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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • except for flooding you with more ads between video recommendations

    That’s literally it. The advertising and marketing teams within Google have politically maneuvered themselves into running the show, and the software/product engineering teams that want to maximize the quality of the system they work on (search, youtube) are overridden by insipid metrics that advertising needs more user interaction with ads.

    They literally have been commanding that things be made more shitty to optimize their malformed metrics. You absolutely can get more people to click the sponsored search results… if you keep making them less distinct from the actual results. And advertising needs those good click through rates nooooow!

    There are email chains documenting this sort of shit going on that have become part of the public record due to various court cases.

    Wonderful article about it all here














  • Ugh. Righteous ideas about how things should work don’t change the fact that these network appliances doing it the wrong way still have years of time left before the bean counters consider them depreciated and let us replace them. Or that we’re locked into a multi-year contract with this business system that requires updating certs through a web UI.

    Yes, there are almost always workarounds and ways to still automate it in the end, but then it’s a matter of effort vs stability vs time savings.

    I love automating manual sysadmin actions, it’s my primary role on my team. Still, ignoring the complications that will unavoidably arise in trying automating this for every unique setup is incredibly foolish.



  • Scanning texts is OCR and has never needed modern LLMs integrated to achieve amazing results.

    Automated tagging gets closer, but there is a metric shit ton that can be done in that regard using incredibly simple tools that don’t use an egregious amount of energy or hallucinate.

    There is no way in hell that they aren’t already doing these things. The best use cases for LLMs for NARA are edge cases of things mostly covered by existing tech.

    And you and I both know this is going to give Google exclusive access to National Archive data. New training data that isn’t tainted by potentially being LLM output is an insanely valuable commodity now that the hype is dying down and algorithmic advances are slowing.