cavisne

Super interesting. I’ve seen that as a rumor but never confirmed.

It’s an example of the sort of grey area that would’ve made “openai 2.0” tricky at Microsoft.

A small startup can ignore ToS and scrape YouTube but Microsoft cannot.

Its pretty heartening that among all this drama and activism I've never heard of a users data being maliciously leaked from Google.

To me thats the strongest signal that user data is pretty safe at Google (one of the authors points).

I think the right/ethical move is to identify your organization (ie Flutter) and not name anyone specifically.

I agree completely with the article, but naming someone publicly makes the author seem like they are living in a bubble. Ie in their world the head of their org is a public figure, but hardly anyone knows what Flutter is let alone the org structure.

Its not very cool IMO to name & shame anyone lower than Sundar.

Nevertheless the article is spot on with the effect of layoffs, and the general culture of big tech.

I've never experienced a "crash" in Maps or Google Maps, whether on carplay or on the phone. Maybe there is something wrong with your car/phone?

Carplay & android auto do have issues connecting at first but the apps themselves never seem to crash.

Twitter, I think it is pretty new. The lead author is a very well known engineer.

There is a new paper out from Google which seems like an interesting approach to get out of microservice hell

https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2023/papers/ghemawat....

I think this has to be something to do with Oracles Mellanox holdings, they must be getting a better price or have a license that means they can deploy GPU clusters cheaper. Otherwise why would nvidia give an allocation to oracle over Microsoft.

If you want to run a website today you need to either

1) Implement your own authentication to filter out bots, even if the service could be otherwise public (permanently identifying all your users)

2) Pay some WAF provider like Cloudflare to sit in front of your service and send Captcha's (and while you are at it let them man in the middle all your users traffic somewhat defeating the purpose of TLS).

3) Be rich enough to scale your backend to deal with any DDOS/scraper

A cheap way to throttle or drop non-human traffic and bringing back the option of being able to spin up a couple of VPS's and host a website without involving a WAF seems like a cool problem to me.

Of course its more dubious coming from a company that already has the ability to do 3).

Great podcast that touches on some of these early systems

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HCGn9_aVu0

It blows my mind that they used dead reckoning instead of GPS and it (supposedly) worked!

Why? I don't know the name of anyone who worked on Private Access Tokens at Apple or Cloudflare. Likewise the developers who worked on the Secure Enclave, or the slow march Windows has taken to enforce TPM's.

This was mostly a media/social media storm in a teacup. With bad press because its Google.

Chromium is huge because its open source, so the bar is higher than Macos, Safari & Windows.

But it didnt make this proposal much different/worse than any of the others that already exist and are enforced.

At least we got some hilarious statements like "its not needed because bots identify themselves by their user agent!"

DOCSIS (the Coax protocol) is asymmetric. 10:1 for docsis 3.1 and 10:6 for 4.0

So cable at least will always be a bit asymmetric. A lot of fiber deployments (GPON) are also but the bandwidth limits are much higher so it does not really matter.

Hertz presumably use the fleet telemetry data Tesla provides [1] which probably give some interesting insights into how a car gets damaged.

https://github.com/teslamotors/fleet-telemetry/blob/main/pro...

Clearview was used heavily to prosecute J6 participants. I suspect their political capital is high on both side of the aisle now.

Billions in federal funding for charging stations (that they wouldn’t get if it was closed)

The connectors are much bulkier and the cables are stiffer (not sure if the second thing is a design flaw or an implementation flaw).

Since all the manufactures want to use superchargers they will be forced to handle payments properly (certificates on the car not a flaky payment terminal on the charger). Should help for third party chargers also.

One part is probably because they are so secretive externally and internally, so there have been no business books on apples culture, playbook etc. No TED talks from ex Apple leaders.

I think Tesla is the closest to trying to follow their model, in a much scrappier way of course.

Correct, google also has a paper on this at the DC level

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.10041.pdf

Level 3 basically admitted they did it for them, so it would have been at a hub.

There is a book on this “never pay the first bill”

It’s all a big scam.

I think the other lever is ad relevance?

It’s clear from Facebook for example that they have dramatically lowered the bar for what can advertise recently.

Bidding against a larger pool of advertisers would increase the clearing price of the auction.

GCS launched as an S3 competitor (with an S3 compatible API). So their pricing was basically copy pasted from S3.

From the start though they offered more expensive to run features (a consistent list api, 1GBit transfer per file vs 100mbit for S3 at the time, Glacier-like storage with instant retrieval).

I think this pricing jump is mostly pricing it at what it always should have been. Plus a bit of the now being so focused on enterprises that the list price means less and its all about "call sales for more information".

S3 has built most of those features since then though, without a price increase.

Bizarrely Azure does the exact same thing with Godaddy.

There was a period (roughly the second term of Obama) where tech/media/politics was very intertwined. People moved from media to the Obama admin, which had a close relationship with big tech, and then onto leadership positions in big tech.

Vox was the pinnacle of this, a very technocratic liberal publication which raised a lot of money telling investors it was a tech company (hence the focus on the CMS).

This broke down after the 2016 election as the media blamed the tech industry for the election result (leading the NYT to set a editorial policy that tech must be covered in a negative light), and also had to focus on ideology over technocracy (which is why the wonkier people at Vox got slowly pushed out). The gap between politics and tech also grew as there was no path from the Trump admin to tech leadership (or vice versa).

Meanwhile youtube & twitter grew, making big media less and less relevant.

So this is an interesting if expected outcome as Vox has slowly dwindled in value.

Probably a power struggle with another VP. VP's could care less about if a product works or not, but a common thing in FAANG is to propose a big change, do nothing, but convince everyone the project has been launched.

My guess is he was trying to call out another team for doing this, to bring headcount/priorities back to himself.

A significant amount of issues that people have with cable internet is the bad modem/router combination the ISPs ship.

Outside the US coax based internet is rarer (its fibre or copper) so there isn’t a lot of good modem/routers.

So if you can’t get fibre, get an Eero or similar and at least replace your router.

Jenson could write one of the clouds a license to use 4090s in a DC and make this crunch disappear overnight (would be rough for gamers though)

To be fair one of the issues with AMD and ML is they have been pretending it works for years now, when nothing actually works.

Calling that out publicly is probably needed at this point, or they will keep putting AI in their earnings reports without anyone actually being able to train a model on an AMD chip.

I was reminded recently of a funny segment by a comedian about how everyone on Hollywood virtue signals about socialism and taxes, yet all of them use LLCs to avoid taxes.

The recent strike showed this off with the trend of publishing residual checks, all of them are made out to shell LLCs.

A fraud whistleblower got a 200 million dollar bounty this year from the SEC