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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#151

Post by tuukkah »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #74
gumballindie wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). Outside the bubble of openai workers, openai is not seen as a particularily great place to be at. Even here on HN that company is increasingly dreaded. Their CEO promotes theft and the workers cheer. If anything, openai is the very opposite of what google was.

Google never stole? That’s a memory hole if I’ve ever seen one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Googl... .

Did we read the same article?

> The Second Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the District Court's summary judgement in October 2015, ruling Google's "project provides a public service without violating intellectual property law." The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently denied a petition to hear the case.

Re: Mourning Google

#152

Post by pcurve »

eigenvalue wrote: post #141

What happened with Google has nothing to do with “late stage capitalism” and everything to do with horrible management. You only have to compare Sundar to Satya to see what could have been possible for Google with better leadership and vision. Particularly given the legacy Google had to work with and the early focus on AI which was thoroughly squandered. Capitalism will start to really work its magic when Google’s op…

I agree about the Sundar and Satya comparison, but I also feel Microsoft has always been in more stable position in terms of diversified revenue sources and its stronghold in business / enterprise market that served as platform for growing other lines of their business.

Re: Mourning Google

#153

Post by jbaber »

redrove wrote: post #100
Xcelerate wrote: post #53

> quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business” This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company. The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, j…

I think it’s simpler than we may think: don’t hire anyone who hasn’t pushed a git commit in a management position. Knowing code is the new knowing how to read and write, we should be less tolerant of “non-technical”, “in English, doc!” type people in positions of power in tech companies.

Are there enough people like this who want to deal with the unpleasantness of being managers? The only enticement we have is money.

Re: Mourning Google

#154

Post by throwawayqqq11 »

_bohm wrote: post #67
samirillian wrote: post #25

I like Tbray's posts but I want to quibble over language. What's happening to the term "late stage capitalism"? Feels like it's becoming a meme like neoliberalism. What does it even mean to say that it wasn't tech's fault, it was late stage capitalism's fault? Kind of dodging a particular responsibility with a generality. I think LSC came to prominence through cultural marxists like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson.…

> cultural marxists I think maybe you mean just "Marxists". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th... To your question, I do think the term is becoming heavily watered down as I see it being used frequently by people who clearly lack the context on Marxist thought to be able to use it with it's original meaning. More often, when people use the term, I infer the sentiment that the "capitalism" we…

You think, you can reach people that speak of "cultural marxism" with wikipedia?

I dont and i dont know an alternative since cognitive biases slowly take away the ability to freely reason about contradicting statements; their ability to reason in general.

Re: Mourning Google

#155

Post by redrove »

jbaber wrote: post #153
redrove wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s simpler than we may think: don’t hire anyone who hasn’t pushed a git commit in a management position. Knowing code is the new knowing how to read and write, we should be less tolerant of “non-technical”, “in English, doc!” type people in positions of power in tech companies.

Are there enough people like this who want to deal with the unpleasantness of being managers? The only enticement we have is money.

> The only enticement we have is money.

Again, it may be more simple than we imagine :)

Re: Mourning Google

#156

Post by Roark66 »

nostrademons wrote: post #68
vanderZwan wrote: post #22

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the…

This description actually makes me feel like the metaphor is more apt. The dinosaurs went down because they were large, complex lifeforms that required a vibrant, complex ecosystem to support them. Amidst a fundamental shift to that ecosystem, large complex organisms were the first to go down. This is a general pattern - complex systems are always the first to collapse when there's a shift in the ecosystem, because t…

>As for what will take them down - all large institutions are failing right now. The public education system. The health care system. The government. The mass media. The immigration system, and general idea of national borders. The zoning / building code / housing system. Childcare. Wouldn't surprise me if we see the financial system, currency, and military go down next. The trigger is part climate change, part demographics, part COVID, and part the loss of trust triggered by the Internet and Big Tech.

Falling? When was the last time in a developed country when an educational system/heathcare failed as a system? Or the government (other than in Argentina), or Military? As for the concept of borders? No, that is not failing either, it's just people in some countries today became convinced it is not worth to use deadly force to defend borders. See for example Sweden, or France for where this path leads to. It is not a pretty picture, but it is very far from "systems failing". As for reasons, why these systems are under pressure I can definitely agree on demographics, but climate change affecting our education/healthcare systems? No way.

Periods of boom and bust are a feature of our financial system, I'm not seeing anything unusual. Currencies fail too due to mismanagement. But extrapolating this into some sort of overall systemic failure of everything caused by climate change no less is not rational.

On the global scale the biggest challenge in today's world is the growing power of authoritarian nations hell bent on global domination and continued enfeeblement(deindustrialisation, increased corruption, disregard for the rule of law) of the free world. Then demographics, then very far in the distance climate change.

Re: Mourning Google

#157

Post by lxgr »

redrove wrote: post #100
Xcelerate wrote: post #53

> quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business” This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company. The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, j…

I think it’s simpler than we may think: don’t hire anyone who hasn’t pushed a git commit in a management position. Knowing code is the new knowing how to read and write, we should be less tolerant of “non-technical”, “in English, doc!” type people in positions of power in tech companies.

Having pushed a git commit says nothing about whether the person pushing it has enjoyed doing so intrinsically or as a means to an end.

Conversely, I’ve worked with very passionate technical people that seemingly couldn’t care less about their share value or even core business metrics (which is ok as long as there’s somebody around that can reel them in if they go off on a tangent and they let them), but just don’t like writing code.

I don’t think there’s a simple, non-gameable heuristic for determining whether somebody is intrinsically or extrinsically interested in the tech part of a tech company, or even the company’s core product.

Re: Mourning Google

#158

Post by lxgr »

fidotron wrote: post #42

There are aspects to early Google that have been memory holed because they are no longer fashionable or even acceptable and yet may have been key to early success. Firstly they were allergic to design and marketers. The whole data driven approach yielded interfaces that were gawky but highly functional, the extreme opposite of today. The iPhone caused them to throw the baby out with the bathwater on that. More contro…

I don’t know about marketers, but being allergic to design by itself does not yield a good product. At best it’s orthogonal to it; at worst – see Amazon.

Re: Mourning Google

#159

Post by tuukkah »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #118
coldpie wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sorta. Plenty of psychotic smart guys around in big tech, too, which is a potent combo. Bezos; Zuckerberg; Musk, if his loose spending habits qualify him as a big tech leader. Capitalism rewards psychopaths the most, without guardrails they're gonna win every time, everywhere.

Psychosis and psychopathic (or antisocial) traits are very different psychiatric phenomena. They are not even similar, also psychosis is often temporary. So maybe people should look for a different "smart" way of describing craziness. Or, if you want to use psychiatric terms, subclinic antisocial persobality disorder is most closely related to business success, as far as I know.

"psychotic" seems to have been a typo as the subheading is "Psychopaths".

Re: Mourning Google

#160

Post by glimshe »

nostrademons wrote: post #68
vanderZwan wrote: post #22

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the…

This description actually makes me feel like the metaphor is more apt. The dinosaurs went down because they were large, complex lifeforms that required a vibrant, complex ecosystem to support them. Amidst a fundamental shift to that ecosystem, large complex organisms were the first to go down. This is a general pattern - complex systems are always the first to collapse when there's a shift in the ecosystem, because t…

Large institutions have been "failing" for over a century, in most countries, similar to things in orbit being always "falling". Just go find old newspapers and you'll see similar wording. The constant criticism and renewal of our institutions is part of the system.
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