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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#311

Post by Apocryphon »

el_benhameen wrote: post #309
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…

Where do we think the unicycle riders work now?

Whichever company has pickleball courts

Re: Mourning Google

#312

Post by wilsonnb3 »

GNOMES wrote: post #278
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 There's an outdated saying that goes, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"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…

Curious on your Android would be dead without Samsung comment. I know the US is skewed towards iOS, but Android is the #1 mobile OS, presumably due to cheap devices. Is there a stat showing Samsung is largest manufacturer? I found this, but company market cap != number of devices obviously https://finance.yahoo.com/news/16-biggest-smartphone-compani... It looks like there are 20+ manufacturers in the Open Handset All…

there was an article earlier this week talking about Apple overtaking Samsung for the first time that has some good numbers

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-overtakes-samsung-t...

Re: Mourning Google

#313

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

geodel wrote: post #241
twisteriffic wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those public institutions are being _made_ to fail right now. Purposefully. Not by unthinking forces of nature but by conscious effort.

Right, it is always that vast right wing conspiracy .

Is it your position that there are no powerful entities that actually desire to see many social institutions diminished if not outright demolished?

Re: Mourning Google

#314

Post by naasking »

lolinder wrote: post #281
naasking wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (pro…

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

At this point, there is no conceivable extinction level event humanity couldn't avoid or avert, in principle, given sufficient time/warning, except the heat death of the universe.

So I disagree that there's no point in talking about survivability in the abstract. You can roughly project the growth of a species' capabilities through time, and the trajectory the dinosaurs were on clearly entails they were heading towards extinction due to an inevitable run in with a supervolcano or an asteroid. Humanity's trajectory is conceivably very different due to science and our ability to construct sophisticated tools.

> The dinosaurs as a whole survived hundreds of millions of years, through many extinctions

I'll also note that this is a slightly unfair comparison because "dinosaurs" is a category consisting of many species, where the comparison here is against the one homo sapiens species. Many dinosaur species went extinct through those events you mention, some survived.

Re: Mourning Google

#315

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

genmon wrote: post #198
nostrademons wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

you're saying that dinosaurs were a zero interest rate phenomenon? ok ok flippant but maybe not entirely flippant... I'm used to conceiving of fitness as in fitness for a niche. But I hadn't grasped the idea of "meta-fitness" being the ability to adapt to a highly dynamic niche. there must be a term in evolutionary theory for this.

The term is "resilience".

Re: Mourning Google

#316

Post by theptip »

Chathamization wrote: post #124
cousin_it wrote: post #16

I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to…

That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not i…

If the only X moonshot that lands is Waymo, I think that still counts as having a transformative impact.

But also, Transformers were invented at Google, even if they were given away and not commercialized.

I think there was plenty of room for the “old Google” to change the world, if they had not sold out / commercialized. Imagine what 20% time projects could have been created around 2017 with a modest TPU budget per employee?

Re: Mourning Google

#317

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

rchaud wrote: post #297
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Yes, Youtube for example could certainly be spun off into its own company. But Google (or is it Alphabet?) has always resisted this. We do know that YT is not profitable, so I imagine they can't spin it off and charge market rates for GCP hosting.

Are they unprofitable like amazon was for a long time, where there’s a switch laying around somewhere they could choose to flip, or is it the other kind?

Re: Mourning Google

#318

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Apocryphon wrote: post #305
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Don't be evil" was really just a diversion --- a seductive marketing ploy that soon vanished I don't buy this. I believe that "Don't be evil" was a genuine desire, but it characterized a contrarian position designed to stand in opposition to traditional corporate culture. The correct lesson, IMO, is that you cannot ever grow to be a corporation remotely the size that google is and fight that traditional corporate…

People forget how common this cycle reappears in tech. Jobs founded Apple in opposition to IBM culture alongside Wozniak the ultimate hobbyist tinkerer. Musk was lauded for open-sourcing Tesla’s patents, ten years ago. I’m sure even an up-and-coming Microsoft was seen as a “good guy” at the top of the ‘90s. Though some of this was just public posturing, of course.

All correct except the Microsoft part. They were never seen as the good guy, thanks to Gates' "Letter to Hackers" in the 80s. MS may have started small, but they were always about "let's make lots of money".

Re: Mourning Google

#320

Post by jqpabc123 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #301
jqpabc123 wrote: post #112

This is really mourning the human condition. This scenario is not new. It is one that has been repeated over and over again --- not just in the history of business but in the history of humanity. I'm not the only one who saw the big flashing warning signs at the start of the Big Tech/social media era. The distressing and frustrating part is the fact that so many others didn't. I watched as even my own family ignored…

> "Don't be evil" was really just a diversion --- a seductive marketing ploy that soon vanished I don't buy this. I believe that "Don't be evil" was a genuine desire, but it characterized a contrarian position designed to stand in opposition to traditional corporate culture. The correct lesson, IMO, is that you cannot ever grow to be a corporation remotely the size that google is and fight that traditional corporate…

Larry & Sergey were just incredibly naive about this, that's all.

You are free to believe as you choose.

I believe they were fully aware of the nature of their work and who was funding it before the company was ever formed. And they worked to counter any realistic public perception of it.

Email conversations in 2012 between the NSA chief and Google executives, including Brin, were uncovered, inviting the Google heads to a classified threat briefing.

https://www.grunge.com/640181/the-shady-history-behind-googl...

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