971–980 of 988 posts
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I don't even think it's good for services. It's not like you go through cumbersome reviews/tools and then things are safe. They have insane homemade config languages and obscure systems that 99% of SWEs don't really understand but won't say it out loud. That's how they dropped cns2, and the postmortem is never going to blame the tools.
You have no clue what you're talking about.
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What do you mean? Google bought SpaceX shares when it was a tiny startup. They are probably more than 100X on their initial investment. Even with a 99% drop in SpaceX stock, Google would still be positive. Edit. Google invested 900 million in 2015 for roughly 5% of the company which comes out to 71.5 Billion dollars at 1.45 Trillion dollar current valuation. That's an 80x increase. I think Larry Page individually mig…
It doesn’t matter what price they bought SpaceX stock for. They could have gotten it for free. Any gain prior to Google’s investment could be realized prior to Google giving SpaceX even more money. What matters is the return on investment for the $12B/year into SpaceX. In order get that back by “pumping” SpaceX stock, SpaceX market cap would have had to increase $200B based on that investment, and then Google would n…
Also, for better or worse, SpaceX did increase by about 200B today.
For all it's faults, it is forming a massive military and telecom monopoly that is nearly unassailable. In the next few years, it can start directly competing with Verizon. The Ukrainian military and civilian population heavily relies on those satellites
> Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering. Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down…
> It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion. It think the vast majority is what the decision to leave says about the overall sentiment at Google, not the value of these two individuals.
To be clear, even if this is an accurate observation, I am not arguing in favor of high executive pay.
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> If we can be accused of anything in this context, it's not kicking bad people out aggressively enough, which seems very different from fostering bad ideas. It's not very different. It's barely different at all. Right now, I have five tomato plants growing in my garden. Two of them I planted; the other three grew from seeds left in the ground by tomatoes that dropped from plants growing last year. All I did was refu…
Yes, it's a balancing act. It should be noted that abusers also tend to be very good at painting people dangerous to them as abusers, so it's difficult to start with. Generally speaking you look at a person talking about vegetarianism and decision theory to some other people in a corner, and you don't usually think "this will end in them murdering their landlord with a samurai sword." We at least managed to ban her f…
This is when co-mingling becomes actively dangerous. New members may (often, will) lack the necessary knowledge to identify core vs. fringe beliefs, to contextualize debates, to recognize insider "shorthand" for what it is, etc. They need (and are possibly even looking for) a useful education, not to become test subjects or disciples. They _cannot_ be engaging in useful research at this stage, even if this is what they wish to do (there are some unfortunate status-seeking behaviors that can come into play here).
Also coming with this scale are a crap-ton of meta discussions concerning basic community governance, including those around "how quickly do we have to kick out crackpots to keep them from recruiting here?" Those discussions _also_ shouldn't be co-mingled with the educational structure, although it's good for new folks to have some visibility into them and at least know that this sort of governance _exists_ in a tangible way (because if it's opaque, that thing you noted about crackpots playing victim becomes a LOT more effective).
This is all a huge amount of boring, tedious work, and... An awful lot of communities start in on it waaaay too late or don't bother at all. What if it stops being fun and exciting and everyone leaves? Of course, there are worse ways to go, but folks tend not to think about those until after they've happened.
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Angular is not a developer tool, it's a UI framework. Closure might qualify, but it was not a general tool used by the entire company. The developer tools we're talking here are Critique, Blaze, Forge, Sigma, etc...
I counted all the above as tools in my original comment at least. And my criticism wasn't against some of those foundational tools. Like Borg is fine for what it's meant to do, but anyone deploying a frontend or backend isn't doing it directly on Borg.
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> GCL is a whole nasty programming language. They came so close with Piccolo and Gmon but still made it not Python. The GCL designers made several mistakes in its design, but the worse was the lack of a versioning that would make language evolution easier, as well as interoperability between different versions. GCL2 solved some issues, mainly cleaning up the interpreter. Still, BCL is IMNSHO by far the best infra lan…
But it's almost a general-purpose language, so why not just use one? I'm still not seeing why a DSL was necessary or helpful.
The usefulness of not being a general-purpose language it that it makes static analysis very good; that's what made the BCL-based tooling so useful: being able to easily diff two versions of the same module (a tool called UBdiff), compute the transitive closure of a module's dependencies, trace the execution of BCL code and correlate it with the AST, to point out where an error comes from.
All these features were either unavailable or took years to develop for Piccolo, because Piccolo was based on Python.
> I'm still not seeing why a DSL was necessary or helpful.
BCL has distinct evaluation rules and a notation that encodes many patterns that SREs used for defining services, and that made BCL code much more compact and easy to ready than all the alternatives.
BCL was designed to be unidirectional: a module was evaluated locally, and the result sent to the Borgmaster. Compare that to Terraform, whose execution model consists of an execution tree where some nodes come from RPCs, meaning that it's not generally possible to statically analyse a TF module, because some errors can come from from feeding RPC results into new RPCs, and execution often fails after tens of minutes. All very janky.
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> I'm an SRE and I think it's quite likely the best infra language I've ever seen. I only worked with 4-5 SREs and they all grudgingly tolerated it. What did you like about it, compared to other infra languages you've used professionally?
Every SRE I've worked with has said different things, though at the time the controversy was around Piccolo. It flip-flopped between shiny new thing vs deprecated. Then the SREs I worked with got laid off, and I started cargo-culting the Piccolo we had lying around.
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Losing Ive was probably a good thing for Apple. I often feel that after a few years these big guys have done what they could do and somebody else can take it from there. So far even losing Jobs didn’t hurt Apple as it looks.
The MacBooks certainly got a lot better and more usable. Anyone remember the touchpad MBP with no physical escape key and the butterfly keyboard? (Respect to many of Ive’s great legacy though)
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It doesn’t matter what price they bought SpaceX stock for. They could have gotten it for free. Any gain prior to Google’s investment could be realized prior to Google giving SpaceX even more money. What matters is the return on investment for the $12B/year into SpaceX. In order get that back by “pumping” SpaceX stock, SpaceX market cap would have had to increase $200B based on that investment, and then Google would n…
It would be extremely foolish for an early investor like Alphabet to liquidate SpaceX holdings en masse all at once. Also, for better or worse, SpaceX did increase by about 200B today. For all it's faults, it is forming a massive military and telecom monopoly that is nearly unassailable. In the next few years, it can start directly competing with Verizon. The Ukrainian military and civilian population heavily relies…
I agree, which is just one more reason why the original reason you proposed for Google’s investment is very likely not correct. More likely is that Google got a good deal on compute from them. Normal business reasons.
> Also, for better or worse, SpaceX did increase by about 200B today.
The relevant question is how much it would have increased without Google’s investment of an additional $12B. If the answer is “more than $0” then the fact that it only increased $200B means it was a bad investment to pump the stock.
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> put the effort into keeping Search profitable The company would have ended up like Stack Overflow? I don't think there was an option for them.
If they focused on keeping search results genuinely high-quality, I think the outcome could have been very different. Basically everyone I know slowly began shifting their questions to something like ChatGPT because Google search results were only presenting irrelevant SEO'd garbage with 12 ads shoved into every page. Slapping the lowest quality model at the top as an "AI Overview" and removing the one genuinely usef…