
Google Will Eat Itself (2005) - slater
http://www.gwei.org
======
rattlesnakedave
Probably don’t visit this site if you have epilepsy.

Discussion from reddit (~7 years ago):
[https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/htidn/til_of...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/htidn/til_of_gwei_a_plan_to_make_google_eat_itself_it/)

And from hn circa 2008:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273337)

Definitely a hoax (but a really cool one, indeed) by the art collective Uber
morgen.

~~~
Dylan16807
Probably? I'll counter with very unprobably. It's mostly a blur effect and the
amount it shifts is very small.

Edit: I hope whoever downvoted has actual evidence of danger.

Also the danger range is generally around 12-20Hz and that background is at 4.

~~~
LukaD
I don't care if it's dangerous. It's annoying and makes me feel uneasy. Had to
block it with ublock.

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varjag
"202.345.117 Years until GWEI fully owns Google."

In less than a galactic year!

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darepublic
This reminds me of zeno's paradox, even though you continue to buy google
stock its a smaller and smaller fraction so even if you buy google to infinity
you still never own it

~~~
EGreg
Zeno’s paradox only seems like one before you learn differential Calculus.

That’s because dx is going to zero, true, but _as dt goes to zero_.

We have figured out that this converges to an actual number, in a system that
is totally consistent and makes sense.

 _x_ 0 + sum of all the _dx_ converges to _x_ 1 just as _t_ 0 + the sum of all
the _dt_ converges to _t_ 1\. And that’s the exact time when Achilles catches
up to the tortoise.

Zeno’s paradox ignores that _dt_ is going to zero, and always acts like the
sum of all the dt is infinity, thus “Achilles will _never_ reach the tortoise”
is wrong.

Simple!

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z3t4
There was a time where you could actually make money by having _text_ ads. But
then the whole ecosystem got diluted by fake impressions and clicks. One easy
solution would be to require people to solve "captcha", for example when
logging in, before being served a text ad.

~~~
kkarakk
i actively avoid sites that serve me captchas now, clicking through images of
cars/bicycles/firehydrants is the most excruciatingly boring thing i've ever
done

~~~
ccffph
same. nothing more infuriating than failing a captcha three times....somehow.

~~~
kermitismyhero
Why get one person to do one unit of work to train your AI for free, when they
could do three units of work for free?

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swiley
It looks like this ended pretty quickly.

[http://www.gwei.org/pages/google/google_letter_02.html](http://www.gwei.org/pages/google/google_letter_02.html)

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tyingq
This page seems unwise:
[http://www.gwei.org/pages/google/check.html](http://www.gwei.org/pages/google/check.html)

A check with enough info for G to probably figure out which advertiser it is?
Or maybe they have some pool of accounts?

Edit: Ahh, nevermind. They mention a pool of accounts, some already disabled:
[http://www.gwei.org/pages/google/google_letter.html](http://www.gwei.org/pages/google/google_letter.html)

~~~
Cthulhu_
I'm confident Google doesn't have any rules against this practice; after all,
if they serve legitimate ads on legitimate sites and don't do any fraud,
Google still earns money themselves off of the ads.

edit: another commenter pointed out they got a letter and a disabled account
due to click fraud already.

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Mugwort
I don't know about eating itself (possible) but Google might one day not need
human employees at all or be very close to 100% AI. Maybe Sergey and Larry
will keep their jobs because of seniority. The rest of us are in trouble.

~~~
tehlike
Meh. Will never happen.

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burtonator
they say they own $450k worth of google stock?

~~~
todd3834
> Amount of USD: 405.413,19

That’s kind of a weird way to format it. So I double checked the math.

> Google Shares owned by GWEI: 819

> Current Google Share Price : 495.01 USD

The current share price is actually $1,287.58

So they own $1,054,528.02 of Google stock?

~~~
MattBearman
IIRC most of mainland Europe formats numbers this way ('.' for thousand
separator ',' for decimal separator)

Strangely there doesn't seem to be a 'falsehoods programmers believe about
numbers' post, but if there were, this would definitely feature :)

~~~
oliwarner
Most? A very large chunk use spaces or thin-spaces as thousand separators. By
GDP, at least, periods are probably in the minority.

~~~
swiley
The spaces is an iso standard.

Most Europeans I’ve talked to use “,” for the radix and “.” For the separator.

Personally I really like spaces since they’re unambiguous.

~~~
house9-2
> Personally I really like spaces since they’re unambiguous.

But not if you are writing with a pen or pencil, a visible token makes way
more sense.

~~~
davemp
I've seen '⎵' commonly used as an unambiguous space. Maybe that could work?

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julienreszka
That's funny

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0898
Aside: Google Will Eat Itself seems to be a pun on the English band Pop Will
Eat Itself, who I can recommend.

~~~
jhbadger
I suspect both names are a pun on the old Marxist slogan "Capitalism will eat
itself".

~~~
julienreszka
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros)

