Thoughts From The Static

 A couple decades ago, some meterologists were admitting bluntly that electronic thermometers simply did not work correctly; and it's easy to see that they still do not work.  Today, the thermometer in my car suddenly increased almost ten degrees within seconds while driving down the road (usually it decreases while driving due to the cooling effect of air passing over the car at high speeds), and the thermometer at my house was showing an even hotter temperature (hence even more inflated). The various temperature readings from my town cited by the "Weather Underground" site often vary by ten degrees, even the ones that are within a few blocks of each other. I'm old enough to remember mercury thermometers, which had less variation and none of the crazy spikes that electronic thermometers are plagued by.

Online news media outlets tend to fill their webpages with popups, endless ads, videos that follow you down the screen when you try to read the article, and other nuissances that make it difficult to read the news which the outlet is ostensibly trying to publish. And if you try to write a comment to correct mistakes in the article, there is often a convoluted process of signing up and then verifying your account, only to be told that the system has detected "suspicious activity" which requires another round of verification. Which pointy-haired executives think these policies are good ones?  It's like living in a Dilbert cartoon.

 This has nothing to do with the internet or computers, unlike most of the posts here.  While in town this morning, I was confronted yet again by cars that were parked diagonally across multiple parking slots (multiple cars simultaneously in the same small parking lot). Two days ago I was prevented from squeezing my car into an on-street parking zone because two drivers had both simultaneously left a large chunk of space between their car and the one in front of them, thereby restricting the total number of cars which could park on that section of road. Other people have commented that this is a recurring problem in this entire county.  Presumably this mentality is caused by the relatively large amount of space per person in most areas of the county, which is predominantly small towns and farmland. Many people apparently feel free to use up as much extra space as they please, and they maintain this habit even when in a city where parking space is at a premium. Irritating....

 Google is advertising its AI system (Gemini) heavily on "X" (formerly Twitter) with the following spiel: "The Gemini era is here, bringing the magic of AI to the tools you use every day."   https://x.com/Google/status/1790455194485981275 But the comments underneath the above ad show a great deal of skepticism from the public after Gemini's previous gaffes. Obviously this is not a scientific poll to determine the public's view of Gemini or Google as a whole, but certainly a significant number of people  are fed up with Google. Oddly, Gemini still is not allowed to produce images - the main feature which produced so much public wrath some months ago - so it's not clear why Google is heavily promoting Gemini now, before this basic feature has been re-enabled.     

After trying Google News again this morning, I remembered more dysfunctional new "features" that have surfaced in the last few months.  News results are often indundated by numerous obituaries that have seemingly nothing to do with the search term. Searching for news from just the last day or two often yields extremely old news articles from several years ago (years, not days) in spite of the explicit time limit. Some of these "necro-articles" repeatedly bob to the surface on nearly a daily basis no matter how old they may be, and keep showing up month after month. Oftentimes a search for the previous 24 hours' worth of news returns more results than a search for the past 48 hours (which obviously defies logic), and likewise putting a phrase in quotes sometimes returns more results than leaving it without quotes (the reverse of what should happen since using quotations is supposed to limit the search to only the exact phrase). But all of these quirks occur at ra...

 While many people on social media have been focused on the problems with Google's AI system, some of Google's more basic features have been slowly going downhill for years. Google News used to deliver useful results but in the past few months it has gone downhill so badly as to be almost pointless. Putting the search phrase in quotes (to limit results to actual occurrences of the full phrase) no longer works. Leaving out the quotes produces a haphazard list of mostly unrelated articles (e.g. articles containing only one of the words but not the entire phrase). The entries for the news articles no longer even provide a relevant snippet of text to show the context in which the keywords are used. Instead, it now displays a random section of the article that often doesn't include any of the words in the phrase.  This requires tediously clicking thru each entry to see whether the article actually deals with the topic. Searching for foreign phrases generally doesn't work, si...