"But Google Fiber got something out of its time here. It learned that nanotrenching—the cost-saving process of burying fiber optic cables just two inches underground—was a bust. “We currently do not have plans that call for 2 inch trenches, our primary specifications are focused on going deeper,” a Google Fiber spokesperson said in an email."
It's so weird to just use cities as A/B tests and just disregard all the people and plans built around a failed case at the drop of a hat. Are they going to start A/B testing countries against eachother next?
Trying new products in small markets as an experiment has been a thing forever, and is something literally every company does regularly. There is nothing weird about it. As for the fallout, IMO the city is to blame for it more than Google, since the company is obligated to do exactly what the contract entails.
Yeah, but when a soda company, say, tries out one new flavor in my town, and different new flavor in your town, and mine flops and yours succeeds, they don't just stop selling soda in my town. They start selling the flavor from your test in my town, too.
It would have risked much less bad publicity if they had done the 2" experiments in a city they were willing to use 6" trenching in. Do part of the deployment with 2" and part with 6", and if the 2" part doesn't work redo that part with 6".
I think what's different is typically cable/phone companies have been reluctant to give up on their investment so easily. This is probably somehow due to the past and present monopolies they hold. Google, like the honey badger, don't care.
Isn't that what cities, states, and countries are in an abstract sense? They are randomized trials of different systems of law and government, and so on.
It's much messier when it's accidental, but ... wouldn't it be smart for say, new state propositions in California to be tested in a trial to verify they produce the consequence voters asked for?
Google does this all of the time with all of their products. The purposely degraded the performance of some users on their products (search IIRC) to see how they would react.
YouTube too, can't find it now but they did a study where they degraded users to 480p to see how many would manually switch back to HD (spoiler: very few did)
I believe YouTube also experimentally surfaces new recommendations slowly to see how many clicks they get and if it should be surfaced more or not
The web is what I know well, this may not be true in other areas, but the W3C has a long history of being hostile to end users, ignoring privacy, and pushing corporate interests over others.
Following their recommendations and doing things just because they were in the spec does make those decisions ethical or even legal. Developers have an obligation to push back against standards boards and corporations that make bad decisions.
Hiding behind the business rules or the standards committee is completely unacceptable anymore. Especially when it comes to bad security/privacy practices that generally favor a market over an end user.
The W3C staff I've talked with seem very decent, in a public-interest kind of way. Though there's always been a tendency of Web standards (de facto, and de jure) to serve the interests of dotcoms, a bit like an industry consortium.
I think that industry-savvy people used to be mainly concerned with avoiding abusive monopolies, since we had examples of that. What I think many early Internet and Web people (who tended to be altruistic) didn't anticipate was the current culture of pervasive sneaky privacy abuses and often questionable engineering.
I think when we get into cool near sci fi stuff we'll have faster than light communication pretty soon with quantum entanglement effects, which should be way easier to wrangle than neutrinos.
Some companies (I worked at one) are creating separate floors or entire buildings for the executive team with steel security doors and high security locks, walls, etc. And men with hidden AR15s to protect them.
Many of the big name CEOs and COOs have permanent security details, which means a truck full of men with hidden AR15s following them around.
I'm not sure how much farther this trend goes, but at some point things fall apart. We can't just pretend the elephant isn't in the room, there are too many men with rifles standing around this is getting absurd.
Here we go, buckle up. With the amount of power democrats are likely to consolidate in the next few elections there could be some serious movement on this if it becomes a priority for the party.
I think the big three are way too powerful and need to be broken up, but doing so intelligently is a tricky problem that I don't have much faith in government tackling.
Zuckerberg integrating all the services yesterday seems to be a transparent attempt to short circuit splitting the company along these service lines, he knows this is coming. I'll bet $100 he'll soon be talking about how it's impossible to split out insta from facebook because of database keys and integrated AI or whatever.
At this point in the campaign, I think people are just throwing out ideas to see what sticks. If this idea becomes super popular on, say, twitter, then it will probably enter into the rotation of things she talks about at rallies and become part of her platform. If it doesn't really catch on, I could see it not being brought up again.
I don't think it'll be a priority because I'm not really sure if this is a real thing that Warren believes or if she's just throwing this out there to see if it has legs.
If someone other than Warren gets elected, it could very well get put on the back burner. But this is defintely what Warren believes. When she was a professor at Harvard or the head of the CFPB, cracking down on very large, very powerful corporations was always her focus, whether via anti-trust or other means.
I think that's very unlikely. Maybe in the far future, but unless there is some significant campaign finance reform first, the big tech companies have more than enough cash to prevent the "worst" possible outcome (from their perspective).
This is another nonsensical plan, between ideas like this and 70% tax rates (that would certainly apply to people earning far less than $10M+ annually) there would be tanks in the street by 2026.
I have reported and watched maybe half a dozen bugs get fixed on Amazon, starting in 2003 I think. Never even experienced a reply from any other company when trying to report problems over the years.
I think a handful of companies are getting more proactive with security reporting, but everyone still treats the quality of their services and front line support system as an afterthought.
The customers are testers, especially in "break early, break often" scenarios. I wouldn't call them testers to their face, but... operationally, they're part of the loop. Treat them as such. If you're not going to pay for much testing up front, at least treat the real testers (customers/endusers) as part of a process, not as part of a problem.
If, when I reported an issue, and it was determined not to be PEBKAC... loop me in on updates, or followup with questions. I'm happy to try to reproduce issues, or give more details, or whatnot. I'm a user/customer - I want the product/service, and I want it to be better.
Yeah, it's honestly disheartening, but it's great seeing Amazon realize the value that support can play. Even looking at the hiring requirements for some of the positions can give you some insight into why it works as well -- support teams which require it have strict development requirements, and consequently the support engineers
1) know the problem space and can infer what you're trying to do
2) know what it feels like to be blocked by something completely out of your control and feel like you're writing into the aether
It would be great for companies as a whole to start realizing the value that you can bring to your existing customers through this experience, and to recognize that this is another face of your company.
This is so bizarre, so Google/Youtube is still trying to claim that they are NOT a media company, just a platform, no media, not responsible of course, but at the same time they are putting responsibility of moderating user comments ONTO THE VIDEO MAKERS themselves.
This is completely hypocritical and idiotic. Youtube comments have been famous for a decade for being among the worst of the worst content on the web, and now they're going to try to just foist that cancer on channel owners and wash their hands of it? Are you kidding? Is this a joke?
Is nobody in charge at Google anymore? Are they just going to keep endlessly reacting to whatever media story got the most attention last week instead of actually trying to build something new?
They didn't have any clue. Back in 2005 personal data and access logs and analytics was considered a chore, you'd delegate the annoyance of log rotation to some sys admin or helpdesk intern and generally purge all data as quickly as possible because storage was expensive.
Occasionally someone would make a cool tool that parsed htaccess logs and gave you a neat visualization or something, but that was it. Literally nobody tracked anything on the internet.
It almost seems like fiction when I type it out now.
Some pretty big power struggles going down it seems.