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I find it hilariously dumb that people are hyperventilating over what, at first glance, looks like a fairly obvious cache corruption bug of some kind. The Orwe

I find it hilariously dumb that people are hyperventilating over what, at first glance, looks like a fairly obvious cache corruption bug of some kind. The Orwellian implications of not showing Churchill's /image/ in the carousel of Prime Ministers after a search are precisely nil.

seesawtron 6y ago
Nothing is "fairly obvious" in today's world. You can choose to ignore everything and assume that the state is run by organisations that care about the "greater good". This is of course a effortless thing to do. Or you can start to re evaluate your dependence on a single centralized source of information and how there exist no measures to control that source by a publically elected body making it an extremely powerful agency for mass propaganda IF it decided to do so. It's more than just about whether this was an honest glitch or an intentional response to adhere to ongoing anger of public so as to show support. Either way, it is necessary to think how long such powerful agencies can exist without intentionally or unintentionally contributing to Orwellian dystopia.
- JamisonM 6y ago
  This is a good example of what I find very funny. Your comment would be an entirely appropriate reaction to, say, the well-documented evidence of YouTube's recommendation engine pushing people toward radicalization - which seems like a very dystopian thing, aligns very well with their profit motive, and if demonstrated to be accurate, effective, and intentional would be of genuine concern. This is literally just a trifle.
thu2111 6y ago
A cache corruption bug? Of exactly this guy, and nobody else in that carousel, at exactly that time? At a company that has decades of experience of serving data from huge datasets without corruption? There are really only two plausible explanations here. The first is that some employee with KG access went rogue and blacked out Churchill because they're an idiot. The second is that the process for selecting the image of such people is entirely automated - probably pulling from Wikipedia - and the mass orgy of USSR-style history erasure has affected one of the input data sources in such a way that the algorithm bailed out or didn't know what to do. Given Danny Sullivan's apparently sincere answer that they don't currently know what happened, my guess is it's probably the latter. If it was an employee deleting it then an audit trail would probably have been left or said employee would have admitted to it and they'd know already. But sorry, to believe that this is caused by anything other than BLM hard-left historical revisionism is very naive. That's not how computers work.

seesawtron 6y ago

Nothing is "fairly obvious" in today's world. You can choose to ignore everything and assume that the state is run by organisations that care about the "greater good". This is of course a effortless thing to do. Or you can start to re evaluate your dependence on a single centralized source of information and how there exist no measures to control that source by a publically elected body making it an extremely powerful agency for mass propaganda IF it decided to do so. It's more than just about whether this was an honest glitch or an intentional response to adhere to ongoing anger of public so as to show support. Either way, it is necessary to think how long such powerful agencies can exist without intentionally or unintentionally contributing to Orwellian dystopia.

JamisonM 6y ago
This is a good example of what I find very funny. Your comment would be an entirely appropriate reaction to, say, the well-documented evidence of YouTube's recommendation engine pushing people toward radicalization - which seems like a very dystopian thing, aligns very well with their profit motive, and if demonstrated to be accurate, effective, and intentional would be of genuine concern. This is literally just a trifle.

thu2111 6y ago

A cache corruption bug? Of exactly this guy, and nobody else in that carousel, at exactly that time? At a company that has decades of experience of serving data from huge datasets without corruption? There are really only two plausible explanations here. The first is that some employee with KG access went rogue and blacked out Churchill because they're an idiot. The second is that the process for selecting the image of such people is entirely automated - probably pulling from Wikipedia - and the mass orgy of USSR-style history erasure has affected one of the input data sources in such a way that the algorithm bailed out or didn't know what to do. Given Danny Sullivan's apparently sincere answer that they don't currently know what happened, my guess is it's probably the latter. If it was an employee deleting it then an audit trail would probably have been left or said employee would have admitted to it and they'd know already. But sorry, to believe that this is caused by anything other than BLM hard-left historical revisionism is very naive. That's not how computers work.