asciimike

No longer!

As a side note, I really enjoyed [Prisoners of Geography](https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Geography-Explain-Everythin...) which discusses this dam, as well as other political disputes, viewed through the lens of geography (e.g. why the Saichen Glacier matters).

I'm not a betting man, but, "Egyptian political leaders on Monday met Morsi to discuss the report. Apparently unaware their discussion was being televised live, some of them proposed hostile acts including aiding rebels inside Ethiopia and destroying the dam itself."

From: https://web.archive.org/web/20130606172030/http://www.washin...

I got some "I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood."[1][2] vibes from this.

I have occasionally considered auto mechanics if I ever get to the point of software-related burnout, though the way cars are going, I feel like they'll be entirely software by the time I feel the need to switch.

[1]: https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964

> The only people bringing up the free speech argument are the people defending Google, not the other way around.

Quoting the OP, "Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Damore, he was engaged in free speech." This sounds like it refutes your statement, no?

Having worked there when this happened, the discourse definitely felt like, "Google is stifling the free speech of one of their employees" vs "Google has the right to fire employees for any reason."

> Open discourse can exist as a value too

It does (are we not engaging in it right now?).

There were (and I assume still are) plenty of random internal mailing lists where those types of discussions happened. I mostly stayed away from them because my goal at Google was to build cool products, not waste my day on internal mailing lists; I prefer to go to HN to do that.

> Just as LeBron James has the right to defend the genocidal regime of China.

I guess the NBA and China is the Godwin's law equivalent for free speech. He has the legal right to say what he wants, he doesn't have the right to have what he says have zero consequences (which is what the comic says).

You argue that he doesn't have a choice, but he does: he can speak his mind and potentially lose access to his largest market; he's just unwilling to do that because he deems the economic ramifications are too large. You always have a choice, most just choose to not make the hard one.

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1357/

We haven't lost our tolerance for free speech, we've lost our tolerance for listening to people who claim society has to listen to their bullshit because of the first amendment rather than because they present a compelling argument in a positive way.

The US Supreme Court has some thoughts they'd like to share with you...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden

Even REI has had to change policy in recent years due to what some may call "abusing the policy", e.g. https://www.rei.com/conversations/ask-an-rei-employee/return...

Yes! Thanks for the link :D

This reminds me of a blog post that I can no longer remember that discusses how Chinese is a lot of arranging several related kanji into a single character to express a new idea (please link it if you can find it).

I would love to see unicode characters to allow for arbitrary combinations beyond those defined using just ZWJ to allow more flexibility (e.g. blizzard could be created by adding like "slowflake x 5" which creates a single character with five snowflakes, without having to create an entirely new character representing blizzard from snowflake + ZWJ + snowflake).

As an aside, my favorite ZWJ magic is black flag + ZWJ + skull and crossbones = pirate flag.

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols for more symbol language fun.

Relevant link: https://youtu.be/q8LaT5Iiwo4

Election sausages are by far my favorite fun fact about voting in Australia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_sausage

It could also be "IT didn't turn it off and on again" in reference to https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycl...

They sold ~270MM in Q1: https://www.coindesk.com/tesla-sold-bitcoin-in-q1-for-procee...

I see you also worked in SF...

Unless things have changed, the bigger issue is that Firebase Analytics is included by default and can't easily be excluded.

Linking Firebase to Ads requires conscious action on behalf of the developer, while the former only requires using any Firebase product.

Also, Google is in the online ads business, so I don't think it's surprising that they provide docs that show how to use Firebase data to target ads. That said, it's not the default, so it's not as shady as you're making it sound.

Firebase's terms are here: https://firebase.google.com/terms (and GCP's data processing terms are here: https://cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing-terms)

Having worked on those products (and in some cases, written the terms), I'd say so.

This reminded me of an Oatmeal comic [1] about how "being weird" requires you to cultivate an interesting personality.

[1]: https://theoatmeal.com/pl/senior_year/pe

Ah, so everything's finally been moved to superquota? I was also living in an app engine world, where everything was... Old and broken.

Occasionally I'd get an escalation asking for product approval, but generally yep, it was an auto-approve if it's within the predefined range.

Also, if you're paying GCP any reasonable amount of money, you have an account manager who will respond in < 24 hours to connect you with the right PM to deal with the issue. Google deals with lots of random humans, GCP mostly deals with actual businesses. As much as I hated the support offshoring Google (and sometimes GCP) did, most actual businesses could get a human fairly quickly.

A not uncommon flow was:

- google form submission

- creates a PR with the project ID and the requested value as an exception in a file (this requires OWNERS approval, so at a min one eng/pm to approve)

- file would update a DB the next time it's picked up

While I agree with the automation piece, guessing first.last@google.com is going to get someone a large % of the time. You can reach an engineer or a PM with about 10 minutes of stalking LinkedIn.

Woof, sorry. I worked on the Users API deprecation a while ago (2018-2019, prior to any announcement), and there were a few features that just couldn't be migrated reasonably to OAuth (e.g. the `admin` functionality). We did consider things like moving to Cloud IAM (e.g. what we did for GCF and Run) as well as Firebase Auth, but couldn't replicate everything :/

I'm shocked that any cloud provider lets you use prepaid cards... all of the major providers have problems with crypto mining and abuse, so it's crazy that AWS would allow prepaid cards that might be laundered, etc.

And IMO, if you're a real customer, all the providers are fairly forgiving, provided you can get in touch with a real human who works there.

The last startup I was at repeatedly ended up with $25k AWS bills due to runaway elastic search clusters or dynamodb. The only reason we resolved them was due to us having hired our former AWS account rep.

I got my fair share of those from customers while at GCP, but I agree that in the past several years GCP has gotten much better at billing infra given all the problems we heard of...

They sorta did that by counting GSuite as "Cloud", but I don't think it's reported quite the same as O365 == Azure.

On the first, I've worked as a PM on Firebase, App Engine, and Endpoints.

Nobody has been forced to migrate from the Firebase RTDB to Firestore (and AFAICT the Firestore API hasn't deprecated anything?), App Engine deprecations (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/deprecations) are basically "you can't do new things using these old things, but the old ones will continue to run" (though other deprecations I've done have provided clear explanations of why we're deprecating and how someone can work around it), and Endpoints is still around despite being comically out of date (it's even getting a managed version!).

That's because Google's quota increases are binary:

- either they're automatically approved because you fill in a form requesting more and it just becomes a PR for an engineer to approve, OR

- it can't move because you've hit an internal service limit