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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#411

Post by pjlegato »

coldpie wrote: post #104
herval wrote: post #37

> "Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these people are wealthy and litigious." Big Tech in a nutshell

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.

Socialism rewards psychopaths even more than capitalism does. In that system, the psychopaths quickly become the ones who define what those "guardrails" are, for their own personal benefit; and then use the full weight of state enforcement power to prevent any dissent.

At least under capitalism, the decentralized free market eventually erodes the ability of a corporation run by psychopaths to continue to operate, if not as fast as we might like.

Re: Mourning Google

#412

Post by atombender »

Multicomp wrote: post #216
Chathamization wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary. I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the c…

But did Bell Labs put those out as products? There are things that have come out Google (Kubernetes, their contributions to Linux and containers, gRPC, HTTP/2-3, Bazel, Go, compression, etc.) that have been similarly useful for others to build businesses on, the same way Bell and Xerox's research stuff became the foundations for other things outside of those companies.

But the discussion here is around Google's inability to create good products, so I don't think the comparison is apt.

Re: Mourning Google

#413

Post by pjlegato »

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…

They hired smart people not to monetize their genius, but to tarpit it: to eliminate the small chance that one of them might work at a startup and build something that threatened Google's cash mashine.

Re: Mourning Google

#414

Post by amiantos »

herval wrote: post #37

> "Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these people are wealthy and litigious." Big Tech in a nutshell

Any company in a nutshell. I've worked retail, warehousing, IT, and engineering, and every company I've worked for has had a big problem with owners hiring charismatic psychopaths who end up causing some degree of harm to the employees around them. I worked with a guy who was very favored by the bosses at one company, and he instructed employees to break company policy and then went to me in IT and told me to install a camera in the areas he told the employees to break policy in. When I inadvertently learned the truth, I ignored his request. But... yeah. It's not unique to google or tech companies.

Re: Mourning Google

#415

Post by waylandsmithers »

eigenvalue wrote: post #141

What happened with Google has nothing to do with “late stage capitalism” and everything to do with horrible management. You only have to compare Sundar to Satya to see what could have been possible for Google with better leadership and vision. Particularly given the legacy Google had to work with and the early focus on AI which was thoroughly squandered. Capitalism will start to really work its magic when Google’s op…

> has nothing to do with “late stage capitalism”

Couldn't agree more, and the ironic thing about this phrase is that it's really more reminiscent of the pre-depression era of robber barons, price fixing, no workers rights, Panic of 18XX where companies really got too powerful and ran wild because there wasn't enough regulation yet

Re: Mourning Google

#416

Post by hintymad »

I've got to give it to Bezos on how Amazon could maintain its culture, or at least could slow down the dilution of its culture for the past 30 years. I feel that the 14 leadership principles offer a more balanced and actionable framework than Google's "do no evil", which unfortunately also gives a small number of activists room to do evil. An interesting observation is that Amazon used to promote slowly. A new grad would join Amazon as L4, and took more than 10 years or more to get promoted to L6. Making L6 used to be a big deal. L7 engineers were like demigods. In the early years, Amazon got most of its L7 through internal promotion, and gave them enormous power at the institutional level. Those old-timer L7s didn't give a shit about political pressures from their peer managers, so they held a really high bar on promotion. Interestingly, Amazon engineers were pretty cool with the promotion process, probably because the promotion anxiety came from comparing with one's coworkers. I heard the culture dilution accelerated in the past few years because, no surprise, Amazon hired and promoted faster. Many L7s were hired externally and could easily succumb to the pressure from peer managers. Going to the next level in three years or less has become a thing. The L8 is the new L7, yada yada yada.

Re: Mourning Google

#417

Post by hello_computer »

wharvle wrote: post #283
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.

It's twitterati short-hand for, "I don't like the n-th order consequences of the choices that I've made (and would totally make again)." Everything is someone else's fault. No introspection. Never a mea culpa.

Re: Mourning Google

#418

Post by jqpabc123 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #404
jqpabc123 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2012, "Don't be evil" was still their corporate motto. 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.

I worked at the University of Washington, dept of Computer Science & Engineering, for the first half of the 1990s. I was there when the first webcrawler was created (Brian Pinkerton). I knew a lot of graduate students there. I was the "webmaster" too. I feel fairly confident in saying that even though the facts of the MDDS grant that was helping to fund Page & Brin's graduate student research are clear, I do not beli…

it wasn't even clear to them precisely what they were doing, let alone "for whom".

Sergey Brin dropped out of the doctorate program at Stanford in 1995 to spend more time working on his search engine. He and Page founded Goggle a few years later. Their and their company's close relationship with 3 letter agencies is well documented.

Draw your own conclusions but to claim he didn't know what he was doing defies credibility IMO.

Re: Mourning Google

#419

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

hintymad wrote: post #416

I've got to give it to Bezos on how Amazon could maintain its culture, or at least could slow down the dilution of its culture for the past 30 years. I feel that the 14 leadership principles offer a more balanced and actionable framework than Google's "do no evil", which unfortunately also gives a small number of activists room to do evil. An interesting observation is that Amazon used to promote slowly. A new grad w…

> I've got to give it to Bezos on how Amazon could maintain its culture, or at least could slow down the dilution of its culture for the past 30 years.

Really??? Bezos only left the CEO role in 2021. I've already seen tons of posts and commentary talking about how "It's well into Day 2 and beyond at Amazon", and the founder has only been out of his post for not even 3 years.

Perhaps in plain years he kept things going longer than at Google, but that's just because he held the reins more directly.

Re: Mourning Google

#420

Post by gumballindie »

nkohari wrote: post #350
gumballindie wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those would have to be some rather corrupt courts to agree to such theft. What's next? Agreeing that if you are out on the street it's fair game to be robbed?

Your definition of theft doesn't necessarily match the legal definition. It still remains to be seen whether training foundation models is fair use or not, and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

Downloading copyrighted material and using it, let alone for comercial purposes, is theft. I am not allowed to download movies or music. Nor am i allowed to resell them if i did download them. Which is what openai did for some of its content. It is appalling that some people defend their crime. Not sure for what reason.
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