Content gets more engagement as it gets closer to the "policy line" of getting banned, and in a competitive information environment (an engagement maximizing algorithm) you end up with a lot of content close to the border of what's allowed.
I remember software working really badly in the early 2000s, when Microsoft had an unassailable monopoly over everything. Then there were a bunch of changes: Windows started getting better with Windows 7, Firefox and then Chrome started being usable instead of IE, and Google and Apple products were generally a huge breath of fresh air.
Since then, Google and Apple products have become just as bad as Microsoft's. I think this is because the industry has moved towards an oligopoly where no one is really challenging the big players anymore, just like Microsoft in the late 1990s. The big companies compete with each other, but in oblique ways that go after revenue not users.
Can someone link to a real source for this? Like, a paper or something? This seems very interesting and important and I'd prefer to look at something less sketchy than venturebeat.com
> It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something
Probably worth Googling something like [men who don't have social media] to think what women think about this, it's more positive than you might think :)
Approximately what proportion of the US federal budget is spent on scientific research? What proportion is spent on foreign aid? Looking up these values is a useful exercise.
A billion here, a billion there, before you know it you're talking about some real money.
If I were president I would probably cut from military spending - but at some point that becomes painful to cut aswell.
A lot of people have misunderstood me in this thread, at no point do I want to see public research cut. Its just that the same people who are worried about what climate change will bring over next 50 years (and I am too!) dont seen to feel any sense of alarm at the federal government living outside its means for the next 50 years, and I can not understand why
Because the federal government is not in any sense living outside its means.
I’m not sure how to explain this to you, really - you’re fundamentally stuck, I think, on the idea that the gov is like a business or a household, and needs to budget the same way. It really doesn’t.
Maybe think of it this way, to start to get your head around it: current debt is just over 100% of GDP - so in some sense the US has borrowed about a years worth of production. 100% sounds scary, but does 12 months sound so scary? Would you consider yourself in catastrophic debt if you owed a year of your salary?
Personally I wish my mortgage was only a year of my salary!
You can call it stuck if you want, I guess I am - how can this not be a bad thing? It feels like its not a bad thing until suddenly it is. Countries can & do go broke. You can sell your house and break even, thr govt cant sell the NIH
Consider the idea that without decades of money printing, your house might only cost 1 year of salary in the first place
Or maybe let me ask it a other way - if the govt really doesnt need to balance the budget, why dont we have 50 aircraft carriers and free healthcare for all? Such huge sums of money go beyond merely number balancing, at some piint theyre forcefully managing the real resources of the nation
Debt can’t increase to infinity, true - but that does not mean it can’t be a finite number indefinitely.
And the current finite number is nowhere close to causing a crisis for the US (Japan had two and a half times GDP in debt and did not collapse into hyperinflation or some other catastrophic fate, for example).
I don't honestly think that technology is meaningfully downstream of money. A startup or hobbyist can build something that costs Google several million dollars in a weekend. Most of these systems are complex, but not as complex as e.g. an operating system.
But upgrading technology requires government administrative capacity. That's generally cheaper than outsourcing technology development to third parties, but does require a commitment to try to understand the thing you're managing.
Politicians don't hire competent administrators because they believe that building a solution yourself and buying a solution from a contractor are basically equivalent, which anyone on this website can tell you is not true. This is an easier problem to solve than most think, but it's not trivial. And it's really hard when you have clowns like Elon Musk purposefully destroying institutional knowledge for no good reason.
You're right that a hobbyist couldn't build something like search or maps or docs in a weekend, but a lot of what Google ships is boring webapps. And I promise that they are really hard to ship: approvals are annoying and time-consuming, and the infrastructure is designed for scalability and performance, not flexibility or iteration speed.
There's a joke inside Google that Google infra makes easy things hard and impossible things possible.
Google is a mess of configuration languages. Starlark, GCL, piccolo, textproto, yaml, the weird subset of starlark boq uses. From the outside it seems a lot more uniform than it is.
It's a mess, yes, but it's better than most places I've seen that end up using a bunch of YAML/JSON and then poorly defined custom tools to mangle things together.
Also I'd argue that there's a good core in Google's config stack: everything resolving to a proto at the bottom, textproto for "raw" representations, and having one language above that. If we could standardise on that it would be good, but of course that's unlikely.
Does Boq use a subset of Starlark? I thought it was Piccolo. I've always assumed Piccolo predated Starlark and that Starlark was essentially the external-first rewrite with some learnings.
From what I remember, Piccolo uses a Python interpreter.
Blaze also used to call a Python interpreter to evaluate BUILD files, but this is something I've changed. Starlark is unrelated to Piccolo, it started as an interpreter written inside Blaze. Starlark was created just before we open-sourced Bazel (because I didn't want to open-source the Python preprocessing).
Boq has a lot of restrictions on what you can do (ex. No user functions except a tiny allow list they own). It lives in a manifest.bzl file though, and I'm pretty sure uses the golang starlark interpreter.
It was a complete mess, hard to maintain the code, with scalability and performance problems. The semantics were very error-prone because it combined two interpreters (Python interpreter, optional, as a preprocessing step) followed by the interpreter in Bazel.
Bazel started a Python process for each BUILD file to preprocess. If two BUILD files were using the same bzl file, that bzl file would be parsed/evaluated twice. In a graph with lots of dependencies, it was causing a lot of redundant work. It's a bit like #include vs modules in C++: Starlark can evaluate a dependency file once, and provide the result for each BUILD file.
Python can be hard to sandbox, and we got multiple security reports about exploits.
Interestingly, Facebook Buck went through the same way. They originally copied the Python preprocessing approach. When we open-sourced Bazel, the Buck team took our Starlark (aka Skylark) interpreter, and started the migration. See https://buck.build/concept/skylark.html
Google is trying to standardize on a few configuration languages: GCL (because it was too hard to migrate away from it), Starlark (when BCL is not suitable) and Text proto (for things that don't need logic).
It used to be a complete mess, but a plan was written a couple of years ago. So there's hope of improvement.
That's good to hear, but sad that I (as a SWE/SRE) haven't heard of the plan! Maybe I've been living under a rock, but knowing that I should be building new projects with these and not, say, Piccolo, would be nice. Updating codelabs to reflect this where there are multiple options would also be nice, IIRC the CDP codelab still uses Piccolo, but could probably use GCL fairly easily?
I worked there a decade ago and we were trying out the "gcl2" reimplementation that was based on an actual formal specification of the languages. The semantics were subtly different and we couldn't switch our complex config to it quite yet back then. I wonder if the experiment succeeded or you're back on to the implementation-defined language semantics
Both Starlark and CUE are projects that evolved from former Googlers learnings about BCL and GCL
aiui, Starlark is closer to the internal languages while CUE takes a different philosophical approach (logical language that ensures correctness at scale)
Nuclear is really terrible at peak loads; it's a very reliable base load. It's basically impossible to quickly increase or decrease the output of a nuclear plant.
In what world is the US education worse-than-third-world? The US has universal literacy, phenomenal higher education institutions, and primary and secondary schools that are comparable to peer countries on average.
We spend lots of money on schools in the US and generally get pretty good outcomes. Our math scores leave something to be desired, but average reading scores are better than peer countries. There are plenty of exceptions, especially in poor neighborhoods, and chronic absenteeism is a real problem, but it's worth keeping sight of the fact that the vast majority of American schools are quite good.
I'm not trying to say that the US educational performance is great, just that it's not terrible. I think there's a lot of room for improvement, but there's a narrative that US schools are failing horribly and that just isn't true.
Wouldn't you agree that "failing" is relative? Given just how much money the US has, wouldn't you agree that we should expect better outcomes? Wouldn't it be a failure that despite our massive wealth, we are below OECD average in any subject?
The PISA scores are below average in 2022 but not significantly so. Most countries have had a pretty bad decline in test scores due to covid, but that's (hopefully) a one-time problem and future cohorts will do better.
I'm not saying that's a good thing. We're a very rich country and we should do better.
But the US also has a lot of systematic problems that peer countries don't, like child poverty, that are likely a bigger cause of subpar test scores than bad schools.
There's a difference between "below average and rising" versus "below average and falling". The US, over this period, happens to be the latter: below average and falling.
Merely focusing on "below average" without acknowledging the trend -- declining -- seems to be disingenuous.
If you charge them for the extra bandwidth usage, it is. Not saying it's morally right, but definitely something a shady business would do. There's nothing "conspiratorial" about that. You'd be surprised how many conflicts of interest Big Gov and Big Business find themselves in.
Content gets more engagement as it gets closer to the "policy line" of getting banned, and in a competitive information environment (an engagement maximizing algorithm) you end up with a lot of content close to the border of what's allowed.