I think you underestimate how deep-seated the view of Google as liable to end-of-life any product at any time is for the outside world. I don't adopt any new Google products any more, because I have no reason to trust that it will stay around.
I didn't mistake you for that at all. I didn't give any thought at all to that, in fact.
My point was that this "more even than it did for the outside world" seemed to downplay how strongly this view of Google from the "outside world" is held.
I just found it amusing that people at Google would assume even my first comment was indicative of being at Google, much less my second comment, rather than being a totally normal thing for someone outside Google to think.
I'm not surprised to hear that this hold inside Google as well. You just don't need any inside knowledge of Google to hold this view.
Can confirm this internal joke/complaint. In hindsight, hearing it my first week or so should have been a strong red flag toward future frustrations, and the current state of some products.
Consider the gray pixel in the center a placeholder, much like Escher's place holder in the above image (because he couldn't think of how to realistically depict what turns out to be the infinite fractal nature of the center)
> An edge, no matter how small breaks the cross.
My very weak intuition says that an edge of infinite smallness would not.
"... an edge of infinite smallness ..." is not a well-defined concept, and is not allowed in the original formation of the problem. Otherwise take a circle and divide it into N segments "like a pizza". They all meet in the middle in an "edge of infinite smallness", so that would require N colours.
Now make N as large as you like.
So allowing this makes the problem uninteresting, and precluding it makes the problem interesting and hard.
(I don't recall details - but the preconditions of the Four Colour Theorem rule out all the fuzzy sets, infinitely crooked lines, "this region is all points with one rational and one irrational coordinate", and other trickery that folks who've had a bit of math might otherwise be tempted by.)
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