Comment by siliconc0w
4 days ago
Sergey is brilliant but it's really the lightsaber that is super voting shares that make him uniquely empowered to slash through Google's immense bureaucracy.
4 days ago
Sergey is brilliant but it's really the lightsaber that is super voting shares that make him uniquely empowered to slash through Google's immense bureaucracy.
I think being the founder of Google gives him more political capital at Google than anything on paper. As a controlling member of the board there's a variety of things he can do with that hammer, but just simply being who he is, not even just on the org chart, has got to be worth way more.
The very fact that he (or anyone in a similar position) holds the hammer is enough to guarantee that he will very seldom have to swing it.
The ghost of Steve Jobs would like a word with you.
Are you referring to his firing in the 80s? That was because he was supposedly a jerk at the time and no one wanted to deal with him.
this seems an idealistic view, my cynical view is that if King Lear gives up all his legal paper power he will find out nobody cares who the hell he is and take advantage of him without remorse.
In my experience (at a much smaller scale than these guys, of course) the legal papers power is more of a formality. It’s the soft power tied up in knowledge, relationships, trust and goodwill that really count.
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Looking at the two as separate parts ends up forcing the dance apart from the dancer no
What you describe is a benevolent dictator.
Brin wasn’t bothered to wield any of that power to try to arrest the decline in Google’s search quality. He wasn’t bothered to direct the Chrome team to support MathML, or to bring back Google Reader, or do anything about a hundred small insults like, say, the deletion of YouTube comments with URLs to keep the rubes inside the casino. But he was able and willing to come back and wield his clout because he was bored and wanted to play with AI. As someone who’s old enough to remember how much leeway Google used to get from governments and the public at large on the basis that Page and Brin were nice young men who could be relied on to be responsible stewards it’s a little galling. Don’t give Mr. Brin any belly-rubs until he tells us when Reader is coming back.
Everything you are mentioning are user issues. AI search myspacing googles ad business is an investor issue.
User issues have an annoying habit of eventually becoming investor issues so you better deal with them while they are still 'just' user issues.
They're all Google issues.
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He saw AI as an existential threat to Google.
Right, though it's also reasonably clear that part of the story there is that he finds a high-stakes AI race personally interesting and exciting on a technical and a business level. Conversely it's also fairly clear that he finds doing anything about the steady encrudification of Google to be a big snooze. (Even though it may also be a long-term, though less dramatic, problem for the company's future health, exactly the sort of long-term issue which Google's dual-stock structure was supposed to empower Page and Brin to care about and act on.) But in any case, whatever his mix of motivations are, he's able to act within Google on things he cares about. He is also perfectly able to act on a number of the issues at Google which have significantly bad effects on its users and on the population of Earth at large. (Not all of them, to be sure: there are clearly some problems which would be very hard to fix, alongside a number of no-brainers.) He evidently just isn't willing, because he doesn't care about them.
Enshittification of existing money making activities of Google independently of AI is also an existential threat. Parts of the threat are codependent on AI, but there is little reason to open the door wider as they have.
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I loved google reader, many people were blogging and social network was "ick" as people immediately associated the term with okcupid/friendster(myspace?) and reader was decentralised and encouraged all walks of life to participate... maybe I just missed the vibes back then, gosh I was so hopeful
Not just links, either
Youtube comments are completely censored in real time with some sort of AI, it's horrible
The videos too. Geopolitical commentators cannot show e.g. an explosion in Ukraine caused by a drone, and they say "T" instead of "terrorist", and "kaboomed" instead of "killed", etc. Doing so may see the vid demonetized or even taken down.
OTOH deep fake gepolitical commentators are all over the place, and it is allowed (sometimes Youtube shows a label, sometimes the channel itself describes itself as a "fan channel" of the commentator, and not the real deal. Sometimes e.g. for Shorts you can see in the info whether things are AI generated).
Yet Google cant remove porn bots with 99% similar usernames or avatars.
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That's great and all, but you're anthropomorphizing the advertisement company.
Where?
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