A Marketing Operations / MarTech person in Toronto, Canada. I created this account in order to stop lurking and start connecting. Feel free to reach out to me at my first name at jacobfilipp.com
Regular end-consumers didn't pay them anything. The people paying were corporations that advertised online. Through Google's publisher network (Adsense), their Doubleclick acquisition and the DART For Publishers middleware, and the ad buying tool (Google Ads), they completely price-fixed the market. Add to that "Jedi Blue", their non-compete cartel with Meta, and you can see Google is built on crime.
A free market with functioning anti-monopoly enforcement is a simple solution. Why trust in a government enforced Supply Management system when the same government can't manage to punish a clear criminal conspiracy to price-fix?
I just thought of an interesting thought experiment. Inagine a politician who kowtows to racists and does their bidding for his whole career and then, just before grabbing the presidency, he has a heart attack and dies. How would you see his legacy? What can you say about the essence of this person?
Reminds me of a forecasting book I read. The author highlighted that services such as The Weather Network are entertainment/ad-media services first and foremost, and they'll serve you inaccurate forecasts to make sure you return. This isn't the same goal as something like the gov. of Canada forecasts.
Now, despite that, for some reason the Weather Network forecasts do tend to reflect reality than the Govt. ones. Maybe their hype is working on me.
I encourage 'yall to reflect on how the content of the CUJ disappeared as Dr. Dobbs' magazine was shut down (along with Dr. Dobbs' own content). If this reader base - tech savvy and archival minded - will not save copies of these classic magazines, then what hope of archival do other communities' magazines have?
You can still find a CUJ archive in a secret corner of my website.
'Real techies don’t worry about forced eugenics. I learned this from a real techie in the cafeteria of a software company. The project team is having lunch and discussing how long it would take to wipe out a disease inherited recessively on the X chromosome. First come calculations of inheritance probabilities. Given a population of a given size, one of the engineers arrives at a wipe-out date. Immediately another suggests that the date could be moved forward by various manipulations of the inheritance patterns. For example, he says, there could be an education campaign. The six team members then fall over one another with further suggestions. They start with rewards to discourage carriers from breeding. Immediately they move to fines for those who reproduce the disease. Then they go for what they call “more effective” measures: Jail for breeding. Induced abortion. Forced sterilization. Now they’re hot. The calculations are flying. Years and years fall from the final doom-date of the disease. Finally, they get to the ultimate solution. “It’s straightforward,” someone says. “Just kill every carrier.” Everyone responds to this last suggestion with great enthusiasm. One generation and—bang—the disease is gone. Quietly, I say, “You know, that’s what the Nazis did.” They all look at me in disgust. It’s the look boys give a girl who has interrupted a burping contest. One says, “This is something my wife would say.” When he says “wife,” there is no love, warmth, or goodness in it. In this engineer’s mouth, “wife” means wet diapers and dirty dishes. It means someone angry with you for losing track of time and missing dinner. Someone sentimental. In his mind (for the moment), “wife” signifies all programming-party-pooping, illogical things in the universe. Still, I persist. “It started as just an idea for the Nazis, too, you know.” The engineer makes a reply that sounds like a retch. “This is how I know you’re not a real techie,” he says.'
Well, none of the AI-generated code now seeping into those companies' codebase is copyrightable. So we're about to see a lot more free-use code hit the scene, when the chickens come home to roost. (Not the same as open source, but still a shakeup of the current status)
I used to work at a large global company that was part of a uopoly in its industry. We had a lot of mandatory training about bribery, how its forbidden to offer bribes and receive bribes. A lot of training and processes around data retention, for privacy and also for lawsuit discovery... I guess the training was mandated because of previous egregious violations. A F500, older company likely comes with a long history of mandatory remediations for past transgressions.
For site-search, I recommend making it a much better value for money. Sites with 300 pages don't really require a search engine. Imagine people with 30,000-300,000 pages where 99% don't ever change (so don't need a re-crawl) and who get 10,000 total visitors a month. That's a wholly different point on the searches x crawl frequency x number of docs matrix that you can still serve profitably.
I'm creating a piece of "home cooked software" - a multi-player web game to play with my team at your monthly Social. Made for a specific team, for a specific occasion.
Its janky, and I made several time-saving decisions that'll cost me more time in the end, but I'm having fun.
It's unpleasant to face, but this initiative from Google is a concrete example that the homeless/too-poor-for-phone do not matter. I've heard of cases where university library apps/admin systems required a phone, and for those cases you could borrow a phone from a "device library" on campus. But, obviously, there's nothing like this for the homeless guy being blocked by Google...