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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#181

Post by zehaeva »

whythre wrote: post #173
glimshe wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You aren’t wrong, but we used to teach Latin in schools. Things aren’t getting better in a lot of these arenas, they are being chipped away… and the center cannot hold forever.

What does teaching Latin in schools have to do with schools, ostensibly, failing?

Are you saying that Latin is something that is useful to everyday life and because we don't teach it to our children we're depriving them of this wonderous tool?

I personally do not know Latin, but I have never run into a situation where I needed to know it.

And to analyze the idea that, "Well, it's not Latin in specific, but that we are not teaching our children to think for themselves", this too has been bayed about for the last forever, Plato complained that "children today are not learning the things that they should"

I don't know which pedagogy is the "correct" one, stuff children with, seemingly, random knowledge and watch them "blossom" or to stuff them with narrowly focused learning so that they will flourish at whatever work they are funneled into.

But I do know that teaching a dead language isn't the bellwether you think it is, unless you're trying to start a jobs program for all those unemployeed Latin tutors.

Re: Mourning Google

#182

Post by sojournerc »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #148
Grimblewald wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

building on the dino thing, we've currently hellbent in creating a new dino age it seems. Hot ass planet high in the CO2 required to create thriving lush jungles.

There was also much more O2 in the atmosphere. Doubtful that's coming back.

Plants do this weird thing and turn CO2 into O2. More CO2 means more plants. The earth is greening with the additional atmospheric carbon.

https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...

Re: Mourning Google

#183

Post by Perz1val »

stevage wrote: post #80
alimbada wrote: post #54

> Use Chrome for Google stuff: Maps, Calendar, Docs, Translate I don't see any good reason to stick to Chrome for these. I've been using them without issue via Firefox for years. I used to see warnings on some of those products that " works best with Google Chrome" when using Firefox but those have all disappeared now and even when they did have those warnings I don't remember experiencing any major issues.

Yeah there is nothing that doesn't work fine on FF. Sometimes I find that Dev tools works a bit better on chrome, so I use that for a while. But not consistently.

I use chromium browsers (Brave), only because of the dev tools - I'm just not used to Firefox devtools and don't want to invest time in learning their quirks.

Re: Mourning Google

#184

Post by fidotron »

robin_reala wrote: post #176
rezonant wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search was a product designed by two engineers. Maps from 2005 was a very sleek product, but at the time there were no competitors on the web, and now Maps is so ubiquitous, and requires such an insane data investment, that we'll probably never know the ideal Maps design, because every competitor out there is still catching up. Their primary advantage was the money they threw at mapping data and the ability for them…

The primary reason for Chrome’s success was literal billions of dollars in pervasive advertising (I remember years of Chrome TV ads and billboards), ads plastered all over Google’s products saying “better in Chrome”, and product bundling into many many pieces of software a user might download (e.g. Acrobat[1]). That’s not to say that it wasn’t a technically good product, but it wasn’t so much better than the competit…

Honestly I feel like I am in a parallel universe with ideas like this.

Chrome was dramatically faster than anything else (thanks to v8 which was a total revolution for js engines) and each tab crashed separately, with far better security than other browsers of the time. On Windows (and initially it was only on Windows) this was a big deal and so it displaced a huge proportion of the tech aware userbase very fast, permeating out from there.

The billboards were a thing but not what drove initial adoption to critical mass.

Re: Mourning Google

#185

Post by wavemode »

ak_111 wrote: post #171
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…

Tangent: I thought you were going to hate the inflection point metaphor (and hence started your post with a pun about it). The point being inflection points mathematically speaking don't usually imply a peak, rather a change in concavity (which might still be increasing). It would be better for people to say something like "...it feels like we reached a high water mark..." to stress they worry about a certain maxima…

Well, you can't change to concave down without eventually either hitting a maximum or another inflection point, right? Could be apt, given that most big tech companies are still growing in strength, for now. Just not as rapidly.

Re: Mourning Google

#186

Post by mattgreenrocks »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #18

Part of me is actually happy that Google lost its shine. A part of this is certainly schadenfreude, for which I am obviously ashamed, but there is another side to it. I remember the awe/respect with which people thought of Google back in the mid-'oughts. Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). All these amazing engineers went to work there and everyone was j…

It still happens. Dev culture today is way more steeped in external status indicators than it used to be. It’s just naïveté and a need for some sort of hierarchy for engineering competence.

Actually assessing it is hard and costly, so it gets outsourced.

Everyone seems to conveniently ignore regression to the mean when it comes to the lionized companies because that would break their mental model, and potentially their end goal.

Re: Mourning Google

#187

Post by anticorporate »

asah wrote: post #78
rezonant wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. In an absolute sense, probably nothing can, short of society ending cataclysm. In a shareholder sense, I think we're seeing it happen right now.

Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any…

> Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc.

What you're describing is security, not privacy. Privacy is not determined by how far the data is shared. If Google respected privacy, they would not collect most of the information that they do in the first place.

Re: Mourning Google

#188

Post by Paianni »

Zetobal wrote: post #136
Paianni wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome? Chrome OS? Google Docs? Those haven't been successes?

They were inevitable even my granny would have made those decisions.

Maybe, but several companies had attempted 'internet appliances' in the past and failed, Chromebooks were a risk.

Re: Mourning Google

#189

Post by Radim »

coldtea wrote: post #98
sanderjd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well put! It's very difficult to know how you'd feel about experiences from your past if you plopped your current self into the middle of those past experiences. It makes me cringe to think about it!

It makes me cringe to think people believe any mention of the past and comparison to the present is automatically some age-induced hallucination, as if reality doesn't exist, changes never happen, and (in this case) 2024 Google isn't a much shittier version of the older Google.

You're just too old to understand! :-)

“When I was a boy of 18, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 30, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in just twelve years.” *

There is real change, and having experienced its evolution first hand – the stumbling path, wrong turns, compromises and victories – does have value. Beyond merely acknowledging the distance between {start, end} states.

One of my regrets is I didn't query my grandparents more about their pre-WW2 and WW2 experience while they were still around. The way societies (and companies) breathe and evolve is hard to reconstruct from just books and official records & ex-post propaganda. Our lives are too short to internalize multi-decade patterns.

* Ages adjusted from 14 and 21 respectively, to account for maturity inflation since Mark Twain.

Re: Mourning Google

#190

Post by _Algernon_ »

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…

Just because extinction of a species occurs because of a rare Black Swan event doesn't mean that it isn't evolution. (Large) dinosaurs were in fact an evolutionary dead end when it comes to the threat of large asteroids crashing into the planet.
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