by Tomorrowful to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 6:51 AM
51 users marked this as a favorite
posted by Tomorrowful to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 6:51 AM
51 users marked this as a favorite
It was always conventional wisdom that Google could fuck up as many products and launches as they wanted and they'd still always be fine as long as they didn't fuck up search.
It's been fascinating to watch them fuck up search. Both the speed and breadth of the fuckup is astounding. Search went from "eh, this seems less good than it once... [more]
posted by phooky to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 11:58 AM
51 users marked this as a favorite
posted by phooky to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 11:58 AM
51 users marked this as a favorite
<Moe Szyslak voice> You know what I blame this on the shutdown of? Reader. </Moe Szyslak voice> [view]
posted by Kattullus to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 12:27 PM
50 users marked this as a favorite
posted by Kattullus to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 12:27 PM
50 users marked this as a favorite
Yesterday I might have read that Civil War thinkpiece, but having seen it last night, today I won't. I'm Team DirtyOldTown from our FanFare thread on this. I came out of it wondering what on earth people are thinking when they say that it lacks context or is centrist or "bothsideism". The context for the movie is the entire last... [more]
posted by rory to MetaFilter on Apr 21 at 2:28 PM
49 users marked this as a favorite
posted by rory to MetaFilter on Apr 21 at 2:28 PM
49 users marked this as a favorite
and also WHY IS THERE NOT MORE GOTH FOR AND BY OLD PEOPLE. WHY DO ONLY YOUNG PEOPLE MOAN ABOUT DEATH. GOTH SHOULD BECOME MORE INTENSE AS YOU APPROACH THE GRAVE, NOT LESS. WHAT THE FUCK [view]
posted by phooky to MetaFilter on Apr 26 at 5:31 AM
48 users marked this as a favorite
posted by phooky to MetaFilter on Apr 26 at 5:31 AM
48 users marked this as a favorite
This is as badass as computer engineering gets. Programming a nearly 50 year old 64k computer that's outside the solar system with a lag time of almost a day. Simply amazing. [view]
posted by indexy to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 1:40 PM
48 users marked this as a favorite
posted by indexy to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 1:40 PM
48 users marked this as a favorite
tl;dr
"Any Salad Can Be A Caesar Salad (if you stab it enough)" [view]
posted by lalochezia to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 8:26 AM
48 users marked this as a favorite
posted by lalochezia to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 8:26 AM
48 users marked this as a favorite
This is interesting but I have a problem with the framing of heroic software engineers against evil management/consultants. Not that management isn't evil but there's nothing inherently ethically or morally pure about software development. It's some old school Silicon valley/Microserfs philosophy. [view]
posted by muddgirl to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 12:36 PM
46 users marked this as a favorite
posted by muddgirl to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 12:36 PM
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Christ, what assholes. [view]
posted by Wild_Eep to MetaFilter on Apr 27 at 12:15 PM
45 users marked this as a favorite
posted by Wild_Eep to MetaFilter on Apr 27 at 12:15 PM
45 users marked this as a favorite
{looks around the room at literally thousands of books}
Shit. [view]
posted by metametamind to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 8:18 PM
43 users marked this as a favorite
posted by metametamind to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 8:18 PM
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Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want? Just like you get all the movies you want from Netflix? Or all the music you want from Spotify?
I'm sitting here trying to figure out what that $9.99 a month would get me that my library card doesn't. (Faster access to new titles, I suppose. Is that a... [more]
posted by aws17576 to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 10:31 PM
39 users marked this as a favorite
posted by aws17576 to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 10:31 PM
39 users marked this as a favorite
Clearly, the wombat heard about sea level rise and is working on evolving to the aquatic life. It could be the first mersupial! [view]
posted by GenjiandProust to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 9:00 AM
39 users marked this as a favorite
posted by GenjiandProust to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 9:00 AM
39 users marked this as a favorite
Good thing we spent all that money upgrading our ventilation systems in response to COVID, right? /padme [view]
posted by Horace Rumpole to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 2:22 PM
38 users marked this as a favorite
posted by Horace Rumpole to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 2:22 PM
38 users marked this as a favorite