r_klancer

I work with user data in Search and this is a common sentiment ... but I think it slightly misstates the purpose of using user data.

The primary purpose has always been improving search overall -- traditionally this has meant updating query interpretation, ranking, presentation, etc for smaller and smaller query slices ("Ah, when we show the mayor and the population in response to [Barcelona] people just revise their query to [Barcelona FC], so we should make sure to include latest match result on the top. Not so for [New York]."), and running tests on every product change to see what people like. In this case nobody cares about any _individual_ user's data, only the collective. This is basically the original "collective intelligence" contract of PageRank, albeit hillclimbing on billions of searches and clicks instead of using link structure. (Old question: does original PageRank count as machine learning, or not?)

Second is personalization -- things like "Oh, my flight or my delivery is expected on date X, handy that gmail popped a reminder on my calendar, good work Google." Or searching for a restaurant in Maps and seeing results that are biased towards the kinds of restaurants you already like, that kind of thing.

When it comes to revenue the purpose of these isn't to target ads, it's just to have you get value from and use the product, and when you are ready to spend money this is where you come to search for the thing, whatever it is.

Finally there is limited use of a limited set of data for ads relevance. There's higher CPC for ads you might actually be interested in (and if you are looking to spend money, is finding a willing seller who has compelling terms via an ad such a bad thing?) But ad revenue is mostly downstream of users being satisfied with the core product and using it more, whatever that product is. (Search, Maps, AI chat, etc)

(Bonus. My Search pro tip re: ads is leverage the modern stack and spell out your intent with a few more words when you query. We're pretty good at not serving ads for non-commercial queries. But old-school super short "searchese" queries make it hard to guess whether your intent is commercial or not.)

Actually that would be kind of awesome.

Can't speak for GP, but in my case it was an academic optometry center. Life changing. See my longer toplevel reply.

Should be fixed soon! We decided at 6pm on Friday to reduce biomedical research centers' budgets by billions of dollars ($4B in Massachusetts alone), effective Monday. So in the future China will have to train its own scientists.

Sadly, no "/s"

After I installed a high-COP, cold-climate heat pump in my Boston area house in 2020, I figured the wintertime running cost was about half again the cost of gas heat. However, the cost was about the same as that of running the somewhat ancient oil furnace the house came with.

Electricity prices in MA are high and are controlled by the marginal cost of gas to run generators, even though we have a significant fraction of renewable, hydro, and nuclear generation. Gas prices are also high because we're at the far end of the east coast natural gas pipeline network.

It's interesting to think about the whole chain -- burning gas in a high efficiency condensing furnace at home approaches 100% efficiency of conversion from chemical to heat energy.

Whereas utility generators that convert heat to electricity are upper bounded by the second law to ~60% efficiency, and then you have transmission losses on top of that. But you win roughly all that lossage back because your heat pump can pump ~3 units of outdoor heat energy into your house for every ~1 unit of electrical energy it consumes.

Add transmission costs and unfortunately heat pumps are more expensive here for now. But CO2 wise of course it still wins because of that renewal and nuclear share I talked about

More importantly, I can also install solar and start getting some energy "for free" (obviously, much more so in the summer than in the winter). And over time of course our renewable share will go up.

> the US government has caused more harm to its own people than China has today; US spies on its citizens, unfairly enforces laws against people,

Maybe, maybe not. But when the PRC decides the time is right to take Taiwan, it will have prepared the ground by making sure lots of Americans saw TikToks (made by other Americans) saying basically this.

I'd rephrase that as "the author is the author, Stephen Johnson, who is also one of the key people..."

I've read many of his books over the last 20 some years (and even watched a PBS documentary series he hosted). I was aware via his Substack that he was collaborating somehow with the NotebookLM team. But I was rather startled when he demoed NotebookLM at a Google all hands meeting a few weeks ago! Apparently he's a full time product manager now.