Does anybody remember Google People
qntm.org
qntm.org
The breadcrumb reads "Things Of Interest >> Fiction >> Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories >> cripes does anybody remember Google People"
"Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories" is one of his book available on Amazon.
I've read most of qntm's books [1] and enjoyed them greatly. See also hatetris [2] and absurdle [3].
Also qntm invented base32768 [4] encoding which is in use by many happy rclone users to store long encrypted file names more efficiently on storage systems which are based in UTF-16 (eg OneDrive, Dropbox, Box).
(...If my memory serves me right)
It had two major issues.
The first one was if you went beyond using it yourself or a very limited collab, it would desync, which was a major deal breaker for something like this. Nothing google with their vast amount of resources couldn't fix though.
The second one was it really was usable for multiple niches. This made it confusing for the general public, and the main audience doesn't even bias towards IT when you are at the scale google operates at.
You could use it as a note taking app yourself that you think might warrant sharing or collaborating later on.
You could use it as a spreadsheet, like how google sheets currently function.
You could use it to replace what we use Slack for these days.
And I really think that a niche or a community would find it useful for one of these and it would become a major tool they'd depend on if google just let it sit around for a while.
Sounds like Teams, but without anyone complaining about having to use it.
A few years ago I was invited to a (pre-release, I think) focus group at Dropbox headquarters on their Dropbox Paper project. We went around the room, speed-dating like, to different tables, where PMs and/or engineers showed us particular UIs or use-cases and asked for feedback. At every table I told them that "this looks a lot like Google Wave", and was met with blank looks.
There are downsides to the tech industry's extreme youthfulness.
Every engineer and PM (there was only one) I knew on the team was aware of the origins of the Paper codebase and the connections to Wave, since it was a fork of Hackpad (acquired by Dropbox) which in turn was a fork of Etherpad (acquired by Google).
What year was this focus group?
I liked Dropbox Paper, and tried to get several projects I "owned" at my company going on it. No one, and I mean no one, else could grok it. We defaulted quickly back to laborious email chains. Grrrr.
It's odd how some tools seem intuitively useful to some kinds of minds / work, and not to others. The Wave / Wave-like interface has an appeal to techies, and was responded to positively by the the theatre professionals with whom I used it in ~2010. Paper was utterly rejected by the biz-dev sorts with whom I work now. I suspect that has something to do with creating something new vs uncritically applying known algorithms. But I don't really know, and that may be an uncharitable analysis.
Actually, that was Google Folks. It was followed by Google People which was then renamed to Google Town. They shared bleeding edge features such as instant messaging and videotelephony.
At least the whole legal kerfuffle brought us Sim Google (which I have an unopened copy of!)
Edit: huh you're not alone though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37724652 And checking a traffic capture, indeed it shows platform.twitter.com being loaded and blocked. Wtf is it trying to load (to the point of crashing browsers) if not the twitter posts?!
It feels like weak writing to fall back into a narrative first-person account for the entirety, but I can't place my finger on why.
Maybe it just seems like it's the easiest 'fiction' to write because it is so predicated on the fantasy being narrated by a perspective that is entrenched and anchored in a normal reality while witnessing something extraordinary?
Cloverfield is essentially constructed by the acting prompt : "Pretend you're a bystander seeing not-Godzilla, react for the camera!".
Then yeah, I agree.
It plays on the cheap shock value of starting off sounding entirely plausible, and I can see people falling for it here ITT. I don't like it.
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
Far more success in comments:
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
(I thought I might have first encountered it here, though it might have appeared elsewhere.)
Harlan Ellison's "I have no mouth and I must scream" has had some success: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
Marshall Brain's "Manna: Two Views of Humanity's Future" (2003) was what I'd had in mind when finding the Ellison story, but it's also had little success:
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
Cory Doctorow's Little Brother by comparison did well: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6390441>. Though still hardly spectacularly.
E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" has seen both multiple submissions and comparatively decent discussion: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
(Searching specifically for fiction is something of a challenge, I'm trying a few different queries as they occur to me.)
I suspect both length and copyright limitations work against fiction submissions generally.
You articulated something I’ve been aware of but hadn’t put into words.
It’s the primary reason I stopped reading/watching all news.
have well-developed critical thinking/reading skill and recognize AI generated pasta more easily thanks to the training.
I seemed to have completely missed this
Their book There Is No Antimemetics Division is pretty good but also a bit disturbing (in a good way).
Anything by Qntm is awesome, to be honest. _Antimemetics_ is my favourite.
From comments in this thread I learn that it is written in the style called creepypasta. Not entirely familiar with the culture, but it felt similar to some indie horror games, such as those Markiplier plays in his YT series "3 scary games".