421–430 of 485 posts
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…
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The metaphor can work to the degree that the dinosaurs succeeded, and the mammals stayed small (occupying a cockroach-like niche) until a large exogenous disruption upended the system. Of course that isn't what happened to the car companies, or the newspapers, or most once large sectors, and I do actually think that the same gradual, rather than abrupt, decay will happen to these big tech companies. In fact we see it…
Right, it can still work, as other commentors also show with their interpretation. However, I'd say that this is only so because we put in the effort to "patch" the metaphor into something the author didn't really say. Also even then a lot of those comments still miss why I take issue with the "evolutionary dead end" implication, which is that it is presented as evolutionary survivors somehow being inherently better…
Yes, it a misunderstanding of evolutio, ascribing some sort of teleology on a inherent process as purposeful as multiplication.
Tangential to the article, when I onboarded in 2017 it felt like showing up to a house party at 3am. You had missed all the action, everyone was now in some kind of stupor half awake half asleep. I think it was literal weeks after they moved "Don't be Evil" to the bottom of the employee handbook or whatever. I didn't make it to three years. I met some incredible individuals, but the org as a whole as I experienced it…
I'm glad you posted this. Honestly, while I agree with the flood of recent posts mourning Google in the wake of their layoffs (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046825 ), some of these posts (not necessarily this one by Tim Bray, as he left Google a decade ago, but certainly lots of the other ones) kinda leave a bad taste in my mouth because they strike me as a bit self-serving. That is, I think folks gener…
It was February 11, 2011 in Tahrir Square. That, as far as I can tell, was the place and moment where 'tech' changed.
Governments and other organizations were very rudely shaken awake by how 'tech' had just toppled an otherwise stable government at a key choke point of a populous country. How all this newfangled communications tech and silly meme culture came together out of seemingly nowhere and threatened everything.
After Tahrir Square, every government and agency and whatever else saw tech as a very powerful and possibly threatening 'thing'. And they slowly but surely managed to change 'tech', work with it, get hired in it buy it off, and make it and themselves more to their liking and plans. The adolescence was over.
Tahrir Square was when the suits woke up and then went to work in 'tech' because everyone could see that was the future.
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O2 levels are not set that way. Just think where all the new CO2 is coming from.
Much of it is coming from the carbon in fossilized remains of a time when there was much more O2 in the atmosphere because there was so much flora and a warmer planet... what am I missing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen
And where it goes after a plant captures the carbon.
Now read the original comment again. Did you notice the problem?
That wiki page is surprisingly unhelpful. The O2 on the atmosphere mostly doesn't come or go anywhere, but on geological timescales it is mostly created from water and absorbed by rocks. The phenomenon that entire page is about stopped billions of years ago.
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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 credib…
My own analysis and that of others would note that MDDS was not in fact interested in a web search engine - they were interested in ways to identify individuals online.
Google's services did indeed provide this, but not at the beginning - that had to wait for as much as 14 years later, and came about through google becoming the utterly dominant search engine. But that wasn't part of Brin's research, and I'm not sure that he & Page even recognized at the outset what "the set of things searched for by someone" would even mean. In fact, I see no evidence that the intelligence or law enforcement agencies saw that either, certainly not in 1995, when frankly the web was the domain of a bunch of tech first-adopters and appeared quite unlikely to become the platform it was by, say, 2012. Very, very few people saw the potential of the web in 1995, and the idea that intelligence agencies had people far out ahead of CS (and physics!) departments is laughable to me.
I was also the #2 employee at amzn, and the amount of crap I read where people speculate about what was being said, thought and done at that company during its earliest days is laughable. I have no doubt in my mind that early google is similarly serendipitous: a hacker/grad student project, partially funded by MDDS, that mushroomed into initially an insanely powerful tool for web users and because of this then became a system of intense interest to intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
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Absolutely. My outside impression of current Google is everyone is at war with everyone at their level. Get promoted and it's war with a new level. Your success at a given level is based on your ability to persuade the level above of your use to them ascending further levels. It's tempting to blame Sundar for this, but he is the result of this game being setup that way in the first place, and he simply eliminated all…
So basically Microsoft under Ballmer?
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 goin…
Fair point. It is ultimately CEO's responsibility to shape a company's culture, as culture is really just "who gets rewarded and who gets punished". After a CEO steps down, it will be hard to uphold the same standards, for good or for bad, at the highest level.
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Much of it is coming from the carbon in fossilized remains of a time when there was much more O2 in the atmosphere because there was so much flora and a warmer planet... what am I missing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen
Ok, now tell me where the O2 in CO2 comes from. And where it goes after a plant captures the carbon. Now read the original comment again. Did you notice the problem? That wiki page is surprisingly unhelpful. The O2 on the atmosphere mostly doesn't come or go anywhere, but on geological timescales it is mostly created from water and absorbed by rocks. The phenomenon that entire page is about stopped billions of years…
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Most of the people who worked directly under Steve Jobs knows he is an Asshole. At the same time they all loves him. You may want to watch [1] Steve Jobs Insult Response. And you can imagine most people are the guy asking that question. [1] https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=4fMzMqFS8lLbMZJr
> You may want to watch [1] Steve Jobs Insult Response. And you can imagine most people are the guy asking that question. Yes, but not every CEO is able to give the response he gave. At least, he tried to connect with the developers. When was the last time Google's CEO interacted with devs?
This Q&A is the evidence for why I think many tech people underestimated him, and as you observe such unfiltered Q&As do not occur with other tech CEOs, though he was not CEO at the time. He's not 100% right about how things would go, but he was a lot more right than anyone else proved to be.
Some of his answers to the really tough questions are not stellar, but Apple was in a truly terrible state at the time, and there were not nice answers to give. The fact that he stood there ready to take the hits spoke volumes though.