Klox

Not Republican is the only qualifier if you’re a sane person.

Never republican. Prior to that, whichever Democrat says they will reign hell fire.

Disbanding ICE, disbanding TSA, slashing CBP, cutting military 75+%, expanding the supreme court by 10+ seats, expanding DOJ for that massive backlog of criminal prosecutions, forcing better vote methodologies, forcing a constitutional convention (new branches of government, independent DOJ, independent science research, independent health), encouraging new states (DC, Guam, Puerto Rico) to join the union to fix Senate proportions, remove electoral college, add in mechanisms for national no-confidence votes, healthcare as a right, etc. There’s a lot more heh.

https://thelemmy.club/post/42990481

How is this expected to impact other operating systems like GrapheneOS? I’ve really enjoyed a pretty solid experience on Graphene.

they are typically for things like carnivals.

Well xAI is a circus, so it’s fairly accurate.

Jury: come back when you’ve got some results.

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All fair criticisms that I also hold.

Search and YouTube’s ranking algorithm (and all the dimensions and weights/coefficients) are trade secrets and 99% of the company will never see for pretty good reasons. I never had access to them. I have discussed with multiple YouTube people that know the algorithm skewed towards bubbles for exactly the reasons you said: it is literally more engaging. My understandimg is it was the kind of unintentionally, institutional bias-type when you don’t properly control for human psychology. The top line metrics get adjusted to try and compensate for these things in ways I am not too familiar with (for example changing the metric from “watched minutes” to “positive engagement” because Google does not want angry viewers). IMO they were too slow to respond and are definitely culpable in misinformation and radicalization in our culture. I was never in YouTube so I can’t speak to it in any more specific terms.

Android I wholeheartedly agree, but to play the devil’s advocate, I provide a lot of support for non-tech folks. They are constantly losing their email credentials, getting spyware/adware/malware, etc. There’s a lot of cases of scams guiding people to allow third party apps and allowing permissions they should never be allowing. People are far too gullible and can’t see warnings right in front of their eyes. I don’t know that Android is improving it by locking down AOSP. I personally moved to GrapheneOS after leaving Google and I know it’s not for everyone, but it’s got some nice improvement. Google gets paid by phone companies to have play store and a bunch of services installed, and then Google pays back the companies to have their search as a default. The first part never really gets brought up, but phone companies could go without Google services. They just don’t want to make the competitive investment. It’s disappointing.

100%. Google could easily disallow specific uses of their systems. ANTIFA and anti-police state could be terms, but they don’t. And Google is so freaking profitable, theres zero reason to cater to those business segments AT ALL. It would be a boon to their company image to actively NOT participate. So disappointing.

I hear a lot of different far out theories: microphone spying on Android (as a feature, not some 0-day bug), manipulating search results nefariously, handing information over to the government, and dozens more. Google wants user profiles to sell ad segments, but beyond that they do not want your data:

1. Some data is product-scoped. Emails, pictures, YouTube videos, etc. Google can’t just delete these because people want them back heh. Most product-scoped data is not accessible for analytics at all. For example, there’s no scanning gmail to inform ad decisions. Data is encrypted in ways that would make that impossible, e.g. only an SRE or bug investigation might be able to review a specific email. Another example is Maps tracking data. Maps Timeline is now user-device local. Google no longer has the data. Thats pretty impressive, to have a timeline feature and not have the data!

2. All the other tracking and analytics data (that comes from every individual user) have time-locked controls. Data types expire at specific business intervals ranging from hours, weeks, months, and more rare is a about 1.5 years. Some very special types may get retained indefinitely, such as legal holds, or data that is business-produced (as opposed to user-produced). There are both row and column wipeout processes always running for hundreds of reasons.

3. Google has aggressive internal goals to cut costs. They don’t want to host infinite pictures and videos. They improved consolidating user data so that Google Wipeout is pretty much a guarantee that you are gone from their system. Very few people do that though, so they also push the data plans to recoup some of those costs.

4. All the user data they collect is downloadable: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en. Everything there can be deleted.

Yeah, they are excellent at monetizing data, but IMO it’s not for sacrificing user privacy. From my engagement with privacy communities, that is not well understood at all.

I have for sure been avoiding programming since I left. Yes avoiding some tech as a result. I’m de-googling as they say. I’ve spent a lot of time with my family, pursued other hobbies, and volunteered more, which has all been fantastic.

I know I will get back into programming at some point. I really enjoy the selfhosting community and I think I will likely be focusing on the areas of decentralized private networks (similar to Tailscale), decentralized apps (not really web3, but open source apps that can leverage ipfs easily and make it dead simple for others), and tools for public good (promoting good information, skepticism and rational thinking, promoting democracy, fighting against fascism/GOP, etc.).

I hear you on that. It seems like there’s room for it, but it’s just covered in this gross amorphous hyper-capitalist structure.

I am inspired by DeepMind giving away the AlphaFold protein structure database for free. That was awesome!

Or developing and giving away anonymous, decentralized, Bluetooth-based proximity detection for COVID tracking. That’s freaking awesome!

YouTube too is awesome, and it’s profitable, but they slowly make insane, gross decisions to chase 30% YoY growth. 1.5 hour ads, double ads, cutting creator payments, etc. Just make it sustainable!

Repeat ad nauseum across the business units. It’s upsetting.

Good question. I wasn’t. I was not located in California, and the union never really came up in any of my conversations with colleagues. I vaguely thought dues were 5-8% of total compensation (I see now they are 1% which seems reasonable, either I am misremembering or they have since lowered, or maybe I looked at a different union) and they did not have any negotiating rights. Admittedly, if the union isn’t negotiating then I don’t know what it is for. But maybe it just needed to get to critical mass to have that negotiating leverage and I could have helped by joining. My total compensation was very good though, so it didn’t really seem like something a union had to protect. I had excellent work-life balance, good benefits, etc.

Edit: Internally, Googlers are fairly transparent. There were multiple anonymous surveys run by employees for collecting compensation statistics broken down by gender, role, region, office, etc. It had a pretty high number of participants. That was very informative and I always participated.

I took a voluntary layoff from Google last year. It’s probably self-rationalizing, but IMO I had an excellent role at the company for the last 5 years of my time. I helped design a system that locks down and redacts server logs across many of Google’s services. Only on-call engineers with an emergency backed by a post mortem review could get temporary access to original server logs. The system doesn’t delete all data but it can enforce codified contracts, country/state regulations, make certain privacy gurantees, and surface problems for auditing.

Google has made and continues to make poor business decisions, but from my experience they are one of the best big companies managing user privacy. I can’t speak for all of Google’s business units (well I can’t speak for the company at all, heh), but the privacy zeitgeist says the opposite which I’ve found misleading, but could never really speak to while being employed.

User data is taken extremely seriously at Google, and I worked with hundreds of people that would gladly get fired if asked to do anything unethical with user data. They audit and lock down access, build systems for guaranteeing anonymization (systems in place long before I worked there), report compliance, and most importantly they work independently from the employees that use the data. Every business unit had committees to consult and review privacy specifically. I was also an expert consultant for several privacy incidents and the number of people involved and the seriousness taken was personally impressive for even minor incidents.

IMO it’s still one of the best companies to work for, but there’s many legitimate reasons to cut them out. My opinion switched when Google had their first layoff in January 2023. The company had issues (I am sure there are plenty of legit lawsuits that I know nothing about that can be fixed with money and internal/external controls and improvements), but in that moment I realized it’s not the company I thought I knew. Rough ordering of reasons for my exit:

1. Government contracts supporting fascism (Israel, CBP, ICE, face tracking, etc.).
2. The layoffs.
3. Pichai going to inauguration and capitulating. GOP donations.
4. 180 on remote culture.
5. AI slop.

There’s probably more if I reflected longer. Maybe I should have resigned sooner, idk. I’m glad I made the choice that I could.

Google was good to me for the years I was there. I got up to L6 and saved enough for my family to exit on my own terms and find a better environment. I’m still looking heh.

Happy to answer some questions (culture, privacy, SWE/SRE, oncall, etc.) if there are any. The company is massive and I saw only a small slice.

They do! Check out https://play0ad.com/ if you haven’t. A free, open source variant that’s pretty complete.

https://tagpro.gg/

I’ve played 3300 hours over 12-13 years. It’s a free capture the flag web game that is typically 4v4 and around 4-10 minutes per match (6 min with a slaughter rule of 3 caps and an OT for ties).

There are 3 types of power ups: tag pro, juke juice, and rolling bomb. There are a few special tiles: boosts, bombs, spikes, gate switches, gravity well, and speed. There’s a lot of maps that rotate every month by committee vote.

It’s a good ratio of team tactics and individual skill that keeps bringing me back. The community is solid and they just slowly keep improving the experience. The community isn’t huge so there’s more popular regional times to have matches.

Maybe a Lemmy hug will get an infusion of new players :) Come check it out!

Who knew that violating the Constitution has neglible damages. What a fucking joke of a country.

The people will have justice.

tl;dr Snopes said nothing of significance and didn’t rate the claim.

They do spend a lot of time regurgitating nonsense. We saw the god damn video!

Was he put into the casket alive with a poison triggered by a random event? If so, love that conviction.

Fullmetal Alchemist was awesome. It gets really intense and pretty graphic. I haven’t seen it in over a decade but might be time for a rewatch!

Thanks!