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Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

bbc.com

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Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#231

Post by nostrademons »

dekhn wrote: post #149
Clewza313 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda? All of Alphabet's Bets including Loon are explicitly high-risk, high-reward "moonshots", meaning it's expected for many if not most to fail. By contrast, Wave, Plus and Glass were all consumer products from the mothership that were heavily hyped as being the Next Big Thing that would revolutionize work/IM, social networks and mobile phones respectively.

loon was neither high risk or high reward. it was just an internet balloon.

A lot of Loon's early engineers were drawn from a team I was on, because Loon's founder (Mike Cassidy) was our PM's boss. When our PM left to work with him, he said "It's a crazy idea. Less than 5% chance of success." He joined it anyway. The team certainly felt it was both high risk and high reward.

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#232

Post by cromwellian »

imwillofficial wrote: post #230
cromwellian wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still N=1. He uses a single example, product search for t-shirts, but doesn't look at all the ways search actually got better. It's cherry picking. There are firms which evaluate search quality by employing a huge corpus of queries and human raters. I trust those more than someone running a single query for a commercial search. The reality is, the Web didn't stay static. If Google 2020 used the same exact sear…

Look, I wanted to keep this debate going, but your reference to MULE totally derailed my train of thought. Damn you, now I’ve got to go find an emulator and see how bad the C64 days were all over again. I’ve only been on the web since the mid-late 90s, but it has changed so much for the worse, perhaps not in usefulness, but in… Idealsim? I remember reading the hacker manifesto and it moving me. That crappy little tex…

Lets just end this on a positive note, I can't argue with anyone who is a fellow M.U.L.E. lover. :)

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#233

Post by tweetle_beetle »

Zenst wrote: post #21

I read the article and shame the BBC went for the small sound-bite click-bait title. Most of the article is about other aspects, from AI, Quantum computing, corporation TAX and the title per-say does not do the article justice. With that in mind, it seems most comments appear along the lines of a response to the title and not the content and is just going to clog Dang up with work. I personally found the aspect and q…

Amol Rajan thrives on being contrary and questioning designed to provoke. You could see from his other questions that they were purely designed to create headlines in a similar way:

> When I invited Pichai to commit there and then to Google pulling out of all tax havens immediately, he didn't take up the offer.

> In a very revealing quick-fire round of questions, we discover he doesn't eat meat, drives a Tesla, reveres Alan Turing, wishes he'd met Stephen Hawking, and is jealous of Jeff Bezos's space mission.

The headline really is irrelevant to the majority of the interview, but I really wouldn't be surprised if he personally signed off that headline to run with from the interview (the same was used on the television news). He's a former newspaper editor after all.

This form of journalism is what I thought was starting to be considered old fashioned. I don't understand how he became the BBC's Media Editor and host of the most prestigious morning radio programme on the BBC, apart from having loads of connections and history in the publishing industry.

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#234

Post by justshowpost »

adolph wrote: post #146
ignoramous wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Pichai's quote is taken out of context. In his capacity as Alphabet CEO, he worries about neutrality of the interconnects. TFA goes: > And, when I asked about whether the Chinese model of the internet - much more authoritarian, big on surveillance - is in the ascendant, Pichai said the free and open internet "is being attacked". Importantly, he didn't refer to China directly but he went on to say: "None o…

Toxic language online silences important voices. We’re exploring how machine learning can reduce toxicity online and create more space for healthy conversation. Throughout this report we use the term “toxicity,” defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is likely to make someone leave a discussion. We specifically use the term toxicity, as opposed to words like “abuse” or “hate speech” for both pr…

While «hate speech» is merely a convenient alias for «free speech we don't like». That figures.

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#235

Post by justshowpost »

cromwellian wrote: post #129
oldgregg wrote: post #84

Google will attack and subvert every nationalist politician around the world because they are existentially dependent on globalism and weak national borders. Anyone who is a nationalist is racist and hates freedom according to Google. Nevermind self-determination. China is their worse nightmare because they are not dumb enough to let profiteers monitor and manipulate their citizens. Other countries are waking up to t…

Nationalism is followed by fascism quite easily, it o accident that many consider excessive nationalism to just be a kind of secular religion, with an easily route to toxicity, dogma, and racism. Look no further than the fact that nationalist movements have right wing ethno-state ambitions attached to them everywhere, usually with a return to “Greater X” where X is an older empire they use to have, usually when their…

> Nationalism is followed by fascism quite easily

Is there any evidence behind that statement? Looks very bogus.

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#236

Post by [deleted] »

oldgregg wrote: post #174
cromwellian wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nationalism is followed by fascism quite easily, it o accident that many consider excessive nationalism to just be a kind of secular religion, with an easily route to toxicity, dogma, and racism. Look no further than the fact that nationalist movements have right wing ethno-state ambitions attached to them everywhere, usually with a return to “Greater X” where X is an older empire they use to have, usually when their…

So google is trying to save every country in the world from fascism... by forcing them into a technological matrix they exert total authoritarian control over. Lol. FAANG employees and their shills truly believe they are gods guiding humanity into the future.

[deleted]

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#237

Post by knolax »

Just a minute ago I had found that a piece of controversial media I used to watch was scrubbed from all Google services (youtube, search etc.). Had to use Yandex and Baidu to find it. They all have their masters, Google is the one only bold faced enough to pretend they represent all of the internet.

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#238

Post by knolax »

cromwellian wrote: post #218
adolph wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the Olympics part of a fascist propaganda machine? > Nationalism is followed by fascism quite easily It seems just as easily followed by other forms of totalitarianism as exemplified by the USSR, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Venezuela.

[flagged]

Xi wasn't even in power in 2008. Shows how politically illiterate you google employees are.

> China under Xi is fascist. Mass rallies under a glorified leader for life. Calls to return to a mythic past of nationhood under national rejuvenation. What's the difference between Nuremberg rallies, and the mass rallies the CCP runs? The near constant glorification of the CCP and Xi, the huge number of young people in the party and at the rallies (almost 100 million people in the CCP Youth League).

Your definition of Fascism is having rallies and involving young people?

> #4 is especially good example

You forgot about the multiple terrorist attacks and race riots that led to this so called "obsession". Those "protestors" set elderly people who disagreed with them on fire. Who asked you, in your comfy office job in Silicon Valley, what is and isn't a real security concern on the other side of the planet. If you're so concerned about frivolous use of "national security" then maybe do something about the literal National Security Agency your company clearly works with.

I used to be neutral on Google but it's clear that the people working there should have no power over anything.

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#239

Post by knolax »

jancsika wrote: post #188
retox wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you've seen how a "journalist" doesn't have the patience to spend 60 seconds searching for something you're knowledgeable about, will you (not you specifically) take as gospel anything they say about something you're not knowledgeable about? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

It appears you are attempting to indict the entire field of journalism by referring to a cocktail story told by a sci-fi writer. Wouldn't it make more sense to study the field and sort journalists into groups based on their performance over time? Even casual sports fan do that kind of work reflexively. I don't get why journalism should be treated any different, and I especially don't get the desire to find an anecdot…

I think most people have never in their life read an article by a journalist about something they're knowledgeable of that wasn't complete dogshit. You mention Glenn Greenwald because presumably you're not an expert on state-level corruption. Pretty much any piece of journalism on any topic you can poke plenty of holes in with some research. Hell some articles you can use the article itself to disprove the main point the journalist was trying to make. At some point overwhelming empirical evidence can elevate a "cocktail story" to a rule of thumb.

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#240

Post by afpx »

endymi0n wrote: post #189
benreesman wrote: post #133

I’ve never met a person inspired by what we thought the Internet would be in the 90s who isn’t sad that it went the way it did. I suspect the more idealistic of the cryptocurrency people will also feel nostalgic when Goldman and JP Morgan run blockchain in a few years. It’s extremely tempting, especially to technical people, to believe that some piece of technology will create net freedom and equality. The reality is…

Wayne Dyer used to sometimes take diametrically opposed criticism of his books, photocopy it and send it to the other party — together with the four simple words: "You may be right." Here's the other envelope: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528350 The modern day equivalent to the old internet isn't YouTube or Facebook. That's the equivalent to Cable TV. It's rathe…

How does one find such places?
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