7 ms·

"Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a

by dsr_ 5y ago

"Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another. A terminal, in the shape of a ring, button, bracelet or pen or whatever, was your link with everybody and everything else in the Culture. Without a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need." --Iain M. Banks, in The Player of Games

RealityVoid 5y ago
First thing I thought about as well. I really think The Culture is very special in its ability to "feel" the future.
mostlysimilar 5y ago
So I had a feeling "without a terminal" was a typo and I wanted to look up the exact quote. I googled the sentence and expected the right quote to be at the top, but all Google gave me was results for helping people with terminal cancer cope with their coming death. It was only after I appended "Ian M Banks" that I got the result I was looking for. I'm honestly surprised Google failed that search so hard.
- ChuckMcM 5y ago
  Not surprised. The way I see it, Google is trying so hard to monetize search that they have left behind any pretense of information retrieval.
- shiftpgdn 5y ago
  Google is optimized around showing ads, not returning relevant search results.
- manachar 5y ago
  Google has become blinded by metrics focused on giving people what an algorithm things most people want. It's the digital equivalent of going to a restaurant and looking for vegetarian food only to be inundated with gluten-free and other health-fad foods. I suspect their algorithm is in a bit of a doom loop as it's being trained on people clicking worse and worse results of pages that seem clearly written to game the SEO. This is not unique to google. Amazon keeps including things I didn't search for because they want to be "helpful". Indeed, my experience at big box hardware stores is matching this as well. If you go for one simple thing that you know you want, you're presented with an entire aisle of absolute crap that sort of does it but for much more money while the one item you need is out of stock.
  - carom 5y ago
    Gluten free isn't a health fad. Please learn about celiacs.
    - tleilaxu 5y ago
      It can be both…
    - joebob42 5y ago
      The set of celiacs is much smaller than the set of people who think eating gluten free food is a good idea.
      - ashirviskas 5y ago
        Afaik unhealthy diet increases gluten sensitivity. I have it and it sucks having your knees and elbows hurt for a week after eating a gluten rich pizza.
        kennywinker 5y ago
        > Afaik unhealthy diet increases gluten sensitivity I don't want to argue with your overall point at all, because I assume that whatever this sentence specifically means to you is true for you - but given that there is no actually objective definition of what a healthy diet is - it's hard to agree with the statement in general. I would feel like I was eating unhealthily if I had a can of coke every day, but that doesn't actually mean it's unhealthy. It probably depends on everything else I'm eating, how much I'm burning off, maybe even something as fine-grained as how fast I drink it. You would almost definitely feel unhealthy if you were eating bread every day, but as long as it was whole-wheat and had some good sandwich fixins in it, I'd feel pretty good about that. Anyway, sorry if I'm being pedantic, but I feel like people toss around things like "healthy diet" as if we're all supposed to know and agree what that means.
- belltaco 5y ago
  Google has become borderline unusable for finding something that's not popular that's more than a month or year old. Multiple times I have spent more than 5 to 10 minutes trying to find something I have read a few years or even a few months ago and it's next to impossible to find it, even with time gating the results Google just keeps returning popular search results over specificity. The long tail is just ignored in their current algo.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  ..but it was a typo, yeah?
  - dsr_ 5y ago
    Yes, it should be "With a terminal".
- spullara 5y ago
  People are constantly saying these things about google and when I search for: "Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal" I get the exact answer as a snippet at the top of the search. I am beginning to think everyone that has bad search results has some kind of malware installed on their computer since their searches always work for me.
  - tomilola39 5y ago
    Parent likely searched without hard quotes; leading to the bad results.
  - tyrfing 5y ago
    It fails if you search for the incorrect quote; the last sentence should start "With" and not "Without". Checking competitors, Bing fails to find any variation of the quote, Yandex returns 5 results if you remove the incorrect word and quote it, but returns garbage otherwise. Considering the single-digit number of results for an apparently very obscure quote, and that it was incorrect, this does seem reasonable. I'm starting to think that standards are simply rising over time. 10 years ago, would anyone complain that an incorrect quote from a 30-year-old book didn't return results?
    - spullara 5y ago
      Trying this: Without a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know It suggests results that don't include terminal (but of course that is a critical word for this quote), selecting must include terminal, gives the quote as the top results.
      - tyrfing 5y ago
        Fascinating. Quoting individual words like "terminal" or "shout" also works as a nudge for both Google and Yandex, but not for Bing. And since our written observations modify the behavior, an update: quoting the whole sentence now returns a single result - this page.
- _23sd 5y ago
  (I misunderstood your comment initially so corrected this sentence) The problem is that the sentence is typo'd so searching for the exact quote (not keywords) doesn't work correctly. For the record the actual quote is: >With a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need When you Google that in quotes you get actual results from Google Books and Goodreads, while Bing/DuckDuckGo only returns an archive from a random blog that quotes it halfway down the page, and the new hot search engine Brave finds nothing. I agree it's a little disappointing that one mistaken word throws Google so far off the trail.
  - solveit 5y ago
    > I agree it's a little disappointing that one mistaken word throws Google so far off the trail. But can you imagine the aggravation if Google chooses to do the opposite and 'helpfully' 'corrects' your quotes for you? Actually I am not sure I have to imagine...
    - _23sd 5y ago
      Definitely hands off my quote searches, but one might hope that if you took out the quotation marks it would be able to pick up the correct quote. In fact it can if you change around certain words in the first sentence (Stories set in the Culture...). I think what's going on is that "without a terminal..." is not such a well known quote and has some pretty broadly applicable keywords (terminal...question...help), while combining the more unique set of keywords from "stories set in the culture...", which is a more well known quote, is more likely to lead the search engine to the quote even if you're missing one of the keywords in it due to a typo.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Falkon1313 5y ago
    For me on duckduckgo, the first two results are this thread and the fourth is the story itself. >There were (true) stories of people falling off cliffs and the terminal relaying their scream in time for a Hub unit to switch to that terminal's camera, realise what was happening and displace a drone to catch the faller in mid-air; there were other stories about terminals recording the severing of their owner's head from their body in an accident, and summoning a medical drone in time to save the brain, leaving the de-bodied person with no more a problem than finding ways to pass the months it took to grow a new body. >A terminal was safety. >So Gurgeh took his on the longer walks. Our cell phones might sometimes be pretty useful devices, but they're not quite capable of that sort of thing yet. Still, you can walk around and explore without using it, while still having it along in a pocket just in case you do the modern equivalent of fall off a cliff or get decapitated. Just better hope you have cell service and your battery is charged up if you do. I got a smartphone 10 years ago after a trip where I got lost in an unfamiliar city at night. I did manage to navigate my way around by sense of direction and spotting buildings and river, and was just a little late to the party I was going to. But I thought something with maps would be more useful than a flip-phone if I ever got lost while traveling again. A few years later, exploring randomly in the mountains a couple of states away with my wife, we pulled into a small town late one evening and got out our phones to look for a place to eat and a place to stay. No service, for either of us. So we just wandered around the town with our eyes open and asked people. Found a great restaurant and a nice quiet little bed and breakfast. Once again serendipity beat the cell phone. What is more concerning is that kids who've grown up with them their entire lives just might not be able to handle that sort of thing. They might just freak out as much as if they had fallen off a cliff or something.

by dsr_ 5y ago

RealityVoid 5y ago

First thing I thought about as well. I really think The Culture is very special in its ability to "feel" the future.

mostlysimilar 5y ago

So I had a feeling "without a terminal" was a typo and I wanted to look up the exact quote. I googled the sentence and expected the right quote to be at the top, but all Google gave me was results for helping people with terminal cancer cope with their coming death. It was only after I appended "Ian M Banks" that I got the result I was looking for. I'm honestly surprised Google failed that search so hard.

ChuckMcM 5y ago
Not surprised. The way I see it, Google is trying so hard to monetize search that they have left behind any pretense of information retrieval.
shiftpgdn 5y ago
Google is optimized around showing ads, not returning relevant search results.
manachar 5y ago
Google has become blinded by metrics focused on giving people what an algorithm things most people want. It's the digital equivalent of going to a restaurant and looking for vegetarian food only to be inundated with gluten-free and other health-fad foods. I suspect their algorithm is in a bit of a doom loop as it's being trained on people clicking worse and worse results of pages that seem clearly written to game the SEO. This is not unique to google. Amazon keeps including things I didn't search for because they want to be "helpful". Indeed, my experience at big box hardware stores is matching this as well. If you go for one simple thing that you know you want, you're presented with an entire aisle of absolute crap that sort of does it but for much more money while the one item you need is out of stock.
- carom 5y ago
  Gluten free isn't a health fad. Please learn about celiacs.
  - tleilaxu 5y ago
    It can be both…
  - joebob42 5y ago
    The set of celiacs is much smaller than the set of people who think eating gluten free food is a good idea.
    - ashirviskas 5y ago
      Afaik unhealthy diet increases gluten sensitivity. I have it and it sucks having your knees and elbows hurt for a week after eating a gluten rich pizza.
      - kennywinker 5y ago
        > Afaik unhealthy diet increases gluten sensitivity I don't want to argue with your overall point at all, because I assume that whatever this sentence specifically means to you is true for you - but given that there is no actually objective definition of what a healthy diet is - it's hard to agree with the statement in general. I would feel like I was eating unhealthily if I had a can of coke every day, but that doesn't actually mean it's unhealthy. It probably depends on everything else I'm eating, how much I'm burning off, maybe even something as fine-grained as how fast I drink it. You would almost definitely feel unhealthy if you were eating bread every day, but as long as it was whole-wheat and had some good sandwich fixins in it, I'd feel pretty good about that. Anyway, sorry if I'm being pedantic, but I feel like people toss around things like "healthy diet" as if we're all supposed to know and agree what that means.
belltaco 5y ago
Google has become borderline unusable for finding something that's not popular that's more than a month or year old. Multiple times I have spent more than 5 to 10 minutes trying to find something I have read a few years or even a few months ago and it's next to impossible to find it, even with time gating the results Google just keeps returning popular search results over specificity. The long tail is just ignored in their current algo.
whimsicalism 5y ago
..but it was a typo, yeah?
- dsr_ 5y ago
  Yes, it should be "With a terminal".
spullara 5y ago
People are constantly saying these things about google and when I search for: "Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal" I get the exact answer as a snippet at the top of the search. I am beginning to think everyone that has bad search results has some kind of malware installed on their computer since their searches always work for me.
- tomilola39 5y ago
  Parent likely searched without hard quotes; leading to the bad results.
- tyrfing 5y ago
  It fails if you search for the incorrect quote; the last sentence should start "With" and not "Without". Checking competitors, Bing fails to find any variation of the quote, Yandex returns 5 results if you remove the incorrect word and quote it, but returns garbage otherwise. Considering the single-digit number of results for an apparently very obscure quote, and that it was incorrect, this does seem reasonable. I'm starting to think that standards are simply rising over time. 10 years ago, would anyone complain that an incorrect quote from a 30-year-old book didn't return results?
  - spullara 5y ago
    Trying this: Without a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know It suggests results that don't include terminal (but of course that is a critical word for this quote), selecting must include terminal, gives the quote as the top results.
    - tyrfing 5y ago
      Fascinating. Quoting individual words like "terminal" or "shout" also works as a nudge for both Google and Yandex, but not for Bing. And since our written observations modify the behavior, an update: quoting the whole sentence now returns a single result - this page.
_23sd 5y ago
(I misunderstood your comment initially so corrected this sentence) The problem is that the sentence is typo'd so searching for the exact quote (not keywords) doesn't work correctly. For the record the actual quote is: >With a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need When you Google that in quotes you get actual results from Google Books and Goodreads, while Bing/DuckDuckGo only returns an archive from a random blog that quotes it halfway down the page, and the new hot search engine Brave finds nothing. I agree it's a little disappointing that one mistaken word throws Google so far off the trail.
- solveit 5y ago
  > I agree it's a little disappointing that one mistaken word throws Google so far off the trail. But can you imagine the aggravation if Google chooses to do the opposite and 'helpfully' 'corrects' your quotes for you? Actually I am not sure I have to imagine...
  - _23sd 5y ago
    Definitely hands off my quote searches, but one might hope that if you took out the quotation marks it would be able to pick up the correct quote. In fact it can if you change around certain words in the first sentence (Stories set in the Culture...). I think what's going on is that "without a terminal..." is not such a well known quote and has some pretty broadly applicable keywords (terminal...question...help), while combining the more unique set of keywords from "stories set in the culture...", which is a more well known quote, is more likely to lead the search engine to the quote even if you're missing one of the keywords in it due to a typo.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Falkon1313 5y ago
  For me on duckduckgo, the first two results are this thread and the fourth is the story itself. >There were (true) stories of people falling off cliffs and the terminal relaying their scream in time for a Hub unit to switch to that terminal's camera, realise what was happening and displace a drone to catch the faller in mid-air; there were other stories about terminals recording the severing of their owner's head from their body in an accident, and summoning a medical drone in time to save the brain, leaving the de-bodied person with no more a problem than finding ways to pass the months it took to grow a new body. >A terminal was safety. >So Gurgeh took his on the longer walks. Our cell phones might sometimes be pretty useful devices, but they're not quite capable of that sort of thing yet. Still, you can walk around and explore without using it, while still having it along in a pocket just in case you do the modern equivalent of fall off a cliff or get decapitated. Just better hope you have cell service and your battery is charged up if you do. I got a smartphone 10 years ago after a trip where I got lost in an unfamiliar city at night. I did manage to navigate my way around by sense of direction and spotting buildings and river, and was just a little late to the party I was going to. But I thought something with maps would be more useful than a flip-phone if I ever got lost while traveling again. A few years later, exploring randomly in the mountains a couple of states away with my wife, we pulled into a small town late one evening and got out our phones to look for a place to eat and a place to stay. No service, for either of us. So we just wandered around the town with our eyes open and asked people. Found a great restaurant and a nice quiet little bed and breakfast. Once again serendipity beat the cell phone. What is more concerning is that kids who've grown up with them their entire lives just might not be able to handle that sort of thing. They might just freak out as much as if they had fallen off a cliff or something.