But he’s not complaining about the traditional pages of search results!
He is definitely complaining about it in general. He has many complaints laced throughout which are not solely about the infobox, and which show his general opposition to the very idea of a search engine, eg.
But the self-appointed custodians of the world’s knowledge can’t cope with that tiny irregularity in the data, so they insist on filling the gap with whatever comes to hand:
Yes! That’s the idea! Showing whatever comes to hand! That’s exactly what I want and need!
The photo is gone again, probably because I managed to get it taken down from the Russian site a few days ago. But the underlying problem remains: Google’s software has no ability to distinguish reliable assertions about the real world from random nonsense that appears on the web, created by incompetent or malicious third parties.
The ‘underlying problem’ is the problem, even when what, according to you, the problem is, has been fixed.
For the people being falsely portrayed as “Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan”, this is probably just a minor nuisance, but it provides an illustration of how laughable the notion is that Google will ever be capable of using its relentlessly over-hyped “AI” to make sense of information on the web.
“Make sense of information on the web” obviously goes far beyond complaints about merely a little infobox being wrong.
This seems to have helped, slightly, but only in the sense that photos that shouldn’t be included here at all no longer come first in line. The current clumsy mash-up is shown in the screen shot on the left: a few copies of the decoy images that I put on my site in the hope of letting humans know that there are no actual photos of me on the web, and a couple of my book covers as well
“Decoy images”!
And so on and so forth, like the 2016 entry which is a thousand words criticizing Google for supplying not in the infobox about a bunch of other, actual, Greg Egans.
Again, Egan is being quite clear that he means the crazy thing you insist he can’t mean. And this is what he is talking about when he complains about “And by displaying results from disparate sources in a manner that implies that they refer to the same subject, it acts as a mindless stupidity amplifier that disseminates and entrenches existing errors.”—he thinks displaying them at all is the problem. It shouldn’t be amplifying or disseminating ‘existing errors’, even though he is demanding something impossible and something that if possible would remove a lot of a search engine’s value. (I often am investigating ‘existing errors’...)
if you’re an specialist that already knows what you’re doing, but non-specialists just reach for the first duct-tape solution that comes to mind without noticing how bad it is.
I was an even worse programmer and web developer than Egan was ~2009 (see eg his mathematics pages) when I solved the same problem in minutes as part of basic DNS setup. Imagine, I didn’t even realize back then I should be so impressed at how I pulled off something only a ‘specialist’ could!
I agree that preëmptive blocking is kind of weird, but I also think your locked account with “Follow requests ignored due to terrible UI” is kind of weird.
The blocking, whenever it was exactly, was years and years before I ever locked my account, which was relatively recent, because it was just due to Elon Musk following me. (It would be even weirder if he had done so afterwards, as there is even less point to preemptively blocking a locked account.)
He is definitely complaining about it in general. He has many complaints laced throughout which are not solely about the infobox, and which show his general opposition to the very idea of a search engine, eg.
Yes! That’s the idea! Showing whatever comes to hand! That’s exactly what I want and need!
The ‘underlying problem’ is the problem, even when what, according to you, the problem is, has been fixed.
“Make sense of information on the web” obviously goes far beyond complaints about merely a little infobox being wrong.
“Decoy images”!
And so on and so forth, like the 2016 entry which is a thousand words criticizing Google for supplying not in the infobox about a bunch of other, actual, Greg Egans.
Again, Egan is being quite clear that he means the crazy thing you insist he can’t mean. And this is what he is talking about when he complains about “And by displaying results from disparate sources in a manner that implies that they refer to the same subject, it acts as a mindless stupidity amplifier that disseminates and entrenches existing errors.”—he thinks displaying them at all is the problem. It shouldn’t be amplifying or disseminating ‘existing errors’, even though he is demanding something impossible and something that if possible would remove a lot of a search engine’s value. (I often am investigating ‘existing errors’...)
I was an even worse programmer and web developer than Egan was ~2009 (see eg his mathematics pages) when I solved the same problem in minutes as part of basic DNS setup. Imagine, I didn’t even realize back then I should be so impressed at how I pulled off something only a ‘specialist’ could!
The blocking, whenever it was exactly, was years and years before I ever locked my account, which was relatively recent, because it was just due to Elon Musk following me. (It would be even weirder if he had done so afterwards, as there is even less point to preemptively blocking a locked account.)