Posts by Dinanziame 1317 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2019
I remember clicking on a "don't track me" button somewhere, and as a last-ditch effort, the website showed a message on the lines of: "Are you sure? We're going to show you ads anyway, we might as well try to show you something you're interested in instead of random crap"
Strongly disagree as well. For all its brokenness, the visual aspect makes it far more palatable for me to have meetings. This will affect different people differently, but it's far easier for me to follow what people are saying if I see them speaking. And though it cannot compare to a physical meeting, you still can transfer a lot of visual social cues.
Admittedly, what's the point of sending a human there? It's been done before, at this point it's just checking whether we can do it again fifty years after, with vastly more experience of rocket science and technology that is insanely more powerful. It's not the worst thing to waste money on, but you can do more interesting.
This still seems very complicated and inefficient compared to Japanese bullet trains, which are vastly simpler and cheaper to build. Admittedly they only do 300 km/h, but that is enough to be faster than planes for distances like Milan-Rome, since you remove the trips to/from airport and the waiting time at the airport. For trips under 1000 km, high-speed trains are already competitive with flying, while being far easier to build and use than the hyper loop: As you said, you buy a ticket and wait for the next one. There might be a small range around 1000 km of distance where the hyper loop is fast enough to beat the simplicity of trains and simple enough to beat the speed of flying, but it's very niche and hardly seems worth the trouble.
Android is far more customized by phone manufacturers than you would think. They literally do a separate fork of Android for every single phone model. Every nifty feature like edge touch or foldable screen or having three separate cameras, the manufacturer needs to modify the code. So Google cannot just send an update; they can only provide a patch to manufacturers, and those need to apply the patch to all of their forks. Which is, as noted, not exactly in their interest, since they make money by selling new phones, not by maintaining older ones.
Google has been trying to regain control by putting more and more features away from Android into the Google Play services; though that inevitably raises the problem of them having a monopoly control over Android phones.
It's still very unclear to me how does that work. Let's take Google, which probably has a gap of >600. Google has offices in SF, sells ads to businesses operating in SF. What is this tax applied to? Is it a sales tax on services sold by Google to companies in SF? Or on services sold by Google employees in SF to the rest of the world? Is it a net income tax on profits made by Google in SF? Are Google employees working in SF paying more tax on their salaries?
I do see the article mentions "gross receipts attributable to San Francisco", but as far as I know, this gobbledygook could mean any of the above.
Isn't it still the way the server decides whether to redirect you to the website for mobile?
But also, let us remember this was used by Microsoft to prevent people using Opera from accessing their MSN portal. That was back in 2003, when Microsoft thought that MSN could become a "trusted" part of the web, where everybody would want to go and they would control everything, and the rest of the web would become irrelevant.
As I understand it, reCAPTCHA only issues an actual puzzle to users it has reasons to doubt. In most cases, I only have to click a checkbox marked I am not a robot; and in a few rare cases, like if I'm in incognito mode, I have to click the parts of the image containing a car or something. Which clearly means that Google is fingerprinting me in order to guess whether I'm a human or not, and is storing information over time to facilitate the fingerprinting. It's not possible to get out of that. And ultimately, data that they have is data that they can use for ads; and we're supposed to "trust" them that they don't. Privacy policies are very nice and all, but they've been caught not respecting their own policies, haven't they? Though I guess whatever data they could get through reCAPTCHA would be rather insignificant compared to the firehose the vast majority of users sends to them anyway...
You get one (good) set of results if Google knows it's you but you get another (garbage) set of results if you try to use it anonymously.
Sounds like letting them gorge on your data does make the results better... Which, as it happens, they claim to be the reason they're doing it!
Oh come on, don't say it's creepy! Remember, the computer is your friend!
I wonder what Alphabet's yearly net income is, divided by the number of their users? A quick DDG tells me $34B
Note that net income is what they make after paying for salaries, electricity, data centres, tax, etc. Their total revenue (what they make for selling ads and a bit of cloud computing, before paying for all the stuff above) is $160B, and that's what you would need to replace with a yearly payment.
That said, no matter how much Google uses their power to keep users in, they can only be successful if they have a good product (and they had plenty of failed products like Google+, no matter how hard they tried to push it). It's much better to keep that incentive to keep the product good.
According to StatCounter, Bing has only 1% market share in the US on phones. But on desktops, Bing has 12% market share. And on tablets, Bing apparently has an astonishing 18% market share. So yeah, that's probably people who receive a Windows device and never bother to change the default search engine. No wonder that Google is paying Apple billions for being the default on iOS. On the other, there's far more than 12% of desktops that are on Windows, so a majority of people do change search engines, and that mostly means Google.
Note that Mozilla switched the default to Yahoo in 2014. Then they switched back to Google in 2017, amid lawsuits between Mozilla and Yahoo reported on this excellent website. One particular detail is interesting:
Also of interest is a section explaining that when Mozilla went to market for a search partner in 2014, it considered Yahoo! a very risky proposition and sought special protections in its contract.
This seems to imply that Mozilla does not only use Google because it's paying well, but also because they consider it more reliable.
I never heard that there was anything kept in the browser except cookies and cache. What's even the point of having data that is not stored as a cookie? Isn't it functionally the same? Is information that you are logged in to a website part of "site data", or is it a cookie (which is what I assumed)?
I think the most obvious purpose is to attract people to the Google assistant: "Watch this! Alexa and Siri can't do this!", yadda yadda. The big companies are trying super hard to put every feature from the useful to the ridiculous in their assistants, because they're becoming a major entry point for user queries, and if people use theirs rather than another one, it means they can charge more for ads. It's like the whole Android thing, which technically is not making Google any money — it's free. It's only useful to bring more people to Google services.
Apart from that, I don't think humming recognition serves any useful purpose to Google. The commercially-important part was recognizing copyrighted performances, and that was done long ago.
Google is not known for doing things without a reason
Huh? You mean the Google that did an 8-bit version of Google Maps? Or the Google that has ten different messaging apps? Or the Google that bought Boston Dynamics, never did anything with it and sold it a few years later? Or the Google that named its paying YouTube service YouTube Red?
Quoth the article: “In regard to photogrammetry, we often talked about number of cities or places that have it on Bing vs. Google. However, when I was examining the same area on both platforms, to my surprise (or not), the quality of photogrammetry on Bing is a lot worse, both in texture quality and polygon counts.”
Printing is on the way down, so nobody wants to be the one maintaining the required systems. I was delighted when I realized I could print directly from my phone out of the box thanks to Google cloud print. Alas, I've heard it is going away, because Google can't even bother to just... maintain... it.
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