I find that if you can't speak frankly and avoid trouble, then you need to give a long hard thought to what you're doing. A terd is still a terd by any other name.
To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
111–120 of 319 posts
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#112If you think this rule is silly because the lawyers ought to know that when an engineer says something that uses a term used colloquially that the lawyers will interpret legally, you aren't allowed to be pedantic when a non-programmer uses a programming term incorrectly either. Like, you can't complain when someone says "growing exponentially" when they mean "growing really fast." It's the same sort of problem, and i…
Good point. But because being arrogant is more fun ... ... first a nitpick: Exponential growth is a mathematics term and it's misused a lot by programmers and HN users (to mean "growing really fast."). ... then a wider sweeping comment: Thanks to COVID-19, the understanding of what exponential growth means has probably increased a lot in the general population. It was quite funny to see people saying things like "Not…
or there[sic] 10th
Another reason to be wary of making corrections to someone else's work: Muphry's Law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
FWIW when commenting on my phone, like I usually do, the autocorrect and I make some really cringeworthy typos and substitutions too.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google will likely go under if they are broken up. The prevailing theory is that their ad success is solely due to data sharing throughout their service offerings.
The search engine alone is a money printing machine even without sophisticated ads. As an example, if I search for 'nike' right now, the first result is an ad payed by Nike leading to nike.com, the second is an ad for an independent webshop selling Nike products and the third is the first actual search result (almost not on the screen anymore), again leading to nike.com So, effectively Nike is paying Google (a lot) t…
I am shocked this isn't illegal yet. Basically what Google is doing in your example is selling Nike it's own trademark, with the subtle threat that if they don't, Google will use Nike's trademark to direct to a competitor instead.
The idea that Google can charge Nike to be the top result on a search for Nike is a form of subtle extortion, and I'd have to imagine trademark infringement. It's definitely a form of rent-seeking, as Google isn't actually helping advertise Nike: The people searching for it already knew where they wanted to go.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why we originally had an IETF and RFC's were publicly commented on and why standards are supposed to be company agnostic. The whole proprietary-APIs-over-HTTP was a giant step back. Before we did that interop between internet based applications was far more common and supported. Now every company treats 'their users' as their own private little walled garden when before 'your users' were not so much cows to mi…
I'm not convinced, though there are, obviously, advantages to RFCs and IETF. The primary disadvantage is speed. A private corporation innovating on its full stack can come up with a faster and more secure HTTP alternative for their use case in the time it takes the RFC process to get up in the morning and find its shoes. Google has a streamed cloud gaming service running in its web browser right now; how long would i…
OnLive was streaming games years before Google entered the space, there isn't much novelty in what Stadia has done.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#115Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…
Your theory on Google reader is completely false. This fake news
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Btw, in the trainings I've taken, it's not just about avoiding specific words, but avoiding the thoughts behind those words. It could be to keep the trainings themselves from looking bad during discovery.
You can always come up with a sinister motivation for a good act. The question is whether there's evidence to support that surmise. I guess that's why sometimes it's best to look at the effects of the system rather than the intention behind it. Do the training actually have the effects that one would desire from them, if one had good intentions? At least in my case, the answer is yes. I have never thought about my wo…
> You can always come up with a sinister motivation for a good act.
You can also come up with a beneficial motivation for a sinister (or at least, not morally positive) act. (This is the one Google employs.) Google is a corporation, and it exists to extract money effectively from others to make it's shareholders rich.
If a corporation says it is doing something for the good of the public, it's because looking good has positive value for the corporate brand. To some degree, there is also value in convincing employees that they are benefiting society as well: They work harder and above requirements without you having to pay them more, and they'll defend and advocate for their employer on social media for free. ;) That, of course, also has a positive value for the corporate brand.
I definitely think the revealed internal emails (from all of Big Tech) will be exciting to see. It wasn't a surprise, for instance, but the emails about how Kindle purchases in iOS were shut down by Apple because of an Amazon ad about how Kindle books could come with you from iPhone to Android was very, very blunt.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#117> We use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search’ and never the term market share,” that document says Now that this document is out, can't the government just map their fancy words back to the original word using this doc as a map?
Not easily, because how do you separate the now-two uses of "people prefer Google search?" Sometimes they mean "market share" and sometimes they mean "people prefer Google search," and there's now no way to tease them apart reliably.
If it were so, how is it possible for the Google employees to tell them apart?
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure that's presumable. It sounds like a better way to do things in the short run (in the long run, there's a net loss from the loss of the cross-pollination benefits of security and best-practice on the backend that Google enjoys now).
It depends on how stupid the regulators are - the one with the google name will win. Seriously people - domain names and awareness matter ans you can't just partition websites to regions with an international web.
We already know how incapable the regulators are. 20 years after they went after MS for their dominance in personal computer operating systems, productivity software and browsers, MS is still dominant in two and the third doesn’t matter to anyone except for Google.
MS had the highest market cap in the US in 2000. As of today it is #3.
The government had a monopoly suit against IBM in 1969 and finally withdrew it in 1983 and nothing came of it.
People in tech have been wanting the government to go after Big Tech for years. Four of the CEOs show up for Congressional hearings and then the government goes after...TikTok and WeChat instead.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#119Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…
> Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully
It's worse than that, Google releases products for free killing competitors in the markets they enter, and once those competitors are gone, Google pulls their products.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#120All the big tech companies do this, and yes, it is not OK. These organizations are too big, wield too much power, and are like governments unto themselves. For some reason, they have not had the same public perception and have avoided labels like "conglomerate" that have stuck to other companies like Samsung.
Because conglomerate is a technical term. They aren't making Google washing machines or google munitions. GE is an actual conglomerate.
The definition is simple though. "A conglomerate is a multi-industry company". Google is in search, advertisement, video, music, hardware, productivity software, cloud, cars, etc. These are a substantial piece of the modern economy and if we aren't calling that "multi-industry", I am not sure th term has meaning.