Kyle Brady: A Blog

Have you heard of ‘Mahalo’? No? Well, here’s an excerpt from their FAQs:

Mahalo is a human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms.

Hm. Ironically enough, uncov has written about Mahalo many times, each time speaking to what degree of “fail” it is. That’s really no surprise…

Are You Stupid?

Read this. It’s from Jason Calacanis’ blog. Does it make you laugh so hard you wet yourself? It should. Why? I think it’s pretty obvious… it takes at least 24 hours for a page to be created on a topic, and only if they get enough requests for it. The example shown is “grey wolf”, which you would think is common enough to warrant a page.

Thank you, Stewie. You said it so perfectly.

I’m Sorry…

I’m sorry, but I thought Google already did this. Maybe I’m wrong, but when you search for something in Google, you always get results. And, chances are that you get exactly what you were looking for within the first result or two. It’s like magic, except that it’s created by a computer. Which means that there is no delay time, no time wasted on “people search” or other such craptastic nonsense.

Kompubers R Kool

In this age of “Web 2.0″, you’d think that people would understand how the Internet works. Or at least that you can use a “search engine” to “find” certain “things” on “teh Intorwebz”. Without the “help” of “human beings”.

Were there enough ironic quotes there for you to get my meaning?

Stop It.

Let’s be serious for a second. Google became popular because it returned results on exactly what you were looking for, all the time. And it was simple and uncluttered. So that begs the question: why, in God’s bloody name, do you think you can compete with Google? More importantly, how can a relatively small group of underpaid and probably not-very-educated people do better than a computer?

Keep it up, Mahalo Guides!

Here’s some simple facts (you = Mahalo):

• You will never be able to produce results for every topic people want to know about.
• Your results will never be as relevant or up-to-date as real search engines.
• You are not a search engine. “Engine” implies algorithms. Which are not made of people.
• You are a “glorified” wiki. And I mean that in the sense that you over-value yourself, because you are worthless, and are actually of less value than a wiki devoted entirely to kiwi fruit.

I Think…

I think you should quit. I would say “while you’re ahead”, but you’re clearly not ahead. You’re living somewhere around 1992, dial-up and everything.

Stop wasting VC money. Stop wasting people’s time. And, most importantly, stop making real engineers and programmers look bad by pretending you know what you’re doing.

Jason Calacanis, you are a stupid stupid bastard with a self-inflated ego of worthlessness.

posted on November 12th, 2007 at 8:45 am by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Failure, Google, Programming, Rant, Search

Leave it to the Russians to find a prehistoric “fish” in an underground river. Seriously, it’s like all the cool stuff you can find is over there in the motherland.

It’s Alien!

Take a look at the picture below:

Property of whoever that site took it from. Larger version over there.

Now, look at the life-form from the first ‘Alien’ movie:

From IMDB.

Similar?

I don’t know about you, but these two seem very very similar to me.  I know, one has “legs” and the other doesn’t, but I’m talking about the overall appearance.  The overall structure.  The Russian-found “fish” looks a little bit like one of those horseshoe-crabs, but I think it’s pretty obvious the writers of Alien had prescience and knew what this thing would look like.

Eat My Face, Please

What would have happened if the Russian workers hadn’t killed it?  Would it have jumped on one of their faces?  Probably, since they mentioned that story about throwing it food, and it trying to attack them.  Would it have embedded itself in your stomach, waiting for the right time to explode out of your chest in a fit of unmitigated fury?  Probably, since they look similar.

And, most importantly, would it eventually also live inside of something like a cow, resulting in an alien-human-cow crossbreed that creates an immensely strong and intelligent creature that wants to destroy/eat every human it comes in contact with?  Definitely.

I bet it would even fight a different alien race for ownership/supremacy over the puny humans.

posted on November 12th, 2007 at 7:28 am by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Alien, Aliens, Prehistoric, Russia, SciFi

Recently, I came across a release from Harvard University that’s titled “Engineered weathering process could mitigate global warming”. I was pretty interested, so I read on.

The Basics

I won’t get into all the details, since you can read for yourself, but it’s “simple” to understand, at least in a broad concept (I have no idea how it’s actually done). Long story short, the title is a little misleading, because this is not a way to control weather, but rather to manipulate our environment to slow/reverse global warming. How?

Burn, baby, burn.

It involves a topic that has been discusses many times: the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In this case, they claim to be able to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and permanently transfer it to the ocean (a pool of water in a lab?), by some complicated process. Apparently, this happens naturally, and they are only replicating this process on a faster time-table.

The Benefits

The benefits of such a process, were it to be implemented, should be pretty obvious. A slowdown of global warming (”if it exists!”), or even a reversal, would be highly lauded around the world… especially by greedy corporations, and China, who have a large footprint, yet don’t care to do anything about it unless forced.

Hello, Exxon.

The Negatives

In other research projects / thought-experiments on such processes, there have been a few “problems” with such a process [Note: I won’t link to any specific one, but if you Google it, you’ll find many valid results]. The biggest one? It should be the most obvious… the effect on oceanic life.

It’s common knowledge that fish take oxygen out of the water to breathe, right? What happens when you add an over-abundance of CO2 to the same water? Many scientists claim you’ll end up hurting, if not killing, many fish and other ocean-based creatures, as well as making shrimp questionable to eat (because of poisoning).

The Answer?

I’m not sure there really is an answer to this, as to whether or not humanity should inflict it’s problems on other life-forms of the same planet, but I do know this: out of global warming “control” / “reversal”, it’s quite possible that we will see complete weather control, ala “Weather” in Frank Herbert’s Dune books.

Not really what I had in mind…

Why? If you can control the amount of CO2 in the air, it then follows that you can directly control the temperature. (If you didn’t follow that: global warming is occurring because we are trapping excess heat within our atmosphere due to gases. If you remove those gases, less heat is trapped.) This, at least to me, would seem to be the first step in weather control.

Now if only we could figure out how to make hurricanes disappear…

posted on November 12th, 2007 at 6:44 am by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Energy, Environment, Future, Global Warming, Physics