Target had been pandering to the LGBTQ community for a long time, they released many shirts and ads that tried to present itself as inclusive and forward thinking.
But the very second things change on the top, they flip.
Yes quite a few people are upset at this. They concretely damaged their brand, ruined trust, and pissed off a bunch of their target market. There is an intentional boycott now and it is clearly affecting their stock
My opinion on this is that as a generic business it's better to just stay out of politics and not pander to specific groups. You may score some short-term wins but if you fail any purity test from that point onwards, or pull back at all, that group will feel jilted and retaliate. Then, you're worse off than if you had just remained neutral.
Well no, because they are employees / contractors of the film studio, who presumably claim all copyright of what they captured.
However, the camera operators likely do own the pictures they take with their own cameras on-set, provided the contract they are working under allows for such ownership
Roblox does seem to be particularly bad at moderating it. For example, the Wikipedia section on Club Penguin's child safety concerns [0] makes it look like Disneyland compared to the reports I've read about Roblox.
If I remember a video I watched on the subject correctly, creating a safe space for kids on the internet was the explicit goal of Club Penguins. Good moderation was a selling point in a time when most parents wouldn't let their kids "surf the web" alone (rightly so...).
Now that kids spend almost more time before the screen than not, and that the Overton's window been shifted to a place where it has become acceptable to market digital casinos to kids, no one bothers with costly moderation anymore.
That allows chat. Can go the hearthstone model where all you can say is “hi” and “good job”. Letting randos talks just is going to lead to bad times w kids.
There used to be a blog where a developer who worked for Disney and their Toon Town MMO discussed the absurd difficulty of trying to keep young kids "safe" in an MMO.
The bottom line is this: If you give kids literally any way to communicate, they will use it to bully each other and destroy the "kid friendly" nature of the game. If you let kids place objects in the world, they will spell out their home address for a pedophile by dropping objects to create words and then build a giant penis next to it. If you give kids the ability to emit only a few specific pre-approved sentences as a "chat" feature, they will find a way to sext with it, and then tell a pedophile their specific location through an ad-hoc code involving character facing direction and specific sentences.
Kids are smart, and imaginative, and don't understand or respect the concept of "You aren't supposed to do that" and don't recognize the danger of telling strangers your home address (in as much as there is actual danger there, as "stranger danger" is massively overstated) and will utilize ANY possible signal channel to explore taboo topics in an environment that seems safe.
Like, people in the Wii days shared friend codes in multiplayer shooters that had zero chat by using gunshot decals to spell out friend codes one digit at a time!
Either don't make a game where strangers can interact in any way, or pay shitloads for aggressive moderation like disney did. Those are your two options.
Or just do what roblox does and let kids be found by literal pedophiles who then go on to sexually message them and just somehow not have parents freak the fuck out? Also you get to literally profit from the work of children. I guess the moral of the story is to sell your soul to the devil because he has great PR
Another perspective is Google is stifling American innovation by its megalithic presence in markets. Suppressing local growth in exchange for short term profitability.
Separately, why is having tech giants a pure advantage? These companies got big by innovating, but the innovation slows down when they are big. Sounds to me that we should be regularly clearing old growth to let new ideas break through
Some things can only be done at scale, or are a side effect of solving problems at scale. It’s not quite so simple as “big is bad”.
Also, it’s harder for international companies to buy, say, Google, than a browser-only company, just through the amount of capital needed to put up a credible offer.
one really easy example is the AI arms race. and make no mistake, it is an arms race that matters for maintaining global American supremacy and ensuring china stays secondary. LLMs are one of the very few recent technologies where the marginal cost of a user is well above zero; they require colossal build-out of energy and compute. everyone who's done a good job with them is either a tech giant or has become one in valuation. c.f. how Google specifically has been working on TPUs for years, produced solid models with Gemini, and offers them for a tiny fraction of the cost of others. having a large team experienced with scaling stuff perhaps better than anyone else is a good thing and google keeps those people paid.
Having actually talked to people who have filed FoIA requests, it’s actually near impossible to get things from the government if they don’t want to share it with you.
First the requests have to be narrow and specific. You can’t just be “give me everything you have on xyz”. Then they can very much drag on the process forever by going back and forth on how narrow the specifics need to be. Then there’s the issue of a wide range of documents that are not covered under FoIA. And then finally even if you manage to request the documents correctly and they are covered under FoIA, sometimes they simply don’t have them. This is amazingly common when FoIA activists try to get budget and spending related documents.
They can also simply ignore your request, and force you to take them to court in order to get a response. There's little downside in doing this, especially against small requestors. This happens with some regularity, and is known as "constructive denial".
In a sense, that is much of what computers are - ease of access. What's the difference between millions of of paper documents in a warehouse, and a live database with the same information instantly accessible, processable, etc.? I suppose it's just 'ease of access'.
But it is all the difference in the world. One does not compare to the other. FOIA requests - which take paperwork, must specify the thing requested, and sometimes years to resolve - don't compare to live access to the databases and applications and personnel.
There's a lot that you can't get via FOIA. You can't just go on a fishing expedition. A lot of stuff is unclassified but personal, and restricted.
This potentially gives you access to everything. Such access is supposed to be about the system itself and not the data within (just like your sysadmin can theoretically look at your files but promised not to). But hey, who's watching, and to whom would they complain?
If I want to produce a device, am I required to put work in to maintaining it forever? An iPhone 8 is really old by this point, honestly I’m impressed it still works.
What timeline would you recommend that is fair to both consumers and producers?
Maybe not forever, but we have really short timelines for product longevity in this industry, even at the hardware level. A washing machine or kitchen appliance that had to be replaced every <7 years (taking the timeframe from the post) would be considered low quality; furniture that can't last 10-15 years is considered nearly disposable. Cars -- maybe the thing closest in comparison in terms of complexity and engineering required to build, even if several orders of magnitude more expensive -- are expected to last decades with proper maitenance.
Certainly there is a trend towards this in a lot of industries besides computers, but given how powerful and expensive these devices are now, the current upgrade cycles are crazy fast. I think consumers are souring on them a bit as well (both because of the price, and because the annual new models have really slowed down in the visible feature improvements they offer).
I know the economic incentives for the producers are aligned towards repeated purchases, and that's super tough to realign, but how long can the market and the environment support four-digit phone price tags that are upgraded every 1-3 years?
I have been using an iphone6s (ios 15. Received an update 4 months ago). for some time already. It works fine. Granted, I don’t use it for “important” stuff, but it works fine for browsing, checking train timelines, Uber, radio, youtube, whatsapp, Slack, camera, maps…
The problem will not be solved by laws requiring corporations to act ethically. That will never work as long as their incentives are what they are. IMO the only way to address these issues is to have a free software phone-OS alternative that users can have control of.. that is to say if you want the government involved, it would be best served by funding an free software project along these lines.
I agree that this area is more complicated than simple statements will be able to cover, but at first thought I like the idea of some sort of rule for opening up any device that is not being maintained. That when a company decides a device will no longer receive updates, some amount of source code/documentation needs to be released to allow third parties to take over.
Tying software support to how long the hardware lasts will ensure that every hardware manufacturer builds in a time-based killswitch into every device they make.
Then users should be compensated when the manufacturer decides to remotely kill their devices (whether by a kill switch or by stopping maintaining the software).
Then we will simply see fewer and more expensive models available for sale as some manufacturers and investors decide these regulations are too much and exit; others will raise prices to pay for the compensation and extended software support.
Ironically the _lack_ of dogfooding GCP products at google is often quoted as one of the reasons AWS beat GCP to defining the Cloud market. Amazon builds AWS on AWS as much as possible, Google has only somewhat recently pushed for this
What I understood is that AWS is more than dogfooding. It is something Amazon first built for themselves, to give more independence to individual teams. And as they noticed it worked well, they realized that they could turn it into a product.
For what I understand as an outsider, Google is much more monolithic, having a platform where each team can do their things independently is not really their culture, so if they build one, it is only for their customers, because they don't work like this internally. Whereas for Amazon, an AWS customer is not that different from one of their own teams.
That’s mostly a marketing myth on the AWS side. As recently as three or four years ago there were _new_ initiatives being built in the legacy “corp” fabric; and even today Amazon has internal tooling that makes use of Native AWS quite different than it is for external customers; particularly around authn/authz.
And that doesn’t even mention the comic “Moving to AWS” platform that technically consumed AWS resources, but was a wholly different developer experience to native.
Now building on AWS inside is heavily emphasized, but just a few years ago most services were built with internal systems that are very different. Some solutions (multi account/cellular architecture for example) seemed to come from dog fooding heavily, but supporting services (like account SSO for handling many accounts) are still very different from the publicly available equivalents.
As someone who worked at AWS it’s ironic how hard they dog food cellular architecture but when it comes to customers, all the offerings and docs are terrible, with the only information in obscure Re:Invent talks or blog posts.
I now work for a large customer and you would be shocked at the household names that basically put all their infrastructure in a single Account and Region. Or they have multi region but it’s basically an afterthought and wouldn’t serve any purpose in a disaster.
I think Gmail was great initially because of dogfooding. Right now, the incentives are different, and it's more about releasing new stuff. And we can see how that worked with the Google Chat saga.
Lots of other Google products suffer from similar issues because of an apparent lack of dogfooding. I bought a Pixel phone not so long ago and I had to install all updates, one by one, to bring it to the latest Android version. It took several days.
I can see why they do it, though. There are a bunch of foundational Google infra technologies that are great for building an IaaS on top of, but which can't themselves be offered as IaaS services for whatever reason.
Let's use Google's Colossus (their datacenter-scale virtual filesystem) as an example. Due to the underlying architecture of Colossus, GCP can turn around and give you:
• GCE shared read-only zonal PDs
• near-instantaneous snapshots for GCE and BigTable
• async and guaranteed-durable logging (for GCE and otherwise) and Queues (as Pub/Sub and otherwise)
• zero-migration autoclassed GCS Objects, and no per-operation slowdown on GCS Buckets as bucket size increases
• BigQuery being entirely serverless (vs e.g. Redshift needing to operate on a provisioned-storage model)
But Google can't just sell you "Colossus as a service" — because Colossus doesn't have a "multitenant with usage-cost-based backpressure to disincentivize misuse" architecture; and you can't add that without destroying the per-operation computational-complexity guarantees that make Colossus what it is. Colossus only works in a basically-trusted environment. (A non-trust-requiring version of Colossus would look like Apple's FoundationDB.)
(And yeah, you could in theory have a "little Colossus" unique to your deployment... but that'd be rather useless, since the datacenter scale of Colossus is rather what makes many of its QoS guarantees possible. Though I suppose it could make sense if you could fund entire GCP datacenters for your own use, ala AWS GovCloud.)
Google's consumer-facing systems all tend to be very focused. Things like search, maps, gmail etc. are not the same kind of system as Amazon's store.
While these systems do presumably give Google something to exercise their cloud systems on, the sense I have (as a longtime user of both GCP and AWS) is that it doesn't give them a realistic sense of what other companies, that don't just sell advertising and consumer data via focused products, do. Amazon's store is more representative of typical businesses in that sense.
Basically, it seems to me that Google Cloud has continually learned lessons the hard way about what customers need, rather than getting that information from its own internal usage.
It also depends on the density and mobility of your host population.
Ebola kills too quickly for hosts to move around and spread it, but that's in small villages in the jungle. What if there's just enough time for the host to take a crowded train and attend a Presidential campaign rally with tens of thousands of other people before feeling too sick? This might be a better strategy for an ambitious virus in the post-Covid world than a slowly escalating illness that just makes people call in sick and stay home.
It's a bit of a shame that Plague Inc does not support re-infection. Once someone had the disease, they are immune for life.
And the only goal the game really supports is killing everyone, instead of eg going for the largest sustainable population of your organism. (Think more like one of the bugs that cause the common cold, and less like the black death.)
It also doesn’t seem very realistic that the virus can infect everybody and then evolve to start killing them, and somehow the past infections all get the updated orders to kill, haha. Gameplay concessions I guess.
One of these days, someone's going to genetically engineer a virus that spreads easily to infect as many people as possible, but stay dormant for a few years while in this phase, then suddenly it'll turn lethal. Someone from the future might use a time machine to try to come back and gain information about the virus, and then even try to stop its spread once he finds the rogue researcher releasing it at airports, but then will tragically find out that you can't change the timeline, even if you can travel back in time.
Even then it seems like a crapshoot whether or not it works, because somehow if you become highly infective but otherwise are flying under the radar you'll still be detected and suddenly all governments start closing up shop... or at least that was the case in Pandemic II. I can't speak to any of the clones.
But the very second things change on the top, they flip.
Yes quite a few people are upset at this. They concretely damaged their brand, ruined trust, and pissed off a bunch of their target market. There is an intentional boycott now and it is clearly affecting their stock