I think it is interesting to point out that AI will be good, maybe too good. It isn’t right now, it’s a novelty in the early stages of such mass adoption that a lot of the consequences are just starting to appear.
The phones owned by Gen A in 40 years will have a useful, realistic, and default AI assistant. It just sucks that the development of this technology is only driven by late-stage capitalism.
I am a software developer, this story isn’t really about that though. When I was first becoming interested in coding I was reading about vr and ar and how it would be this huge multi billion dollar market in the next few years and I thought that sounded awesome, as it could enhance our lived experiences with info for the curious, or decorate the real world with computer generated architecture, sculpture, even some ads to pay for the whole thing. I said I’m gonna get into computer programming and then transition into vr/ar once I learn a few things.
Of course this didn’t pan out. 2-3 huge tech companies rushed onto the market with somewhat crappy products just to own the patents so smaller companies couldn’t innovate. When they weren’t immediately profitable they started cutting back and shutting down. Just another big tech grift, like cryptocurrency and now AI. Ai is probably the worst example of all because it got pushed out to soak up a bunch of excess cloud computing when crypto crashed, and now its a huge real estate scheme as well since there’s a big rush to build data centers to handle the artificial demand. You wanna know the next big bubble to bet against? Its ai and all the related industries.
It requires massive amounts of computing power to accomplish the most mundane tasks, which require electricity created by burning fossil fuels. All so your boss can spend less time writing emails letting you know you’ve been laid off, and political advisors can mass produce legislation to take away your rights.
Of course this didn’t pan out. 2-3 huge tech companies rushed onto the market with somewhat crappy products just to own the patents so smaller companies couldn’t innovate. When they weren’t immediately profitable they started cutting back and shutting down.
The way advanced capitalism can’t even grow a product before trying to strangle it for every last penny is all that saves us from special Black Mirror levels of hell.
It told me today that Harvard did research to show 165 degrees killed H1N1 in milk. The reference? Recommended cooking temp for chicken.
Fucking lmao
I’m kinda surprised he isn’t bound by some sort of NDA.
Every tech company I worked at, NDAs were a doc to not share code or research discoveries.
Some companies have you sign things after leaving.
Obviously, when you start laying people off, or do stupid shit like stack ranking, some people are going to walk out and just blab about all the dumb shit your employer does/did - and they’re heroes for doing so.
What are they gonna do if you refuse to sign? Fire you?
If this guy voluntarily left, then he wasn’t getting a severance package that they could withhold (and on that note, this is a good reason to include involuntary severence in your employment contract, if you can negotiate it).
For many, it’s the severance offered that makes them sign. If you’re about to lose your job, a few months pay, and free relocation back home if your visa is due to be cancelled is likely enough to make you sign something.
I’m not condoning it, at all. I think the practice is fucking disgusting, and have seen it wreck lives, but it’s a reality in many tech companies, including Google under Sundar.
But they’re not gonna offer severence to someone who quits, right?
The wording made it sound like he quit rather than got laid off.
My understanding is that while you’re 100% being terminated (and are ineligible for rehire) what you sign indicates that you’re actually volunteering to resign.
For more info on it, look up Amazon’s Focus and Pivot programs.
Laws will differ in different places, but I’m familiar with 3 categories of terminations:
- With cause (firing)
- Without cause (layoff)
- Voluntary (quitting)
When someone is terminated with cause or quits, they are not entitled to severance and they do not collect unemployment insurance. When someone is laid off, the employer is obligated to pay a severence package.
The Amazon focus and pivot program is interesting. That definitely looks like they’re bribing low performers to quit, and I smell an ulterior motive. Maybe it’s to get them to sign an NDA but I feel like it’s to avoid wrongful dismissed lawsuits. Although I suppose why not both?
NDAs are usually signed when you’re hired, not when you leave.
I think that Amazon and Meta (where this is a known practice) do both. I’ve not signed anything in tech that stops me talking about internal company practices or any work that might have resulted in “voluntary” dismissal, but others in these companies that do the Jack Walsh thing and fire their employees do…
These are all general opinion statements. There aren’t any verifiable facts like, “on this date at a meeting with x we discussed how AI project y is myopic and non-user-centered.”
AI told him he could ignore it.
So excited for AI written TOS that are just around the corner.
So not only is no one reading the TOS, soon no one will be writing them either.
I was just talking to my friend anf his job is going to use AI to parse contracts to understand who is Liable for X, whose responsibility is Y, etc.
So yeah no we’re close.
Can’t wait for that one to go horribly wrong.
I liked that insider peek from Jenson - well I liked reading all of this, but especially that:-).
For a brief moment in the beta for all this, it basically just summarized the top two or three reputable results, and attached a link to where it got the data.
They should have just left it at that, and not started mixing in random blogs and social media sites.
The ability to summarize the Wikipedia article and a random university professors page where they list every fact known to man about pine trees or something was actually helpful.If I want the AIs best guess about how to fuck up a pizza, I just go to the site where I can ask it. Bad advice when searching is just shit.
A tldr for “what is turpentine” is actually helpful.Running with scissors is good exercise if you don’t fall, and good for your pores if you do.
How do you get the AI results on google.com? When I search for anything, it shows a summary and then all the results, sponsors, etc… Nothing is tagged as “AI”.
(I never visit google so forgive me if this has an obvious answer)
I can reproduce most results with Google app on Android. I’m in Europe, not in USA. It just appears as some text below the search box, not marked as anything. Except this one about smoking. Now it says smoking as bad. I guess Google already told the AI to behave.
You can opt into it and other beta technologies at Google Labs.
Thank you!
I think it’s still in A/B testing stages, 80% of my searches don’t include the AI but it pops up occasionally. I also notice it more often on my phone, and rarely on my desktop where I’m not signed in.
Are you in the US?
Yeah
I’m not sure then. Maybe Google is just rolling it out in waves, and hasn’t gotten to you yet?
All good. I’ll just continue to mock their progress for now.
Asking Andisearch to generate AI jokes
OK I like the 3rd one actually
Yes, the sense of humor is still somewhat limited in AIs. Anyway, Andi is not designed to tell jokes, but rather to give reliable answers to questions and this it does quite well…
The difference between G+ and now is that Google search is actually bad now and they need to do something to fix it, but they just did the completely wrong thing…
Google Plus was a good platform that was horribly managed.
Also, they made a huge mistake right at the beginning. It was invite-only…
Invite only, then when they didn’t have enough users, they tried to force it on everyone in conjunction with trying to force them to use their real names on YouTube. The whole thing was just an absolute master class in fucking up a launch from start to finish.
The difference is that Google+ was actually a wonderful product.
But a couple years down the line Google did what Google does and destroyed it from the inside making it worse and worse until it was just a shell of what it started out being.
Google did what Google does
I remember wrapping my head around “Google Wave” and being like “Hey that sounds nea–oh it’s gone already?”
Dude for real. Wave was awesome.
It was a fine product I don’t know about wonderful. The communities could be good that was true. But the actual UX was pretty middle of the road IMO.
If you were into tech, the tech people were amazing. Yonatan Zunger comes to mind. He was a backend engineer at Google and the guy was great.
I also met many people who are still friends, many of whom became real life friends too.
I even got an amazing job thanks to my contacts on g+.
The feed layout was awesome. The fact that everything got fed to rss. The fact that you could tailor posts so easily. God I miss it. Only social media I’ve ever really been a part of.
It was wonderful ♥️
Also basically every Linux big name posted there. It was so great. I’m still sad it’s gone
Hey like I said the communities were great! But no worries I’m glad it was a great experience for you and I don’t want to be needlessly contrarian here
Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying that your experience isn’t valid, I am merely providing a counterpoint based upon my own experience.
I feel you
A wonderful product or a wonderful community? It sounds like you’re describing the people who were on it and not the platform itself.
The platform was wonderful. Intuitive, powerful, everything every other platform was not. Google started killing it slowly long before it died, but in its heyday it was amazing.
Trailer Trash be all like: “SEE AH TOLD Y’ALL IT WAS GOOD FOR THE BABY! GOOGLE DONE SAYS SO!!!”
Why do you hate the poor.
Why do you hate comedy?
Prob a reaction to punching down
As “down”, I hereby grant maculata retroactive permission to make the above joke; and formally proclaim that I found said joke to be at least somewhat amusing
Why do you hate… eh. Can’t be bothered. Need to take my clothes out of the washing machine.
That’s the spirit. All conflict in the world can be resolved by the crushing and inescapable weight of adult responsibilities.
That’s a good point, most major conflict is caused by people who make/pay/coerce people to do their adult responsibilities for them. 🤔
Chores…really do build character? Dad was right?! (Of course he was.)
If Google tries to lock me in, watch me lock me out.
