#The Daily Show | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mysharona1987 · 1 year

Text

#Gun crime #gun violence #the daily show #fox news #gun control #democrats #liberals #quotes #schools

23K notes · View notes

teesadutta · 2 years

Text

6.29.22

#YES #the daily show #trevor noah #roe v wade #abortion #gun control #gif #television #popular

34K notes · View notes

rhysdarbinizedarby · 5 months

Text

Someone requested for this clip of Taika Waititi and Leslie Jones on The Daily Jones due locked region. Have fun watching!

#taika waititi #leslie jones #next goal wins #our flag means death #the daily show #blackbeard #spanish jackie

1K notes · View notes

one-time-i-dreamt · 2 months

Text

The Daily Show hosted a press conference in Washington DC to officially reveal their new full-time anchor. That anchor turned out to somehow be Brennan Lee Mulligan.

#dream #text #March 2nd 2024 #brennan lee mulligan #the daily show #press conference #washington dc #queueueueueueueueueueueueueue #anchor

598 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 19 days

Text

Too big to care

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.

Today, Google has a 90% search market-share. They got it the hard way: they cheated. Google spends tens of billions of dollars on payola in order to ensure that they are the default search engine behind every search box you encounter on every device, every service and every website:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Not coincidentally, Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with a quick Google search no longer show up in the first ten screens of results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don't need to spend money on quality, because we're all locked into using Google search. It's cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we'd still prefer Google.

This is enshittification. Google is shifting value away from end users (searchers) and business customers (advertisers, publishers and merchants) to itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

And here's the thing: there are search engines out there that are so good that if you just try them, you'll get that same feeling you got the first time you tried Google.

When I was in Tucson last month on my book-tour for my new novel The Bezzle, I crashed with my pals Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I've know them since I was a teenager (Patrick is my editor).

We were sitting in his living room on our laptops – just like old times! – and Patrick asked me if I'd tried Kagi, a new search-engine.

Teresa chimed in, extolling the advanced search features, the "lenses" that surfaced specific kinds of resources on the web.

I hadn't even heard of Kagi, but the Nielsen Haydens are among the most effective researchers I know – both in their professional editorial lives and in their many obsessive hobbies. If it was good enough for them…

I tried it. It was magic.

No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again.

That was before I started playing with Kagi's lenses and other bells and whistles, which elevated the search experience from "magic" to sorcerous.

The catch is that Kagi costs money – after 100 queries, they want you to cough up $10/month ($14 for a couple or $20 for a family with up to six accounts, and some kid-specific features):

https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan&plan=family

I immediately bought a family plan. I've been using it for a month. I've basically stopped using Google search altogether.

Kagi just let me get a lot more done, and I assumed that they were some kind of wildly capitalized startup that was running their own crawl and and their own data-centers. But this morning, I read Jason Koebler's 404 Media report on his own experiences using it:

https://www.404media.co/friendship-ended-with-google-now-kagi-is-my-best-friend/

Koebler's piece contained a key detail that I'd somehow missed:

When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,” as well as a handful of other specialized search engines, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, etc. Kagi then combines this with its own web index and news index (for news searches) to build the results pages that you see. So, essentially, you are getting some mix of Google search results combined with results from other indexes.

In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.

The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework

No wonder Google spends a whole-ass Twitter every year to make sure you never try a rival search engine. Bottom line: they ran the numbers and figured out their most profitable course of action is to enshittify their flagship product and bribe their "competitors" like Apple and Samsung so that you never try another search engine and have another one of those magic moments that sent all those Jeeves-askin' Yahooers to Google a quarter-century ago.

One of my favorite TV comedy bits is Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator; Tomlin would do these pitches for the Bell System and end every ad with "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml

Speaking of TV comedy: this week saw FTC chair Lina Khan appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

The coverage of Khan's appearance has focused on Stewart's revelation that when he was doing a show on Apple TV, the company prohibited him from interviewing her (presumably because of her hostility to tech monopolies):

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/apple-got-caught-censoring-its-own

But for me, the big moment came when Khan described tech monopolists as "too big to care."

What a phrase!

Since the subprime crisis, we're all familiar with businesses being "too big to fail" and "too big to jail." But "too big to care?" Oof, that got me right in the feels.

Because that's what it feels like to use enshittified Google. That's what it feels like to discover that Kagi – the good search engine – is mostly Google with the weights adjusted to serve users, not shareholders.

Google used to care. They cared because they were worried about competitors and regulators. They cared because their workers made them care:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/4/18295933/google-cancels-ai-ethics-board

Google doesn't care anymore. They don't have to. They're the search company.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

#pluralistic #john stewart #the daily show #apple #monopoly #lina khan #ftc #too big to fail #too big to jail #monopolism #trustbusting #antitrust #search #enshittification #kagi #google

432 notes · View notes

obsessedho · 1 month

Text

olivia munn by alei hay for GQ magazine, 2010

#olivia munn #gq magazine #gq #alei hay #the daily show

333 notes · View notes

alwaysanxiousrobot · 5 months

Text

And I knew back then, too.

TAIKA WAITITI on The Daily Show

Bonus:

#taika waititi #leslie jones #the daily show #next goal wins #ofmd

769 notes · View notes

stalebagels · 1 month

Text

Strike Force Reductress Headlines

183 notes · View notes

contemplatingoutlander · 3 months

Text

Jon Stewart returns to ‘The Daily Show’ for 2024 election cycle

Jon Stewart is coming back to “The Daily Show” after nearly a decade. Paramount Global announced Wednesday that Stewart, who hosted the talk show during its most impactful and popular years, will take up hosting duties on Monday nights beginning on Feb. 12 — the Monday after the Super Bowl. Stewart will remain as part-time host throughout the 2024 election cycle, with rotating hosts throughout the rest of the week. He will also as serve as executive producer for every episode through 2025. Stewart was given the Monday slot because Mondays are the most-watched day for the show during the week and a catch-up day for weekend news, according to the network. “Jon Stewart is the voice of our generation, and we are honored to have him return to Comedy Central’s ‘The Daily Show’ to help us all make sense of the insanity and division roiling the country as we enter the election season,” said Chris McCarthy, president and CEO of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios, in a statement. “In our age of staggering hypocrisy and performative politics, Jon is the perfect person to puncture the empty rhetoric and provide much-needed clarity with his brilliant wit.”