New Yorker published an interesting article on Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat few years ago - The Friendship That Made Google Huge [0]
[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...
The Jeff Dean Facts
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Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#52What’s Mustang? Web search?
It is or was the serving component of the main index. The part that does the posting list intersections and lookups.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#53Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#54Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was…
I’m no expert, but I certainly wouldn’t call that racism. Bias, absolutely. And it’s important that we acknowledge our biases.
But in a more literal sense, the chance of your joke landing was likely higher due to the things that you stated and due to your audience and their biases.
I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular. But if you try to calculate every second and third order consequence of everything that you do, let alone any moments of humor you might have.. Well, you might as well lock yourself in a cell now.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#55> When Jeff gives a seminar at Stanford, it's so crowded Don Knuth has to sit on the floor. (TRUE) That's actually funny and cool if true. I think what's even more impressive is that this stuff was all pre-AI boom.
It probably is. I think the same thing happened when Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) gave a talk at Google. I was there, it was crowded, and Don Knuth showed up. 90% sure he sat on the floor.
FWIW the XKCD talk at Google is here (wow, 18 years ago! I remember watching this video when it was posted): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24 (Knuth comes up to ask a question at 21:30) (Can't tell from the video where he was sitting otherwise, though there are definitely at least some people sitting on the floor.)
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#56Jeff Dean liquidated Google's entire AI ethics team because they wouldn't revise an academic publication to align with the corporate PR spin on AI.
This is overstating it by a lot. Jeff was the AI lead at the time, and there was a big conflict between management and the ethics team
And I actually think Google needs to pay more attention to AI ethics ... but it's a publically traded company and the incentives are all wrong -- i.e. it's going to do whatever it needs to do keep up with the competition, similar to what happened with Google+ (perceived competition from Facebook)
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
It probably is. I think the same thing happened when Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) gave a talk at Google. I was there, it was crowded, and Don Knuth showed up. 90% sure he sat on the floor.
Friends and I nabbed front-row seats to the Munroe talk; after a time we were asked to take seats a few rows back to make room for Knuth and others. He definitely did not sit on the floor.
Well, that shows what my 90% sure memory is worth. I sit corrected.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#58Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was…
Ah, I knew I recognized the friendship between Jeff and Sanjay -- they were the subject of a New Yorker article in 2018:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...
EDIT: And HN at the time:
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#59Jeff Dean liquidated Google's entire AI ethics team because they wouldn't revise an academic publication to align with the corporate PR spin on AI.
I'm having trouble following what exactly this means. So Jeff wanted the team to modify an existing publication to fit the PR spin on AI, the ethics team refused, and Jeff dissolved the team?
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#60I once mailed a CL to Sanjay. He replied, "This is outside of my expertise. Can you send it to Jeff?"
One of my more junior teammates got their CL assigned to Sanjay for review, she had no idea who he was and I just told her to look at all her new badges tomorrow.