As somebody that’s a paying Kagi user and generally happy with the service, it is interesting seeing exactly where the tradeoffs are.

While I’d say Kagi pretty much universally returns better results for technical information or things like recipes where it deprioritizes search spam, it’s also pretty clear that there are other areas where the absence of targeting hurts results. Any type of localized results, e.g., searching for nearby restaurants or other businesses tends to be really hit or miss and I tend to fall back to Google there.

Of course, that’s because Kagi is avoiding targeting to the point where they don’t even use your general location to prioritize results. It’s an interesting balancing act and I’m not quite sure they’ve hit the sweet spot yet, at least for me personally, but I like the overall mission and the results for most searches so I’m happy with the overall experience currently.

Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you’re looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising.

And we have evidence that this is exactly why it happened, too:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

While I’d highly recommend giving either the article a read or the companion podcast a listen because Ed Zitron did some fantastic reporting on this, the tl;dr is that a couple of years ago, there was direct conflict between the search and advertising wings of Google over search query metrics.

The advertising teams wanted the metrics to go up to help juice ad numbers. The search team rightly understood that there were plenty of ways they could do so, but that it would make for a worse user experience. The advertising team won.

The head of the advertising team during this was a man named Prabhakar Raghavan. Roughly a year later, he became the head of Google Search. And the timing of all this lines up with when people started noting Google just getting worse and worse to actually use.

Oh, and the icing on the cake? Raghavan’s previous job? Head of Yahoo Search just before that business cratered to the point that Yahoo decided to just become a bing frontend.

Zitron is fond of saying that these people have names and it’s important that we know who’s making the decisions that are actively making the world of tech worse for everyone; I tend to agree.

Fleet yaw is a different phenomenon that impacts terminal ballistic performance. It’s essentially a way of describing why some projectiles tumble and fragment after impact while others will tend to remain more stable and pass straight through for longer.

The projectile AoA being described in that context is only a couple of degrees. It’s enough to change how the round behaves after hitting something, but it’s not the type of in-flight wild tumbling that results in keyholing on a target.

Already happening. Required training hours were roughly doubled a couple of weeks ago effective Jan 1:

https://www.11alive.com/article/news/investigations/georgia-mandatory-law-enforcement-training-hours-for-new-recruits/85-c835bdef-3984-452b-acf0-88b22629f414

That said, this was a state trooper. GSP have long been known for a culture of cowboy recklessness and special treatment codified into law. They report up directly to the Governor and are explicitly excluded from many of the restrictions put on local police (the moniker God’s Special People has been around for decades for a reason). They are one of the few major agencies in the state that still refuses to use body cameras, for example.

Institutionally, it’s a group set up to be and that views itself as special enforcers that are above the restraints put on others. GSP is routinely involved in high speed pursuits that end in either a fatal accident or a shooting.

More training is always a good thing, but I’ll just say I was unsurprised a trooper was involved here.

that’s definitely going on for at least 5 years

Keyword: relatively.

Uber’s been around 15 years.

unless you see the uber car circling around you on the map, then canceling the ride and cashing in the “cancelation fee”

That’s a relatively new phenomenon as people have learned how to game the system. The reliability of Uber when they first launched was complete night and day.

yes, uber was faster to adapt it than traditional taxi industry, but they are not doing it for your blue eyes, they are doing it for profit and they do lot of shady stuff to achieve it.

I never said otherwise. I was merely providing an example of why Uber gained adoption early on. The service was materially better than what taxi companies were delivering at the time in many places. I experienced that first hand.

Tracking, arrival timer and an easy app.

The fact that they would actually show up.

Where I live, before Uber you needed to call the cab company at least an hour before you wanted to get anywhere (in a city that you can get pretty much anywhere in 15 minutes). The dispatcher would tell you someone will be there in 20 minutes and, if you were lucky, somebody might show up in 45. Before Uber, there was more than one occasion where I ended up stranded downtown until 4 or 5am after the bars had closed at 3:00.

Being able to request a ride, having someone reliably show up, and show up reasonably close to when they said they would was an absolute game changer at the time.

Also worth noting: 2K is incredibly toxic and regular paint filter masks are useless for preventing it from getting into your lungs. It’s supposed to be used while wearing positive pressure ventilated PPE.

Probably not the best choice for redecoration on the move.

In fairness, tires really should be replaced at minimum in pairs on any vehicle. Definitely hurts more when it’s a full set, though.

And it hurts extra hard on the STi. My latest set of tires a few weeks ago because I damaged a sidewall was ~$1500.

Subaru’s AWD system is legitimately better at putting down power to the wheels and getting traction than the vast majority of other AWD systems on the market. There are plenty of third party tests showing as much.

That said, it’s a question of whether you actually need that. The truth is the vast majority of people don’t need AWD at all for the kind of driving they’ll actually do.

I have an STi which has an active center differential beyond even the typical Subaru system and I absolutely love it. It’s magic feeling it at work. But my “likes to take the car on dirt and go sideways at 50MPH” use case isn’t needed for a commuter either.

His Forrester is built on a Legacy chassis; it’s a four door sedan with a little lift and a bigger body shell on top.