"What on earth"? Nothing.

thing i run into a lot

people who get what I mean:

people who have found a way to have fun in the corn maze but who I'm a little worried about:

person who we are going to put in the corn:

Kiki’s Delivery Service: takes place in the regular world— albeit at some nebulous point in time— but also magic is real and witches are a thing. Witches exist in this world because it’s fun and we like them. It’s fantasy elements in a familiar setting— essentially urban or modern fantasy.

Porco Rosso: takes place in an extremely specific place and time and contains exactly one fantastical element— Marco’s pig head— which is never given an explanation and is never questioned as a biological impossibility. It’s clearly a metaphor and commentary on a real world issue but it’s also very much literal. This dude 100% has a pig head. No other mentions of magic are made. This is magical realism.

it's bad but I want to encourage people to read along and interpret it in more depth than the article above.

I will be skipping sections (indicated with [...] ) due to things such as when the speakers present hypothetical scenarios, repeat previous products, to cut out marketing flourishes of language, or at my own discretion for focus on the topic at hand. feel free to go to the source yourselves if you want to hear what i cut

transcript of the relevant section:

[...]-we've been on a journey to bring together the best of a search engine with the best of AI. [...] with AI Overview. [...] last year on this stage that we launched AI Mode. It's our most powerful AI Search, bringing in our most advanced Gemini models. And as of today, we're upgrading it on Gemini 3.5. [...]

And now, we're entering the next chapter of Google Search, where [...] AI features aren't just in Search; Google Search is AI Search through and through. [...], it's an AI Search that brings to figure out our most advanced Gemini models, our newest agentic capabilities, and the full breadth of the world's information. [...] Now, to start, I'm excited to announce we're launching a brand-new intelligent Search box. Before, the Search box was a contained space, but now, it's totally reimagined with AI. [...] As you ask, Search helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions. This goes beyond autocomplete. It offers nuances that you might not have even thought to add, helping you take the exact question on your mind and ask it with ease. [...] And you can ask across modalities with text, images, files, and videos, and Search reasons across them all. This is the biggest upgrade to our iconic Search box since its debut over 25 years ago. And it's starting to roll out today. [...], bringing AI Overviews and AI Mode into one seamless AI Search experience. You can float effortlessly from your question to your response on the main Search results page, to follow-ups in AI Mode. Your context stays with you and your conversation gets deeper. Your links and sources get even more relevant to what you might want to explore, so you continue to get the best of AI and the best of the Web. [...] this new seamless AI Search experience is live today, across desktop and mobile worldwide. [...] you'll be able to create and manage multiple AI agents for your many tasks, right in Search. We're entering the era of Search agents. Now to start, you can set information agents to work for you 24/7 in the background. They can find you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it, and help you take action. You can spin up multiple agents in Search simultaneously, [...]

And these will work with and alongside Gemini Spark to help you get more done, [...] [...] your agent sends you an intelligent and synthesized update. It helps you understand what's going on so you can separate the signal from the noise. And it points you to hyper-relevant content, like this crowdsourced research platform, news site and social. This helps websites and creators get fresh content discovered by people who really care about it, when it matters most to them.[...] your agent continuously scans the entire web, across sites, social, and forums. [...] And it monitors everything from blogs to our Shopping Graph so you don't miss out. You'll be able to put information agents to work for you this summer. Just ask Search to keep you updated on whatever you want to know. [...], information agents are among the first of many agents we're introducing in Search to make it more helpful for you.

so what is my understanding of this roll out?

first of all it appears to be less of a replacement for traditional search and more just shoving sentence suggestions and tool prompts into your field of view to nudge you towards searching queries completely within their ai mode, nothing in the presentation directly stated that regular search results would be going away, i feel like while criticising what they are doing we should avoid criticising something they didn't actually do.

Let me talk about existing google features I think it is just reworking:

image/file upload search, google lens, the various search filter tabs you can already see under the search bar, advanced filter/search tools, google alerts, it's already existing AI mode, already existing agents and gen-ai features

a LOT of what this 25 minute section of video discussed is just updates of existing google products that are then mashed together to encourage a multimedia interaction.

the use case they repeatedly present is a person speaks or types the beginning of a thought, selects a predicted autofil end to their sentence, and is presented with with a series of interactive results with the option to make real world purchases completely within their interface environment. the end goal appears to be just pushing the virtual assistant angle to do the work for you and prevent you from navigating away even to create purchases, multimedia, or receive information.

the actual beneficial part of the update is they have somewhat streamlined including multiple elements to your actual search queries, for example you could always upload an image to search and then add text key terms to refine the results- but now you can add videos and files as well so there can be multiple sources to search with. however this is not that different to how many gen-ai chatbots already function.

essentially it looks like if you want to do a traditional web search that won't change but there will be an intrusive chatbot element because like a lot of companies they want to lock you into their environment and act as middlemen for your online interactions.

yes this is another attempt to convince you you NEED ai to do things people have been doing online for 33 years, including 5 years where google didn't even exist yet. yes in addition to attempting to justify ai it is also one of many ways they normalise data harvesting users. yes it is just repackaging multiple features already provided and when you actually look at what's new it amounts to some refinement updates and incorporating everything into one location. yes it will have a negative impact on both websites that rely on SEO and users who are babied into handing over their autonomy and decision making to software they don't understand and have to trust the reliability of.

no it is not getting rid of traditional web search functionality. everyone please relax a little on that specific matter. continuing to use that functionality and ignoring or blocking the ai elements (i block google ai overviews in search results using ublock) is already a small statement you can make

A few years after finishing it, I was talking to a friend who had just played it. He was saying how he dumped all of his orbs (game currency) into upgrading his minimum health pool and how he wanted to start over with a different build.

I stared at him. "Wait, what?" He repeated- he dumped all his orbs into increasing his minimum HP and just tanked a bunch of stuff.

That was when I realized that you could upgrade your minimum health. I had not noticed that you could spend orbs to do that. I spent them on everything else OTHER than upgrading my health bar. I literally spent so so so frikkin long beating the game with MINIMUM. HP. I WOULD HAVE HAD SAVED SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY IF I HAD JUST FRIKKIN NOTICED THAT INCREASING MY MINIMUM HEALTH WAS EVEN AN OPTION. NO WONDER I HAD TO REDO THE SAME FIGHTS 20 TIMES. NO WONDER EVERYTHING WAS SO. DIFFICULT. I COMPLETELY just missed a crucial element to gameplay and specs and I basically played the game entirely incorrectly, exerting WAY more effort to get the same results as anyone who actually took time to examine the obvious upgrade options.

May I suggest, The Lot:

In the Infinite Ikea or Backrooms you can convince yourself there's gonna be a door round the next corner or behind that wall.

Bert: Bert and I

Ernie: Bert and I, we've been best friends forever, but we're also something else too!