Googler... ex-Googler

> I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.

Yes, you were. Next time, please choose a company that contributes to society rather than shoving ads in everyone's faces.

No need to kick someone while they are down.

Google contributes to society.

Search helps people find information. YouTube is quite possibly the most prolific source of learning ever created. Without Google Translate I'd have had a much harder time in a recent trip to Japan.

There's a lot of bad, but no contribution to society? That's a bit much.

Disclaimer: Ex-googler (left 2 years ago).

I worked at Google, and now I work at derivative finance. No sympathy should be expected when you don’t contribute anything valuable to society.

To an awful lot of people work is food and roof over their heads, and they're lucky if they can manage even that.

I found this comment rather funny.

Ironically you're statistically very likely to be writing this comment in a browser based on chrome.

And Chrome really helped save us from an Internet "embraced and extended" by Microsoft. We were heading for Microsoft succeeding in their (not first) attempt at owning the Internet.

Someone extremely critical of Google is likely to not just use Firefox? That doesn't sound statistically likely.

Well, two points to that: 1) If this person doesn't use Google products, then they are going out of their way to avoid Google. They are then very aware that their values are overruling technical benefits. 2) Surely if they are this invested in Firefox then they know who's been funding Firefox for years?

I'm typing this from within Firefox, which I switched to over the adblocking changes. But I'd say that claiming Google has contributed nothing to society is silly.

There's also the AI stuff with transformers, running the deepmind work with alphafold, alphago, alphazero. And GSOC.

And the papers on bigtable, spanner, mapreduce, etc… bootstrapping modern big data, spawning many opensource copycats.

And Android? I used a linux based Nokia N900 before Android, but clearly the world preferred Android.

Hell, Google Search itself was once a paradigm shifting improvement over alternatives.

> Without Google Translate I'd have had a much harder time in a recent trip to Japan.

I haven't used Google Translate in years. You do know there are alternatives, don't you?

How is Internet being "embraced and extended" by Google feeling like as society contribution?

It has literally turned into ChromeOS, with exception of Safari, and Firefox meagre 3% hardly matter.

I do. I try them from time to time, they weren't better.

I didn't say they were better. Just that without Google Translate, I doubt you would have had a much harder time in your recent trip to Japan because you could have used them, and they aren't particularly worse :-).

Yeah, probably a poorly executed assault, but I felt it was an intent instead to kick Google with that comment.

i am also extremely pissed at his complete lack of self awareness... of course, i am sad for what happened to him. but holly shit. do you think you were saving the world or what? you were working on a glorified spyware.

Try out the big LLMs for translating and explaining translation (e.g. ChatGPT). Much better than Google translate in my experience.

It's not just about whether you yourself use Google Translate, it's that - much more than anywhere else I've ever travelled - Japanese people will regularly use Google Translate to communicate with you, usually by typing or speaking into their tablet and then showing you the machine translation.

I'm not sure, specially as a lot of income for mozilla foundation came from google.

I don't think switching to an LLM is exactly in line with what GP was trying to say :)

I definitely think that there's a difference in kind about what Google has done and what Microsoft attempted to do.

Microsoft wanted everyone on MSN instead of the Internet. They bullied their browser to be the only one, and then kept it crippled. They tried to own the scripting language (VBScript) of the Internet.

I'm going to try right now: Oh, looks like I can visit any website I want with Chrome. Or Chromium. Or now IE also using Chromium.

Google is of course still driven by capitalism, not altruism. But when you look at their history they've in the vast majority of cases done the right thing arguably for the wrong reason.

And that's because Google's incentives have been aligned differently. Microsoft earns money from Windows and Windows related services (very broad here, where I include Office). Until Bing, every time someone used the Internet instead of native apps, Microsoft basically lost money. Definitely lost power.

Every time someone spends more time on the Internet, Google earns more money, statistically. So Google, in a complete opposite to Microsoft, has been incentivised to help people get onto the open web.

Yes, after Microsoft's surrender the Chromium market share is too big. And it's a problem. But at least thanks to Apple you cannot make a website that only works on Chrome. Especially since Chrome on iPhone uses WebKit, not Chromium, because of Apple app rules.

Another problem with Google is that some important opensource projects have a large set of maintainers be Google employees. But the alternative is that they… not contribute? Didn't we say that big companies should give back to opensource? But of course they'll work on what they need. Though there will be a large overlap.

It's kind of a first world problem that the open source (apache license) Kubernetes has "too many google employees" as contributors.

During Microsoft's domination, this was not the problem. This was not the problem at all.

What can you not do, or need to special case, with Safari+AWS?

Android, OK there Google asserts control. Not total control (see any Samsung phone), but a lot.

They are actively enshittifying search and YouTube. So if these things are good for society, and Google is making them worse , it feels like we shouldn't be giving them too much credit.

I'm aware I don't contribute anything valuable yet. No hard feelings :).

On the contrary, I'm trying to get to the point I can sustain my own small projects and stop worrying about Corporate America once and for all.

He did, he worked at Google. What is your contribution to society? Some language reinventing the wheel for the 500th time? Google created a dozen of those alone and they don't even make the footnote of the contributions list.

Actually in quite a few places there (mostly in Kyushu) they used a bespoke handheld device or DeepL.

> YouTube is quite possibly the most prolific source of learning ever created.

That's bizarre.

how's that going for you?