471–480 of 485 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who said YouTube is unprofitable? They brought in 30B last year - if they’re unprofitable it’s because of accounting magic to offset other parts of the business.
Unprofitable without ads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. People want to believe in the genius that conquered the world, because it gives them the impression that success is a function of individual agency. It is much less impressive to hear that some world changing product was made by hundreds of engin…
How do you resolve that with the fact that the same hundreds of engineers doing boring engineer stuff nearly bankrupted the company before they brought Jobs back?
What Jobs did fix (and some claim it was due to getting bitter pills few times before returning to Apple), was to play on the feelings when you buy apple gear. And that you stopped being important the moment you paid, though some support orgs were on life support until income stream became just too stable to worry.
> "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…
Works across many levels, not just higher up management.
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…
What makes it late stage is that these decrepit monopolies or pseudo-monopolies are so ensconced in their markets that the share price will not fall appreciably long after calcification has set in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah there is nothing that doesn't work fine on FF. Sometimes I find that Dev tools works a bit better on chrome, so I use that for a while. But not consistently.
YouTube and Google Drive large file uploads sorted? Also google meet no longer randomly fail to load? If so I will be very excited since I want off of Chrome but for work it was broken last time I check and that was like early December.
Can't say I've tried.
> Also google meet no longer randomly fail to load?
Definitely no problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, this is my intention. Good product is made via collaboration between the people writing the stories and determining the overall experience and the engineers that make it happen.
I would add that in the development of the best products, the engineers don't merely implement, they also invent new features and whole categories of services.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. But 1. so has their processing power 2. lots of the problem (first page of results filled with ads that looks like content, including spam in the results and not giving us a block option) are not related to scale 3. Smaller (search.marginalia.nu) and larger (kagi.com) competitors keep demonstrating that it is possible to implement doublequotes correctly and not include results I didn't ask for - even in 2024.
For 2 it is related to scale. Because of their scale Google is targeted by spammers the most. The smaller searches don't need to fight off bad content because it's not targeting their specific algorithms.
Good post. But it ended as soon as I was sinking in deep to read it. Not blaming, just felt it ended abruptly.