Absolutely scathing dissection of what’s gone wrong at Google Search, by Ed Zitron for his newsletter/blog:

In an interview with FastCompany’s Harry McCracken from 2018, Gomes framed Google’s challenge as “taking [the PageRank algorithm] from one machine to a whole bunch of machines, and they weren’t very good machines at the time.” Despite his impact and tenure, Gomes had only been made Head of Search in the middle of 2018 after John Giannandrea moved to Apple to work on its machine learning and AI strategy. Gomes had been described as Google’s “search czar,” beloved for his ability to communicate across departments.

Every single article I’ve read about Gomes’ tenure at Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made, who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a — to quote Gomes himself — “guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that.” And when finally given the keys to the kingdom — the ability to elevate Google Search even further — he was ratfucked by a series of rotten careerists trying to please Wall Street, led by Prabhakar Raghavan.

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo’s search and ads products.

Long story short, Ben Gomes was a search guy who’d been at Google since 1999, before they even had any ads in search results. He was replaced by Prabhakar Raghavan, who previously was Head of Ads at the company. So instead of there being any sort of firewall between search and ads, search became a subsidiary of ads.

Zitron’s compelling narrative is largely gleaned through emails released as part of the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google. Is the story really that simple? That around 2019 or so Google Search’s institutional priorities flipped from quality-first/revenue-second, to revenue-first/quality-second? It might be more complicated than that, but the timeline sure does add up.

And as a truism this feels right: if content reports to ads, content will go to hell. Publications, TV networks, operating systems, search engines — no matter the medium, you can’t let the advertising sales inmates run the asylum.

Wow, this one hurts. He had his hands in everything. "Recorded by Steve Albini" is practically a genre in itself. Just look at this insane discography. I own so many of those records, and of the many others that I don't, I feel like I probably ought to check them out. There comes a moment in every GenXer's life when they realize that every record they've ever loved was recorded by this one dude.

Let's start with his thundering 1993 article, "The Problem With Music". "Some of your friends are probably already this fucked."

Then there's this 2015 article about his business practices, "Punk Rock Ethics Are Good Business".

"A bakery opens because a guy wants to make bread. That's why people start businesses. It's because they want to do something with their time. They want that enterprise to be how they spend their days."

Here's an interview with him talking about him coming to terms with his 90s "edgelord shit".

I was gonna link to a few sample videos, but it just kept growing, so now it's a mixtape. Please enjoy jwz mixtape 245 of Albini-related music. (He probably hated music videos.)

Update: This post wasn't quite finished yet, so I wrote some more.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

I spent all afternoon assembling yesterday's blog post and mixtape about Steve Albini. Afterward, I went out to DNA Lounge to check out some punk bands with whom I was unfamiliar. (Just like Steve would have wanted.) But all night, I kept feeling that the post was incomplete.

Besides his involvement with so much incredible music, Albini also managed to carve out an incredibly successful career while also living and working ethically in one of the most notoriously exploitative industries in the world.

As someone who has struggled to find a way to live with themself within two different fantastically exploitative and extractive industries, this is relevant to my interests.

The following story has often been told, but it really is important, and unusual to the point of incredulity:

When Nirvana, the biggest band in the world at the time, asked him to produce their next album, it was the industry standard to take "points" on that. That's what everyone expected, what everone did. Nobody would have batted an eye. That he refused to garnish the band's wages for the rest of their lives marked him as a weirdo. If you haven't read his letter to the band, the whole thing is worth your time, but here's the part about dough:

I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. No points. Period. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It's the band's fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it's a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band.

I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it's worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There's no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn't be able to sleep.

I respect the shit out of what he accomplished, and how he chose to accomplish it. We should all aspire to his example.

---

Also, mad respect for what turns out to have been his final post on social media:

The Rolling Stones lips but it's a butthole. Do they still sue people? I have an idea.

Legend, going out like a legend.

Previously.

As our climate changes, we fear that warmer temperatures and drier conditions could make life hard for us. In most locations, it’s a future concern that feels uncomfortably near, but for some locations, it’s already very real. Take the Sahara desert, for example, and the degraded landscapes to the south in the Sahel. These arid regions are so dry that they struggle to support life at all, and temperatures there are rising faster than almost anywhere else on the planet.

In the face of this escalating threat, one of the most visionary initiatives underway is the Great Green Wall of Africa. It’s a mega-sized project that aims to restore life to barren terrain.

A Living Wall

Launched in 2007 by the African Union, the Great Green Wall was originally an attempt to halt the desert in its tracks. The Sahara Desert has long been expanding, and the Sahel region has been losing the battle against desertification. The Green Wall hopes to put a stop to this, while also improving food security in the area.

The concept of the wall is simple. The idea is to take degraded land and restore it to life, creating a green band across the breadth of Africa which would resist the spread of desertification to the south. Intended to span the continent from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east, it was originally intended to be 15 kilometers wide and a full 7,775 kilometers long. The hope was to complete the wall by 2030.

The Great Green Wall concept moved past initial ideas around simply planting a literal wall of trees. It eventually morphed into a broader project to create a “mosaic” of green and productive landscapes that can support local communities in the region.

Reforestation is at the heart of the Great Green Wall. Millions of trees have been planted, with species chosen carefully to maximise success. Trees like Acacia, Baobab, and Moringa are commonly planted not only for their resilience in arid environments but also for their economic benefits. Acacia trees, for instance, produce gum arabic—a valuable ingredient in the food and pharmaceutical industries—while Moringa trees are celebrated for their nutritious leaves.

 

Choosing plants with economic value has a very important side effect that sustains the project. If random trees of little value were planted solely as an environmental measure, they probably wouldn’t last long. They could be harvested by the local community for firewood in short order, completely negating all the hard work done to plant them. Instead, by choosing species that have ongoing productive value, it gives the local community a reason to maintain and support the plants.

Special earthworks are also aiding in the fight to repair barren lands. In places like Mauritania, communities have been digging  half-moon divots into the ground. Water can easily run off or flow away on hard, compacted dirt. However, the half-moon structures trap water in the divots, and the raised border forms a protective barrier. These divots can then be used to plant various species where they will be sustained by the captured water. Do this enough times over a barren landscape, and with a little rain, formerly dead land can be brought back to life. It’s a traditional technique that is both cheap and effective at turning brown lands green again.

Progress

The initiative plans to restore 100 million hectares of currently degraded land, while also sequestering 250 million tons of carbon to help fight against climate change. Progress has been sizable, but at the same time, limited. As of mid-2023, the project had restored approximately 18 million hectares of formerly degraded land. That’s a lot of land by any measure. And yet, it’s less than a fifth of the total that the project hoped to achieve. The project has been frustrated by funding issues, delays, and the degraded security situation in some of the areas involved. Put together, this all bodes poorly for the project’s chances of reaching its goal by 2030, given 17 years have passed and we draw ever closer to 2030.

While the project may not have met its loftiest goals, that’s not to say it has all been in vain. The Great Green Wall need not be seen as an all or nothing proposition. Those 18 million hectares that have been reclaimed are not nothing, and one imagines the communities in these areas are enjoying the boons of their newly improved land.

In the driest parts of the world, good land can be hard to come by. While the Great Green Wall may not span the African continent yet, it’s still having an effect. It’s showing communities that with the right techniques, it’s possible to bring some barren zones from the brink, turning hem back into useful productive land. That, at least, is a good legacy, and if the projects full goals can be realized? All the better.

NASA plays nicely with privately owned SpaceX, but is that something to be concerned about? In an interview with NPR, NASA director Bill Nelson assuages any fears of an unsupervised Elon Musk running a space agency by reminding us that SpaceX is actually run by its president Gwynne Shotwell. Nelson trusts Shotwell to…

Read more...

There’s more Bluey on the way in the form of Bluey Minisodes! A new batch of 20 shorts will be released on Disney Jr. and Disney+ this July.

Read more...