7 ms·

Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. To operate safely on Google's platforms, you need a friend who works

by panic 6y ago

Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. To operate safely on Google's platforms, you need a friend who works at Google who can vouch for you as their over-eager police keep trying to put you in jail.

singron 6y ago
I'm not sure how this would work legally with employment contracts, but it would be worth it to get your employees hired at Google so they can professionally execute that role for you. We have joked before about not poaching friends from Google since they are more valuable working there than at your company.
- znpy 6y ago
  Ah, this might seem like a joke but it's true. I was part of a student association when I was an university student. Part of the activities was to host gnu/Linux courses record them and upload them to YouTube. One day, out of the blue, the channel goes dark and nobody knows why. We all panicked. We had received no warnings and there was no way to appeal. In the end, we asked some former students that were employed by Google to pull some levers internally, and we managed to get our channel restored.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    This is bordering on dystopian monolithic megacorp nightmare.
    - xvector 6y ago
      Ugh. We get the cyberpunk dystopia but we don't get the cool cyber-limbs and neural AR interfaces. Worst of both worlds. Can I get a refund?
      - mlvljr 6y ago
        No, you'll get a COVID shot.
      - ehnto 6y ago
        All of the dystopia, none of the cyberpunk. Instead we get a business services dystopia. Spreadsheets are the last refuge of the BS Underground, fighting for their right to maintain their email inbox and browser extensions, while risking all revenue to MonoCop.
foobarbazetc 6y ago
Having friends (software engineers, SREs, etc) at Google used to be the way to get a human to look at something but these days it gets you nothing. You’re better off with a highly rated news.yc post.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  It depends how highly placed they are (and how much money you spend/ make them).
Silhouette 6y ago
The tech giants seem to operate on a law of averages, where automating everything and having essentially zero support system for those using their services is worth it despite the (apparently quite frequent) failures that may break accounts and cost the giant some money as a result. I've seen similar situations happen with Facebook, where entire businesses with what you might think were significant ad budgets were completely shut out of advertising on FB because its system for advertisers was broken yet again. I guess if you have a very small number of channels that are totally dominant, as Google and FB now are, you can afford to throw away a thousand here or even a million there if it saves you millions in support costs. Whether organisations that have become so dominant should be legally allowed to do that, given the unfair adverse effect it can have on others operating in the ecosystems they create, is a different question. Just as we have laws about monopolies and limit what they can do in other contexts, maybe it's time for the handful of businesses that dominate online advertising or marketplaces to be regulated for the protection of everyone else.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. It's more like dealing with a blind automaton, and that's becoming more common outside of Google, too. Automation support scales well because the fixed costs are high but the marginal cost is low, human attention scales poorly, with a high marginal cost.
- adrianN 6y ago
  To a first approximation authoritarian bureaucracies are blind automatons too.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    To a first, and second, and third approximation, bureaucracies are distributed computing systems; procedures, laws and bylaws are code, bureaucrats are the computing units. A lot of "fat" in bureaucracy comes with dealing with the fact that the computing units are buggy, unreliable, and sometimes actively malicious.
    - klingonopera 6y ago
      And so the next step would be to actually throw out the written word and replace it with actual code. I'm serious. Why let "government code" be subject to all the shortcomings and pitfalls of natural language when you could just use cold hard logic and exact math instead? Natural language is just programming for humans, anyways.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        That would be a very wrong move. I'm serious. This unreliability that comes from agency of the individual compute nodes has some very important benefits: the system is much more resistant to bugs in code[0], and much more humane. Software, as it is today, doesn't understand morality. That's e.g. you wouldn't want to automate away judges in the justice system - the law is code, but it's buggy, and isn't complete enough to handle all cases in all contexts. You need case-by-case judgements, and that's why it's good to have human bureaucrats who can independently think and override the system as needed. Otherwise, the system would just grind people that fell into it. -- [0] - Like, "you have to deliver document X before 14th to get something done, but the document is only available from 23rd". Happened to me during university, where some scolarship depended on a government document that you could procure only well after deadline. Of course, the secretary at the university knew this and let you fill in incomplete application; she'd wait for the whole allowed processing time, then send you a letter asking you to bring in missing documents and giving you 14 extra days. Given that this was a bug at an intersection of two bureaucratic systems, if this was software, it would likely go undetected for a while, until someone started to wonder why nobody is applying for scolarships anymore.
artsyca 6y ago
This is a manifestation of O'Sullivan's law as applies to corporate culture and it's a spot on assessment
abbadadda 6y ago
Zomg good thing this is visible.
prox 6y ago
And its one of the reasons people should stop using google products, or it will get worse. I am 99% on DuckDuckGo and other search engines, Firefox (which is great), Lots of mail providers these days which excel on every front, lots devtools that don’t need any Google infrastructure, I really hope one of these days we get a message from Google (btw Google is really the most faceless organization out there, I really need to think hard to give you any names) that they will change their tune, but until that time, its best to leave.
- stanislavb 6y ago
  Yup, DuckDuckGo's been my default browser search engine for quite some time now. I'm quite happy with the results. I'm reaching out to google.com less and less every day. The last straw will be abandoning Gmail :)
  - danShumway 6y ago
    I don't if this will help you make that decision, but Fastmail's alias system is a godsend for me when it comes to filtering incoming emails and protecting myself from spam. With every account you get a finite number of aliases you can create, but in practice that number is high enough that I just use a new alias for every site I visit. Unlike in Gmail, these aliases don't contain any references to your original address. So if you're signing up for a dogwalking service, you can create an alias for `ilovewalkingdogs@fastmail.com`, and then if you start getting spam to that address, you know where it came from, you know that there's no chance your real address will be reverse-engineered from your alias, and you can auto-reject or sort everything to that address into a separate folder without affecting any of your other emails. I have separate email aliases I distribute to friends and family members so that if I ever run into a doxing situation or for some reason need to go nuclear on my email, I can turn everything off except for them. I also have my email linked to my own domain of course, but when I sign up for most commercial services, I use @fastmail.com aliases. That way I know that there's no way for those services to track me across accounts/websites via my personal domain name. And everything gets organized in the same inbox, same account. I consider it to be a killer feature.
ezoe 6y ago
s/these days/always/ Here, fixed it for you.

by panic 6y ago

singron 6y ago

I'm not sure how this would work legally with employment contracts, but it would be worth it to get your employees hired at Google so they can professionally execute that role for you. We have joked before about not poaching friends from Google since they are more valuable working there than at your company.

znpy 6y ago
Ah, this might seem like a joke but it's true. I was part of a student association when I was an university student. Part of the activities was to host gnu/Linux courses record them and upload them to YouTube. One day, out of the blue, the channel goes dark and nobody knows why. We all panicked. We had received no warnings and there was no way to appeal. In the end, we asked some former students that were employed by Google to pull some levers internally, and we managed to get our channel restored.
- manigandham 6y ago
  This is bordering on dystopian monolithic megacorp nightmare.
  - xvector 6y ago
    Ugh. We get the cyberpunk dystopia but we don't get the cool cyber-limbs and neural AR interfaces. Worst of both worlds. Can I get a refund?
    - mlvljr 6y ago
      No, you'll get a COVID shot.
    - ehnto 6y ago
      All of the dystopia, none of the cyberpunk. Instead we get a business services dystopia. Spreadsheets are the last refuge of the BS Underground, fighting for their right to maintain their email inbox and browser extensions, while risking all revenue to MonoCop.

foobarbazetc 6y ago

Having friends (software engineers, SREs, etc) at Google used to be the way to get a human to look at something but these days it gets you nothing. You’re better off with a highly rated news.yc post.

alasdair_ 6y ago
It depends how highly placed they are (and how much money you spend/ make them).

Silhouette 6y ago

The tech giants seem to operate on a law of averages, where automating everything and having essentially zero support system for those using their services is worth it despite the (apparently quite frequent) failures that may break accounts and cost the giant some money as a result. I've seen similar situations happen with Facebook, where entire businesses with what you might think were significant ad budgets were completely shut out of advertising on FB because its system for advertisers was broken yet again. I guess if you have a very small number of channels that are totally dominant, as Google and FB now are, you can afford to throw away a thousand here or even a million there if it saves you millions in support costs. Whether organisations that have become so dominant should be legally allowed to do that, given the unfair adverse effect it can have on others operating in the ecosystems they create, is a different question. Just as we have laws about monopolies and limit what they can do in other contexts, maybe it's time for the handful of businesses that dominate online advertising or marketplaces to be regulated for the protection of everyone else.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. It's more like dealing with a blind automaton, and that's becoming more common outside of Google, too. Automation support scales well because the fixed costs are high but the marginal cost is low, human attention scales poorly, with a high marginal cost.

adrianN 6y ago
To a first approximation authoritarian bureaucracies are blind automatons too.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  To a first, and second, and third approximation, bureaucracies are distributed computing systems; procedures, laws and bylaws are code, bureaucrats are the computing units. A lot of "fat" in bureaucracy comes with dealing with the fact that the computing units are buggy, unreliable, and sometimes actively malicious.
  - klingonopera 6y ago
    And so the next step would be to actually throw out the written word and replace it with actual code. I'm serious. Why let "government code" be subject to all the shortcomings and pitfalls of natural language when you could just use cold hard logic and exact math instead? Natural language is just programming for humans, anyways.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      That would be a very wrong move. I'm serious. This unreliability that comes from agency of the individual compute nodes has some very important benefits: the system is much more resistant to bugs in code[0], and much more humane. Software, as it is today, doesn't understand morality. That's e.g. you wouldn't want to automate away judges in the justice system - the law is code, but it's buggy, and isn't complete enough to handle all cases in all contexts. You need case-by-case judgements, and that's why it's good to have human bureaucrats who can independently think and override the system as needed. Otherwise, the system would just grind people that fell into it. -- [0] - Like, "you have to deliver document X before 14th to get something done, but the document is only available from 23rd". Happened to me during university, where some scolarship depended on a government document that you could procure only well after deadline. Of course, the secretary at the university knew this and let you fill in incomplete application; she'd wait for the whole allowed processing time, then send you a letter asking you to bring in missing documents and giving you 14 extra days. Given that this was a bug at an intersection of two bureaucratic systems, if this was software, it would likely go undetected for a while, until someone started to wonder why nobody is applying for scolarships anymore.

artsyca 6y ago

This is a manifestation of O'Sullivan's law as applies to corporate culture and it's a spot on assessment

abbadadda 6y ago

Zomg good thing this is visible.

prox 6y ago

And its one of the reasons people should stop using google products, or it will get worse. I am 99% on DuckDuckGo and other search engines, Firefox (which is great), Lots of mail providers these days which excel on every front, lots devtools that don’t need any Google infrastructure, I really hope one of these days we get a message from Google (btw Google is really the most faceless organization out there, I really need to think hard to give you any names) that they will change their tune, but until that time, its best to leave.

stanislavb 6y ago
Yup, DuckDuckGo's been my default browser search engine for quite some time now. I'm quite happy with the results. I'm reaching out to google.com less and less every day. The last straw will be abandoning Gmail :)
- danShumway 6y ago
  I don't if this will help you make that decision, but Fastmail's alias system is a godsend for me when it comes to filtering incoming emails and protecting myself from spam. With every account you get a finite number of aliases you can create, but in practice that number is high enough that I just use a new alias for every site I visit. Unlike in Gmail, these aliases don't contain any references to your original address. So if you're signing up for a dogwalking service, you can create an alias for `ilovewalkingdogs@fastmail.com`, and then if you start getting spam to that address, you know where it came from, you know that there's no chance your real address will be reverse-engineered from your alias, and you can auto-reject or sort everything to that address into a separate folder without affecting any of your other emails. I have separate email aliases I distribute to friends and family members so that if I ever run into a doxing situation or for some reason need to go nuclear on my email, I can turn everything off except for them. I also have my email linked to my own domain of course, but when I sign up for most commercial services, I use @fastmail.com aliases. That way I know that there's no way for those services to track me across accounts/websites via my personal domain name. And everything gets organized in the same inbox, same account. I consider it to be a killer feature.

ezoe 6y ago

s/these days/always/ Here, fixed it for you.