Irreal

Chris Hardie is, like me, a believer in RSS and considers it an important protocol that can be used for more than just following blogs. He considers the example of a municipal website that posts information of concern to its citizens. Suppose, he says, that a water main breaks, the water supply is compromised and the city tells its citizens to boil their water. When the water supply is safe again, the city will post an alert letting everyone know that they no longer need t boil their water.

If you’ve ever been through something like that you know it’s a pain and that you want to stop as soon as you can. What to do? You can check the city’s Website every time you need water but who wants to be checking a Website all the time?

But suppose the Website had an RSS feed. It’s easy to leverage this into an alert by piping into something like Slack or a simple notification app. The problem is, what if the city’s Website doesn’t have an RSS feed as many don’t.

Hardie has a couple of solutions but they’re complicated and more work than most people would be willing to do. That leads Hardie to make a plea: if you’re a Web developer or responsible for deploying one, please provide an RSS feed. It’s not hard and it can make a lot of difference to your users.

One of the reasons I love being in New York City is that you can get virtually any type of food delivered at any time. Tampa is hardly a backwater but pre-covid we didn’t have a robust food delivery infrastructure unless you wanted pizza. Of course, all that’s changed now. Just like the Big Apple, we here in Tampa can get a meal or even our groceries delivered to our door.

Humans driving cars around to deliver food doesn’t seem all that efficient so, of course, the Geek in me is interested in other solutions. One such solution—probably best suited to smaller areas such as campuses—is the delivery robot. If you haven’t seen one, think of a beer cooler on wheels. They autonomously navigate from the provider to your door.

It’s easy to imagine a lot of ways things could go wrong but here’s one that didn’t occur to me:

Difficult situation on campus. Traffic jam of automated food delivery robots, apparently all stuck behind a carelessly discarded scooter. I just observed a couple of students clearing a path out of pity for the robots. This is our future, I guess pic.twitter.com/4VjjaRAaBk

— Sean Hecht (@seanhecht) February 15, 2022

Back in January, I wrote about a Twitter thread concerning poor Google search results. The complaint was almost all the results were ads. DKB has a new post that covers the same ground. He says that Google is dying and reddit is now the search engine that everyone uses.

Neither of those two claims seems valid. After all, no one thinks that Google, who just had record profits, is literally dying. And how would you even use reddit as a search engine? DKB provides the needed context in his post. What is actually dying is the quality of Google search results in certain categories. Those categories are precisely the ones that attract advertisers. If you ask Google who the 32^nd President of United States was, you get a accurate answer and probably little advertising. If, on the other hand, you search for a review of a particular late model car, your results are apt to be mostly ads and SEO engineered content.

That’s where reddit comes in. If you ask reddit about that same car, you’re going to hear from real people who doubtless have strong views but not a vested interest in getting you buy one. So DKB’s claim that reddit is the “most used” search engine should be understood to mean that people are now appending “reddit” to their searches as a way of finding out what reddit has to say on subjects whose results are abused by ads and SEO.

Take a look at the post to see the whole argument. You may or may not agree but it’s one more indication that Google is failing in their primary business.