endofcapital

So the possible #2 (it was debatable as to whether Sandberg or Cox would have take over) and the person who run Whatsapp just quit.

Some pretty big power struggles going down it seems.

"But Google Fiber got something out of its time here. It learned that nanotrenching—the cost-saving process of burying fiber optic cables just two inches underground—was a bust. “We currently do not have plans that call for 2 inch trenches, our primary specifications are focused on going deeper,” a Google Fiber spokesperson said in an email."

It's so weird to just use cities as A/B tests and just disregard all the people and plans built around a failed case at the drop of a hat. Are they going to start A/B testing countries against eachother next?

The web is what I know well, this may not be true in other areas, but the W3C has a long history of being hostile to end users, ignoring privacy, and pushing corporate interests over others.

Following their recommendations and doing things just because they were in the spec does make those decisions ethical or even legal. Developers have an obligation to push back against standards boards and corporations that make bad decisions.

Hiding behind the business rules or the standards committee is completely unacceptable anymore. Especially when it comes to bad security/privacy practices that generally favor a market over an end user.

I think when we get into cool near sci fi stuff we'll have faster than light communication pretty soon with quantum entanglement effects, which should be way easier to wrangle than neutrinos.

Some companies (I worked at one) are creating separate floors or entire buildings for the executive team with steel security doors and high security locks, walls, etc. And men with hidden AR15s to protect them.

Many of the big name CEOs and COOs have permanent security details, which means a truck full of men with hidden AR15s following them around.

I'm not sure how much farther this trend goes, but at some point things fall apart. We can't just pretend the elephant isn't in the room, there are too many men with rifles standing around this is getting absurd.

Here we go, buckle up. With the amount of power democrats are likely to consolidate in the next few elections there could be some serious movement on this if it becomes a priority for the party.

I think the big three are way too powerful and need to be broken up, but doing so intelligently is a tricky problem that I don't have much faith in government tackling.

Zuckerberg integrating all the services yesterday seems to be a transparent attempt to short circuit splitting the company along these service lines, he knows this is coming. I'll bet $100 he'll soon be talking about how it's impossible to split out insta from facebook because of database keys and integrated AI or whatever.

The odds of it not being a scam is pretty tiny number. Not scientific notation small, but getting there.

I have reported and watched maybe half a dozen bugs get fixed on Amazon, starting in 2003 I think. Never even experienced a reply from any other company when trying to report problems over the years.

I think a handful of companies are getting more proactive with security reporting, but everyone still treats the quality of their services and front line support system as an afterthought.

This is so bizarre, so Google/Youtube is still trying to claim that they are NOT a media company, just a platform, no media, not responsible of course, but at the same time they are putting responsibility of moderating user comments ONTO THE VIDEO MAKERS themselves.

This is completely hypocritical and idiotic. Youtube comments have been famous for a decade for being among the worst of the worst content on the web, and now they're going to try to just foist that cancer on channel owners and wash their hands of it? Are you kidding? Is this a joke?

Is nobody in charge at Google anymore? Are they just going to keep endlessly reacting to whatever media story got the most attention last week instead of actually trying to build something new?

They didn't have any clue. Back in 2005 personal data and access logs and analytics was considered a chore, you'd delegate the annoyance of log rotation to some sys admin or helpdesk intern and generally purge all data as quickly as possible because storage was expensive.

Occasionally someone would make a cool tool that parsed htaccess logs and gave you a neat visualization or something, but that was it. Literally nobody tracked anything on the internet.

It almost seems like fiction when I type it out now.

If I was running a marketing team or PR firm working on this problem I'd keep pushing the nonsense of AI magically solving everything someday. The actual nuts and bolts of content is pretty horrific, and they are obviously going to want to hide this reality.

At least pay these people more than a dishwasher, please.

This is almost exactly like reddit ~8 years ago. It's amazing how often we keep repeating ourselves.

Where I come from the police used to hunt and kill "undesirables", and bury the bodies up in the mountains. One of the first things my dad taught me was how to recognize those long skinny headlights on a cop car, you had to learn to avoid them at all costs to survive if you didn't have the appropriate skin color.

They aren't always good guys, and it's ok to have legitimate concerns about cooperation with law enforcement.

It wasn't normal at all anywhere in the world until very recently. The world has changed so much in just 50 years that people often just flat out don't believe me when I tell them what it used to be like. Even when I'm willing to present evidence, they just don't believe it.

I'm not sure how to overcome that.

I've been a part of a lot of acquisitions, and a lot of investment rounds. The stakeholders always want to start stirring the pot sooner or later. Maybe you get a year or two of being left alone, but eventually, it always happens.

How can I win the battle with endless captchas from cloudflare? Getting like one an hour, it's really annoying and I'm tired of training your machines or training your partner's machines.

The big tech giants seem to be A/B testing different ways of opposing and working with the government. Sooner or later these tests are going to start showing they have more power than the government, and they will start ignoring laws because they are irrelevant to increasing whatever metric is important this quarter.

This may have already happened, it's really hard to say.

So massive amounts of corporate welfare and blatant handouts aren't enough? AFTER doing that, we're also supposed to play nice and continue to say good things about the most massive, powerful corporation in the world or else they will just take their ball and go home?

This whole thing is beyond stupid, no aspect of this model works for anyone. Just stop.

The world isn't nearly as dangerous as you've been lead to believe. Not even like within an order of magnitude.

This guy just said yesterday that Hezbollah is in Venezuela, so reality doesn't seem to matter much anymore. Who knows?

So access to (large amounts of) capital becomes a highly politicized, US-centric proposition. Imagine if you could control the backbone of a global information network and access to capital in the 21st century.

Better than aircraft carriers.

The whole reason I got into freelancing was to take 3-6 months off a year. Lighten up people, you're gonna be dead soon and absolutely nobody is going to care about how many times you committed to github.

While I don't think there is anything wrong with this, the larger pattern of endlessly reacting to whatever content media decides to cover and banning it isn't exactly a good long term strategy.

This is a thing? What?

I first developed a web page in 1997. First got paid to do it in 1998. Innovated a lot of the DHTML/AJAX/SPA techniques before anyone else knew that was even possible, way before that first AJAX article was written.

Not sure how that's relevant, but yeah the web just gets worse and worse every year. Mostly due to the corporations of course, but the standards group are culpable too. I kind of want to write a book on the history of the W3C if nobody has already, it's such a horror show.

I remember visiting Haiti in the 80s/90s and being blown away by how the entire tropical forest was just completely clear cut. The border line with Dominica is striking, it's dense forest then just... nothing.

I didn't think the web could get any more terrible than it is today, but if everyone starts adding ML to all the tracking/targeting/adware systems then that seems to be a new deeper level of hell.

I've been looking for other analytics solutions that aren't creepy, your timing is great. Looks promising!

Yes you're spot on, even if this morning every single employee working at Google is highly ethical and working towards bettering humanity, it's still not going to be true tomorrow.

The phrase in the article that really popped out at me was "no one is truly at the helm". When a mega-corporation gets this massive and powerful it's not going to be possible to account for everyone in the building and all the bad decisions that can occur.

Sure, maybe, but one fact doesn't really relate to the other. The fact remains that they just spent $10B on share buybacks, and they are now laying off thousands and closing a few factories because they want to save $6B.

Even if they waited a few more years, the optics are just really bad. Not that optics seem to matter like they used to, most companies just shamelessly do this now.