You could also argue that Google tried to reinvent Skype, Slack, Discord, and a million other chat apps, and they cannibalized their own offerings because they were feckless and mercurial.
Yeah, and also cuz they kinda sucked. 1st-gen iMessage, or even old-school Trillian, was loads better than Google's graveyard of shitty chat products.
Google had no overarching chat strategy, just threw gobs of money and different teams at reinventing different spokes of the wheels, never thinking about the cart as a whole.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Also: please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. We're trying for a different sort of site here.
Google Talk evolved into Hangouts which then evolved into Chat. It's all one continuous line with a terrible marketing strategy. From what I can tell, Meet seems to be just a confusing way to access Hangouts video chats.
I can still see all of my Talk/Hangouts/Chat history going back years. Removing XMPP sucks, and I was annoyed by that too, but the chat history is still there.
What do you mean by "Cloudflare isn't a slick Brand"?
I feel like they're the only cloud company that's been doing any real innovation for the last 5-10 years, and in a very approachable and affordable way.
Spinoza's God is interesting not because it's a competitor to the Christian God or Thor or whatever, but because it's a rarely-explored aspect of Einstein's belief system (and confusion) about the origins of, well, everything.
Questions of religion vs science plague proper scientists too, Einstein among them, and nobody really has a clear answer about how to proceed. It's the sort of inquiry that is itself perhaps a precursor to eventual discoveries -- what is now "What happened before the Big Bang? Did someone create it?" may one day, if we're lucky, be answered by something like "It depends. Which big bang are you talking about?" But there's no harm in asking the questions... just jumping to conclusions.
>>> Questions of religion vs science plague proper scientists too, Einstein among them
This is something you are making up, because in his own words Einstein clealry states opposite of your claim:
"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
You can't just take one quote out of context and use it to paint Einstein as altogether disinterested in religion -- he wasn't.
To him, there was a difference between believing in Your Own Personal Jesus™, or some variation of Abraham's fickle, meddling god (as in Judaism, Christianity, Catholicism, Islam), vs contemplating religion as a social/moral force and a line of philosophical inquiry about the origins of structure and organization in the universe. The whole point of him mentioning "Spinoza's God" is to underscore that difference.
Einstein wrote about religion on more than one occasion, and his views weren't as straightforward as "religion is dumb, I don't think about it." Far from it; he recognized the universe as something inherently profound and beautiful and drew from it a philosophical sense of spirituality. No one is accusing him of being a Bible thumping Jesus lover, but he was definitely interested (on the side) on questions of spirituality, purpose, etc.
My own personal take is that Einstein recognized the limits of our understanding and drew peace and inspiration from the boundless complexity yet to be understood. He found it powerfully spiritual, but he did not attribute it to a "personal" god the same way a follower of the Abrahamic religions would. Nonetheless he was interested in these questions, even if he didn't have the answers and didn't believe the Christians did.
You wrote a lot of words to argue an unrelated point. Whether someone is interested in religion is not the same as whether they find truth in religion.
> Whether someone is interested in religion is not the same as whether they find truth in religion.
OK, I agree with that assessment. But I wasn't arguing that Einstein was deeply theistic. I was saying he and other scientists were deeply interested in religion -- not to the degree of a theologian, obviously, but interested nonetheless. I believe that to still be true.
We as a species may lack the mental faculties to truly understand the mechanisms by which life evolved the ability to analyze and reason about its surroundings and itself.
We lack the scientific tools to properly differentiate or falsify "consciousness" from any other sufficiently complex phenomenon. We can't tell whether it's an emergent phenomenon arising out of a particular arrangement of energy and matter, or whether it requires some input that we cannot currently observe/measure, or something else entirely. We don't know whether we can create consciousness from its constituent parts, or if it even has constituent parts. We don't know if there's a finite supply of it in the universe, we don't know if it's a dimensional thing, we don't know how it interacts with other forces.
We do know that it appears as though we have much more agency than a rock, yes, but it's a matter of degree how much more when we compare ourselves to other lifeforms, primates, dolphins, elephants, ravens... or other people. We don't know if certain members of our species are "more" or "less" conscious. We don't fully know what happens to consciousness during comas or brain death or dream states or sleep.
It's just an ambiguous term that we apply to the "state of human information processing that we can't really explain". Substitute "ambiguous" for "illusion" if you prefer, but it could also very well be an illusion the same way centrifugal force is a pseudo-force, i.e. the measurement of consciousness depends on some reference frame that we don't know how to use yet.
It's entirely possible that consciousness is NOT an illusion, that it is indeed a special "thing" in the universe, but we can't prove that with the science, language, philosophy, and possibly mental capacity that we currently have. Maybe one day we will. Maybe not. But it's premature to assume we understand anything about consciousness in the philosophical sense.
Why are you concentrating on individual animals, where herd behaviour of them can not be explained by behavior of individual. Same applies to people - there are enough of examples in history of groups of people believing in God and his plan and that belief has led to catastrophic consequences for tribes and even nations...
For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet and Life on earth can go extinct.
I don't understand what you're trying to point out. That groups of things can have behaviors that lone individuals don't exhibit? Yes, that is true, whether at the atomic level or the cellular level or the family level or the population level or the species level or the ecosystem level... it's very fascinating, to be sure, but in what way does that prove or disprove any sort of god? It's just the same Watchmaker argument, i.e. that complexity requires a maker, which it arguably does not. Complex behaviors, even flock behaviors, can evolve from the sum of its constituent parts. A pinball machine with eight balls in play will react very different from one with a single ball or no balls, but nobody accuses the pinball machine of being sentient (or if they did, I'd really like to play that machine).
> For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet and Life on earth can go extinct.
Yes, and? I wouldn't worry about it too much... you'll likely die from something far more banal, like plain old climate-change-driven political instability, North Korea, the next anti-vax movement, etc.
What's the philosophical difference between your subjective experience of existence and a 90s-style power-on-self-test?
"I am on. I can tell that I am on. I dunno what I think once I am off." Same could be said of man, machine, consciousness, whatever.
What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.
Huh? Subjective experience is about whether the machine experiences the power-on-self-test, not about what it emits externally. Animals, machines or even rocks might all be conscious, but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means.
>What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.
> but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means.
Yeah, exactly. We haven't developed a good enough Turing test -- for machines, people, or gods.
> What a ridiculous strawman.
I don't believe is a strawman as much as you think it is. A lot of arguments for consciousness derive from the desire for humans to be special, which is in turn derived from Abrahamic cosmology that places us directly beneath their God.
I'm imagining The Universe™ sitting in front of a crusty old interdimensional space laptop, thumbs-upping your actions in the ol' Fatebook once in a while. Probably The Universe™ ran out of space cats and you were the next best thing. What a fortunate turn of events.
> (eastdakota) That limitation doesn’t apply to the R2 service or Workers generally. We’ll update and clarify our ToS. Thanks for flagging!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28683255