Keith Lindgren

[Rany Jazayerli @jazayerli]

There is a reasonable case to be made that the 1999 Royals had the worst bullpen of all time. (The Royals that year had a winning record after six innings...and finished 64-97.) I certainly never thought I'd see a Royals team with a worse bullpen.

But this one is close.

[Max Anderson @MaxAnderson]

As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty:

This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term

Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries

Google’s response?

Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for

A few examples to illustrate:

For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model

I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid

This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much

However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding

It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem

Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision

Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting

This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed

But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact
-match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)”

The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off

So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam

This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants)

This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes

Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day

And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off

Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target

These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow

Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs

Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future

This is now no longer the case

At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose

[Keith Lindgren @jellyroll82]

Royals lead the American League in Quality Starts (by 3!!!) Royals wasting the best starting pitching in 40 years like this is criminal.

[Keith Lindgren @jellyroll82]

@klseaboldt And they still lead the American League in quality starts (by 3!) Heck, Noah Cameron had a decent start in that 3 game stretch. Wasting the best starting pitching they've had in 40 years like this is the most frustrating Royals season ever.

[Badlydone Emma is with her #Harris2024 @chemimommy]

Rep Neguse talking to the press the way Democrats should talk to the feckless media.

He handled that question spectacularly.

[Keith Lindgren @jellyroll82]

Does this mean Taiwan is officially recognized as a country? I know the tariffs themselves are the biggest level of idiocy here... but the president just unintentionally recognized Taiwan as a country. It says it right on his chart!

[Barsee 🐶 @heyBarsee]

We just had one of the biggest days in AI.

-Deepseek-V3
-Google Gemini 2.5
-GPT-4o image generation
-Zapier MCP protocol
-H&M AI clones
-China’s AI training breakthrough
-AI cancer detections breakthrough

Here's EVERYTHING you need to know:

[Barsee 🐶 @heyBarsee]

It's been 24 hours since OpenAI unexpectedly shook the AI image world with 4o image generation.

Here are the 14 most mindblowing examples so far (100% AI-generated):

1. Studio ghibli style memes

[Keith Lindgren @jellyroll82]

@AllenKessler @SIRIUSXM Yacht Rock!

[Rany Jazayerli @jazayerli]

Lorenzo Cain was the best player on a World Championship team, the most important team I've ever rooted for. He scored from first base on a single *twice* in the same postseason. And at his peak he was the best defensive outfielder I've ever watched every day. Godspeed, LoCain.

[Keith Lindgren @jellyroll82]

@AllyneLloyd @zachweinberg @briantylercohen You said 'majority', which is just an absurd lie

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

This morning, Zelenskyy gave updates to U.S. Senators on a Zoom chat. The Ukrainian ambassador requested that nobody share anything on social media during the meeting. Sens. Rubio and Daines posted screenshots from the Zoom anyway, putting Zelenskyy’s life at risk.

[Keith Lindgren @jellyroll82]

My first Wordle ever went pretty well: Wordle 214 2/6

🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

[Kenny Mayne @Kenny_Mayne]

United States of America

[Keith Lindgren @jellyroll82]

@FedExHelp Delivery driver in St Paul left Door tag, but didn't even bother ringing the apt number. Been here all day. Didn't check a box on the door tag to indicate what to do next. Sorry your drivers are in a hurry, but ringing bell is bare minimum.

[Brianna Keilar @brikeilarcnn]

Shots ring out behind @clarissaward - as she stands less than 200 yards from the entrance of the Kabul airport.

"It's definitely chaotic, she says. "It's definitely dangerous."

[Eva McKend @evamckend]

.@MondaireJones bringing the heat to Pres. Biden.

"It is odd to raise issues about the constitutionality of your own executive action shortly before making that executive action."

"This is what I mean when I talk about an empathy deficit."

@AOC with the affirmation. "Mm hmm."

[KJ @normbore]

wish Aaron Rodgers let them keep guessing human rights violations until the episode ended