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Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

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Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#181
post #166

Some 20 - 10 years ago I was seriously interested in joining Google for many of the reasons he lists. In the end I never applied because at the time they had no development in any country I would have been interested to relocate to. However, during recent years I have turned into a Google hater. He does not mention any of those aspects. Google is an evil business IMHO. They are an advertising company. The challenges…

At least newer Android phones have something like 7 years of updates, so there is some progress. The claim that more memory/computing power has no benefits at all seems nonsensical.

I can do fewer things with my computer than I could when computers were slower. Software has more than destroyed the gains of hardware. (The only exception is numerical simulation, which I need occasionally for academic research, but not in my day-to-day life.)

Video games, supposedly the Killer App for high-end computing hardware, are among the worst offenders: your average modern 2D side-scrolling platformer (Mario clone) locks up my computer (to say nothing of AAA games). Web browsers are the second-worst offenders. Chat clients (secretly web browsers) are third: they barely work, and interoperability has gone the way of the dodo. Operating systems are fourth: they (mostly) still let you use older versions of software, but they have mostly just grown new problems (e.g. built-in adware in Windows; GNOME… well, GNOME) without fixing long-standing ones (e.g. slow domain login in Windows; most systemd misfeatures).

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case of Google, it's not just the size of company. It's the fact that the company makes it's money from selling ads. No matter how well you do your job, the end result is only that more ads were sold. Programming is a superpower that can change the world. Yet the best paying jobs for programmers are at FAANGs building systems to peddle ads. .

> It's the fact that the company makes it's money from selling ads. this is true, but it did not at all affect how 90% of the company worked. the ads teams made money and everyone else did whatever, supported by that infinite firehose of cash. a large part of the reason google has sucked (internally and externally) for the last few years is that this changed.

Changed how?

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn’t the G+ push a response to Facebook’s popularity, that they feared losing out on ad revenue?

That was circles

Circles was part of G+ (it was their audience selection model to contrast with Facebook's friends)

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#184
post #167
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar, but less emotively. I'm disappointed in them but I'm not a hater. > 90% of Youtube is useless crap That is the way of all things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law But the best of YouTube, people are clearly willing to pay for that.

The point, though, is the 90% are having a disastrous impact on the environment, despite being fundamentally irrelevant and thus wasteful.

That claim of environmental impact is just incorrect when it comes to the junk content.

The bad ones are barely watched; sitting on a hard drive after getting transcoded isn't an environmental disaster.

You could try to argue that popular culture is fundamentally bad; people have been saying that about TV when I was a kid, dance music before that, novels in the 1800s, Christmas in Puritan New England, and the Olympics in ancient Rome.

The people tend to disagree.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people understand what manifest v3 is trying to solve. It's a good example of how a worthwhile effort to make the Internet less terrible can be misinterpreted.

More explanation from you on this could help. I don’t even know where to begin - everything I search just details how v3 greatly limits the efficacy of ad blockers.

There isn't much more to explain.

Every bad thing has to have some nominal selling point as the way to get everyone to take it.

mv3 sales pitch is to remove the ability for plugins to harm users.

It does do that, but:

1: Only by also removing plugins ability to help users

2: and giving google themselves and anyone else google approves of (entities who pay google or who have other influence like government) the very same ability to work against the user that they took away from anyone else. ie they control the entire browser let alone a plugin. They literally control what you can even see at all. You search and they choose whether something is in the results. You search with not-google and they still control if the dns resolves anything. You use other dns and they still control if the ssl is valid, which it doesn't matter if 11 techies know how to overcome all that, they still controlled what 7 billion people saw, and thus what they were allowed to even think, minus a handful of impervious super geniuses like you and me.

3: There are infinite possible ways to address the supposed problem of harmful plugins, just as there are infinite possible ways to attack any problem. Even if one decides to agree that it was necessary to do something about the problem, it was not necessary to do this about the problem.

There used to be a theory that apparently doesn't exist any more, about the appearance of impropriety. The idea goes that in any situation where someone has power over another, especially over the public at large, like a judge or a politician etc, where everyone has to simply trust that they are acting with integrity, that in fact no they don't have to simply trust. The appearance of impropriety is damning enough all by itself. Since no one can prove what someone was thinking, and the position carries enough responsibility and consequence, then the office holder doesn't get to say "it just looks like I awarded this contract to my brother because he's my brother, that's just a coincidense" That might be true in the absolute term like in physics where technically anything is literally possible. But since there is no way to disprove it, and the bad effects are bad enough, we don't have to prove it. The appearance of impropriety is enough, because anyone holding a position like that also already knows that they have a responsibility to act with integrity and not allow any possible question about that. They already know that they can't just give a contract to a family member. And so doing it anyway and expecting to be able to excuse it, is it's own form of impropriety regardless what quality work the brother will do or what the alternatives were.

Google removing utility from the user and granting it to themselves is way way more than merely "the appearance of impropriety".

It doesn't matter what harms some plugins have done.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#186

Some 20 - 10 years ago I was seriously interested in joining Google for many of the reasons he lists. In the end I never applied because at the time they had no development in any country I would have been interested to relocate to. However, during recent years I have turned into a Google hater. He does not mention any of those aspects. Google is an evil business IMHO. They are an advertising company. The challenges…

lol; Of all the evils, these are pretty tame. I know people hate Google, but this feels like we've gone on a witch hunt.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#187

Some 20 - 10 years ago I was seriously interested in joining Google for many of the reasons he lists. In the end I never applied because at the time they had no development in any country I would have been interested to relocate to. However, during recent years I have turned into a Google hater. He does not mention any of those aspects. Google is an evil business IMHO. They are an advertising company. The challenges…

[flagged]

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#188
post #166

Some 20 - 10 years ago I was seriously interested in joining Google for many of the reasons he lists. In the end I never applied because at the time they had no development in any country I would have been interested to relocate to. However, during recent years I have turned into a Google hater. He does not mention any of those aspects. Google is an evil business IMHO. They are an advertising company. The challenges…

At least newer Android phones have something like 7 years of updates, so there is some progress. The claim that more memory/computing power has no benefits at all seems nonsensical.

Which application works better on newer phones? Can't see any difference, except maybe games and new AI crap that nobody needs.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#189
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9 years is a long time just for money tho. Too much money focused on that attitude

I don't think so, in fact, now that I'm a little "older", I regret not chasing money earlier.

Exactly. Now at 40+ I can only hope for a lottery ticket to retire early and do what I really want. Anything else is just too slow or might reduce my wealth.
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