121–130 of 1001 posts
I read regular stories on HN about employee activism on certain types of popular issues around gender and race, involving petitions and publicity. Spotify, Apple, Google. Yet nothing about the march towards totalitarianism and information control - always with good intentions and to our benefit - promulgated with stories such as this. Not a peep from our young Silicon Valley activists. Do we still teach history at sc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google docs etc aren't even Google's inventions, Google just bought them. I think it's important to emphasize that, to dispel the notion that you need to be a big company to make a product like that.
I agree that you do not have to be a big company to make a product like that, but it seems like you have to be a big company in order to host and deliver it.
Its a slippery slope but not for the reasons you might first think. It's because this is turning a platform into an publisher. Soon more and more governments will be demanding publishers to enforce editorial standards. There seems to be no platforms these days that say they are just that. Even cloudfare, a peice of background infrastructure is happily editorialising certain things. With this idea, try not to get suck…
The "platform vs. publisher" dichotomy that crops up in these conversations is propaganda. Exercising editorial control over content does not create a distinction between one or the other, or convert one into the other. The distinction doesn't exist as a matter of law, legal right or obligation.
Every web site and service, from tiny phpbb forums to FAANG silos, has always had the right to choose what does and does not appear on their site, and the discretion to "editorialize" as they see fit.
And the internet has never been impartial. Individual sites can be run impartially, but that's a choice made by the site owners - not an obligation or legal duty. Other site owners have every right to run their site under other terms. If you don't like the terms under which a service is offered, you can use another service.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny enough, I arrived at the opposite conclusion during my tenure as SWE... Google wasn't taking responsibility for the wide sweep of its arms as the gorilla in the room, and was trying to stay neutral ("We just build services; expecting us to be responsible for them is like expecting fire not to burn") in a situation where they fundamentally can't. Google is already non-neutral... they ban all sorts of content on…
> in a situation where they fundamentally can't. I’m sorry but they can stay neutral by just not reading/blocking people’s Docs
When you have a reach like Google, neutrality isn't an option. And their mission isn't neutrality anyway; it's "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Dangerous misinformation coming from a google dot com domain isn't useful.
I read regular stories on HN about employee activism on certain types of popular issues around gender and race, involving petitions and publicity. Spotify, Apple, Google. Yet nothing about the march towards totalitarianism and information control - always with good intentions and to our benefit - promulgated with stories such as this. Not a peep from our young Silicon Valley activists. Do we still teach history at sc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saying "all the experts" think it may actually be true is a big stretch. It's far more accurate to say that the experts haven't ruled it out. But they still think natural origin is far more likely[1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3
He should not have used the word all, but this feels like a really pedantic point to me. The main thing is that there is no consensus that it didn't get created that way.
Pointing out such a difference is not being pedantic, and in fact is hugely important
The road to hell is paved with "good intentions". We desperately need to find a globally adoptable alternative to google and the services that it provides. Docs, Sheets, Drive, etc. are fantastic services in that they work really well on a massive scale. However, Google's increasing role as an arbiter of right vs wrong and a steward of information puts too much power into the hands of one corporation, whose best inte…
Amazing they have the gall to think they still can arbiter truth, considering how YouTube up until recently was banning the "conspiracy theory" that the recent pandemic may have originated from a Wuhan Lab... Something that now all the experts are saying may actually be true.
What. The. Hell. I suppose limiting sharing might be justified. But limiting access and/or deleting own files is outrageous. For that matter, collections of misleading content can have legitimate purposes. Such as research. Now I'm seriously considering dropping my Drive subscription. Update: I got a lot of upvotes, but tbh I may have misunderstood the new policy, which does seem to (maybe?) only be limited to distri…