This is outrageous. Google definitely lived long enough to become a villain. It is incredible how much goodwill they've lost in the past decade.
When was the last time they did anything good?
When was the last time they did anything good?
Large organizations can do both good and terrible things.
Google still serves are huge portion of search traffic which pretty clearly is a good thing. Youtube has an incredible wealth of tutorials & educational content. Deepmind is pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Various OSS projects continue to be pushed out. Gmail has been an amazing free resource for millions etc.
They are also doing terrible things as well.
All three have their problems (especially that third one) but they have done an incredible amount of Good in the world and they continue to do so every day.
As for YouTube, it is technically marvellous, but since they started censoring and silencing one side of a political spectrum, YT turned into a propaganda machine, no less.
It’s just not all black and white.
GP said: "without Google Maps it would not exist." It's not pedantry to note that's the opposite of the truth.
Like i said, i appreciated the comment, it was pedant for a very valid reason. Yours, less so.
Your dismissive tone all around is pretty jarring too.
You were factually, categorically wrong (twice now). That happens. You may want to accept it gracefully it and go on with your day.
You're not the person I was replying to, I don't have to justify myself to you. If you want me to be graceful, you can come watch me at the rink instead.
I just wanted to point out how wrong you were, and how petulant your reaction was when it was pointed out (several times), just in case it may help open your eyes. Obviously it didn't.
However, a nice and smooth client with drag and zoom was a rather obvious thing to do: a lot of computer games had maps in them as early as in late 1980s, like Sim City and many others, where you could zoom, drag along etc, and it wasn't done in OSM rigth from the start mostly due to pitiful state of web browsers and web standards of the time. So I think that even without Google Maps, OSM would have evolved to have great usability, just as it did in our timeline.
Hard disagree there, a single company dominating search is not a good thing.
The alternative isn't necessarily "there's five competing high quality google search competitors".
There were some nice unique things back then. It also sucked a lot. By the standards of back then we're living in pretty much a utopia. We have devices that Star Trek barely thought of. Seriously, I have a tablet that can speak to almost anyone anywhere in the world, instantaneously, translate into any language (imperfectly), look up any information, access to an encyclopedia tens of thousands of times larger than the most complete ones of just two decades ago, the ability to find free videos teaching me how to do anything, and that's all just the tip of the iceberg.
If I were to talk to someone in 2000 and list the shit we can do in just twenty years there is zero chance they would believe me. And it's not like the internet didn't exist back then. I was on it, as were many others on HN. Those who remember, remember that it mostly sucked.
What we have today sucks in different ways. But it's also accessible to billions of people, which is billions more than back then. That "nightmare" you're talking about is fixable, and it's certainly not fixable by "going back" to anything. You know there were also ads back then and they were just as awful as today, right? There were just less places where they could end up.
That's not to say it was a better time.
If you told me in 2000 about the things you listed I'd tell you you're a slowpoke, that's obviously coming and most things were actually already there like SIP, ICQ, IRC, translator software, browsers, etc. existed on the smartphones of the day. What wasn't there was the adoption by the masses, but the tech was there.
IMO it's a failing of society not so much google that they don't have serious competition in this space.
Oh I dunno... how about that time they solved protein folding?
like with WaveNet, it was easy to train but computationally infeasible to run the way they published the paper. then it turns out there's a trick that makes playing it forward far more efficient, which Google later acknowledged using internally, but didn't disclose.
But more often than not they release a lot of their weights and/or research code.
It's a building block that might pave the way for something else.
I hate to break this to you but google was born a villain. Nobody innately good has to remind themselves "Don't be evil". Imagine walking down the street and meeting a stranger constantly repeating "Don't be evil" to himself?
In the process they did lose me as a user of their free products though. And they lost me as a developer, I no longer opt for building with their tools, including Chrome, Android, Angular, GCloud, etc.
err, what? I still regularly get AMP links from news.google.com
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27192685
I use the terminal theme in DDG, and it's become the canonical SERP in my mind. When I do !g every now and then, it feels like GSearch has become AltaVista with a dash of MySpace.