I wonder how he figures that. I'm well paid and my CA taxes are 1/3 as much as my Federal taxes. Especially in the current regime, CA taxes are not first my point of complaint.
This just reinforces my opinion that we shouldn't listen to billionaires about anything.
I'm kinda shocked to see MicroCenter surge again. The one on Steven's Creek feels like a mini, less seedy, Fry's (I may be biased from Fry's terminal years).
Nevertheless, it still took me 10 minutes to get the attention of the otherwise omnipresent salespeople to let me pick up a UCG, and I ended up getting the rest of my setup at Central Computers.
Edit: I'm ragging too hard. I'm glad MicroCenter exists and the in-person selection they offer.
The front page of reddit (not logged in) is 11 MB, logged in it is 17 MB for me (variable based on media-heavy subreddits and ads). Facebook's login page is 8 MB. Hell, Google's front, once a bastion of efficiency (long since fallen), is 9 MB.
It's sad how 19 MB now doesn't even register for me in today's bloated web.
I do appreciate that it puts up a warning instead of starting automatically, maybe not so much for the 19MB part, but for the fact that it plays sound.
IDK, I still find my Facebook and Instagram feeds very topical and useful to me, so I keep using them. I also curate aggressively, have a wide variety of interests and a few hundred close connections. It could be that I am just fitting into what the algo is steering to, but I don't get the low quality stuff that OP is complaining about.
sure, but now it's giving me days old crappy posts with 3 votes from those subs as it leans wholeheartedly in the Dark Pattern of always feeding me something so I keep reflexively coming back for more.
FWIW, LWN.net has a form of this, where a subscriber can share a "guest" link for a subscriber-only article (All such articles become open a week later anyhow).
It's bad form to share guest links on aggregators like HN, I don't think LWN has a quota on the number of accesses on Guest links. On the other hand, the occasional widely-shared guest link may bring a few more subscribers, but I doubt this scales.
It's actually not bad form to share guest links on aggregators, for that reason — we're entirely subscriber-funded, and we get a lot of new subscribers coming in via subscriber links, which is why we keep offering them. It's always nice when one of my articles end up being shared widely.
Although we do tend to notice trends in what kinds of articles make it onto aggregators like HN and which ones don't; if you've enjoyed LWN's technical reporting, but you've been getting it all filtered through HN or lobste.rs, you might like to come look at the website directly and see some of the wider content mix that we work on.
> Good is really good at engineering great software
was
While they sucked at bringing products to market and sustaining them, they indeed used to have a good reputation at software engineering. However they are burning that up in the AI pivot, though it's not yet very visible externally.
And it's not just messaging. Google has a decades-long history of abandoning apps that don't make them billions, which means no-one with memory trusts them. Especially in their current "AI-everything or bust!" incarnation.
I don't think we should cheer on one of the largest companies in the world to build a product to get them even more enterprise stranglehold.
The praise for this monopoly is misdirected. Every single one of you, unless you're a significant GOOG shareholder, should be wanting for antitrust breakup of Google. They're putting pressure on your wages and other investments, and they're contributing to a ceiling for other startups and companies.
Google engineers are brilliant, but the corporation itself needs to be horizontally dismantled into several Googles that all compete with one another. (Not simply a vertical breakup along product lines, but rather the old-school "Ma Bell" style breakup that creates companies that then have to compete on the same offerings.)
A breakup would be good for GOOG investors too, because there's far more value locked up in the company and far too many opportunities left by the wayside.
I dont get this idea of breaking big companies up is inherently a good thing.
As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake. The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs. Current Google only comes even close with their far out projects(that dont directly make money) such as their quantum computing/deepmind/boston dynamics(when google had them)
Besides, if one does break up google, you wouldnt have those divisions running.
If there are far more opportunities left by the wayside, some one is going to out compete them, ie Slack and Teams
> As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake.
With the benefit of hindsight, the break up was performed in the most ineffective way you could possibly imagine.
Take a national monopoly, and convert it into seven regional monopolies, which don't compete on price or service? Then let those monopolies merge back into three companies?
Countries that addressed national telecoms monopolies with local loop unbundling and similar policies seem to have ended up with much more competitive markets.
The Bell breakup is the only reason we have communication technologies newer than $2/minute telephone calls or (for the same price) Telex.
Bell had one good side, that was Bell Labs. How was it funded? By overcharging the whole country for communications, pocketing 90% of the profit, and using the last 10% to find ways to lower costs to provide the service — cost decreases that would not be passed onto customers.
It was even worse than it is right now with the regional internet monopolies.
> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs.
That was entirely accidental. There's absolutely no guarantee that any given monopoly will produce anything remotely like Bell Labs, and I don't believe that a monopoly was required to do what Bell Labs did.
And yet they sat on transformers until OpenAI kicked off the AI boom by actually productizing that research in ChatGPT. Though it's possible they were just being cautious, my uncharitable view is that they knew this would disrupt their highly lucrative ads business, which is always the problem with monopolies.
Also you're overlooking other top-notch corporate research institutions like Microsoft Research, which arguably are more "Blue Sky" in the sense they are not constrained to any current product lines.
> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs.
This comment is as if "Attention is all you need" was never written and never funded by Google, and the cascade of related research that it inspired inside Google alone isn't considered either. The other Google accomplishments mentioned seem to be filtered to earlier than 2018 as well.
> I don't think we should cheer on one of the largest companies in the world to build a product to get them even more enterprise stranglehold.
Depends of how you see it. At the moment, if you want a good productivity suit of tools, you have Microsoft or Microsoft because Google is hampered by their lackluster chat client.
On that basis, Microsoft are also hampered by a lackluster chat client - Teams is atrocious. Slack is pretty much the only game in town that isn't bad (and even that needs native clients, because the UI is poor and not system-integrated).
I think I have this discussion on HN everytime Teams comes up but it really is a great piece of software for a typical office worker. File sharing is incredible. You get a SharePoint and collaborative editing in a seamless way. Video conf is great and work great with Teams compatible room booking system and room video material. The chat part barely matters. People don't use Teams to chat. It's a collaboration hub. That's what Google is missing actually.
Slack is very much developers software in comparison.
It's not though. There are seams everywhere - between Sharepoint, Teams, OneDrive and so forth. It's the worst possible approach. Fortunately the company I work at switched to Slack the day I started (co-incidentally), so I've been able to compare and contrast the two live. Slack wins for every single use case _except_ video and audio (where Zoom or Webex are the only games in town), hands down.
That's on top of the fact that the Teams client is an absolute pig, and is incapable of remembering basic things like "which of the two cameras do I want to use" and "which audio output is appropriate".
Meanwhile, last time I had a video call in Teams, when I went into the call settings to change my microphone, my computer slowed to a crawl and became inoperable until the person who called me ended it. We eventually settled on a phone call. When I try to share a file over a certain arbitrary size limit, Teams refuses to do so, indicating some undesired and complicated permissions interaction with Teams and SharePoint.
File sharing using Scarepoint is incredible. Incredible bad, that is. Everything is stored in mssql server behind the scenes, in the most inefficient way you could imagine. Scarepoint is the opposite of seamless, number of wasted man-years on it must certainly be in the millions, if not billions. Its ”wiki” sucks. It’s bad software that not even ms themselves want to touch, that’s why many of their other server softwares have migrated away from using it.
Google Duo was upgraded and rebranded to Google Meet in 2022. However, the legacy calling experience (previously known as Duo) was still available. Now, these legacy calls are being upgraded to Meet calls, which contain expanded features like cloud encryption, live captions, in-call chat, stackable effects, and more. To use the new Meet calling experience, update your app to the latest version. As users move over to Meet calling, some of the legacy calling features will no longer be available. In addition, any reference to what was formerly known as Duo will now show “legacy.” From September 2025, legacy calling will be replaced with Meet calling.
Such a great article. I love a good postmortem. I also had no idea of the chequered history of Google's messaging apps. I'd heard some of the names before, but being an iMessage and WhatsApp user, I'd just stuck with those mostly.
It seems that the Messages (iMessage) product manager(s) have never even seen Slack. So difficult to go from such a fun product at work to bland and awkward for the rest of my connected life. Seems completely backwards.
This just reinforces my opinion that we shouldn't listen to billionaires about anything.
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