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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#61

Post by rezonant »

hashar wrote: post #57
rezonant wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a non US person, I have a couple questions: * What is P&A tech? * How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?

Oops, should've been M&A (mergers and acquisitions)

Re: Mourning Google

#62

Post by dmix »

jdub wrote: post #48
samirillian wrote: post #25

I like Tbray's posts but I want to quibble over language. What's happening to the term "late stage capitalism"? Feels like it's becoming a meme like neoliberalism. What does it even mean to say that it wasn't tech's fault, it was late stage capitalism's fault? Kind of dodging a particular responsibility with a generality. I think LSC came to prominence through cultural marxists like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson.…

You question the phrase "late stage capitalists" and use the phrase "cultural marxists"? Shoo.

Meme words attract other meme words. On average people's brains tend to operate on simple reductive trends, things get grouped with over simplified patterns. You can fight it but they'll just express the same ideas in double speak if you make it a no no phrase. I wouldn't use it personally but like what OP is saying, it used to he "neoliberal" then that became boring/overused so they invented "late stage capitalism" as the new bucket to throw every criticism of modern economics into. Likewise with "cultural Marxism" for popular social justice trends.

There will be a new phrase for these same groupings that we'll all get upset about in a few years once these get fully played and become taboo.

Re: Mourning Google

#63

Post by Grimblewald »

vanderZwan wrote: post #22

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the…

building on the dino thing, we've currently hellbent in creating a new dino age it seems. Hot ass planet high in the CO2 required to create thriving lush jungles.

Re: Mourning Google

#64

Post by squarefoot »

baud147258 wrote: post #31
bluetomcat wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. Nothing apart from search, ads, maps, Gmail, Chrome and Android was a huge success. They essentially created their own monocultural ecosystem. Most of everything else was a short-lived fad. Plus, Wave, Reader, Chat and Glass, to mention a few.

I'd add Youtube as a huge success, even if I don't think if ever brought in much money

Google acquired YouTube, they didn't make it, just like Android. At the time Google had Google Video which was terrible in comparison, and although Google was already the most used general purpose search engine, YouTube was so much better that it had already become the standard for publishing and/or searching videos.

Re: Mourning Google

#65

Post by bitcharmer »

cousin_it wrote: post #16

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…

I disagree. To me it looks like the corporateness, the MBA types, KPIs and all that bullshit steered Google off its course and into what it is today.

Re: Mourning Google

#66

Post by _heimdall »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #11

I have to say, I'm not convinced by all of the AI hype, but it makes a bloody good search engine for a lot of the things I want to search (things where I am in a reasonable position to evaluate the truthfulness of an answer). It's only a matter of time before someone realises that and ruins it in the aim of making money.

edit: I totally misread the parent comment, move along

I really wouldn't recommend looking to LLMs to evaluate truthfulness, they aren't built for that and have no way of knowing what true is.

They're much better as a tool for summarizing information, with the usual caveat that any summary is incomplete and can only be as truthful as the original source(s) used.

Re: Mourning Google

#67

Post by _bohm »

samirillian wrote: post #25

I like Tbray's posts but I want to quibble over language. What's happening to the term "late stage capitalism"? Feels like it's becoming a meme like neoliberalism. What does it even mean to say that it wasn't tech's fault, it was late stage capitalism's fault? Kind of dodging a particular responsibility with a generality. I think LSC came to prominence through cultural marxists like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson.…

> cultural marxists

I think maybe you mean just "Marxists". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

To your question, I do think the term is becoming heavily watered down as I see it being used frequently by people who clearly lack the context on Marxist thought to be able to use it with it's original meaning. More often, when people use the term, I infer the sentiment that the "capitalism" we live in is regressing into oligarchy or corporatocracy.

Re: Mourning Google

#68

Post by nostrademons »

vanderZwan wrote: post #22

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the…

This description actually makes me feel like the metaphor is more apt. The dinosaurs went down because they were large, complex lifeforms that required a vibrant, complex ecosystem to support them. Amidst a fundamental shift to that ecosystem, large complex organisms were the first to go down. This is a general pattern - complex systems are always the first to collapse when there's a shift in the ecosystem, because they have more interdependencies. Mammals emerged from the carnage because they were small and nocturnal and could occupy small & simple ecological niches. The original disruptive innovation.

As for what will take them down - all large institutions are failing right now. The public education system. The health care system. The government. The mass media. The immigration system, and general idea of national borders. The zoning / building code / housing system. Childcare. Wouldn't surprise me if we see the financial system, currency, and military go down next. The trigger is part climate change, part demographics, part COVID, and part the loss of trust triggered by the Internet and Big Tech, but all of these are fundamental shifts in the foundations of our society that make our society no longer adapted to the ecological niche it grew up in.

Re: Mourning Google

#69

Post by _bohm »

sanderjd wrote: post #43
AlexCoventry wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI research wasn't a commercial success, but it did have a huge impact.

Yep, the parent comment is the part of the iceberg "above the surface", but there is also a bunch of influential stuff "below the surface", like their AI research, and things like colossus, borg, bigtable, mapreduce, and a few others.

Would add: Go and protobuf/gRPC

Re: Mourning Google

#70

Post by VBprogrammer »

_heimdall wrote: post #66
VBprogrammer wrote: post #11

I have to say, I'm not convinced by all of the AI hype, but it makes a bloody good search engine for a lot of the things I want to search (things where I am in a reasonable position to evaluate the truthfulness of an answer). It's only a matter of time before someone realises that and ruins it in the aim of making money.

edit: I totally misread the parent comment, move along I really wouldn't recommend looking to LLMs to evaluate truthfulness, they aren't built for that and have no way of knowing what true is. They're much better as a tool for summarizing information, with the usual caveat that any summary is incomplete and can only be as truthful as the original source(s) used.

I think you've misread my comment. I have found copilot for example to be really useful for searching for things like how to pull out part of a log like using common bash commands. I can generally evaluate what it comes up with pretty well; having used all of the commands before but just not using them on the daily basis which would make it easy for me to come up with the initial version on my own.

On the other hand asking it the population of Azerbaijan is problematic. I'd have to Google whatever it told me.

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