That office is more of a showroom than where actual work gets done. Most of the important projects are built in generic offices with cubicles & fluorescent lights from the 1980s. Apple employees that are privileged enough to work on secret projects, get to work even even more drab conditions. No doughnut office for them.

… or worked or for a well run business.

I’ll ride this downvote. 15,000 people is insane. Not apples to apples, but Craigslist has about 50 employees.

And if it doesn’t deploy: space junk

Google publishes a lot of papers. PageRank, one of the the original key algorithms for Google search, was released to the public. Unfortunately, this empowered spammers to game the search engine and create link farms & other “gems.” That’s a big reason why they don’t share in that space any longer. Too many people looking to exploit search results by any means necessary.

On other topics, Google has been the sole inspiration for some substantial projects. AI aside, their paper on BigTable (their own product) caused a ton of interest and sparked independent projects like Hadoop, HBase, & Cassandra). The modern way we work with big data is thanks to Google.

In any case, Google has no obligation to give away algorithms or the designs for entire products, yet they often do.

Tech like this has been around for a few years, and companies with machinery already exist.

You don’t try to shake down the only significant source of traffic for your site. Google adds value to news organizations by prominently featuring their content, when most people don’t even want it. Broadcast news doesn’t provide nearly the same value to Google.

They already charge to receive traffic and charge the customer for delivery. Like if UPS was charging the shipper and recipient then complaining that shippers should also pay to upgrade their infrastructure. They want to triple dip on each byte served.

When I had Samsung phones, I remember how painful it was to disable all of the Samsung BS. No, I do not want Samsung Internet. No, I don’t want Samsung Mail. No, I sure don’t fucking want Bixby. It’s what I imagine if Siri and Alexa had a mentally handicapped child together.

Some scammers call simply to record people saying “yes?” Help with scamming to have other people’s voices.

Running at 120fps means that every single thing you do has to fit with the rest of the game and run in less than 5 milliseconds. Everything is performant by necessity… but only up to a point. You can spend years optimizing every single bit of waste to squeeze as much as you can out of the hardware, but at the end of the day, you have to cut your losses. Does another year of optimizing justify supporting older hardware, that won’t even support the full experience?

Cool. Now every app can be built in Node.is and shipped on Electron.

My fans cry in Slack and VSCode.

Small steps

There was an odd period of interest for second life… lasting a week or two. A handful of companies announced that they were “moving in.” I think CNN had a virtual town hall. Retailers were exploring virtual shops.

It didn’t go well. I distinctly remember a live news cast interrupted by an obscenely modeled furry.

It’s almost like nobody had used second life before announcing that they were embracing it.