4 ms·

I always heard "I don't know how to count that low" as more of a tongue-in-cheek joke about Google's scale, not necessarily a sign of smug superiority, or that

by alecbz 5y ago

I always heard "I don't know how to count that low" as more of a tongue-in-cheek joke about Google's scale, not necessarily a sign of smug superiority, or that work at smaller scales "didn't matter". Like if someone was wondering "is it wasteful to store this data as a 1 GiB file, maybe we should compress it/structure it differently", someone might say "I forgot how to count that low", meaning, "that's a small enough amount of space that it's not worth it to worry about optimizing it".

TulliusCicero 5y ago
> I always heard "I don't know how to count that low" as more of a tongue-in-cheek joke about Google's scale, not necessarily a sign of smug superiority, or that work at smaller scales "didn't matter". This is exactly correct. I dunno where the author's coming from, it sounds like they might be one of those people who frequently misinterprets others' intent.
ergocoder 5y ago
I was at Google, and I didn't see anyone using it with superiority complex.
nybble41 5y ago
1 GiB? That's nothing. I just finished reformatting 280 GiB of Google Takeout data from .tgz format into a 130 GiB SquashFS filesystem (both for space reasons and to allow efficient random access). It would have been nice to be able to do that on the server without downloading 150 GB of extra data first, plus another 30+ GiB because one of the downloads failed partway through and couldn't be resumed due to the download URLs having very short expiration times relative to the file sizes. Apparently 180 GiB of data transfer and 150 GiB of storage doesn't register as worthy of optimization for Google, but it's quite a bit for your typical home user.
- Seirdy 5y ago
  I'd imagine that the inconvenience of handling takeout data is beneficial for Google's business interests, so there isn't a big incentive to improve the situation.
  - nybble41 5y ago
    How many other services make it relatively painless to download all your data in one place? Or at all, for that matter? For me, the existence of Google Takeout is definitely a selling point when comparing their services to the competition. There is room for improvement, and perhaps some conflicting interests are at work behind the scenes, but I wouldn't say they go out of their way to make the process inconvenient.
    - Seirdy 5y ago
      I'm not saying that they go out of their way to make it inconvenient; I'm saying that making it more convenient is probably not going to give them an ROI of any sort .

by alecbz 5y ago

TulliusCicero 5y ago

> I always heard "I don't know how to count that low" as more of a tongue-in-cheek joke about Google's scale, not necessarily a sign of smug superiority, or that work at smaller scales "didn't matter". This is exactly correct. I dunno where the author's coming from, it sounds like they might be one of those people who frequently misinterprets others' intent.

ergocoder 5y ago

I was at Google, and I didn't see anyone using it with superiority complex.

nybble41 5y ago

1 GiB? That's nothing. I just finished reformatting 280 GiB of Google Takeout data from .tgz format into a 130 GiB SquashFS filesystem (both for space reasons and to allow efficient random access). It would have been nice to be able to do that on the server without downloading 150 GB of extra data first, plus another 30+ GiB because one of the downloads failed partway through and couldn't be resumed due to the download URLs having very short expiration times relative to the file sizes. Apparently 180 GiB of data transfer and 150 GiB of storage doesn't register as worthy of optimization for Google, but it's quite a bit for your typical home user.

Seirdy 5y ago
I'd imagine that the inconvenience of handling takeout data is beneficial for Google's business interests, so there isn't a big incentive to improve the situation.
- nybble41 5y ago
  How many other services make it relatively painless to download all your data in one place? Or at all, for that matter? For me, the existence of Google Takeout is definitely a selling point when comparing their services to the competition. There is room for improvement, and perhaps some conflicting interests are at work behind the scenes, but I wouldn't say they go out of their way to make the process inconvenient.
  - Seirdy 5y ago
    I'm not saying that they go out of their way to make it inconvenient; I'm saying that making it more convenient is probably not going to give them an ROI of any sort .