mathteddybear
essentially, provided you were at a right place in a right time, you could get a BSc in it
If you order food directly, you won't have the delivery tracking on the map. Even within the app, if the restaurant provides their own couriers, you lose the visibility and arrival ETA info.
And 15% might look impressive, but if you are getting your food from a delivery app, you probably don't care that much about food price in the first place.
There is a section 2.1.3 "Online platform studies versus lift tests" in the article. For the marketing tools purpose, you can use either (or some mixture of both). There are pros and cons to the choice.
It's not the only thing that changed. Good thing, my manager joined Google back in these older years, so, for instance, he could say to me that I was "expected to rise to L5" in such a way that I knew it wasn't enforced in our org.
Other companies in that auction could apply this kind of optimization, too. Perhaps the improvement is not as large for smaller participants, and so, not worth looking into.
At that time, the exchange was a second-price auction, and all parties could submit up to two bids (presumably, the top two bids from their own collection of advertisers). Let's call the Google bids G1 > G2.
Since Google already implemented automated bidding strategies, they would submit to this auction (1+a)G1 and (1+b)G2 for certain fixed small value parameters a,b. Project Bernanke computed on historical data the optimal values of these a,b parameters.
Cue government discovery misunderstanding documentation
Generally speaking, we have all kind of LARPs in the sword-and-sorcery scene
- battle LARPS - no story, just hit the participants belonging to the other faction, preferably in formations. This ranges from smug reenactment-quality groups, like Warhammer Fantasy fans in Europe, to groups that retain fantasy-themed clothing the way sports such as tennis have a specific proper attire, like Belegarth society in USA.
- (story-rich) LARPS - these originated with to "let's play D&D but in real life" and some of them even kept the trappings of the original, such as "levels" or "character classes"; some of them drop most of the gamey aspects, becoming more or less like those "chamber" LARPs mentioned by the OP (only in a fantasy setting; though, a Dune LARP could be a thinly-veiled middle-east, for all I know)
What follows is that these companies have enough revenue to afford FAANG salaries. And FAANG employees in foreign countries have their salaries computed by HR spreadsheets, with the goal of making a family-oriented employee quality of life on par in every country. According to levels.fyi, in Poland Google pays $96.7k to SWE L4. Sure, those salaries were often set when the particular office location was created, and inflation happened since, unevenly. So you might find even higher reported salary from tech companies that opened their Warsaw office somewhat recent.
So, even the entry level SWE earn more than custom software contractors. Beyond that, there's more. With their skillset, 10x employees could leave and form start-ups. To prevent that, the FAANG have a career ladder that make 10x employees earn 10x more every 10 years. Provided they jump the promo hoops.
Again, the tech companies afford that, because their revenue comes from tech products
That isn't to say that as an SWE in these companies you couldn't work on a CRUD database project for some internal website. Perhaps you can get promoted doing that, even though it has more in common with custom software development.
Generative AI notwithstanding, in order to make a game you will hire some artists, and the best artists are "getting paid in USD" already, to use the words from this discussion thread. They may be talent living locally, but they work on-line, too.
Thus, successful indie games usually have budgets "in USD" and sales "in USD". I mean, making one is still a first world problem.
https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0310016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpI8hIgOyko
Soon later, "debugging backwards in time" morphed into "time-travel debugging"
I don't want to speculate, but it's not inconceivable that this will be achieved by AI within the future lifetime of XTX
Counterpoint - since I left Google, little birds told me good things happened, for example, cranking down on the travel expenses (that higher-ups used to spent with little to none oversight)
Google used a second price auction, and also it ranked ads in the auction by bid multiplied by click through rate. Squashing is something like ranking ads by (bid * power(ctr, gamma)) where 0 < gamma < 1. In auctions where the 3rd bid (or lower) wins under the (bid * ctr) rank switching to squashing may increase revenue, because the actually higher bid will win the auction.
In particular, the linked article mentions 'squashing', and a quick research finds https://www.theregister.com/2010/09/16/yahoo_does_squashing/ where it is mentioned that ads are ranked not by bids, but rather by "bid multiplied by click probability". In the ideal world, the first question to the auction expert should be "what price is charged, if due to click probability, the second bid ad wins the auction?"
For all we know, it is equally plausible that Google at some point launched a new prediction model, and in a traffic experiment it showed up the following stats: increase on campaign average cpc price, decrease on average auction discount (or whatever the metric for the gap to 2nd bid is called), and no harm to conversion cost. Team manager reported the metrics highlights to their higher ups. Emails found in discovery... ends with guys on HN throwing fraud accusations, pretty easy.
> Dahlquist asked Juda if they had introduced changes to ad sales in a way that raised the cost-per-click by a consumer that advertisers pay. "I believe that's fair," said Juda.
> But Wendy Waszmer, a lawyer for Google, asked Juda on Wednesday afternoon on if there were ways that his ads quality team could raise prices unilaterally. "No," Juda responded.
Regarding the article and the auctions, I recall the internship at Google in the noughties. There was an overview talk on search and ads. One thing that was clear back then, the ads are not ranked by the bids alone. They are ranked by bid multiplied by ad score. As the ad gets displayed more and more, the score tends to be based on the click-through rate of the ad. That way, a bad ad that does not get clicked on effectively cannot be forced to display by bidding high.
On the other hands, in most reporting on these antitrust cases, folks read "auction" and the picture they have in mind is like an art auction, the highest bidder wins. Then they report on obvious things as if this was some revelation of manipulation.