Has Google Lost Its Mission? (cnbc.com) 126
A former Google employee said the company has lost its way, writing in a recent blog post that Google is inefficient, plagued by mismanagement and paralyzed by risk. Praveen Seshadri joined the Alphabet-owned company at the start of 2020 when Google Cloud acquired AppSheet, which Seshadri co-founded. He left in January, according to his LinkedIn profile. CNBC reports: Seshadri argued it's a "fragile moment" for Google, particularly because of the recent pressures it is facing to compete with Microsoft's artificial intelligence initiatives. Seshadri said Google's problems are not rooted in its technology, but in its culture. "The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems," Seshadri said. "They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called 'Ads' that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins. (1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement."
Instead of working to serve customers, Seshadri argued most employees ultimately serve other Google employees. He described the company as a "closed world" where working extra hard isn't necessarily rewarded. Seshadri said feedback is "based on what your colleagues and managers think of your work." Seshadri said Google is hyper-focused on risk and that "risk mitigation trumps everything else." Every line of code, every launch, nonobvious decisions, changes from protocol and disagreements are all risks that Googlers have to approach with caution, Seshadri wrote. He added that employees are also "trapped" in a long line of approvals, legal reviews, performance reviews and meetings that leave little room for creativity or true innovation.
"Overall, it is a soft peacetime culture where nothing is worth fighting for," Seshadri wrote "The people who are inclined to fight on behalf of customers or new ideas or creativity soon learn the downside of doing so." Seshadri said Google has also been hiring at a rapid pace, which makes it difficult to nurture talent and leads to "bad hires." Many employees also believe the company is "truly exceptional," Seshadri said, which means that a lot of antiquated internal processes continue to exist because "that's the way we do it at Google." Seshadri said Google has a chance to turn things around, but he doesn't think the company can continue to succeed by merely avoiding risk. He argues that Google needs to "lead with commitment to a mission," reward people who fight for "ambitious causes" and trim the layers of middle management. "There is hope for Google and for my friends who work there, but it will require an intervention," he wrote.
Instead of working to serve customers, Seshadri argued most employees ultimately serve other Google employees. He described the company as a "closed world" where working extra hard isn't necessarily rewarded. Seshadri said feedback is "based on what your colleagues and managers think of your work." Seshadri said Google is hyper-focused on risk and that "risk mitigation trumps everything else." Every line of code, every launch, nonobvious decisions, changes from protocol and disagreements are all risks that Googlers have to approach with caution, Seshadri wrote. He added that employees are also "trapped" in a long line of approvals, legal reviews, performance reviews and meetings that leave little room for creativity or true innovation.
"Overall, it is a soft peacetime culture where nothing is worth fighting for," Seshadri wrote "The people who are inclined to fight on behalf of customers or new ideas or creativity soon learn the downside of doing so." Seshadri said Google has also been hiring at a rapid pace, which makes it difficult to nurture talent and leads to "bad hires." Many employees also believe the company is "truly exceptional," Seshadri said, which means that a lot of antiquated internal processes continue to exist because "that's the way we do it at Google." Seshadri said Google has a chance to turn things around, but he doesn't think the company can continue to succeed by merely avoiding risk. He argues that Google needs to "lead with commitment to a mission," reward people who fight for "ambitious causes" and trim the layers of middle management. "There is hope for Google and for my friends who work there, but it will require an intervention," he wrote.
No (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I was gonna say - their mission, as best I can tell, is to collect as much data about everyone as they can and then monetize it. I don't see any signs they've deviated from that.
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Yeah, I was gonna say - their mission, as best I can tell, is to collect as much data about everyone as they can and then monetize it.
Wasn't it "Don't be Dr. Evil" -- or something like that? :-)
I don't see any signs they've deviated from that.
Well... They seem to have stayed their course, whatever it was.
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The love of money etc etc. They got popular, that made them profitable, that got them offers and they sold out. Going public inevitably turns a company into something else — the obvious joke is "a corporation" but seriously, once you become beholden to zillions of anonymous shareholders that's going to constrain your choices forevermore.
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The mission is to get hired by google (Score:5, Interesting)
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Which is odd because Google is an advertising company. Who wants to publicly admit they work in that scummy industry?
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Some people like it. And no, there is no accounting for taste.
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Our applications: Best Web search, Best email.
Will people pay for either of these, in the new "interweb" age?
No.
Ok sow how do we monetize our applications?
Well we can see peoples' interests, through the history and keywords of their searches, so...
we can sell interest-targeted advertising to companies, where those ads appear alongside organic search results to end users.
Make it so.
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Early on they hired a lot of PhDs. I'm not sure how many are there now. There really aren't that many of them, so at some point this had to break down; but they've always cultivated this notion of hiring "smart people". The trouble with this is that now you've got a lot of smart people who can quickly become expert at working the system. Google might be illustrative of the fact that corporations are most decidedly not people, and are not capable of rational self interest. Rather, corporations are a col
depends on the mission (Score:5, Insightful)
if the goal is to become increasingly creepy, persistent, and insulting to the intelligence of users, then yeah they're swinging for the god damn fences.
look, you cunts are primarily search engine, stop trying to interpret queries to prevent 'misinformation' or whatever social agenda you feel obligated to impose on the proles. You should be as transparent as possible to what your user's actually wanted to look up. And maybe, just maybe stop changing UI elements on your projects to be more cumbersome/awkward to use, for no apparent good reason.
It's almost as if they just cannot help themselves after a while from making everything they touch objectively worse over time.
finally, stop putting the needs of your absolutely creepy and disgusting ad business (aka mass surveillance and pervasive snooping) above all else. it sucks that you are a virtual monopoly at this point, entrusting such a huge bulk of our online activities to an ad company is pants on head, clownshit retarded.
Re:depends on the mission (Score:5, Interesting)
stop putting the needs of your absolutely creepy and disgusting ad business (aka mass surveillance and pervasive snooping) above all else.
To paraphrase a famous quote: The greatest trick Google ever pulled was convincing the world they're not just an advertising company.
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it sucks that you are a virtual monopoly at this point, entrusting such a huge bulk of our online activities to an ad company is pants on head, clownshit retarded.
If you're going to have a search engine, you've got to pay for it. Google definitely has become less useful of late, though. And I mean I've noticed a sharp decline in the value of results recently, though it would be more fair to say it's been ongoing and I only noticed the pace step up.
On the other hand, it's still the best thing around... And I'm sure not going to pay for one.
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I think the decline in usefulness of the search engines has as much to do with the ever-worsening state of the Information Supersewer as with any changes the Goog has made. (To be clear, they have made some bad changes.)
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well, google didn't start out this way. Up until about 2016 or so they were fairly innocuous, yeah we knew they were an intrusive ad company, but it was manageable. it was one of those transactional relationships which were tolerable because they got your data, but you got actual search results. Now they get even more of your data, and unless you're actively searching for something to buy, you get mostly useless bullshit results and a headache.
But starting with trump, then covid though they really got ou
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The earth is flat.
The moon landings were faked.
Ukraine is run by Nazis so it is only right that we invade it and change its government.
Global warming is a hoax.
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I actually do pay for a search engine. It isn't as good as it needs to be to provide sufficient value, but it is only slightly worse than Bing/DDG for factual content, and for general content it is commensurate. They are putting too much of their energy into chatbot results, but that is the game.
Google is trying to monetize everything, and in the process it seems to risk losing a lot of mindshare. My wife complained that her google hosted email wasn't working on Monday. It took me a bit of time to realiz
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I don't know what people thought Google's mission was, but its primary purpose for the past 20 years has been to deliver targeted ads to its user base to enrich Google's investors. Let's not pretend that they have some higher moral purpose, they're a for-profit business.
Search, Gmail, and Android are really just glorified data collection devices designed to assist with personalized ad delivery.
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...and all that you describe are perfectly good "missions" to have. Maybe they're not the upstanding morals we might like, but perfectly good if your aim is to sustain a company.
I read this as there's an internal lack of focus. That is, when faced with an issue, people think "how can I turn this to my advantage?" rather than "what can we do to help the users?". When I worked in a big tech firm, that sort of thing was very much around, and guess where they are now... yeah, not "big" tech any more.
I suspect a
Accurate from insider reports (Score:5, Informative)
It did start different (Score:1)
Google was started as a "good" company meant to help people but they couldn't survive without generating revenue so they turned to advertising.
Advertising quickly became manipulation and profit at all costs with no regards to moral responsibly. Despite generating ridiculous profit, advertising is simply not a sustainable model. You can only strip rights and money away from people for so long until there is nothing left. I'm talking about both the consumers and advertisers.
Now they are nothing more than a mo
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yea but it didnt start in 2020, and its mission then was pretty clear when this person signed on
someone didn't expect it to be a job, they expected it to be ..."here little one have some crayons and make something creative". That's not how most jobs work, even if you are in a position of having the luxury of being creative (like I am) you still have to sell management, and your colleges, your idea no matter how many hours of wishes and hard work you put into it.
In fact, least in the electronic engineering w
I don't get the "working hard" part. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't get the "working hard" part. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think when it comes to "working hard", that results are what matters is implied for most people.
The middle managers wanting people to return to the office because they say they can't tell whether they're working if they're not in the office proves otherwise... And Google is as big an offender in the back-to-the-office imperative as anybody. If the results were what mattered, that would never happen; they would judge work based on output, not on input.
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I don't get the feedback either, I want to know what colleagues and managers think ... that usually means that I am going in the right direction. I mean if I work extra hard at something that everyone thinks is shit, then there's a problem.
I don't really think the guy understands what he was getting into, google serves its customers just fine, or else they wouldnt be swimming in ad money, after all the end user is not the customer. Google's mission is to get more users to see those ad's not be a daycare for
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Indeed. It is a cultural defect though, and hence probably impossible to fix. Quantity over quality has stopped being a good idea a long time ago.
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If you have to work hard, then something is wrong.
If you've never had anything go wrong at your workplace, I envy you. Maybe someone misunderstood the scope of a project and now a deadline committed to a client is at risk. Maybe someone introduced a bug that needs fixing urgently. When these things happen, effective businesses put the effort in to understand "why" and make changes so that they don't happen again.
But... in the moment, when something has unfortunately gone wrong, sometimes you have to work harder to correct for it. If someone puts in a
Capitalism (Score:2)
Their mission is to make money. Any other claims made are to appease their "customers" and regulators as they fleece data from them, or to appease their employees so they can feel good looking in the mirror as they sell their souls to help sell ads and harvest data from the public for obscene amounts of money.
No. (Score:2)
Don't. Be evil. (Score:1)
Isn't their mission to essentially be the gatekeeper of the web and collect their pound of flesh from every interaction? Seems like they've been fairly steadfast towards maintaining that goal.
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that is their goal, and we've gone way too far in enabling them to ratchet it up.
you want surveillance society? because this is how you wind up with one.
risk-aversion at big companies = Survivorship Bias (Score:5, Interesting)
"Seshadri said Google is hyper-focused on risk and that "risk mitigation trumps everything else." Every line of code, every launch, nonobvious decisions, changes from protocol and disagreements are all risks that Googlers have to approach with caution"
It's easy to be risky and avant-garde when you're actually on the avant of the previous garde.
When you have no one, no one can hurt you.
So you do all this cool stuff and attract people who are looking for some place willing to take a chance on their wild dreams. Then your company succeeds, and you think it's because of you. It ain't you, baby. There were hundreds of others trying to do some portion of the same thing. They happened to fail; you happened to succeed. Whether it's butterfly wings flapping or water-drops running down Jeff Goldblum's fist, you succeeded because someone was going to succeed. If time travelers traveled back and killed every member of your startup in the crib, instead of Google it would have been Jiggle or Quizzle or Jeevzle or whichever meatsacks were propelled into that same space by the forces of socio-economic-technological history.
But then when you succeed, you suddenly have something to lose. You think your ass will age like wine, and it does. But if you think that means it gets better with age, it don't. If you think that means it turns to vinegar, it do.
And that's a hard fact of life that you have to get realistic about. So you start working suuuuper carefully and slowly and building a 273-step framework for efficiencifying how many paper clips the company orders in a given year across all its operational locations, because you want to control your HOLD on success the same way you OBTAINED your success -- by controlling it.
Except you're just the schmuck who happened to survive. You didn't actually build that. You didn't control your rise to success, and you can't control your grip on it. Every empire, whether religious or political or mercantile, thinks it can live forever and stay on top if only it keeps controlling everything, because every empire quickly falls to its own hype and believes its success was an inevitable outcome of its choices, rather than understanding the brutal truth: You were shaped by broad historical forces to make the choices you made, and the success was determined by undercurrents of Selection Pressure. You did the literal work to build the tangible artifacts, but the success you was subsequent to building it; it was the outcome of a billion cofactors in your environment.
But vanity and the exceptionalism hardwired into the human neuro-ego construct won't let you see that. And so because you have to keep believing you made your success, it MUST logically follow that you can clutch success in your cold death-grip hands if you just control the shit out of everything.
Control is death.
Safety is death.
Ego is death.
Ozymandias was here.
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what is this i don't even
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Hmm... Maybe yes (Score:3)
Probably when it changed from a single to a double negative prefix for its "... be evil!" directive.
Googlers think they've achieved enlightenment (Score:5, Interesting)
So while it annoys me, I accept it...if someone doesn't want to be my friend after taking a job, it's their choice and I have plenty of other friends...however, it makes me worry about Google, in general. They really think there's Google and there's everyone else. Google, as a culture, should be learning from the outside world and collaborating and influencing it. Instead, they think only Google has ideas worth considering. Even every person we've hired from Google, won't shut up about Google and how things are done there, even 2 year after leaving. Maybe it's something specific to my region, but boy are they problematic.
Google has achieved a lot of success, but much more so with their early products than any recent ones. The company has a huge failure rate and a strange sense of unearned confidence. I can easily see the attitude I've seen from nearly a hundred local googlers and their many recent software and hardware failures as being related. A greater sense of humility and reduced sense of entitlement would go a long way, IMHO. Google used to be the most exciting company out there and could do no wrong 15 years ago....now almost no one knows what's going on there, what they're doing, or why. Google announcements used to be like Christmas...oooh, what new exciting product or service are they coming out with? I can't remember the last Google announcement that I found exciting or interesting. I think some change would serve them well. They're a business, not a religion, not a cult.
That sounds like police insularity (Score:2)
So much for don't be evil. The sooner Google goes the way of Yahoo and AOL the better.
Re:Googlers think they've achieved enlightenment (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yes, probably. As most tech problems are _not_ solved in this space though, this is a sure road to eventual failure.
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They're a business, not a religion, not a cult.
One office has been infiltrated by a cult. Makes me wonder if there are any more Google offices that have been infiltrated.
It is not just the playground, but everywhere (Score:2)
I am getting old now. I remember the first Google search page. An empty page with nothing but a single text entry box. I remember many things about the industry that happened long before that. Giants of the industry collapsing, almost overnight.
I have used, promoted, and implemented Google products at scale extensively in my career. Not anymore. It has been obvious for some time that something has changed, and not for the better. I have even contributed a significant amount of my free time contributi
Get Woke, Go Broke - Sounds like Google (Score:2, Insightful)
When your internal company dialog is hijacked by whining and fighting over diversity, inclusion, and equity with massive virtual signaling pet projects along with firing anyone who dares speak up, what could go wrong?
https://www.vice.com/en/articl... [vice.com]
https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/... [nypost.com]
Get Woke, Go Broke is a phrase coined by the internationally bestselling author John Ringo to express the opinion that when organizations "get woke" to politically correct actions, those same actions usually result in a massive l
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Get Woke, Go Broke - Sounds like Google
Hm so google is broke to the tune of about 1.2 trillion dollars in the black at the moment. If I am a little bit woke can I get to be a little bit broke like that? How much do I need to cause Fox News addicts to froth at the mouth in order to go as broke as google?
Get Woke, Go Broke is just wishful thinking (Score:2)
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I asked my favorite AI Chatbot if "Google was woke." and this is what it said.
"Yes, Google is considered to be a "woke" company. It has implemented initiatives such as the "Responsible AI" organization, the introduction of its "inclusive language" feature, and the addition of pop-up warnings when users type in potentially politically incorrect words. Additionally, Google has taken steps to address issues such as racial bias, sexism, and other forms of discrimination in its products."
Time will tell if my ana
Correlation != Causation (Score:2)
Time will tell if my analysis is wrong. My thesis is that instead of Google working on the "next big thing" they started other projects.
Even worse for Google, AI Search engine tend to give you want you want and not ads. It will be interesting to see how they balance this with their fee based adwords model. Bing is already running hard out of the AI gate and Google still has nada and Apple hasn't even entered the chat.
Google has 150,000 employees. They have the bandwidth to try many things. They haven't started the "next big thing" because no one knows what it will be and we're reaching the limits of the information revolution. Your attitude is just silly and myopic...it's similar to Moore's Law. People got so accustomed to CPU revolutions and CPUs doubling in speed every 1.5 years and assumed it was the norm. It eventually stopped because transistors are now only a few molecules wide and thus can't be shrunk much m
The object of work is profit, end of story. (Score:2)
The object of work is to make as much profit as practical which is the same reason your employer pays you.
If that employer wants to wreck the company and they pay me, I take the money. Jobs are a purely business arrangement. The only humans who should "invest" in a business are the stock holders and any fuckups are their problem.
Google employees make gobs of money for conforming which makes conformity to whatever is asked of them flawlessly logical.
At their skill level they can effortlessly leave for greene
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Three word gist (Score:2)
Large Company (Score:2)
Sounds like your typical large company
Nope. Mission intact. (Score:2)
They are an ad company that creates screens that appear as end-user tools to gather data and generate ad impressions. When Redmondâ(TM)s productivity tools look comfortable and engaging in contrast, Googleâ(TM)s role is much clearer. Like many service industries, the first gen fails, and some subsequent gen succeeds with a different, more profitable core. Insurance companies are reborn as investment engines, retail banks are mostly real estate companies, etc. First gen search is a ghost, replaced
don't make yourself into a company town (Score:2)
Latest SJ Mercury News article, "Google reassesses timeline for sweeping downtown San Jose transit village. Tech titan’s cutbacks prompt new Google review of Downtown West project"
Many areas scheduled to be bulldozed... then this. As someone commented, "This is why you don't eagerly make yourself into a company town."
Twitter deal fallout continues (Score:5, Interesting)
>Instead of working to serve customers, Seshadri argued most employees ultimately serve other Google employees. He described the company as a "closed world" where working extra hard isn't necessarily rewarded. Seshadri said feedback is "based on what your colleagues and managers think of your work."
If there's something that Musk's takeover of Twitter showed, it's that most workers in Silicon Valley giants are detrimental to the company they work for. His consequent firing of over half of the staff resulted in service getting better within just a few months, with many long asked for features suddenly starting to come out weekly rather than a couple of times a year.
I suspect that a lot of SV giants' leadership saw Musk's experiment and it got a lot of them thinking how much ideologically obsessed dead weight there is within their companies, and how many they would need to terminate to get a similar qualitative boost to their companies. But whether this cleanup can be done with current management that enabled current levels of internal corruption is highly questionable. Most likely you'd need a crisis manager like Musk to take over and do a massive cleanup to purge all the "but my psychological well being is being threatened by getting fired, how dare you!" salaried parasites within those companies, so that much smaller cadre of highly driven workers can actually get back to work without fear of getting stabbed in the back by their parasitic colleagues for "having whiteness (Protestant work culture)".
(For those not in the know, that was one of the major complaints in a large internal meeting over terminations that happened inside one of the SV giants. And yes, one of the definitions of "whiteness" is Diversity/Inclusion/Equity movement is "Protestant work culture").
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You start by describing a sociopathic pursuit of [X] at the expense of all else as something to be admired, and end with a thinly veiled racist comment about "Protestant work culture" being equated with being white. Google may be stagnating, but you're trying to say the problem is "the people I already hate clearly are the problem at Google", which I don't think has a basis. The article did a great job of analysis on the issue and presented a clear set of thoughts. You .. well, you didn't do that.
I'm not
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Imagine being so sheltered, so utterly divorced from reality as to think that pursuit of bettering things is sociopathic.
At least we agree that diversity/inclusion/equity movement is a racist movement. Doesn't change the fact that this movement has been in total control of hiring practices at SV giants for at least half a decade at this point.
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1. This is an expert opinion considered so uncontroversial as to be put in a major museum.
2. This ideology is foundational in modern Silicon Valley HR and has been for at least half a decade at this point.
Ergo, this ideology has had time to implement its hiring practices in action, as observed in practice at Twitter, where large scale firing people hired under these policies resulted in net positive productivity effect for the company. I.e. company became better at everything from product design to product
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No. It's a major museum functioning as a part of the most famous museum system in the world, managed by top tier experts in their field.
That is my argument. Not the shitty strawman you constructed, because you had nothing to argue against my actual point.
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If there's something that Musk's takeover of Twitter showed, it's that most workers in Silicon Valley giants are detrimental to the company they work for. His consequent firing of over half of the staff resulted in service getting better within just a few months, with many long asked for features suddenly starting to come out weekly rather than a couple of times a year.
heh what Twitter are you using? I've had non-stop bugs and just over the weekend Elon's face was in everyone's feed. The value of it has dropped immeasurably for me; the bulk of the community I was there for (infosec) packed up shop and left almost overnight to Mastodon.
The lesson I learned from Musk's takeover of Twitter is that the PHBs at the top of the company might actually be very stupid people.
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>The value of it has dropped immeasurably for me; the bulk of the community I was there for (infosec) packed up shop and left almost overnight to Mastodon.
That's strange. I'm pretty connected in terms of following infosec people and none of them never left Twitter. At least, not the ones I follow (military/intelligence/IT related people).
The handful of whiniest people that left, almost everyone else crawled back in four weeks after Musk's takeover. The whining about how bad Mastodon is compared to Twitte
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Nothing says "I'm an Elon fanboy" like accusing someone of being a pedo.
Anyone that has paid even cursory attention to what Twitter is actually doing in that regard instead just blindly believing of what the dipshit-in-chief mindlessly spams out to his sycophants would know that they have gone massively backwards in terms of their efforts to limit CSAM:
- Layoffs Have Gutted Twitterâ(TM)s Child Safety Team [wired.co.uk]
- Musk faces fines if Twitterâ(TM)s gutted child safety team becomes overwhelmed [arstechnica.com]
- As Elon Fir [techdirt.com]
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Except that I accused no one of nothing. I merely stated the fact that #2 and #3 Mastodon instances in terms of size are what they self-define as MAP communities.
That is "minor attracted person" for those unfamiliar with woke terminology. Yes, normal people call it a pedophile.
#1 is the mainline Mastodon instance which notably banned a lot of whiny twitterati that migrated there to run away from twitter for being whiny, annoying and reporting people for nonsense.
See, unlike you, I actually know how Mastodon
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Primary motivation of technology industry is to enable humanity to do something it couldn't do before. A subsection of that is enabling humanity to do something it already can do with much greater efficiency.
Google Graveyard (Score:5, Insightful)
The Google Graveyard is a good example of why people do not trust google.
Stadia was doomed from the start because Google wasn't going to commit 10 years to it. They killed it in less than 3.
This is the same reason why people didn't buy-in to Microsoft's phones. Microsoft is also absolutely terrible at supporting hardware, and the Xbox 360's showed Microsoft was willing to pinch pennies, even if it resulted in every Xbox 360 owner having to buy two or three of them.
Like it boggles the mind why anyone would buy another Xbox from Microsoft after the 360 fiasco, and that's the same reason why nobody should trust Google. The only companies that "can be trusted" to not pull the rug out from under you is Apple. Apple and Microsoft don't discontinue their core OS, and Apple has a very specific life cycle to their hardware. But if you were to buy in to Google or Microsoft, there is pretty much a guarantee that the thing you buy this year from them is landfill/unsupported next year. Why would you do that to yourself?
Google should never have been in ads, but I can't say that I think it would have survived all the SEO spam of the 2000's as everyone tried to undermine the algorithms. It also could certainly not operate Youtube without ads. When Gmail was launched, we were promised unlimited storage, for a lifetime. And that as retracted somewhere around the time Google started to charge money for Gsuite. What a scam. Get everyone to use your product and then change the terms of use on them to extort them out of their data. Now I have no reason to ever trust Google.
Google will kill your product you like, charge you money to keep using it, or will just make the product so gawdawful to use that you want to stop using it.
Re:Google Graveyard (Score:5, Insightful)
The only companies that "can be trusted" to not pull the rug out from under you is Apple.
Yes, in that they're up front about their rather short support windows, so I suppose it's not from "under" you, but right in front of you. And once the support windows ends, the machine becomes functionally useless as a mac unless you have a fetish for getting pwn3d online. Before you start banging on about how Apple are so great, bear in mind, I am typing this message from my trusty Thinkpad W510, a machine all too rapidly approaching it's 13th year in my service.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/... [notebookcheck.net]
The original OS (Ubuntu 8.04) is out of support, but it's upgradable and they don't block OSs (that's a feature) and the current OS is good apparently until 2028 with the new support from Ubuntu. The latest known good OS will be good through to 2032. I very much doubt they keyboard will last that long and while there are still plenty of stocks of new ones in the distribution channel, and instructions still live on Lenovo's website on how to replace it, I'm not sure if it will be worth the $50 when the time comes. We'll see I guess.
Redhat and Ubuntu won't pull the rug from under you software wise (Ubuntu are patching Python 2.7 until at least 2028), and good hardware vendors have long term availability of repair manuals and new old stock parts. I could still buy a replacement screen or even motherboard for this machine should I wish.
Apple look good compared to crappy vendors selling cheapass crap. But they're in the little leagues when it comes to useful longevity.
Remind me, how old is the oldest Mac running MacOS with up to date security patches?
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Nobody claimed there were no use cases for non-Linux. The claim was that everything else has shorter support windows. So far I see zero counterevidence for that claim.
Video editing on Linux has come a long way, and continues to advance. Sooner or later it will be suitable for your huge editing projects, and eventually the available software will become the best for that. Some would argue that Davinci Resolve already is.
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Linux has been "coming a long way" on the desktop for a long time. So long, in fact, that by the time it gets there the whole idea of a "desktop" operating system might not even make sense.
Barring direct neural interface, a "desktop" operating system will continue to make sense. And we're still in the monkey-killing phase on that.
The Linux Desktop is today superior to the others. It still has some flaws, but the others have actually sprouted new flaws recently, and were plenty flawed to begin with. KDE Plasma/X11 on Debian Bullseye (where it works much more reliably than on Ubuntu 22, since they actually care about reliability in Debian stable) is the best desktop around today by far.
You also
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KDE Plasma/X11 on Debian Bullseye [...] is the best desktop around today by far.
Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912? Die heretic! It's FVWM all the way.
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Is fvwm a desktop now? Last I checked it was just a wm. I ran it for many years (my first wm, on Slackware 2, was fvwm1, and then I ran 2 when it came out) and it's a brilliant mwm replacement...
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Is fvwm a desktop now? Last I checked it was just a wm. I ran it for many years (my first wm, on Slackware 2, was fvwm1, and then I ran 2 when it came out) and it's a brilliant mwm replacement...
Sorta, I mean a desktop is basically a WM and some other guff. I use FVWM as the wm with stalonetray as the tray area, nm-applet as the networking thing, the notifications daemon from xfce4. But mostly you look at it and see FVWM in it's glory.
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My typewriter has a much longer support window than your Thinkpad, and it is far more secure.
Cool.
I don't go around scoffing at people who use more advanced tools.
Well, you seem to be a mac user and you're scoffing at Linux, so that point is somewhat disputable.
Linux has been "coming a long way" on the desktop for a long time.
"works for me"(tm). Let me know how good of an experience you have doing, say, deep learning on a mac destop.
So long, in fact, that by the time it gets there the whole idea of a "desk
Yeah it has (Score:2)
Long ago (Score:1)
"Delusions of exceptionalism" (Score:2)
Yep, pretty much. There is nothing Google does that others don't do as well. Google has stopped being better at some things quite a while ago and these days they start to get worse and worse.
Human nature reflects the fear of the big picture (Score:2)
No, Google Lost It's Way: Don't Be Evil (Score:2)
Lost Long Ago (Score:1)
The wrong Indian (Score:2)
IBM was like this ... (Score:2)
The exact same four aspects: mission statements composed of sunshine and kittens, complacency ("No-one ever got fired for buying IBM"), delusions of exceptionalism (Token Ring was theoretically great, but the IBM-designed hardware stank, and they refused to release the IP so someone competent could have a go - they lost the whole networking space), too many middle managers, too many VPs.
But they did one thing right - when they
Google needs to remember they... (Score:2)
Peter Principle, managerialism, .... (Score:2)
They're only realising it now (Score:2)
It actually happened a while ago.
I think it is time that Google gets the Bell treatment and explodes into many smaller companies.
Yes, google is now evil (Score:2)
Power... (Score:2)
Power corrupts.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It's the same thing we saw in Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, ...
It was only the disruption of monopoly that forced change in different markets; Yahoo, MySpace, etc. are examples where they had monopoly and absolute power, but the introduction of an upstart was able to upend things.
ChatGPT had the potential to be the disruptor to knock Google off its rails, but they released too quickly (focused more on the AI aspects than the product and money-making aspects).
askew (Score:2)
If you type the word "askew" into the Google search box, the entire page will tilt slightly
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Brahmin/Bania/Kshatriya triad from India (Score:2)
Companies ruined by Brahmin/Bania/Kshatriya triad from India https://www.quora.com/Do-India... [quora.com]
Re: yes! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The phrases "do no evil" and "we sell ads" are diametrically opposed.