valker43

I would argue that there is a huge segment of users that would technically be interested in playing actual AAA games but can't be bothered to put up the initial investment. Many friends of mine don't have TV's or a beefy PC. Laptop and phone is pretty much the standard. But if they had the option to click a button on a YouTube video and check out a game, they might. A subscription is psychologically much more appealing to most people that a big payment upfront. Especially if there is a free trial. It's kind of like the difference between CapEx vs OpEx.

I think this segment will be a primary target of Stadia. If you want uncompressed 4K, 144hz, HDR with extremly low latency then your not currently playing on a console anyway and probably have a $2000+ machine sitting on your desk. For the enthusiast the tech is not there yet in streaming. But make no mistake. It will be there soon(ish). The day is not that far off when local machines will disappear for almost anything. And on a technical level nobody will be able to tell the difference.

Maybe a dumb question. But why run those VM's (or the development tools) strictly locally? I have a small server at home for that. Or alternatively there are free tiers on GCP/AWS/Azure. The advent and maturity of WebAssembly/PWA, could help there as well. But we're not there yet obviously.

Well, one could argue that the ad campaign was made in bad faith. Warrens people knew it would be flagged automatically by fb's algorithms because of the logo. No one at Facebook actually decided to pull the ad. And it wouldn't have been, if it weren't for going against ToS. The damage is done. But very insidious tactic still.

> When it's in their own self-interest I'm not sure whether they're being friendly or not. Can't really tell.

Does it have to be mutually exclusive. Sure, Google is hoping you're going to go GKE for your Kubernetes/Container needs. But you're completely free to use another cloud, or roll your own.

For all cloud native backend stuff I really love Go (and Rust for that matter).

Two ways of looking at it. Many see it as a betrayal of Google's ideals. They left in 2010 because there was a breach in gmail originating from government affiliates and consequently endangering customers. Also, it the west this was perceived as a stand against human rights issues in China. So now a reentry looks like they are backtracking from that stance.

On the other hand, as you say, a purely pragmatic view is that it wouldn't make the situation worse if they offer a censored search engine, because that's the only thing (most) Chinese users get now anyway.

It all comes down to economics. The population is OK with the CCP's policies because they brought unprecedented growth. The GDP growth chart since the cultural revolution is really almost hard to believe. The part of the population that's profiting from this development happens to be large enough to lead to a somewhat stable political situation.

This is obviously supported by extremely authoritative measures from government. Just look at what's happening in Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan. Imagine now, what happens when the growth engine stops or even reverses. The population might be much less accommodating to restrictive policies like the social credit system.

This is relevant. But Google is also held to a higher standard. Not necessarily by the user base at large, but by the (tech) media. When I saw articles describing Amazons and Microsofts continued support for military and government contracts (Hololens, Pentagon Cloud contract, Jeff Bezos tweets, GovCloud) there is some push back in the comments. But many commenters were actually praising their steadfast commitment of "not giving in to public pressure", and "if they don't do it, China will win". In that way, they kind of got away with it and Google is now at competitive disadvantage. It's weird, because I don't believe MS or AMZN's personell is any more fine with it than Google's is.

Anyway. I can't say I'm surprised by this. I'm just hoping we manage to overcome nationalistic behavior in time. Global problems (AI regulation, climate change, human augmentation) will require global cooperation on a level that will allow no self-serving behavior. And unfortunately evolution has ill prepared us for this.

That's what I don't get. This seems to be true in a more general sense as well. Amazon just keeps pushing things out at an insane rate. Be it through acquisitions or native dev.

Google Assistant for example is mostly superior to Alexa. Yes, Alexa technically has more connected device options. But not really that much any more. They are just really good at somehow capturing markets.

AWS is more extreme still. In many ways GCP is technically superior. I suppose a lot of it is first mover advantage on Amazons part. But some of it the perception people have of Google not supporting stuff. Which might be true for beta software and consumer products. But is not at all worse than other clouds for commercial (paid) offerings.

Off topic: Amazon also seems to dodge the brunt of the press onslaught tech firms have been receiving for the last two or three years (mostly deserved, yes). But Amazon is arguable worse in regards to monopolistic behavior and probably equal with regards to privacy.

I get the feeling Google is held to a higher standard because of perceived political stance. While they often publicly take a stance for one issue or another while Amazon simply ignores everything acts more like a a business of old: completely devoid of any politics.

A similar thing is seen in investor relations. Amazon generally seems to get more leeway in regards to capital expenditure. They invest like crazy in all sorts of ventures. As does Alphabet. But analysts only seem to reprimand Alphabet for that. It seems obvious that with Amazons entrance into advertising, and if Google doesn't somehow catch up in the cloud space or looses it's arguable lead in AI then Amazon (and Microsoft I guess) will eventually take over all of IT within the next 10 or 20 years.

My possible personal biases: I like what Alphabet is doing with it's other bets. The crazy stuff. Stuff that doesn't make immediate business sense. Also, and this is unpopular, I like that their taking a political stance in some cases. I like to believe that the founders are actually in it for more than money.

In essence, yes. Except the human assistant could technically be coerced to spill the beans on you. Via bribes or blackmail, etc.

Gmail dosen't. The ads you see have nothing to do with your mail activity. They haven't for a while now. Not saying Google is a paragon of privacy, mind you.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

Except this is a book store pretty much everyone on the internet visits daily. And the books aren't photo copies but small synopses and blurbs.

If you want to go further you get the whole thing on the creators page, which, surprise, is ad-supported or paywalled. Big content creators basically want the ad revenue (which they get, in large, via portals like Google) and a payment from the portals for the service of getting them that ad-revenue.

Previous such legislation in Spain and Germany was a complete disaster. Spain is now without Google News and ad-revenue is down for many content creators. Germany content producers basically caved and gave Google banket permission to list their stuff.

This is a power move originating from the biggest publishers (which will be the only ones potentially profiting). The smaller outlets are actually against it.

So, Medium?