You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain

-- Harvey Dent , in The Dark Knight

Ironically Bill and Melinda Gates turned into sort of worldwide heroes, targeting the big difficult unprofitable problems with the most social impact

It's happened before. Andrew Carnegie gave away most of his fortune which was in its time as substantial as Gates' wealth.

Also, Bill Gates' mom was into public service in big way, so there's some family history. [0] This sort of thing used to be fairly common in the American upper class.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates

Edit: punctuation

Or having enough money to make unprofitable problems profitable for them (e.g. Step 1 invest in Monsanto; Step 2 push Monsanto in developing companies through 'philanthropy').

I'm not a fan of Gates, but it's very unfair to say such things without providing a reliable source.

Why is the Gates foundation investing in GM giant Monsanto? - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matte...

Are Gates and Rockefeller using their influence to set agenda in poor states? - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/15/b...

Monsanto, US, & Gates Foundation pressure Kenya to reverse GMO ban - https://www.rt.com/news/328014-kenya-gmo-us-gates-monsanto/

Gates Foundation is spearheading the neoliberal plunder of African agriculture - https://theecologist.org/2016/jan/21/gates-foundation-spearh...

(And there's lots of articles attacking from a more purely anti-GMO stance, which I don't find particularly helpful, as it's largely the politics/economics behind Monsanto that are the most disturbing.)

Having read these articles, it seems to me he's trying to follow the logic he knows. Hunger? Let's make a partnership with crop-related companies. Diseases? Let's talk to the big pharma. He's following the ways he understands. Not everybody has as much courage as the Indian government in that respect.

> he's trying to follow the logic he knows.

Right - and that's the scary thing. We see what he did in the realm of computing --- now imagine the parallels in the agricultural infrastructure of countries across the world.

He's a hero to some people. I still hate his guts.

And I give him almost no credit for giving some money now. He's giving away stolen money while living in the lap of luxury. Gates acted completely amorally for most of his life and now is simply buying his way into respect. I'm not a Christian, but I'm reminded of Luke 20:45-21:4.

But his Foundation is well-run and effective. Maybe he was a net good for humanity. Probably not, though.

I see your point, but the guy seems to have a different set of values. When he was asking his marketing department to prepare a series of smear campaigns against Linux and Open Source, for example, I don't think he realized he was doing a wrong thing. In his mind, he was probably saving his company from competition, as he always did.

Also, I think a great momentum of Linux in the late 90s was precisely because people hated Microsoft wholeheartedly, and that was one of the main reasons it didn't die as another toy project. So I'd say yes, a net good for humanity - not because but in spite of what he's done so far.

There's plenty of criticism on his Foundation as well. Even if everything it does is good (on which, see above), there would certainly be questions about whether the money is being spent in the best way possible. Setting all of this aside, I think Gates would have to eradicate several horrible diseases just to break even karmically.

I disagree, and also Gates ruined computers for everyone forever.

How so?

Microsoft let the hardware go open-source and generic. And that was an incredible win.

Conversely, Apple and Google ruined handheld computers (which we now call smartphones) forever. So far, anyway. They're fundamentally unsecurable. It's at least nontrivial, and perhaps impossible, to prevent surveillance and tracking.

You won me over with that compelling argument.

I disagree. If Windows were a lot better, the open source revolution might not have gained quite so much momentum. If IE was a lot better—or rather if they didn't let it stagnate—the very concept of installing alternative browsers might never have entered the mainstream zeitgeist.

Same thing is true for Apple's OS, which for many serves as an expensive several year pit-stop between abandoning Microsoft and embracing open source.

Doesn't that pretty much mean "you either turn into a villain or stay a hero until you eventually die"?

No, it means you either die commiting a heroic act, or you're not killed as a hero and end up becoming a villain. Basically saying you'll either die doing a heroic act, or if you die a more natural way of old age or something you may be seeing yourself as a villain.

The quote has mostly to do with risk taking and comfortability that age makes us inclined to adjust. Basically, our habits and creature comforts have a way of making us too complacent and out of touch. Even the best of us can turn into miserable old pricks if we don't take risks and go outside our comfort zones. Even heroes. Heroes die young. So do villains. But an old hero is mighty suspect. Old age isn't due to skill always - sometimes it is due to lack of risk taking - which is a heroes job..

Also see: "Only the good die young."

Taken from the original quote of Nietzsche.

Don't let Nietzsche ride on Hollywoods' coattails. Harvey Dent penned that quip, I saw it on the silver screen. Now please excuse me while I research the themes of crappy sci fi novels to top-post on the next political thread.

One of these doesn't fit:

> BS software patents on applying arithmetic coding to video compression.

https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/84214.html

Also, you missed the biggest one: joining Steve Jobs's anti-poaching agreement, depressing Bay Area software engineer wages for years.

Are bay area software engineer wages really that low that this is the biggest deal?

They were significantly lower during the no-poach agreement. After it ended, Google immediately raised all its engineers' salaries by ~15%, and salaries quickly increased from there.

Look at self driving car engineer salaries today. Those wouldn't have happened under a no-poach agreement. Compare to the mobile OS race, with tens of billions of dollars (at least) on the line. The no-poach agreement between Apple and Google prevented them from beating each other with engineers, so the money poured into lawyers' pockets through litigation instead.

It is a drop in entropy encoder replacing Huffman. Just because the patent is covering dropping it into AV1 doesn't make it ok. It just restricts the scope of the absurdity.

The founder of Xiph says this is the norm for codec patents. I am inclined to believe him.

> Open instant messaging interconnectivity with third parties was canned

True, but I'd say that has been more Facebook's, Apple's and Microsoft's (Skype's) fault. Google offered it for a couple of years, but no big player started to use federation. So I wouldn't blame Google for pulling the plug on something not being used.

However, your list of evil-doing can be extendend, e.g.

- AMP https://hn.algolia.com/?query=amp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...

Would you rather Google created a non-standards-compliant system for preloading articles like Apple and Facebook did? I have yet to hear a cogent argument for why AMP, built on existing web standards and supported by Microsoft, Baidu, Twitter, Pinterest, and Cloudflare (among others), is bad.

Exactly. I keep reminding people that other than Android, which was just a follow on to Apple's pioneering, they havn't really done anything truly innovative on their own COMPLETELY in house other than maybe Google Glass, which you could argue was a response to apple watch and the whole wearable craze (which sorta died out). They really should have stuck with Glass and not chickened out to pressure, hopefully it will be resurrected. All the AI stuff is a result of acquisitions of smaller companies like DeepMind. Waymo is a result of picking of the guys already doing DARPA self driving competitions, arguably one of their best moves but still not really an in house breakthrough. Nowadays, Google constantly plays the "me too" game in every realm. Alexa vs OK Google is a great example. All their X projects sound "feel goody" but ultimately lack luster. They abandon Boston Dynamics which I still think has great potential.

This is a completely absurd claim - if you’ve ever taken a class on modern day systems, you’d know Google is the source of many significant papers that inspired several huge open source projects that power almost every company that needs to scale.

“All the AI stuff is a result of acquisitions” - woefully misguided. Google is hiring academia leaders left, right, and center and growing a collaborative environment that’s innovating. They’re discovering a lot of stuff in-house on this team. They’re building an incredible open-source library with almost 100K Github stars for machine learning.

@self driving, they hired people building projects and are making it into a production self driving car. The latter is a far less constrained problem.

@assistants, The Google Assistant can do way more than Alexa. Not seeing how this is a me too game

> Google Glass, which you could argue was a response to apple watch and the whole wearable craze

Very arguable, considering how Apple Watch was announced in 2014, while Google Glass was first shown off in 2013.

Android was also an acquisition.

They aren’t already?

What sites are chrome-only?

It seems to me, as a news.google.com junkie who recently switched to Firefox (on mobile), that the site has some won't-always-refresh-when-loading issues. It might be Firefox's fault though.

Outside of Google-owned sites, many sites simply don't work properly in Firefox and require Chrome. Could it be the additional privacy features? It might be the web developers' fault, though.

Ever tried adwords? I think my first bug report of it not really working with other browsers was about 6 years ago, that time it was with Opera. My reports usually get verified but commented with "use Chrome instead".

Suggesting that their product works best in their browser is a world away from what MS pulled in the 90's, with the embrace and extend of standards.

I wonder how many relic Intranet apps force the use of old IE in Corporate world because they were built with the 'extended' dialect of JScript.

Google Meet, the hangout replacement if you schedule meetings in Google Calendar

Meet also works in recent versions of Firefox.