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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

#211

Post by skybrian »

reaperman wrote: post #134
skybrian wrote: post #103

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.

The problem they’re worried about is untrustworthy browser extensions that have broad permissions to do harm. There are over 100,000 extensions and from a security standpoint, not having good-enough sandboxing is a vulnerability.

More: https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/the-asymmetry-of-nudges

> In reality, Manifest V3 was meant to solve a real problem — and to do so for the right reasons. I know this because about eight years ago, we set out to conduct a survey of the privacy practices of popular browsers extensions. We were appalled by what we uncovered. From antivirus to “privacy” tools, a considerable number of extensions hoovered up data for no discernible reason. Some went as far as sending all the URLs visited by the user — including encrypted traffic — to endpoints served over plain text. Even for well-behaved extensions, their popularity, coupled with excessive permissions, opened the doors for abuse. The compromise of a single consumer account could have given the bad guys access to the digital lives of untold millions of users — exposing their banking, email, and more.

Maybe they could have avoided controversy by grandfathering in a few popular extensions and watching them closely?

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#212

Post by 9dev »

ben_w wrote: post #184
9dev wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Olympic…

That isn’t true, even just accounting for people expecting the same speed and quality for fringe videos, delivered to mobile devices in any corner of the world, requires mountains of technology.

It’s not that popular culture is bad, it’s that a wasteful way of living isn’t sustainable, and it’s beginning to erode the foundations of our lives.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#213

Post by skybrian »

jorams wrote: post #130
skybrian wrote: post #103

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.

Manifest v3 is an effort to make a browser slightly better at its core feature, that it is importantly already fine at, at the cost of making it worse at serving the user. The internet is increasingly user-hostile, and manifest v3 makes it harder to fight back.

Ironically the stricter permissions are because browser extensions sometimes have crap security and the Internet is a hostile place.

The browser itself might be pretty much okay, but the extensions are where the terrible code is.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#214

Post by spacemadness »

wnolens wrote: post #106
I_AM_A_SMURF wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that sounds very optimistic. I'm 10 in tech and L6 now. I'm definitely not set for life, like, not even close.

In big tech? One can pocket an avg 100k/year. Less in first few years, more later on. That isn't "quit immediately and coast" money, but several times a juicy down payment in the bank and a guaranteed MINIMUM 200k USD/year for the rest of your life IS set for life IMO.

It is not several times a juicy down payment if you live where near any big campus. And a lifetime salary above 200k in tech is not a thing. Tech is riskier the older you get unfortunately.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#215

Post by ben_w »

tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote: post #208
ben_w wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, about a third of the high-quality creators I subscribed to on YouTube initially, also maintain a presence on Nebula. It's not enough to fully switch, but at the very least I get their stuff without mis-gendered advertising — as seen the other day on YouTube, where I was presented with an unskippable ad for sanitary pads.

What portion of the low quality creators you subscribe to?

None? Though looking at my subs list, the low quality channels are mostly personal friends sharing stuff that won't have a broad reach, much like my own is now I'm not making indie games.

(They also post so infrequently that I forgot I'd subscribed to them).

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#216

Post by ben_w »

9dev wrote: post #212
ben_w wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Olympic…

That isn’t true, even just accounting for people expecting the same speed and quality for fringe videos, delivered to mobile devices in any corner of the world, requires mountains of technology. It’s not that popular culture is bad, it’s that a wasteful way of living isn’t sustainable, and it’s beginning to erode the foundations of our lives.

Sounds like you're shifting the goalposts from "youtube is bad" to "the internet is bad" in the first paragraph, and then in the second paragraph to "everything after the start of the first industrial revolution is also sus".

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#217

Post by nojvek »

meiraleal wrote: post #162

One of the funniest things in HN that I love to "lose" some karma points is to join discussions about/with frustrated ex- Googlers. Google is shit, completely enshitiffied and the engineers there are responsible for that but still when you get to this kind of thread the only thing you see is them praising each other, patting back. Google is gone, my friends. Men in suits destroyed it. Gone is the time that people wor…

Google could fire 50% of its staff and still make multiple 100B+ revenues from search ads and cloud.

They have a great business that prints money.

The problem Google has is making more money printing business lines - like Microsoft.

I do hope Google turns around and gets back to its roots.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#218

Post by aectann001 »

advisory5739f2 wrote: post #109
rr808 wrote: post #29

I've done the path from SWE to SRE and back to SWE. I was always happy to do production support and diagnose and fix production problems, so I naturally moved to SRE which is always looking for people. It was a real mistake, SRE is hugely stressful and really unrewarding compared to SWE. Yes you learn some skills and get some occasional glory, but year after year of fighting fires really didn't build any long lasting…

SRE is an anti pattern that Google is unwilling to admit and is selling books on. Just like there should not be QA, release engineering, continuing engineering or DBA as separate departments/job titles, because these critical parts of software development should not be considered optional and thrown over the wall to take care of by someone with no stake in developing the product.

Only having full stack engs taking care of everything works but only until a certain org size (like in a small startup). Once the org gets larger/systems get more complex, you usually need specialisation. It’s natural, and Google didn’t really invent anything here
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