I highly recommend the book Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow. Perrow argues that multiple and unexpected failures are built into society's complex and tightly coupled systems
Come on Gabriel! Yes people search for weather, lyrics, sport scores and local results, but you do not have a web search engine without being able to search the web. Saying "Of course, we have more traditional links in our search results too, which we do largely source from Bing, but that's just part of the page" is disingenuous.
No, it's really not. What people don't realize about search is things get clicked on in an exponential fashion, with each piece down the page being engaged with about half as much, so nearer to the bottom of the visible page, 100x less. Since instant answers are often on top, the % of engagement on non-traditional links is much lower than one would otherwise think. And as mobile searches are now the majority, local results (including maps, places listings, etc.) occur on a large % of searches. Same for Wikipedia content. And neither of those are sourced by Bing, along with dozens of other popular Instant Answers driven by many different indexes. Put another way, we have a very large search codebase and overall engineering team, and all of this technology is doing something, and we believe something good!
Could you quantify this with some numbers? What proportion of the requests you get every day are answered completely by your own index, without using Bing?
I am pretty sure you won't get an answer to this question, it was asked many times before but nothing was revealed, who knows maybe their agreement with bing binds them, or it is just terrible for their business / illusion.
Another famous example of how in the darkest hours there's longing for peace and friendship is the Christmas Truce during the first world war [1].
British soldiers heard German troops in the trenches singing carols and patriotic songs. They started shouting messages to each other. The next day, soldiers from both sides met, exchanged gifts, took photographs and played football.
The article also reminded me of a story from the aftermath of the My Lai massacre:
> In 1998, Thompson and Colburn returned to the village of Sơn Mỹ, where they met some of the people they saved during the killings, including Thi Nhung and Pham Thi Nhanh, two women who had been part of the group about to be killed by Brooks's 2nd Platoon. Thompson said to the survivors, "I just wish our crew that day could have helped more people than we did." He reported that one of the women they had helped out came up to him and asked, "Why didn't the people who committed these acts come back with you?" He said that he was "just devastated" but that she finished her sentence: "So we could forgive them."
> They sang Christmas carols, exchanged photographs of loved ones back home, shared rations, played football, even roasted some pigs. Soldiers embraced men they had been trying to kill a few short hours before. They agreed to warn each other if the top brass forced them to fire their weapons, and to aim high.
> Across the line, still brandishing his binoculars, Old Horseflesh [a hard-liner] shoves a rifle into Green's hands. "Take a steady aim," he commands. Dodger aims well above Coburg's head, and the lieutenant dives into a handy shell hole. Catching on, the German machine gunners let loose a burst well above the opposite trenches.
For the benefit of anyone not in the UK, there is a marvelous Christmas advert inspired by this event, which aired in 2014 (100 years later): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWF2JBb1bvM
Congrats to the team. I am sure it must have been a stressful one.
Some remaining issues:
The desktop app on first message in any conversation says: "Partially sent, click for details". When retried, the message goes through, but is not synced with the mobile client (never appears there).
PS: Happy Signal exists. It's easy to let inconvenience make you forget it sometimes.
