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ta20240226

Re:Google Mesop: Build web apps in Python on Sunday June 09, 2024 @09:46PM (#40629336)
Remember, this is from the company that thought that laying off their Python team was a good idea.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40171125

Draw your conclusions of the level of support for this library.

> “And if you vote for me, on Day One, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht,” the former president said, generating cheers from the audience,

From the reporting, it seems he was loudly booed throughout his speech. I doubt Ulbricht is getting pardoned.

How is that different than a caricature? Or how about a painting of the person? What about a a figure like what was made of a naked Trump? Or how about the Trump diaper balloon? Or like Kanye did of a a naked Taylor Swift? Or what about SNL “lookalikes”?
Is it the rocks or that the pizza that is served at Google doesn’t have enough glue?
Anyone who founds something called “Future of Life Institute” is until proven otherwise not a top scientist but a top rate megalomaniac and BS artist.
Re:How to Be Obscene (1927) on Friday May 24, 2024 @06:54AM (#40464841)
> But then some good angel puts it into the head of a Boston preacher to read your book and take it to the Boston police, and the police go and arrest a bookclerk for selling your book, which is obscene. Instantly the press agencies flash the name of your book to every town and village in the United States, and your publishers get orders by telegraph from Podunk and Kalamazoo.

This reminds me of Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College a couple of weeks ago.

This was a speech by a fairly obscure guy (he is a place kicker) at a fairly obscure college. But because he said something our culture considers obscene, his speech was on the front page of all the news sites and talked about on Twitter.

Normally, maybe a few hundred people would have heard his speech. Now likely millions of people have at least heard a portion of his speech.

Re:What went wrong with UniSuper and Google Cloud? on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @11:19AM (#40368105)
Remember Google just laid off big swathes of their Python team and their core team.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-...

From the article:

>The Core unit is responsible for building the technical foundation behind the company's flagship products and for protecting users' online safety, according to Google's website. Core teams include key technical units from information technology, its Python developer team, technical infrastructure, security foundation, app platforms, core developers, and various engineering roles.

Basically, Sundar Pichai is taking the McDonnell Douglas approach to engineering and just deciding to coast on Google’s previous engineering.

The danger is that while you may have short-term stock returns, you destroy the engineering culture and it is only a matter of time before the doors blow off mid flight like a 737.

Re:Meta rebuffs Google's virtual reality tie-up proposal on Friday March 01, 2024 @03:39PM (#39566530)
I don’t see how this appeals to Meta. It’s not like Meta is primarily a hardware company that doesn’t have expertise in software. They are primarily a software company. In addition, they have a lot of engineers who are familiar with low-level programming, so that is not an issue.

In addition as IBM and Samsung have learned, the OS vendor, not the hardware manufacturer, is the one who controls the platform.

Re:AI Regurgitating Propaganda on Friday March 01, 2024 @06:36AM (#39560816)
For those trying to make a comparison between this versus what happened with Gemini, the big difference is not bias, but whose bias.

This is reflecting the bias of the source material reflecting a society wide bias. I bet if a human evaluated all the text that the model was trained on, they would probably find that the material itself likely had an anti-Palestinian bias.

The Gemini example, however, did not represent the bias in the source material, but rather the biases of the Google management and engineers.

Reflecting the bias of the source material is unfortunate but understandable. Injecting your own bias on purpose is a different matter, and is assuming a level of control that invites scrutiny.