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Some 20 - 10 years ago I was seriously interested in joining Google for many of the reasons he lists. In the end I never applied because at the time they had n
by usr1106 2y ago
Some 20 - 10 years ago I was seriously interested in joining Google for many of the reasons he lists. In the end I never applied because at the time they had no development in any country I would have been interested to relocate to.
However, during recent years I have turned into a Google hater. He does not mention any of those aspects. Google is an evil business IMHO. They are an advertising company. The challenges for this planet are sustainability. The goal of advertising is to waste resources. I can type this on a low end phone that soon turns 10. It works perfectly, except that no recent Android version is supported. Google is in the business that cores and memory have been doubled several times since then, for no benefit to mankind. And phones are far from the only category, advertisement is about selling a lot of stuff that does not bring any true improvement in quality of life. Video is one of the worst energy wasters in computing. 90% of Youtube is useless crap, not worth destroying the planet. Nobody would pay a realistic price for it. They are an ugly oligopolist. The list could go on and on...
- ben_w 2y agoSimilar, but less emotively. I'm disappointed in them but I'm not a hater. > 90% of Youtube is useless crap That is the way of all things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law But the best of YouTube, people are clearly willing to pay for that.
- usr1106 2y agoI would be willing to pay based on usage. But my usage is so low that the current price feels horrendous per hour.
- andsoitis 2y ago> But my usage is so low that the current price feels horrendous per hour. I don’t know how you can decry video streaming and advertising as destroying the planet and thus hating one of the companies that provide these services YET you use it.
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 2y agoGoogle is a monopoly. Of course you can complain over such a company even if you use their products.
- rglullis 2y agoThey do not have a monopoly on video streaming, and if they did piracy would be the morally acceptable option.
- aikinai 2y agoGoogle is not even close to that kind of monopoly. Every one of their products has viable alternative, and plenty of anti-Google people get by without using them.
- denkmoon 2y agoThat certainly isn't true of youtube. It, exclusively, holds a lot of videos. It's not like I can just watch random youtuber on vimeo or some kind of gnutube.
- ben_w 2y agoFWIW, about a third of the high-quality creators I subscribed to on YouTube initially, also maintain a presence on Nebula. It's not enough to fully switch, but at the very least I get their stuff without mis-gendered advertising — as seen the other day on YouTube, where I was presented with an unskippable ad for sanitary pads.
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 2y agoWhat portion of the low quality creators you subscribe to?
- ben_w 2y agoNone? Though looking at my subs list, the low quality channels are mostly personal friends sharing stuff that won't have a broad reach, much like my own is now I'm not making indie games. (They also post so infrequently that I forgot I'd subscribed to them).
- 9dev 2y agoThe point, though, is the 90% are having a disastrous impact on the environment, despite being fundamentally irrelevant and thus wasteful.
- ben_w 2y agoThat claim of environmental impact is just incorrect when it comes to the junk content. The bad ones are barely watched; sitting on a hard drive after getting transcoded isn't an environmental disaster. You could try to argue that popular culture is fundamentally bad; people have been saying that about TV when I was a kid, dance music before that, novels in the 1800s, Christmas in Puritan New England, and the Olympics in ancient Rome. The people tend to disagree.
- 9dev 2y agoThat isn’t true, even just accounting for people expecting the same speed and quality for fringe videos, delivered to mobile devices in any corner of the world, requires mountains of technology. It’s not that popular culture is bad, it’s that a wasteful way of living isn’t sustainable, and it’s beginning to erode the foundations of our lives.
- ben_w 2y agoSounds like you're shifting the goalposts from "youtube is bad" to "the internet is bad" in the first paragraph, and then in the second paragraph to "everything after the start of the first industrial revolution is also sus".
- sva_ 2y agoAt least newer Android phones have something like 7 years of updates, so there is some progress. The claim that more memory/computing power has no benefits at all seems nonsensical.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoI can do fewer things with my computer than I could when computers were slower. Software has more than destroyed the gains of hardware. (The only exception is numerical simulation, which I need occasionally for academic research, but not in my day-to-day life.) Video games, supposedly the Killer App for high-end computing hardware, are among the worst offenders: your average modern 2D side-scrolling platformer (Mario clone) locks up my computer (to say nothing of AAA games). Web browsers are the second-worst offenders. Chat clients (secretly web browsers) are third: they barely work, and interoperability has gone the way of the dodo. Operating systems are fourth: they (mostly) still let you use older versions of software, but they have mostly just grown new problems (e.g. built-in adware in Windows; GNOME… well, GNOME) without fixing long-standing ones (e.g. slow domain login in Windows; most systemd misfeatures).
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoWhich application works better on newer phones? Can't see any difference, except maybe games and new AI crap that nobody needs.
- hakhan0301 2y agolol; Of all the evils, these are pretty tame. I know people hate Google, but this feels like we've gone on a witch hunt.
- j_timberlake 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]