I'm just going to call it the Shitpile.

In a decade, when they've decided that Microsoft ActivePilot 365 Live Pro Gold fails to accurately convey the functionality of their state of the art robot that only needs 12kW seconds to accurately add two numbers, Shitpile will still be the most accurate description.

Yes, the Wikipedia similarity is because of the similarity of the contribution models. The core problem is moderation - you need rules tight enough to keep overall quality high enough that people trust it enough to want to visit. But doing that raises the cost for all contributors high enough that a lot of folks don't want to put up with it.

Kind of an idle question, but I wonder if Spolsky saw it coming or got lucky.

Surely a box of eBay Nokias and some spray paint isn't that hard to pull together.

I understand why it happens. What I was (profanely and tersely, I admit) questioning is management's competence. The product is awful in multiple ways ranging from hilariously wrong to dangerous. They know this.

They also know quite a bit about providing useful, accurate information - whatever else you can say about Google, they are really good extracting signal from unstructured data. Note quite as good as they are at extracting money from advertisers, but really good.

And yet they're choosing to push this wannabe general oracle thing that is utterly unfit for purpose. They should be embarrassed, both for releasing it and for chasing the hype like a chump instead of acting like the leader in the field they actually are. I know a lot of that is public market pressure, but it is still dumb and a bit weird, and makes them look stupid. Let Microsoft release broken crap nobody uses by choice, that's what they do. At least be marginally competent and don't release stuff that doesn't work.

"After setting fire to immense amounts of money on fire, I cannot point to a single compelling use case for an end of year summary. Perhaps worse, I can't even think of anything better to say about it other than use a quote from a dead guy to show I didn't quite get what he was talking about, either."

"Sure, the answer might be wildly incorrect, but it might get it right if you shake the Magic 8 Ball again."

What the fuck is this? Sunrise is a solved problem. We know how to calculate sunrise.

That one of the richest companies on the planet, the one that claims to be "organizing the world's information", publishes some idiotic tool to do that routine thing wildly incorrectly is just fucking stupid.

That them doing so apparently motivates you to defend them is... really weird.

Well..

performance or yield, combined...

"academia works"?

You think Academia ever accomplished anything at all?

Good. You're finally getting the picture that American crony Capitalism sucks rocks and considers immigrants to be barely better than slaves.

With millions of citizen tech workers laid off in the last 3 years, fewer foreign workers is only good news.

PLEASE avoid the United States. We're going through an existential cultural identity crisis right now, and don't need your third world kleptocracies, we have enough kleptocracy here.

Here's something from my country that I can be proud of (while I've got many things to be ashamed of... thanks to our stupid, bad government... I really hope they get dethroned soon)

If they were verbally slick like Mitnick, they'd have committed other crimes. So they're not going to talk their way back into the security world. They won't have a trusted position to abuse, so I'm not sure what else they have to offer organized cracker gangs.

Hope the memories of that money serve them well when they're free and closing robot car doors for a living to make their restitution payments.

I really dislike the move to "relationships" for everything, especially travel-related stuff. I understand why it happens, but it makes one-time-use a massive pain.

I had to drive around LA for work a couple months ago, and finding somewhere to park without preinstalling some application I didn't know I'd need was a hassle.

Those applications are also generally super invasive, scraping every bit of data they can. (This bothers me less than it used to; I use a relatively blank phone when traveling now.)

I do not wish to enter into a relationship with your corporation, I need a fucking two hour parking spot.

Changing the distribution channel didn't change the economics. And entertainment economics don't work for public companies.

There is only so much time in which to consume entertainment, so you have a (large, but real) ceiling for direct customers. Ads are a way to supplement this, at the cost of irritating direct customers, so that's minimaxible but has a ceiling, too.

Public markets hate ceilings. So public media companies eat each other.

This used to mostly be spectacle, you can only get a quarter or two out of goosing the stock with layoffs, so the brunchlord in chief knew to bugger off victorious to the next venture he could shit up.

But now there are so few left at the top that they can offer a different sort of advertising - what we used to call propaganda.

You can make a lot of money gaslighting a nation.

Is there a name for this?

I call it robot poop. And there's "slop". But I don't think we've converged on language for specific variants (like flooding Youtube or drowning out competing voices on Xitter) yet.