It's so weird to look back on these days when people were struggling with whether advertising was even acceptable on the web. So many of us never agreed to this ad model contract and are still annoyed that everyone forgot there was a battle over it.
I've still never clicked on an ad, any ad, expect by mistake or accident, in 25 years of web browsing. Many others haven't either. Seems like that reality is finally starting to sink in, despite the endless amounts of "analytics" claiming otherwise.
You can abstract away the Pi and updates as easily as the cloud abstracts away everything. 90% of AWS users can't even figure or don't care about out how to distribute across multiple availability zones, much less data centers. Two Pis would be fine for 99% of this 90%.
Seems like the future to me, it's just not in any big tech company's best interest right now as they fight over data centers.
It's great that you work there, but that does not necessarily mean you know more about the place than someone who does not. So tired of this line of argument being used, especially to defend companies like Google and Facebook. Employees are often the least informed of anyone.
Murder rate is often gamed for political reasons as well, half the bodies that show up at our office can be coin flipped into either "suicide" or "suspicious" and it often depends on how much money the family has as anything else.
The rich and powerful have always tried to get away with... anything they can get away with. Every industry, every political party, every time period. There is no humble and innocent team, even your team. If you think this isn't happening today you're just naive.
You should always be skeptical of those people, especially when the amounts of money start getting into the hundreds of millions+. Those people have nobody's interests but their own in mind.
Pretending that SEO companies are more or less scummy than a social network or a search engine or an oil company or an airline or a defense contractor is a waste of time. Be skeptical of all of them.
So we need to make the frameworks and tooling much more complex to solve the serverless wiring problem? Aren't the frameworks and tooling already needlessly heavyweight and complex?
Remember when servers rendered HTML? And it was fast? When is that going to be hip again?
I wish I could tell some of the stories about working at this place without getting in shitloads of trouble. "Staggering incompetence" was the phrase I learned there.
They used to have these radiation detectors you have to walk through in order to catch people who might be trying to smuggle out materials like plutonium. The problem was that after you worked there for a few weeks you started setting them off with nothing on you. Entering and exiting. Because you'd been exposed to so much material, you were slightly radioactive yourself.
This was deemed highly problematic for "Security" reasons, nobody seemed to give a shit about all the people.
I haven't traveled abroad in a couple years, so I'm not sure exactly how this works, but I would be unable to contain my laughter if some CBP cop asked me to unlock my phone or laptop. Is this something that actually happens nowadays? Why on earth would anyone ever consent to this nonsense?
Great read, at first I thought it was just a puff piece but the ending is a great insight into the filter bubble that folks with that amount of money and power live in. He can't handle any criticism or line of questioning that dares to peek behind the curtain, it's something that just never happens in his world.
I'm not sure what level of power he's going to buy next, but everyone should be trying to peek behind the curtain. And deleting their Facebook.
The other angle which I haven't seen much written about yet (hint hint aspiring journalists) is I personally know a good number of the mid and high level employees at these companies, and they are becoming increasingly disillusioned by the day. They just don't want to be a part of this bullshit system anymore. Especially at Google and Facebook, they seem to be more authoritarian than some toppled dictatorships of the past century.
Fortunately it's a great time for radical career shifts, especially if you always wanted to be an artist.
I've still never clicked on an ad, any ad, expect by mistake or accident, in 25 years of web browsing. Many others haven't either. Seems like that reality is finally starting to sink in, despite the endless amounts of "analytics" claiming otherwise.