391–400 of 485 posts
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I’m sure even an up-and-coming Microsoft was seen as a “good guy” at the top of the ‘90s. Uh, about that…
I said at the top of the decade, not at its end.
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> 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…
Humanity is currently showing very little potential for averting extinction level events. They might end up surviving and rebounding from the Jackpot, but that's not the way to bet.
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Absolutely. And don't get me started on how M&A has created an absolute monster of technical debt that stares you in the face as a user. Many might disagree, because the trillion dollar veneer Google can throw at things obscures it, but it's there. I used to wonder why Google moves so slow to add features and get literally anything done, but after experiencing the monumental screwup that is Google's underlying unifie…
Joined Google relatively recently and have also worked in/with the payments infrastructure. Couldn’t agree more - absolute nightmare to work in and it’s a small miracle when anything gets delivered at all. As far as I can tell, seems to be a lack of a cohesive vision from leadership and an absolute willing ignorance of existing challenges, as you’ve mentioned.
90% of my personal Google services appear to be tied to the organization one for some reason, but a few recent ones from the Google Store are now tied to my personal one, meaning I need to use the profile switcher to access and manage them. There is no way to move subscriptions between payment profiles and the only option is to close one which will terminate the services immediately and remove the billing history. The one I should remove is the Organization one, as I'm not an organization...
-.-
Meanwhile, I have a single owner LLC that had GCP projects in play before the company was founded. I had tried to set up two separate GCP billing accounts, one owned by my GSuite admin and one owned by my personal account, to bifurcate the projects that fell under the new company.
Somehow that resulted in the one and only payment profile associated with my GSuite business GAIA identity being that same organization payment profile from my personal account! So I can see and manage personal subscriptions on payments.google.com. There's no way to change this that I'm aware of short of working with GSuite support.
You can in fact make a new payment profile, and Google says you should do this when you move to another country, but the help docs themselves note that your existing services will continue to charge on the old one. Which I guess means you are expected to cancel all your Google services, delete your old payment profile so that you can sign back up for all of them in the new payment profile manually, and lose all history of your previous payments.
So there's Billing Accounts which point to Payment Accounts, and Payment Accounts which point to Payment Profiles. In true Google fashion, there's a tooltip on the Payment profile ID which says it used to be called Billing ID. That's not confusing at all.
This is just a few of the utterly baffling things I found while trying to work this out. It reminds me of how PayPal has active subscriptions that it's UI literally cannot manage because they are too old and were incorrectly migrated from one of the zillions of older M&A subscription products that they merged in in their history.
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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…
2012?? Google was founded in 1998. 2012 is 14 years later. I'm fine with the argument that they had already abandoned "Don't be Evil" by that point in time.
I'll assume you just skipped over the part in the reference where their graduate research done in the 1990s that went into Google was funded by the CIA and NSA.
They knew what they were doing and who they were doing it with all along. Suggesting otherwise defies rationality.
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Just having the power isn't enough. Nobody respects pushovers. Think of "Asshole" in corporate leadership as "a show of force" that earns begrudging respect. But to your point you can earn respect without always being an asshole, or being one for no reason at all.
I wonder what it is about leaders like Steve Jobs that makes them popular despite how programmers working for them know the guy in charge has never written a line of code. Is it charisma (whatever that means)? Is it vision? Is it luck and being at the right place at the right time? Is it a few devoted loyal programmers who spread the word about how amazing the Führer is? I often think it also has to do with the perso…
You may want to watch [1] Steve Jobs Insult Response. And you can imagine most people are the guy asking that question.
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Having pushed a git commit says nothing about whether the person pushing it has enjoyed doing so intrinsically or as a means to an end. Conversely, I’ve worked with very passionate technical people that seemingly couldn’t care less about their share value or even core business metrics (which is ok as long as there’s somebody around that can reel them in if they go off on a tangent and they let them), but just don’t l…
There are people in technical leadership making decisions who are not capable of performing the most rudimentary of programming tasks like committing code. This is a problem when the decision-maker doesn't act on advice from staff or is incapable of understanding the advice. Now give that leader an ego and abandon all hope. There are many rungs to fall below "competent, but not passionate". In fact, I think I prefer…
I've seen PM's and PO's that claim 1-5 years experience as developers who are shite because they're not very technical.
The underlying issue is that these positions should be filled by senior developers but instead they became their own career track.
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"Apart from all the many succesful products, everything they did was a failure" is an empty statement which can be applied to any company. So yes, you can say that about Alphabet. You can also mention that they have a market cap of $1.8 trillion and are the fourth most valuable company in the world.
Their successful products are vertically-integrated to provide a walled "convenient" experience to users. You use an Android smartphone to open their browser, searching for stuff and viewing ads, using Maps to find the location of businesses appearing in the ads. The rest of their contributions are welcome side-effects that have enabled running that software and hardware infrastructure.
Isn't that a selling point of Apple ecosystem as well? Everything just works
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Well, you would be surprised how much historical writing you are locked out of by not being able to read Latin. Not from antiquity, but from the fall of rome up until the turn of the previous century, Latin was the language . A tiny fraction of what's been written in Latin is available in any vernacular. By not reading Latin, you're locked out almost all western pre-modern writing. > Plato complained that "children t…
I assure you that I am not surprised with how much historical writing I am locked out of by not being able to read Latin. Honestly I would be willing to bet that it as much as I am locked out of from not being able to read Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Japanese, Arabic, etc. You can't think that's a serious argument for teaching Latin in primary or secondary school? If I were a western historian, sure, you should probabl…
I'm omitting the other charge, because I'm focusing on the charge of corrupting the youth, and the fact that he (according to Plato) associated with the youth much more frequently than he did with the adults. The youths of Athens make appearances in almost every platonic dialogue, and they're almost always shown in a neutral to positive light (unlike the leaders, generals, politicians, poets, etc.) He's portrayed as the opposite of a stodgy old man opposed to new ideas; if any thing he's spearheading an ideological assault on the status quo of Athens!
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Well, sorta. Plenty of psychotic smart guys around in big tech, too, which is a potent combo. Bezos; Zuckerberg; Musk, if his loose spending habits qualify him as a big tech leader. Capitalism rewards psychopaths the most, without guardrails they're gonna win every time, everywhere.
"psychotic" is being thrown around as the new "narcissist". Basically anyone with some personality trait that I don't agree with is now a "psychotic".
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Just having the power isn't enough. Nobody respects pushovers. Think of "Asshole" in corporate leadership as "a show of force" that earns begrudging respect. But to your point you can earn respect without always being an asshole, or being one for no reason at all.
I think Jobs as an example here is confusing, because he's noted as being an asshole and also an asshole , so people will read it your way and people will read it the other way.