3 ms·

Again, very small-scale thinking that misses the forest for the trees. Yes, you don’t care about processor performance. Fine. What I care about is the people i

by nxc18 5y ago

Again, very small-scale thinking that misses the forest for the trees. Yes, you don’t care about processor performance. Fine. What I care about is the people in my life not wasting time because of shitty Android phones. I care about things like being able to give my parents my old phones, which have years of productive life on them; Qualcomm is the reason that doesn’t work on Android. I care about the people who can’t afford the flagship; they deserve a great experience just as much as I do. Digital maps did exist before Google Maps. And they sucked. The industry was all about digital preparation of maps that would be printed. On paper. We don’t know that no one would have done it better; you could say electric cars would have happened anyway, except they didn’t happen until very recently. When a field technician can do a network trace to solve a power outage in minutes instead of hours, that matters. Big tech is enabling things like replacing pesticides with robotics, targeting fertilizer application based on need, and reducing the environmental impact of the food you eat. Big tech is doing things like improving the safety of cars with automatic emergency braking, giving you early earthquake notifications (buying precious moments to duck, cover, and hold on), predicting and warning about dangerous weather with increasing accuracy, and improving medical diagnosis among many, many, many other achievements. So yes, of course, ‘just candy’. People doing their jobs well, consistently, is how healthcare is delivered, housing is produced, and climate change will be solved. The US could implement a social safety net regardless of cultural issues and it very well should. 3 month vacations and slack work ethic will do absolutely nothing to solve healthcare, housing, or climate change, so I don’t really understand why those concerns are relevant.

iso1210 5y ago
Google maps was developed by Where 2 Technologies in Sydney. Google bought it in late 2004, same sort of time OSM started (in the UK) Microsoft AutoRoute predated that by a decade - NextBase (A UK company) built it in 1988, I think Microsoft had bought it by the mid 90s. The US is great at taking other peoples inventions, buying them, marketing them, and claiming them for itself. The rest of the world innovates, the US pumps it out in bulk.
- wreath 5y ago
  But also those US companies brought this tech they bought to the masses. To say they were built by others anyway reduced the role big tech played here same way a naive developer thinks a company’s success is just because of code he wrote.
  - iso1210 5y ago
    America really wins in marketing and consumerism - especially when appealing to the American consumer
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Do you think OSM was going to not bring the data to the masses? Or that no developper was going to make apps that used that data?
    - wreath 5y ago
      There is no way for us to know and I didn't say that w/o Google or other Big Tech we wouldn't be have these candies as someone described. Rather that we should acknowledge the role they played in distributing the tech they didn't create.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        Sure, they did bring them to the market. And they did play a role, which was not vital and that other companies were trying to do at the same time.
sudosysgen 5y ago
I think you're projecting. I'm not thinking at the small scale or missing the forest for the tree. I'm filtering out the implementation details that don't ultimately matter that much. 3 months vacations and a relaxed work ethic are absolutely compatible with issues of housing, Healthcare, and climate change. VC funded start-up oriented solutions are not the only thing that can be done to fix this issue, not by a long shot. Healthcare is a political decision, to begin with, and many EU countries with all of the things you decry basically solved it. Housing is the same way, it's a collective problem that has to be solved collectively. Emergency earthquake notifications is 70s tech. Fancy machine learning approaches to earthquake prediction barely outperform basic linear regression techniques. Emergency notification systems are a solved pro le.. Automatic emergency braking was never developed by American big tech. It was first implemented commercially in Japanese cars. But even here, AEB is a case of small scale thinking - the best way of fixing the issues it targets is not tech but city design. Qualcomm isn't the reason android phones are slow. Qualcomm processors are more than fast enough to do 95% of what you would want to do. The issue is devs who code for the iPhone. Making every processor as fast as the A14 will never happen, people will use lower end processors to save money then. Again, it's just missing the forest for the trees again. The reason why we have the issues we have is, in most cases, not by a lack of tech, but because of other issues. Big tech is not the universal solution to the important problems. By the way, your segment on Google Maps is simply wrong. Digital maps were already used for navigation by then. Google just bought a startup and won the market against Microsoft and OpenStreetMaps. If they lost we'd be using OSM or something from MS instead.

by nxc18 5y ago

iso1210 5y ago

Google maps was developed by Where 2 Technologies in Sydney. Google bought it in late 2004, same sort of time OSM started (in the UK) Microsoft AutoRoute predated that by a decade - NextBase (A UK company) built it in 1988, I think Microsoft had bought it by the mid 90s. The US is great at taking other peoples inventions, buying them, marketing them, and claiming them for itself. The rest of the world innovates, the US pumps it out in bulk.

wreath 5y ago
But also those US companies brought this tech they bought to the masses. To say they were built by others anyway reduced the role big tech played here same way a naive developer thinks a company’s success is just because of code he wrote.
- iso1210 5y ago
  America really wins in marketing and consumerism - especially when appealing to the American consumer
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Do you think OSM was going to not bring the data to the masses? Or that no developper was going to make apps that used that data?
  - wreath 5y ago
    There is no way for us to know and I didn't say that w/o Google or other Big Tech we wouldn't be have these candies as someone described. Rather that we should acknowledge the role they played in distributing the tech they didn't create.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      Sure, they did bring them to the market. And they did play a role, which was not vital and that other companies were trying to do at the same time.

sudosysgen 5y ago

I think you're projecting. I'm not thinking at the small scale or missing the forest for the tree. I'm filtering out the implementation details that don't ultimately matter that much. 3 months vacations and a relaxed work ethic are absolutely compatible with issues of housing, Healthcare, and climate change. VC funded start-up oriented solutions are not the only thing that can be done to fix this issue, not by a long shot. Healthcare is a political decision, to begin with, and many EU countries with all of the things you decry basically solved it. Housing is the same way, it's a collective problem that has to be solved collectively. Emergency earthquake notifications is 70s tech. Fancy machine learning approaches to earthquake prediction barely outperform basic linear regression techniques. Emergency notification systems are a solved pro le.. Automatic emergency braking was never developed by American big tech. It was first implemented commercially in Japanese cars. But even here, AEB is a case of small scale thinking - the best way of fixing the issues it targets is not tech but city design. Qualcomm isn't the reason android phones are slow. Qualcomm processors are more than fast enough to do 95% of what you would want to do. The issue is devs who code for the iPhone. Making every processor as fast as the A14 will never happen, people will use lower end processors to save money then. Again, it's just missing the forest for the trees again. The reason why we have the issues we have is, in most cases, not by a lack of tech, but because of other issues. Big tech is not the universal solution to the important problems. By the way, your segment on Google Maps is simply wrong. Digital maps were already used for navigation by then. Google just bought a startup and won the market against Microsoft and OpenStreetMaps. If they lost we'd be using OSM or something from MS instead.