Even creepier... If Google knows all your physical locations they know how many employees you have at work on a given day
132 karma · joined March 26, 2017
We didn't promote them at all, but they got 30-500 views a month just from Google search. A lot more when someone linked them.
I really got a strong dose of truth in highschool. I got tired of getting picked on and being out of shape in freshman year. I was a loner and a punching bag for kids having a bad day.
I started exercising to stop people from bothering me. I still kept to myself and maintained my outsider status at first, but it didn't last long. The swimming and wrestling coaches wouldn't leave me alone by junior year, and soon after they noticed everyone else did to.
The attention I got from being in shape and attractive was extreme and foreign to me. There was maybe a year lag time that I associate with everyone consciously forgetting who I used to to be. After that, shit got real.
I started getting attention from the popular kids even though I maintained my "loner" friends. I suddenly had several groups of friends that didn't want to be seen around each other.
I was asked to join several sports, and in my senior year I gave in. Once I broke through to sports my popularity was official, and I started getting invites to the richest most popular people's parties.
The craziest part of the attention was the girls. I got groped by women all the time. Women would openly comment on how attractive I was fairly often. Sometimes women in public would catcall me. My mom's friends would openly try to set me up with their daughters. On more than one occasion while drinking, girls I knew but had never touched would literally jump on me and start making out.
And before you think I'm too much of a douchebag, I'm overweight and rather old now. A lot of people will say "it's all confidence" but I'm just as confident as I ever was. Now that I'm not attractive and older it's just called "disgruntled".
It's hard to tell anyone that has been attractive that attractiveness is not important. I've seen it for myself.
Basically google can't trust backlinks anymore because people game them and competitors try to destroy each other's sites by buying scummy links to their stuff.
So they mainly attempt to measure quality in a vacuum. This is using their machine learning stuff to look at the quality, confidence, and reading level of the writing style.
They do the same quality checks for the site. Checking for EV certs, clean markup, real email volume through Gmail, reputable DNS provider, physical address in G maps. A lot of their hundreds of quality metrics don't measure the site itself, but use Google's pervasive data trove from their other services. Most scammers don't bother doing any of this right.
The problem becomes people like me. I setup sites with all measures of quality for legitimate businesses. Have articles written by good writers with knowledge in the subject. Sounds great right?
The problem is that these articles are still done for money and quite biased sometimes. Google is slowly running into a need for a strong AI because all measures of quality can be emulated if enough money is on the line. It doesn't matter if something seems truthful in every way except the fact that it isn't.
This is the same reason "fake news" is invading google and Facebook. Smart spammers have upped their game to the point that it's impossible to know what's real anymore.
Need a wikipedia article changed? Good reviews on Yelp? A nice piece on a popular tech website? All of this can be openly bought with zero consequences.
Based on what I've heard from leaks and various news articles, the leadership of the search division was once adamantly against using neural networks for search.
Things took a sudden turn maybe 5 years ago. Something caused google to do a complete 180 and vastly increase their investment in AI research. They saw something that scared them.
I think it was their unexpected success using AI for machine translation. There was much PR about it at the time, and I think it really got the gears turning at Google HQ. You see, the same language processing needed for machine translation has obvious parallels to search.
The more curious employees began applying word vectors used for translation to search. After all, most of it had been trained on index data from multi lingual websites anyways. They found that, horrifically, rather simple neural networks sometimes outperformed the the search algorithms google had spent billions on.
When this reached upper management it set off a quiet panic. Google, once seen as invincible, could have been beaten by a start-up using effective ML techniques. Computer power calculations showed that this could have been done since a few years after the debut of CUDA, a window of vulnerability of maybe 7 years.
The timeframe of around 2005-2010 coincided with Google spinning off a bunch of moonshot projects and doubling down on their core businesses. Coincidence? Maybe, but I don't think so. I wish a Xoogler or two would come out of the woodwork and tell me if I'm crazy or not.
Anyways, Google usually has a 5-7 year lag time when they release details of their tech to the public. This dates Tensorflow and their heavy AI work to around 2010. The window where somebody could have beat them easily with ML was probably 2005-2010
However, my arguments are easily verifiable and widely known. Why do other countries feel the need to block things like US movies and sports stars? Are your seriously suggesting that such things are secretly US govt propaganda?
The most reasonable explanation is that US movies and sports stars are known for their high quality and allowing the US to compete in those countries would totally wipe out local movies and sports stars. This would obviously contribute to the spread of US culture and continue propagating the believe that the US model of society produces superior products.
Countries like Russia and China depend on their propaganda machines to keep the population complacent. Allowing foreign competition to overtake local firms and show their superiority to the local populace would result in questions those governments don't want these citizens asking.
Foreign companies find little trouble competing in the US, because the US govt by large is not concerned with the influence of foreign culture. The government is slight corrupt but not to the point that it makes widespread lies necessary to maintain order. Many foreign companies have the US as their primary market, something China and other countries that depend on propaganda for peace would never allow.
In the former Soviet Union and even in modern China it's fashionable and a sign of wealth to have American technology and fashion. Among many trade barriers, China artificially limits the number of American movies allowed in theaters to a couple a year because they're so popular.
Even countries with extremely friendly relations to the US take some actions to limit the pervasiveness of US culture. In the case of Japan, limiting the number of US baseball players on Japanese teams comes to mind.
It's telling that even with the magnitude of recent intel leaks there has been nothing found to indicate the US uses government funded propaganda. They don't need to.
Not to go too off my chain too much on why US culture is looked up to, but we're talking about the country that invented the car,microchip, transistor, computer, atomic weapons, GPS, and the internet.
Most of the great inventions of modern history were created in the United States, some of them by the government itself. Silicon valley continues to pump out the most valuable companies in the world at an astounding rate to this day.
So what is soft power exactly? Is it bad that a lot of countries look up to the US model of society? Is that unfair? Your claim is baseless, American culture is popular simply because the US is so successful.
How do I check for undefined in ES5 compatible way?
How do I check if I need a polyfill for cookie API?
The accepted answers for both were rediculous hacks because apparently there's no good and easy way to do it