throwaways885

I don't think things have changed that much, only Google grew so big that 20% projects became a potential damper on your career (the incentives of perf and promo and all that horrible stuff). But the freedom has always technically been there.

"Steamed hams" is a great one :)

I agree with you on your first point, but in a previous comment you openly associated with the people [burning stuff down].

> No one bears you any ill-will, unless you're a public servant who has murdered someone with impunity recently.

The situation is a lot more nuanced than this and I'm sure you know it. Yes the police is over militarised, yes there's a huge problem with urban killings, but you also don't get to solve those problems with violence.

Consider the black business owners who suffered greatly from the BLM riots.

Sorry but the first amendment does not cover burning things down. Talk, hold signs, sure, but not violence.

You and your comrades are dangerous.

People would not have been condemning BLM if it wasn't for the burning.

Indeed.

I'll be honest in saying that I do think the so called "lefty lawyers" are usually defending people most don't like (e.g. foreign criminals), but I also hate the government's characterisation of the lawyers themselves. Like freedom of speech, people have a right to a defence.

In fact, part of having a strong legal system is the fact that it optimises for false negatives. Better to let 100 criminals go free than one person unjustly imprisoned.

There is a Workers Council being formed in the London office too.

I don't believe G Suite data is used for advertising. That's just creepy and not something sellable to enterprise.

> It's hard to get called out for privately-held political views. Things you do in public, though, have consequences.

No, this is just wrong! If I'm making political statements in the public square (e.g. Twitter) then people should respect that as long as it's not something outlandish.

The problem is US politics is just too visceral.

In the eyes of these mobs, being a Trump supporter is akin to supporting the Nazis, and they rile everyone up to harass somebody who probably just wants lower taxes or border control.

I think if apps like Snapchat and Instagram were on Windows Phone, the platform would still be here today.

> For me, all captchas are a stain on the web - in most cases, shifting (and multiplying) the wasted human hours from the company collecting data (eg the owner of the contact form) to the user (the person completing the contact form).

I run a contact form for a small business. Explaining to them why their tiny website has tens of thousands of spammy requests filled with porn keywords is not easy. Of course webmasters add reCAPTCHA, because they're vastly outnumbered by bots and users.

Aren't the poorest in society naturally always going to be the bottom 25% or so? The poorest American is still in the top 10% of the world.

> We're going to see it happen, and the Google SWEs who survive are the ones who are willing to humble themselves, roll up their sleeves, and compete head-to-head with AWS and Azure SWEs on a level playing field. It will mean harder work for less pay, fewer promos, and less autonomy.

I'd argue an organization needs to reward these things properly to happen. People won't give up promo to do right by the business, the business needs to give promo for the right things. If nothing changes then it's far more likely the company is in deep trouble long-term.

> The ads are extremely disctracting: I can't help but notice them

Sadly this sounds like it's perfectly WAI.

> I also once got ads from Jordan Pertsons thing... WOW HOW WRONG CAN IT GET

I mean, what's wrong with that from a marketing perspective? He has a fair few female fans so the targeting can't be that wrong.

What mainstream user software is distributed as a container? Last time I checked it's all just endless deb files.

> Astronomically lower probability of catching a virus.

Yes because nobody uses consumer desktop Linux. With higher market share the malware will come.

> No bullshit forced updates when the OS feels like it.

True, but that also means you're going to end up with a lot more botnet nodes out there because people will never update. Or they'll never update and still complain things are not working.

> No phoning home with you being unable to launch an app when your manufacturer's server is slow.

I hear you, but this doesn't happen enough for anybody to care. People would be more fet up by Facebook downtime.

> No shuffling about trying to install drivers for a thousand components before your computer is usable.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Linux drivers still can require endless faffing about. The biggie is that distros won't distribute nonfree drivers by default, for ideological reasons. The average person doesn't understand that they need to go enable some repo in their package manager, only that their machine isn't working.

Admitting fault when needed is a core aspect of being a good individual.

That's a bit unfair. The web is what made it easy to publish at no cost, CD's still had mail and print costs associated so it made sense to send documentation with the software packages it... documented.

I believe they already do this.

Sadly I think the radicalisation started when the censorship did. I honestly believe they're making things worse by clamping down on misinformation. Streisand effect is real.

Absolutely, Google has added to this world, not taken away from it. Being a potentially abusive company is a completely different matter, but it doesn't automatically invalidate the good things and I still consider it better off existing than not.

In any case, with Trump gone nobody will be around to fight Google if that's your desire.

This is still wrong. Shareholders are _not_ legally required to "maximise shareholder value".

> companies with shareholders are legally obliged to.

Can we please stop with this meme? No, they are not "legally responsible" to keep pushing. Saying this removes the moral responsibility from the people making these terrible decisions.

Search is a very intense application - battering hard drives and memory until it dies, so being able to buy cheap PCs made google financially feasible and scalable. Google wrote great software to run on top of cheap, commodity hardware.

Arguably there is a distinction between "web dev" and "desktop dev with web platform technologies".

Daylight savings time has some really interesting effects on a macro level: https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-dead...

Easy to say if you're not disabled.

One day, you might be. Just be glad you won't be left behind.

Edit: If you want a purely numbers based analysis, well, you're not considering second-order effects. Investment in accessibility represents an investment in technology. ASR in meetings, for example, is a necessary first step towards good auto-translation.

It started a long time ago, back in the days of mainframes and thin clients. Mainframe boxes would run the sever side part of "X Server" while clients (ambiguous term in this context, I'll admit) would send commands (e.g. keyboard strokes) and receive graphics back.

XFree86 is a free software implementation of the X Window System.

The whole server/client thing is a bit outdated now, since almost nobody uses actual thin clients anymore. X forwarding is useful, but it's not a mainstream way to do your computing.

Apple is a hardware company, Google is a cloud software company. They do cross over (iCloud, Pixel), but I doubt they'll ever match each other in terms of their respective domains.

A nice hope, but even if true, it's not one that affects me by definition.

You think rich people are paying those kind of taxes? Why wouldn't they leave if this wealth tax were suddenly imposed upon them?