Google Play Store app annoyances

As of very recently, I get prompted all the time to enter a password or biometrics to access Google Play Store on my new Samsung android phone.

Very annoying! I have never purchased anything through Google Play! However, from time to time I like to install new, free apps or update apps etc.

For many years Google Play used to be accessible without authentication!

When will the cursor finally follow the eye on your computer display?

This is a long overdue innovation! How often does it happen e.g. that you look in one area of the computer display and start typing while the cursor is still somewhere else on the computer display?

If you stare for a moment at one point on the computer display, the cursor should perhaps follow so you can immediately e.g. continue writing.

One of the most egregious mistakes in journalism: Comparisons with same period last year

On a daily basis tons of news media articles are published including such annual comparisons per month, quarter, semi annual.

Often times this information is rather useless or even disinformation! What if e.g. last year's number was an aberration from normal or an extreme value or unique for some reason. Some journalists note this deviation from normal, but often without further analysis.

Much better would be comparisons to some normal value e.g. moving averages or monthly/quarterly,semiannual averages over several years etc. Practical suggestions: A 12 months moving average for monthly data and a 16 quarters moving average for quarterly data. You get the idea!

Given that it is now the second quarter of the 21st century with so many data sources and analytics easily available, this journalistic failure is even more difficult to excuse!

However, too many journalists are lazy or lack understanding!

A lot of Western universities have a lousy website search function

This is incredible in the second quarter of the 21st century! I notice it again and again when I frequently visit various university websites. 

Maybe these universities are relying too much on Google Search to substitute for their lousy website search function! Unfortunately, Google Search has its flaws too when it comes to content from Western universities.

Often, the search results are undated!

It is not obvious how the search results were selected or how they were sorted.

An option to sort the search results by e.g. recency is often missing (see e.g. example below)

Here is an example: University of Manchester. I searched for bilayer graphene, because very recently Physical Review X journal published an article from researchers of University of Manchester. 

Stanford University

Cloudflare launches Kitesurf, a browser built for AI agents. Really!

Will this new AI browser also ask me several times a day whether I am human like many of the website using Cloudflare that I visit every day?

"Kitesurf is Cloudflare's new stateless, highly scalable browser that runs entirely on top of Workers and is designed for AI agents. It is available for free while in beta.

Compared to Chromium, Kitesurf uses 3–7× less CPU and memory for common agentic tasks like screenshots and HTML extraction, so you can run more sessions and scale better for bursty, AI-driven workloads. ..."

Cloudflare launches Kitesurf, a browser built for AI agents | TechCrunch

Introducing Kitesurf, an agent-first browser on Browser Run (original news release)

Introducing Kitesurf: The agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates on Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare’s Web Crawler Flare-Up

Is Cloudflare an annoyance?

How many times are you daily subjected to a human tests by Cloudflare? Me, too many times! Thee tests are so annoying and so primitive!

"Web publishers using Cloudflare will soon be able to separately control an AI bot’s access based on what it does, allowing search indexing while blocking AI training or agent activity.

What’s new: Cloudflare – the content delivery network for nearly 20 percent of the internet – introduced new AI traffic controls which block training and agent bots by default while allowing search indexing crawlers. It also announced a monetization tool that would allow customers to charge specified visitors (whether humans or bots) for access to web pages, datasets, APIs, or Model Context Protocols.

How it works: Cloudflare customers can toggle crawlers’ access based on the bot’s use case, enabling or disabling access to crawlers for search, AI training, or AI agents. Crawlers serving multiple purposes will be subject to the most restrictive setting. For example, crawlers like Googlebot, Applebot, and Bingbot that both index content for search and collect training data for AI would be blocked if a publisher elects to block training crawlers. The controls will be applied beginning September 15.

• Cloudflare defines search bots as those that index content for search engines; publishers have historically welcomed these bots because they increase the likelihood that their sites’ content will appear in search results, which drives traffic. Agent bots are those acting on a user's behalf to perform tasks on a website (for example, fetching data or making purchases), and training bots collect data to train AI models.
• For each category, customers have three options: to block all pages, block only on pages with ads, or allow the bot. By default, pages displaying ads will block training and agent bots (or multi-purpose crawlers like those from Google, Apple, and Bing), but continue to allow search-only crawlers.
• Cloudflare also introduced BotBase, a public database of known bots and agents that classifies them by behavior and tracks how they use website content. Cloudflare’s “Verified” label indicates that a bot operator has been authenticated, is what it declares itself to be, obeys robots.txt instructions, and does not attempt to circumvent publisher restrictions. Publishers still control whether to allow that bot category, such as search or training, but this permits more granular restrictions, like blocking search, training, or agents from a particular company, while allowing others.
• Cloudflare's monetization system lets publishers charge AI agents for accessing online data on a per-request basis. When an AI agent requests a protected webpage or API, Cloudflare requires payment before forwarding the request to the publisher, handling payment verification at the network level. The tool has not yet been released, but customers can join the waitlist to use it.

Behind the news: AI bots account for a growing share of web traffic; Cloudflare says over half (57.5 percent) of all HTTP requests now come from automated systems rather than people.

The value of search traffic has eroded enough that some publishers have even opted out of Google Search, in part because they do not want Google’s agents to bypass their display advertising or train on their content.

Cloudflare's new framework attempts to preserve the benefits of search while giving publishers more control over other forms of AI crawling. It also rewards companies like OpenAI that separate their search and training crawlers, and punishes those, like Google, Apple, and Microsoft, that don’t.

Why it matters: Access to high-quality web data remains critical for developing and improving AI models, but publishers and partners like Cloudflare increasingly place limits on how that data can be collected. That friction has a technical and monetary cost. ..."

Kimi K3 Redraws the Open Frontier

Google annoyances

At the moment, I am using a T-Mobile hotspot to connect my laptop to the Internet. Unfortunately, the download speed is atrociously low!

Apparently, Google search does not like my T-Mobile hotspot either when I do searches!

Here is just one example: I tried to look up a Dr. Marc G. Jeschke on Google Scholar!

Google annoyances again

Just tried to look up Doina Precup (a well known machine learning and AI researcher) on Google Scholar. Here is what I got:

 Working from behind the Great Firewall of China is not easy despite VPN!

Annoyances: Greetings from the AAAS

As of today, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has blocked my current IP address for some unknown reason!

What doe they mean by "Advancement"?

This will certainly affect my work as blogger since I frequently select and comment on their research publications.

I believe, this is the first time ever that AAAS has blocked me like that from accessing a research paper.

Google Scholar really pisses me off since yesterday!

Update on 3/23/2026: I am still blocked for the third day now! Grrr!

Since yesterday I am blocked by Google Scholar! This morning I tried again and I am still blocked!

"Please show you are not a robot! So much for AI excellence!!! This is very lousy by Google!

I am a paying Google account customer!!!! Grrrr!

I am a very heavy user of Google Scholar!

Google Scholar Annoyances

Update: As of late afternoon 2026-03-11, I can not even use Chrome browser incognito window anymore to avoid being blocked! Grrrr! The Mozilla browser did not help either!

This really stinks! Since about yesterday I have been locked out of Google Scholar. I have tried many times since yesterday, but it will always show this! Unfortunately, I am a heavy user of Google Scholar!!!

Unfortunately, the usual test to show I am not robot does not pop up!

Plus, I am a paying customer of Google, I have a subscription for my Google account. I was logged into the Browser with my main Google email address! How stupid is Google????

P.S. Yesterday, I was able to get around this annoyance by using a Chrome browser incognito window.

Disclaimer:
I am currently blogging from behind the Great Firewall of China. My Internet service in China is very spotty. Thus, I am not able to blog as usual.

Google Keep Annoyances

There must be a very lousy dictionary behind Keep. It constantly underlines common English words with squiggly lines when I enter a note etc.. My spellings were accurate and correct.

Why Blogger.com sucks!

I have been blogging for many years on Blogger.com. Sure it free to use, but I would not mind to pay for it to have better service and features. In the past, I have submitted some suggestions for improvement, but they were ignored. 

Reasons:

1. You can not configure your default font! It means for every blog post I have to manually change from the default font, I don't like to Arial. Very annoying! This should be a configuration setting for your blog!
2. You can not configure the default behavior of hyperlinks (I prefer to open it in a separate window/tab of the browser)! So every time I insert a hyperlink, I have to manually change the default behavior from opening the link in the same browser tab to open it in a new tab. Very annoying! This should be a configuration setting for your blog!
3. There is no label manager available. Manually managing the labels is tedious, error prone etc. Very annoying!
4. Several months ago or so Blogger.com completely changed how you can backup your blog. There is no option e.g. to choose only text! The new feature is awful it generates several two gigabyte large ZIP files. Previously it was much easier and straightforward! 

The many annoying design flaws/features of a new HP laptop

I would never have imagined that my latest laptop could have so many annoying design flaws and features! It is the HP - Envy x360 2-in-1 14'' display.

Here is a long, incomplete list:

1. The power button is placed next to the delete button. On my previous Dell laptop, the power button was at the top right above and clearly separated from the the keyboard.
2. You get an electric shock from time to time when you touch the keyboard.
3. The power socket is located almost in the middle of the keyboard base on the side of the keyboard right next to a similar outlet. Should it not be placed near the corner of the keyboard base like my old Dell laptop?
4. When resting the laptop on my bare legs it catches my leg hairs from time to time. Very shoddy manufacturing by HP. My previous Dell laptop did not do this!
5. The sensitivity of the keys of the keyboard is lousy. You have to exercise too much pressure when pressing a key. The keys also make scratchy noises when pressed down (shoddy manufacturing).
6. The backlight feature of the keyboard is a gimmick and may turn out to be serious problem when the backlight stops working. My old Dell laptop also had a keyboard backlight feature, but I rarely if ever needed to turn it on. With my new HP laptop, I constantly and very frequently have to turn on the backlight as soon as the ambient lighting is not sufficient.
7. The touchpad is way too large making up more than 15% of the keyboard base. HP also failed to delineate with a visible short line to separate the left and right click button.
8. The display is attached in a flimsy way to the keyboard base and the display swivels too easily.
9. The sheathing of the power cable is also annoying. It has a texture like made of fibres. It looks old fashioned.

Google Meet annoyances

Google Meet lacks a sound control function! It has a microphone and camera control, but not a sound control on its menu bar at the bottom.

My wife currently works in China. Thus, we use Google Meet to chat. However, yesterday, I could not hear my wife and I suspected it was her microphone, while she could hear me. Google Meet by default keeps the microphone and camera off when you start a new conversation. 

Well, after a while I realized I had still the sound on my laptop turned off as usual and forgot to turn it on before I started Google Meet in the Chrome browser.

Google Meet did not make me aware of this. I guess, it needs a little bit of AI support!

Google Scholar annoyances

GS still does not allow you to save more than 100 scholars that you want to follow! This stinks to heaven!

Today, I ran again into this ridiculous low limit!

I blogged already 5 years ago here about this very annoying feature!

YouTube annoyances

For several weeks or so whenever I watch videos of certain German news channels (like Tichys Einblick or NIUS, YouTube translates the captions of these German language videos into English without my consent.

I know discovered that if I change my YouTube account profile language from English to German it stops automatically translating these video captions. The account profile does not seem to allow for more than one language! Very annoying!

In my Chrome browser language settings it clearly says English and German. I watch all YouTube videos through Chrome browser.

The Deutsche Welle (DW) channel on YouTube is not affected by this. Strange!

Very annoying! 

Here is an example (the original caption of the video is in German, but YouTube translated it into English):

Bad practices in science article publishing regarding the abstract

It is a very common feature found in the abstracts of many current scientific papers published in science journals. 

The authors pollute and obstruct the abstract with sometimes dozens  of reference numbers! Irritating! What is the point!

Another bad practice is to insert images of special characters or equations etc. into text of the abstract. There got to be better solutions than this at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century!

Why not place reference numbers related to the abstract in a footnote to the abstract! 

A quick comparison of Google search versus Microsoft Bing search

There are quite a few queries where I need to use both web search functions almost every day, because Google search results were not satisfactory.

Here is a nice example, where Google search given a very simple, straight forward query in German language totally failed, i.e. "wie viele bundestagsabgeordnete gab es in der BRD vor 1990".

Here is the Google search result (very disappointing):

So I tried then Google AI assisted search AI Mode (utmost embarrassing for Google in the age of machine translation and multilingual, foundational large language models (LLMs)):

Here is the Bing search is the clear winner hands down on first try (without me having to switch to AI or do anything extra):

Blogger annoyances

 I have been blogging on Blogger for many years!

However, very recently Blogger changed the method to backup your entire blog completely. It used to be very simple and fast. Now, it takes hours, if not days and it creates huge zip files. Like the old method, the new one does not allow do specify that you want only the text to be backed up since I do not care so much about the media embedded with the blog posts.

P.S. I have a long time ago complaint that Blogger lacks basic configuration options like default font for every post, links to open automatically in a new window etc. This means a lot of extra, unnecessary clicks for me every day!

Of course, one could also say what am I complaining about since I am not paying anything for using Blogger. 😊