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> You can't just let that fade away.

A westerner would say that, but it's far more appropriate for Disney than Ghibli. Ghibli will fade away. Miyazaki is an auteur. You won't recreate him.


That's rose-tinted glasses speaking. Ghibli today is not just Hayao and Gorō Miyazaki like it wasn't just Hayao and Isao Takahata before. Everyone likes money, even (or rather, especially) Japanese animators; the Japanese have a very prosaic approach to their IP. All the moves from Toshio Suzuki over the last decade indicate that he is trying to negotiate a creative transition to keep the show going. Whether he can do it in his lifetime or not, that's another question, but IMHO there is no doubt that he's trying hard.


Google actually found a result for Eternal September. Call me amazed! I didn't even have to use quotes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September


I think so too. Recent results are clearly ML garbage.

The reason Google isn't explaining it is because they can't explain it. They don't know why the ML is returning the results it's returning. And whatever it's doing in that black box, it's making gobs of money—Google's sole purpose since Ruth Porat started squeezing every dime out of every orifice–so just keep on keeping on.


This.

You'd think from the responses herein that using quotes was a panacea.

It isn't. I see what you see. I think it's ignoring the quotes.


I'm not buying the tribal argument, that I'm the wrong user for Google. The results are shite across the board regardless of tribe.

I think they've accepted that SEO has killed past ranking algorithms and are rebuilding rank from the ground up using ML with the entire internet as guinea pig. All of the crap results we're weeding through now is grist for the ML mill.

I am literally typing exact phrases for content I know is there and not getting the results I should.

I think they've cut the cord with past algorithms, not an incremental update, a major one.

My thinking so doesn't make it so, however, so just my two cents.


Do you know what infuriates me most about this? It's that Google hasn't addressed it when it's clear as fucking day that their search results have gone in the tank.

But now that I've typed that, I can see exactly why they haven't responded: a search company telling the world that its search results are f**ed. That would do wonders for the stock


if they are so bad, why competitors don't get a bigger market share? And if you think there are no competitors, you should know that there are bing, duckduckgo, that are basically the same engine and foreign search engines that successfully compete with Google is their domestic markets(yandex in Russia, Baidu in China and a few less successful others) all of them would be able to get at least some US market share in case google slipped


> if they are so bad, why competitors don't get a bigger market share?

Two things:

1. https://duckduckgo.com/traffic DDG has seen exponential adoption(yes actually mathematical exponential it seems) until last year. Now its traffic just increases at steady rate that most growth hackers would envy.

2. this happens despite their search results being just as bad as Googles: they (pr probably Bing) also sends me tons of completely irrelevant results because they ignore what I write in favour of what they think I write or want me to search for.

DuckDuckGo.com is my go to not because it is better but because:

- it is equally good now

- moving from DDG to Google is faster (just add !g)

- they don't have a history of showing me irrelevant and insulting ads.


I find their results to be better than Google’s. With google, you need to scroll past ads, then the garbage they pull from RDF triples (the boxes with facts, logos, etc), related searches, news, etc, etc and then you get the results.

With Duck Duck Go, there’s much less stuff to scroll past to get the results.

Test query: Samsung Galaxy

Google has 3.5 cell phone screens of header to scroll through. DDG has two screens, then the results, then the remaining screen or so of stuff google jams in the header.

This is much better.

For instance, the list of suggested searches is after the search results. Why does Google think I want to refine my search or switch to a different Google product before I read the results my first attempt at searching yielded?!? Do search logs show that most searches are from people that are typing things they don’t care about into the incorrect website?

Ignoring that, let’s quantify the results by position on the page. DDG has the top result in position 4 (samsung) or 6 (wikipedia).

Google has the first two hits at positions 16 and 27. (And stutters a lot of similar looking Samsung pages for some reason.)

I’m counting horizontal rows of content, skipping headers and columns of additional content.

(Edit: typos)


That's a fair characterization. I think DDG is almost the nostalgia play. What's the David Byrne lyric? You got what you wanted, but you lost what you had.


> I think DDG is almost the nostalgia play.

Good point. Also their main focus seems to be privacy, not quality.

The privacy problems of Google just recently (i.e. last 5 years) started to bother me, their complete inability to fix their broken search operators has bothered me for a decade.

My guess is if DDG provided the same quality as the old Google instead of just this nostalgia play it could possibly rise even faster.


Ulbricht was caught because an FBI agent, who would read things slowly and twice, recognized these 4 letters : heyy.

That's how Ulbricht sometimes spelled hey, and the agent had seen that particular spelling before in his investigation, in an email from Ulbrict’s student email address.

Nick Bilton's book “American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road” is a great read, highly recommended.


it strikes me as extremely naive to take this at face value. see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R2013...

much more likely -- sigint tooling was applied to identify ulbricht, bulk metadata was turned over for his comms history, and it was pored over for things they could connect with sr to get warrants. imo, at least.

but getting to claim you're such a sharp investigator that you can figure it out by noticing the word heyy makes for a much better story to tell an author.


It was more complicated than just heyy, but I won't spoil the book.

It's been awhile since I've read it, but my impression was that solving the case was mostly traditional casework, and a lot of it, by many different people/agents/agencies.

That Reuters article certainly gives pause. Thanks for the link.


That's what they want you to think. He was caught because; Nothing can match against the surveillance arsenal of the NSA.


That's not what I think, that's what Nick Bilton thinks. The quality of his book makes me partial to his thesis, of course, but NSA conspiracy blah adds nothing.

Also, lots more went into catching him than just heyy, but that was the lucky break that had him caught. Now he shares a prison with Dr. Unabomber Kazinsky.


That could be the story but since parallel construction is routinely used to hide the existence of surveillance tools and back doors it’s not unreasonable to doubt it.

I thought I had heard it was stackoverflow, is that looped in somehow?


I don't recall StackOverflow being mentioned, no, but it's been a few years since I've read it.



Correction: He was transferred to a penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona.


Have to admit. I was impressed with the USGOVs ability to recover bitcoin ransoms paid for cyberattacks. I'm not sure if impressed is the right word.


Wtf, who doesn’t add extra y’s to hey sometimes? That wasn’t evidence.


I don't want to spoil the book; but, yes, that detail got him caught.


It’s not fiction you’re spoiling, but a factual conversation about events that you’re not going into due to spoilers. It is an odd defence that kills the conversation when other people bring up good points.

The parallel construction argument seems way more plausible if there’s nothing else besides “heyy”. If there is more, please say what it is instead of mentioning it exists but refusing to say it.


I've thought about this myself, but it's an idea before its time that will fight a desperate fight against one big problem: quality. Quantity is easy. Quality is hard. People who cook for themselves want to choose the ingredients that go into what they're cooking. That's often the reason people cook for themselves: I decide what goes in my body.

I really, really want to know if the green bell pepper has three lobes or four, because they taste completely different. The person being paid minimum wage to shop for my bell pepper couldn't care less, but the wrong choice will ruin my meal. The convenience of someone else shopping for you, while helpful, is racked with such problems of selection, quality, availability, etc.

The problems created by people shopping for me, at least in my experience, significantly offset the convenience.

How to determine quality will become a very big deal in technology in our lifetimes. What's real? What's good? What's legit? I guess it already is. Look at the collasal cesspool that is Amazon. What do I buy? I don't know. I don't know what's good.

In 20 years, your bananas will text you that they're ripe and you should eat them, especially because your potassium is low. In fact, the bananas will order themselves. But today, with the quality problems so thick with muck and subterfuge, I can't even get the correct bell pepper delivered.

This quality problem is why Amazon bought Whole Foods and is about to go brick and mortar countrywide. You just can't solve quality problems with intermediaries at this stage of the game because those intermediaries have no incentive to care.


True, the picking quality is a big factor for the experience. Especially when it’s about shopping for ingredients for a meal. We try to improve this by placing the order on behalf of the customer, so we can optimize the product selection for the cooking experience and have the option to guide the pickers with comments/chat towards the most appropriate products or suitable substitutes if something is out of stock.

Besides that we are considering to give the user an option to simply export the optimized shopping list, so it can be used for offline shopping. We got this a few times as a feature request from users who like to shop the ingredients themselves, but still like a service which provides them with personalized suggestions each week and generates a combined shopping list.


> we are considering to give the user an option to simply export the optimized shopping list, so it can be used for offline shopping

The fact that this isn't included already is a bit of a red flag for me. It's a meal planning service that won't even give me the list of ingredients if I want to buy them myself?

Besides that, it does look interesting. I may sign up for a free trial after showing it to my wife and seeing if she'd find good utility in it. We've done grocery delivery for about a year, but we're on the verge of stopping. So having an exportable list of ingredients is obviously a must before I get too attached to your service.


Yes, do this and I’ll sign up. I live in Berlin and live next door to an edeka. I’m happy to do the shopping myself for fresh food every day after work. All I need is a shopping list in my phone that I can pull up from my phone when I head downstairs to buy food.


Are four lobed ones really sweeter?


I only use the green ones. The three lobed ones are strong up, the four lobed ones are milder. No theory on the sweetness, but then I don't use the red, orange, or yellow ones very often. Maybe like garlic? Young garlic super strong, mature less so?

The male versus female bell pepper nonsense is just that, nonsense. My mother thinks it's all nonsense, but she's wrong.


I tried a blind taste test, and the answer from my perspective was no.


Exact keyword match does not work as well as it once did. I question whether it's working at all on YouTube.


There's a UX problem on mobile. I have to click on something to make the GIF appear. What do I click? A link. Expected behavior of a link is to link me elsewhere, not to show a pop-up GIF, so I'm immediately confused when that happens. I also can't figure out how to make the link actually link. Does it link anywhere? Is it even a link or just Jscript onClick thingy? Do I have to click on the GIF to make it link, because that's 2 clicks when precisely one is accepted link practice. Clicking to engage and then clicking again to disappear is super aggravating, especially on mobile screen, especially on such a long list. Click, click, click, click, click click, click, click. Ahhhh!

This works well if I can hover over the links with a mouse to engage the pop-ups, which then disappear when I hover away. If I have to click on the links, like you do on mobile, then click again to dismiss, neither click actually linking to anything, it fails UX.

Also, too much info in too small a space on mobile. Too much being communicated. Too dense. What UX test calls engineeritis. You need drill down pages for these links. If I click one, I expect a page with detailed information, a drill down, not a pop-up summary GIF.

Mixed UX metaphors. Not lethal, but not quite there yet. Very cool, though, especially for the rapidity with which you were able to implement it, but it needs a bit more test on the UX side on mobile.

A button toggle that displays a responsive, inline GIF as a drop-down, not pop-up, is perhaps the better solution, even if it's not quite as neat as what your creativity created. That would work as expected without damaging your intent, but that still involves click click click.


> There's a UX problem on mobile. I have to click on something to make the GIF appear. What do I click? A link. Expected behavior of a link is to link me elsewhere, not to show a pop-up GIF, so I'm immediately confused when that happens.

The underlines being dotted, it's closer to an <abbr> element (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ab...), which does not act as a link.


another option would be using this ⓘ

User will click/tap and the modal of the gif will show


> User will

No they won't.

I don't mean this cynically, every test I've seen with a feature like that has had _very_ low engagement.*

This is the problem with features that "get out of the way" - they are underused and the intended value is lost.

It's a conundrum, because I totally agree in terms of interaction design but what good is a (well designed or not) feature that isn't used?


Maybe those users simply aren't interested enough in your product? I think adding a simple note "click on the labels to see a demo" should be enough discoverability.


Any UX designer will tell you that users don't read notes.


I'm a big fan of this solution, and I've used it quite a few times.

Ideally I would like to use drop downs where possible like GP describes, since a > icon (or similar) before some text unambiguously indicates how to get more information, but sometimes the implementation is non-obvious. I've had issues when my data is tabular (like this pricing page). Where should the drop down appear? Sometimes you have a 3rd party table (or template, like this article describes), and the customization options might not be there. At the very least you have to spend time styling both the additional information AND figuring out how it fits into the document flow.

The great thing about a tooltip is that it's out of the document flow. You can just ignore the rest of your application, resulting in (usually) faster development speed. However, as GP points out, you have to consider mobile, and it's not always obvious how to indicate _in_ the context of your document that something is hoverable.

ⓘ is a best of both worlds solution IMO. It's totally unambiguous on both desktop and mobile that hovering, clicking, or tapping will bring up more information, AND you get the development speed of using a tooltip.


This feature is effectively a <details>/<summary>. Usually they are displayed with as (▶ collapsed) and (▼ expanded) triangles. I do wonder if the circled i ⓘ has more engagement as a well placed triangle/chevron.


This is really the only correct solution in the context of modern UX.


It's a feature comparison page, so that's the fundamental design issue.

The GIFs add pop, but the intent is to clarify. How does showing this info. on onHover or onClick in any UX achieve that result?

It doesn't.

As designed, it's an ad. It is. Look at it.

If I'm comparing a product with a full page of features, I'm going to be scrolling up and down. The one thing I absolutely won't do is hover over 16 onHover information panels while trying to compare and contrast an extensive set of features, costs, and licenses.

I'm just going to get aggravated that the information I need to make a decision keeps disappearing from view when I click or hover elsewhere.

Also, that's the kind of page you print and underline and circle things on, and give to your boss as a reason for purchase. If half the information is invisible when the page is printed, what use is it?


Yep, you said it, the pricing page is, in fact, an advertisement of the product.

It's not like you can easily compare the prices between two different products in the same segment.

It's an ad. Embrace it. Leaving out the GIFs doesn't make it less of an ad. It just makes it… a worse ad?

Also, does your boss not have a computer?


He does. He just likes the printer more. He also surfs the web on a Texas Instruments TI-85 graphing calculator, so go figure.

I'm not referring to the page as an ad, but fair enough. I see him applying a pop-up advertisement using the wrong UX element to a grid of information that doesn't benefit from it.

Wrong is the wrong word, as apparently a dotted link is and isn't a link. Indicates multiuse? That's clear as mud.


I'm staring at this conclusion with the most bemused expression on my face. I'm thinking of the lines painted on the highway, wondering what tragedies would result if yellow line, white line, dotted line, and solid line were similarly ambiguous.


Sometimes liberties are taken here, such as California originally separating carpool lanes with yellow lines (when they should have been white).

Presumably they felt that even though yellow was incorrect, it sent a clearer "do not cross" message to drivers.

They were later ordered to change them to white.


Were there mandatory prescriptive federal guidelines on HOV lane line colors when California introduced carpool lanes, or did they only come after California had been using yellow lines?

Personally, I do find yellow lines are a stronger border, but then I grew up in a culture of yellow carpool lines. I feel like white lines are almost always ok to drive over, and yellow lines usually aren't (although yellow dotted lines are a sometimes drive over (if safe, to pass on a two lane undivided highway), and yellow solid + dotted is also ok to drive over (if safe, to get into a shared median lane for an unprotected left turn)


I think it's because yellow is supposed to indicate traffic moving in the opposite direction. That's why it's a stronger signal (in theory), but not "correct" for an HOV lane moving in the same direction.


California should have closed the lane once a year for one minute to run a single vehicle down the carpool lane in the wrong direction. Then they could justify that the lane marking was the right color (since in theory, the lane can be reverse-flow at any time, and hey sometimes they even do it).


> I feel like white lines are almost always ok to drive over…

Single and double solid lines parallel to the flow of traffic, of any color, almost always mean "do not cross".

A single dashed line, or a double line where one or both halves is dashed, can be crossed under at least some circumstances. The rules for crossing these vary depending on context, e.g. one-sided passing and center turn lanes use similar markings but with the solid and dashed lines flipped. (You pass from the dashed side but enter the turn lane from the solid side.)

White lines separate traffic going the same direction. Yellow lines separate traffic in opposite directions. This is independent of whether the lines can be crossed.


My funny anecdote around that: The road in front of my house has a dual center yellow line, but the reflective additive they used in the paint shows up white. At night all of the lines are white. VERY confusing.


That sounds like something you should report to an authority. It could even be a whistleblower issue if the contractor shorted the city with substandard glowy stuff and it's causing serious safety issues.


I've driven through places where the lanes change directions or get closed based on traffic flow, most often near sports/entertainment arenas, and they tend to have one or two lanes with dashed white lines which are always open and the rest of the 3+ lanes are dashed yellow. I've always wondered if this is an exception to a rule, or if there even is a definite DOT rule (or if localities can override DOT regulations, such as in the case of rainbow crosswalks). I do recall in my driver's education classes 20+ years ago that a dashed yellow is "allowed to enter and exit but not for travel" but again that may have been a local rule.


I noticed that change recently and assumed it was motivated by Tesla. There are certain things we all take for granted when driving. A huge one that we probably don’t give much conscious thought to us this:

How do we know if the lane to the left is ok to go in, or if it actually is for carrying oncoming traffic?

You’d like to think that one way though not the only way, is to look for a double yellow line. As in, double yellows always separate opposing traffic so never cross them.

In CA though, double yellow was also chosen to separate the carpool lane as OP mentioned. So there was actually a really mundane case where driving to the left of a double yellow was actually fine. Seems very confusing to an autonomous car that’s operating at the mental-level of an 18mo old.


You are giving way too much credit to autonomous vehicles in this theory. Line colours are standard throughout all of North America (that I’ve seen so far). Yellow means what it means. This carpool line experiment would have been confusing to any driver seeing it for the first time.

Imagine a tourist on that highway for the first time, at 3am, when there’s no traffic. Can they use that lane? Can they pull a sneaky u-turn and start driving the opposite direction?

What if I’m driving down the highway, effectively on mental autopilot, and suddenly become aware that I’m on the “wrong” side of the yellow line? How would I be likely to react?

The opportunities for misunderstanding by normal humans seem plenty.


I noticed that change recently and assumed it was motivated by Tesla.

My '11 Nissan Leaf couldn't even have LED taillights because the Feds said "no". Tesla isn't going to march into some DOT office and demand that the color of the lines be changed to accommodate them (I mean, they could, but the laughter would drown out the conversation).

CA changed it because not only was yellow against federal guidelines, but also because I personally believe it was a stupid choice to begin with (for reasons others have already listed).


Yellow lines separating oncoming traffic is not universal though? I believe in the UK that the center lines are white?


Living in Germany and having only driven in Mexico (City) as far as the Americas go, I admit to not understand what yellow lines signify to US drivers, like at all ;) At my place, they're used for temporarily "overriding" regular white lines eg at construction sites, and only for that purpose.



The page is a disaster on a desktop, too. It does something weird to the scroll, so I can't use either my arrow keys or my Vimium keys in the normal way. Note to web authors: I'm sure I'm not the only one who left quickly after I saw that my scroll was hijacked. If you want people to read your stuff, try dialing back the user abuse.


I endured the hijacked scroll because I was curious about what he meant.

It looks like a good idea, but in a very user-hostile interface, what wasn't surprising at all. If I had to guess, the author is honestly trying to increase his site's usability by overriding the default behavior, he is just failing spectacularly.


I was surprised when my arrow keys didn't work properly. Now I see you had the same issue. Using an old laptop, I'm often navigating through pages with keyboard track-pad on these old laptops is trash.


It reminds me that we don't see "floating" touchscreens anymore.

The Galaxy S5, and probably other phones had this feature where you could actually trigger hover targets by hovering your finger above the screen. I just tried it on my Galaxy S5 the linked page and it works flawlessly.

It may be one of the gimmicks Samsung loved to put in their phones at the time, but as we can see, it is not completely useless. And it also doesn't look like there is any downside to it, except maybe a very small increase in price.


onHover has always been a psuedoschizo decision. There are places where nothing is more useful, but misuse it and it aggravates the hell out of everyone, not unlike browser frames/iframes/etc 20 years ago.


What is a "psuedoschizo" decision?


A conflicting decision. Please ignore the word, my brain made it up.


Almost schizophrenic. Made sense to me.


[flagged]


Not using fancy made-up words around you ever again.


[flagged]


You don't need to freak out every time someone invents a new word construction. I understood the comment perfectly the first time, which brings us to 2/3 other commenters having grocked it immediately.

Wait, grocked is a made up word too. Pretend I said understand.


There was a freakout?

Also, it's "grokked", but I'll just pretend that you spelled it correctly instead.


What else would you call jumping into a conversation just to make multiple comments about how you don't like someone's word choice?


I'm not sure, but I wish you would stop doing it already.


Point taken about making it clearer it's a popup rather than a link but...

> You need drill down pages for these links. If I click one, I expect a page with detailed information, a drill down, not a pop-up summary GIF.

I disagree here and much prefer browsing the summary information with a gif to having to click through every single feature into a new page.


Yes, I am rather stuck on the use of that link as a link-button. I argued furiously against them back in the day and, obviously, lost.


There's somewhat of a convention to use a dashed underline on links that have behaviour like this; perhaps that would be an improvement.


Navigating on mobile is something you do on the go, when there are no other options. Of course it's going to be a downgraded experience.


Is it?

Mobile devices drove 61% of visits to U.S. websites in 2020, up from 57% in 2019. Desktops were responsible for 35.7% of all visits in 2020, and tablets drove the remaining 3.3% of visitors.

Globally, 68.1% of all website visits in 2020 came from mobile devices—an increase from 63.3% in 2019. Desktops drove 28.9% of visits, while 3.1% of visitors came from tablets. However, desktop devices remain very important, as they drove 53.3% of total time on site in the U.S. and 46.4% of total time on site globally.

https://www.perficient.com/insights/research-hub/mobile-vs-d...


>Mixed UX metaphors. Not lethal, but not quite there yet. Very cool, though, especially for the rapidity with which you were able to implement it, but it needs a bit more test on the UX side on mobile.

It's definitely a good idea but agree that it's just a bit off. The videos are small and hard to see and there's no way to share a direct link to a video.


Site author here. Thanks for the feedback! I just pushed an update to improve the UX on mobile :)

https://twitter.com/tdinh_me/status/1465898179971350528


>Expected behavior of a link is to link me elsewhere

That may be true, but I certainly wasn't confused when I tapped it and saw the popup. On mobile, you could make the popup take up the whole screen with an easy X button and perhaps it would solve that issue (Minor as it may be)


Either it’s fixed, or it was never a problem to me.

The dotted lines indicate ‘click here to see more’ to me. And I can go directly from one to the next item by just tapping the next one.


Also, use WebM, not GIF, for better compression. GIF is obsolete trash from the 1990's internet.

You can have a GIF fallback but 99% of browsers don't need it.


well... 99% perhaps not. mobile safari is pretty important


It should be an accordion that opens a detail view.


I like it more when items stay opened, instead of closing again when another item opens (like with an accordion).


I'm chuckling at this because, every time I've launched a broadside against onHover, a crafty developer replies with an accordion.

You sly dogs.


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