wilsynet

I was a new employee at Google when we started talking to Firebase. The founders are super smart and get stuff done.

However, I remember saying to the VP who was leading the acquisition, “shouldn’t we decide what market we want to be in, then evaluate if we should build, buy, or partner?”

He said “no, we should buy it first then figure out what to do”.

I’m not surprised Firebase feels like it’s bolted on. They never really knew what they wanted to do with it. That was true then and it’s true now.

I do not recall Sun being renamed into “Java”. It was acquired by Oracle as Sun Microsystems.

It’s fine to have a conservative leaning news channel. It’s not fine to spend so much of the time spreading lies.

Steve Jobs was first a computer hobbyist, then later he worked at Atari before he co-founded Apple in 1976. He wasn’t a non-technical founder, although he was certainly less technical than his co-founder. He could program, he could do digital design, he knew his way around a bread board and an oscilloscope.

He isn’t famous for being a programmer, but he could do it, and he certainly understood it.

There were people who showed up to Washington DC on Jan 6, who were not affiliated with Proud Boys. Who saw the shattered windows and open doors, and decided to go for a stroll through the Capitol building. I think they just showed up and were interested in what was going on too.

There are almost two hundred thousand employees at Google. No matter what environment Google fosters, there are always going to be 0.01% who think it’s OK to stage a protest in the office.

There is no chance AI is making a junior engineer as effective as a senior engineer.

The business model was to license the browser to corporations. And they would have done pretty well except Microsoft gave away the browser for free.

The model of licensing software was pretty typical for the time. I disagree that they didn’t have a sustainable business model. Sure, IE4 was better and Netscape didn’t respond very well, but by 1997 it’s market share and revenues were already significantly eroded.

I am 50 years old and -14.5 diopters in both eyes. Slowing by half would have been a great outcome by comparison.

The NYT and other newspapers don’t go after the archived link providers. Probably because the newspapers scholarly mission includes things like preservation. But they also have a profit motive or they can’t stay in business.

This implicit permission for the archive links to exist, gives some of us the implicit permission to pirate the content.

Disclaimer: I am a happy subscriber to the NYT (and other digital newspapers).

Relying on the App Store to distribute your app is more than a little different than building an extension to iMessages. Apple and Google want you to use their app stores in this way. Apple does not want you to bridge iMessages to other platforms.

There were Internet search engines before Google, but Google did it way better.

I remember when Gmail was new. It was way, way better and more amazing than Hotmail. The idea was a practically infinite searchable inbox. Nothing else was like it at the time.

I think it would be unfair to not give credit to Google for YouTube. YouTube was indeed a visionary idea with legs, but it is so much further developed now than in 2005. And a lot of it has to do with the way Google has nurtured it over the years.

You could also say there were digital music players before the iPod, Apple copied the Mac from Xerox, and there were smart phones before the iPhone.

I used PFS:Write on the Apple II. Then later WordPerfect 5.1 on the PC.

When I was a kid, a university student who couldn’t type paid me to transcribe his essays.

Cars also hit bikes when cars are backing up, making turns, driving above the speed limit, driving below the speed limit, when the driver opens the door. Really, many varied circumstances that have nothing to do with making a U-turn.

Perhaps the phrase “perfectly safe” is wrong. Maybe “otherwise intrinsically safe” would be more accurate. Having said all that, I do wonder if we have U-turn accident statistics.

As merely two examples, both gRPC and Kubernetes are important to Google, and yet Google opened sourced them. "No longer used" is not the criteria Google uses to make their software OSS.

FYI, I work at Google.

There are very few ideas that are absolutely right. I don’t consider “facts” as ideas, although these days even the facts have alternatives too.

Both Amazon and Google have document writing cultures. If you want to propose an idea, you write a doc about it.

The value of a doc writing culture is that writing things down encourages rigor and thoughtfulness. Docs can be widely distributed, and you can read it, think about it, and add comments. Exchanging ideas can be asynchronous rather than meeting oriented.

But also it can all get a bit carried away (because these artifacts become an important component to promotion).

I work at Google, which is a doc culture. But I worked most of my career at startups where we never wrote anything down. Overall, I prefer doc cultures. But yes, left to it’s own devices it can seem like you are working at a doc factory.

Sure, Fleischacker pool was underfunded for years and fell into disrepair and then closed in 1971. But why was it underfunded, and why was there not enough money to repair it?

Compare that to Kitsilano Pool in Canada. It was consistently repaired and upgraded over time, a fact well documented in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsilano_Pool

It’s a two hour plane ride away, but there’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsilano_Pool

The NYT argument is going to be that they put up a site, own the copyright for their content and make that content available for either a human to read it for themselves, or software to index for something commonly understood as a search engine. Those terms do not entitle the training of LLMs for commercial use. Therefore, cease and desist. Oh and destroy anything that was created by violating the terms of our license.

You can make arguments like a) what is ChatGPT but a different kind of search engine, or b) what is an LLM but a primitive human, or c) but but uhh we didn’t agree to these terms.

But I do not think those arguments will prevail.

As previously said, search engines index and provide links. I’ll add that it constitutes fair use because a search engine isn’t itself a replacement for the articles that it indexes.

But ChatGPT is actually providing an alternative that obviates the original articles themselves.

I dislike hot tubs. Don’t want one, don’t even want to sit in one.

I’ll add my support to the chorus of Brother laser printers. My spouse bought one about 6 years ago and the company has updated drivers and it is just super reliable. I just bought a new one for my parents this year. Couldn’t be happier.

My first computer was an Apple IIe, which of course used 5.25” diskettes. Later, I had a 386 with 3.5” drives. I loved those 3.5” disks, they made a satisfying clunk when you pushed them into a drive. I felt like I was living in the future.

And of course I was. My teenage self had no idea that in a couple of decades computers would be everywhere and in everything.

The truth is out there.

To leech, leeching and to be a leecher has been around since people used to download warez. It far predates torrents.

I remember a local sysop in the 80s who ran an Apple II ASCII Express download site with two 5.25” floppy drives. You’d write him a text message and save it as a file. He was a cab driver and he’d come back home once in awhile and check the messages. If you were lucky he’d put your requested software in the second drive and maybe you’d check back in time before he fulfilled someone else’s request.

To lurk, to be in the state of lurking, and to be a lurker — has been around since the BBS days. Thanks for calling it out!

Same with nutrition industry. Decades of saying eggs are bad for your cholesterol, but no science to back it up.

“I put this unusual string in my software” may be enough to get you to discovery. During which time, you can ask for the source code.

Looks like usual banal corporate marketing. I’m not sure what’s woke about it or why it implies that the bank will fail. Are there hidden woke words in the song lyrics?