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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#281

Post by lolinder »

naasking wrote: post #211
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 It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end.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…

> Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you). The inability to avert or survive through an extinction level event literally proves that they are an evolutionary dead end. Extinction le…

There's very little point in talking about ability to survive "extinction level events" in the abstract—the question is which extinction level events a given species is poised to survive, and was it unlucky enough to encounter one that it wasn't. The dinosaurs as a whole survived hundreds of millions of years, through many extinctions, until they eventually met their match.

Humans can deflect asteroids, so we've (probably) dodged that extinction, but that doesn't mean we're immune to others.

Re: Mourning Google

#282

Post by agumonkey »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #177
agumonkey wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

trivia: you just made me wonder what's the etymology of dinosaur, https://www.etymonline.com/word/dinosaur#etymonline_v_8600 says it's from "deinos "terrible" (see dire)". seems that from start, people in the field had this view of crippled genus

It means terror inducing, not bad or substandard

I was wondering, but etymonline had many many pejorative meanings for "dire" so I assumed dinosaurs too. But wikipedia says like you.

Re: Mourning Google

#283

Post by wharvle »

hello_computer wrote: post #75

Zero self-awareness. Larry and Sergey "empower(ed) psychotic pricks" because they are psychotic pricks. Look up how Larry talked to his marketing team in the early days, or his dalliances with subordinates (i.e. Melissa). Birds of a feather. Like attracts like. "Late Capitalism" is just polisci brain-damage. The comic books are more on-point: > You Either Die a Hero or Live Long Enough to See Yourself Become the Vill…

> “Late Capitalism" is just polisci brain-damage.

I dislike that term, but do think post-war optimization of management and finance have built toward… something, which we are now in, which is different from how things were earlier in this process (50s, 60s, at least part of the 70s) and certainly different from pre-war American capitalism.

Calling it “late” seems silly though.

Re: Mourning Google

#284

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

rchaud wrote: post #255

These blog posts eulogizing Google's culture death sidestep the elephant in the room; Google sells ads. Nothing else they produce makes money. Google Search didn't magically get dumber, they simply made a business decision to favor SEO-optimized junk sites, many of which run Google Ads. There's an outdated saying that goes, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" If Google was hiring only the best and brightest, s…

I know ads are their behemoth, but aren’t some of the other groups you listed large enough to be considered huge companies in their own right? You always hear about products getting shut down at google because they “only” make $100M a year in profit or whatever. They may not be as successful as ads, but they sure are successful.

(… at least until they get shut down for not being as successful as ads)

Re: Mourning Google

#285

Post by osmsucks »

YoshiRulz wrote: post #209
puchatek wrote: post #93

I really want to make the switch from Google maps to OSM but i always find that I also want to look up some data about the destination, usually the opening hours. Sometimes the reviews. OSM just doesn't have enough coverage for the place where I live. I wished there was some project that automatically looked up businesses in Google maps and copied their details to OSM but most likely that would violate some t&c or so…

It violates copyright, yes. If you're interested in contributing opening hours data, but learning OSM's quirks sounds too hard, try https://streetcomplete.app (for Android and soon maybe iOS).

Be careful when using StreetComplete. It's by far the most user-friendly OSM editor out there, but it bundles edits together in one big changeset. I didn't know that, so I used it on occasion to fill in information about places I was visiting, and right after to fill in information about places far away that I know intimately (where I live). This created a very geographically large changeset which got reviewers to shout at me multiple times about it (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Changeset#Geographical_s...).

Re: Mourning Google

#286

Post by marcosdumay »

test77777g wrote: post #83
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #15

"Psychopaths" seems to be a running theme in the various reminisces that people are sharing in comments here on Google stories.

I’ve noticed developers have a pretty low bar for being a “psychopath” I’ve found psychopaths to mostly be people that see programmers as disposable. This is pretty much true, hence the psychopaths everywhere.

Hum... Seeing people as disposable is a quite reasonable definition for that word.

Re: Mourning Google

#287

Post by Apocryphon »

robertlagrant wrote: post #73
closewith wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re underselling Search and Analytics as surveillance tools. Google added telemetry to the web.

Er, yes that's fair I suppose. I wouldn't call it surveillance, as that has a worse connotation than I think what Google did deserves, but certainly statistical tracking of populations across websites. I'm still not sure I'd call it corporatisation though, as they were working within the confines of the web, and the monetisation ability of that large-scale but precise user interests tracking meant ads could pay more…

SEO eventually led to the proliferation of link farms, machine-generated blogspam, and recipe sites that read like essays with FAQs. So it did cause perverse standardization of web content to some extent.

But agreed that it didn’t close the web into isolated portals like Facebook, which was in opposition to indexing and the business they were building.

I would say Google has been bad at handling results from semi-open spammy walled gardens though, like Pinterest, Quora, and Reddit. Maybe even Stack Overflow.

Re: Mourning Google

#288

Post by troutwine »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #221
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…

Maybe the same people got older.

Having been around at that time, I suspect a lot of that behavior was period specific — “quirky” as a character trait was big then — or a put on to fit in socially. Lifted trucks that never see so much as gravel in one place, unicycles and learning functional programming language from comic books in another.

Re: Mourning Google

#289

Post by frankfrank13 »

Its interesting that Google always staked itself on "being google-y" and now that its lost that its not clear what value prop it has to new hires beyond brand name and high pay.

Other companies that are highly corporate, and have never tried not to be (or at least in 20+ years), are not having an identity crisis -- Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft.

Re: Mourning Google

#290

Post by pm »

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…

The characterisation is off (stumbling vs. nimble), but the metaphor is apt. Adapt or die.
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