I'm a game developer, professionally!

You may know me from things like: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, The Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, Gone Home, Bioshock 2, or maybe something else.

Right now I work as a Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy Entertainment in Stockholm, Sweden

Perhaps there are other aspects of my personality that may also be revealed here on this website


Email
johnnemann@dimbulbgames.com
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Johnnemann

I've also noticed that specific searching has also gotten terrible, by which I mean things like searching my email or google drive. I can't figure out why this would be since it's not subject to the same incentives as web search!

And, the really truly disturbing thing I've noticed: my email spam filter (presumably at least partly built on some of the same tech as search) is shitty now. NOT ONLY does it let through a billion "Free Tools!" bullshit ads, but EVEN WORSE it seems to file legitimate messages as spam more often now. I used to ignore the spam folder because the chances of it missing things was so low, but I've had to go through there so many times recently, and I just know I've had important emails be deleted.

Legitimately do not know what to do with this information because I don't feel there will be better alternatives out there, though.


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in reply to @johnnemann's post:

re: email and drive search, one thing I noticed is they introduced a synonym/closely related term search that you cannot disable (for example, searching for the word 'insomnia' might return every email with the word 'sleep' in it). this happens on web search and as someone who usually knows very specifically what word or phrase i'm looking for it drives me up the fucking wall that these things are now designed to uselessly second-guess you in what i assume is mythologized as "convenience" or "meeting the need you don't know you have" or whatever

this shit's worse than the algogen stuff, it's possible to get around that but not if search just throws out whatever you actually asked for to give you the exact same homogenized Content slurry they're building towards (including, even in the best-case scenario, a metric ton of shit that is by no possible stretch relevant). Presumably actually tracking all the keywords instead of lumping everything into one of like seven categories is just too big a lift once you've established yourself as the monopoly and most people can no longer even imagine not using your product.

I don't use Google services for anything personal any more other than some lingering automated emails that go to my old gmail address and occasional use of Maps. If you intend to use a normal smartphone this pretty much requires switching to iOS, but otherwise it's been pretty easy and most of the alternatives are a better experience.

  • Protonmail for email, which has good reasonable search and good consistent spam filtering (It also lets me create multiple addresses and filter messages based on which address they came in on, which is useful)
  • DuckDuckGo for search
  • All my personal documents are just local files and I don't use a web cloud service. Right now I just sync things through icloud. Everything on my computer is seamlessly available on my phone as you'd expect with drive, etc.

This is interesting. I already use proton VPN. What tools do you use to actually create files? Especially things like spreadsheets and presentations? And then I guess I also would need a business account that can host my Dim Bulb email...

Microsoft Office, or in some cases the built-in mac apps like Numbers. Or a text editor.

If you already pay for Proton VPN, they have a package deal with email (including custom domains, multiple addresses, etc) and the VPN, which is what I use. The pricing for new users is $12/month right now, which is probably expensive for a lot of people, though.

I have recently been so mad at Google Search that I tried using DuckDuckGo instead for a week and unfortunately: it is still vastly worse than Google Search right now. I have not even once managed to find what I was looking for on the first attempt, for things that I then turned to Google and immediately got. It's very frustrating!

Here was the example that caused me to completely give up, but I was basically constantly having this problem: DuckDuckGo prioritizes more generic results in instances where Google Search is able to correctly identify the actual specific subject being looked for.

DuckDuckGo https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/5df07491-ecc8-43ee-b382-37bf1b16ed30/Screenshot%202023-05-30%20at%2010.25.27%20AM.png

Google https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/da08d14f-df87-4943-b693-b41e3b21105c/Screenshot%202023-05-30%20at%2010.25.58%20AM.png

I tried several times to switch to DDG, and hilariously, the thing that made it finally stick was finding out that I could add "!g" to the front of a query and have it immediately taken to google.
https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

Fundamentally this just makes it really easy to quickly use one or the other for different contexts. Google is now awful for finding products to buy (since it's all just pay-to-play now) and DDG is much worse at finding answers to technical problems. Having both options right at my fingertips is working pretty well for me these days.

Also hilarious: !ggif on DDG is actually a faster way to search google for animated gifs than actually using google (search, tab to Images, find the dropdown...).