Comment Fear (Score 5, Interesting) 197
I don't fear intelligent machines. I fear stupid machines with too much autonomy.
I also fear stupid people with too much autonomy.
I don't fear intelligent machines. I fear stupid machines with too much autonomy.
I also fear stupid people with too much autonomy.
I don't fear smart computers. I fear stupid computers with too much autonomy.
I also fear stupid people with too much autonomy.
Google's Android browser and Chrome for Android and iPhone render plain old HTML 2.0 very badly, with tiny unreadable fonts. This is 100% Google's fault. Now they will punish us for their fault.
Glove compartment. Buried in the back yard. Card in your wallet. Split up and hidden under a rock. In a desk drawer at work. Unlabeled and dissociated from the data you can store the key anywhere.
And snapshots are expensive compared to incremental or differential backups.
Raid adequately covers hardware failure which is less than half of data loss situations.
Most electric plants are just fancy steam engines. Even the nuke plants. Boil water and drive the generators with the steam pressure.
Coal is just a more efficient version of wood. Wood is renewable and we already know we can run an industrial society on coal.
Also, look up the Stanley Steamer some time. We don't even need oil to have motor cars, just high enough quality metallurgy to build pressure containers. And if we save the books, we save metallurgy.
The most effective way for your data to survive a fire (or flood, tornado, lava, etc) is for it to not be in the fire. If you don't want to automate off-site backups then periodically drop a hard disk into a convenient bank safety deposit box.
You're not off base. I think you're right on target. I also think that process sows the seeds of Google's fall, like every other tech company before you.
Look up psychology studies on creativity some time. Creativity and intelligence both benefit from collaboration but unlike intelligence, creativity is not a rapid-fire process. If intelligence measures how quickly you find a solution, creativity measures how many solutions you find over time.
Your hiring process biases towards high intelligence but middling creativity. You then use collaboration as a substitute for creative thinking -- many people, many viewpoints.
Unfortunately, you don't get genuine creativity this way. As often as not you get groupthink instead. Unusually smart groupthink but even so. This shows in Google's products, especially the user interfaces. Many of those UIs have steadily deteriorated over the past half decade. And you've selected for staff who despite their genius are quite literally incapable of reversing the trend.
Which brings me to my other complaint: Google looks at how people think "on their feet" to the exclusion of how they think and perform over time.
I don't know about you, but unless the problem is crazy-simple or something I've seen a dozen times before, I simply don't think in 45-minute timescales. Give me a week and I'll have three solid solutions. Give me a month and I'll have a dozen more, at least one of which is ingenious.
Give me your 45 minute segment of an all-day interview and as often as not I'll have only trash. Working trash but haphazard inscalable trash nevertheless. When you judge me by that trash, you grossly misjudge me.
Enthusiastic, yes. So enthusiastic you invest a couple hundred hours learning their specific tech before you interview, not so much.
The key to interviewing at Google is to drink the kool aide before you arrive. Download and use the core software they make available. If you're not enthusiastic enough about their tool chain to do that, mere competence won't carry you over the finish line.
Most companies couldn't get away with that but Google is Google. At least for now.
I recall several attempts. I just don't recall them being spectacularly successful. As was pointed out in the article you quoted: "The efficacy of this lava bombing is disputed by some volcanologists"
Yes, actually, there is something better about that land. First, it's 13,000 feet above sea level, outside most of the earth's atmosphere. Second, the winds above the side are unusually stable, making it easy to post-process the data with computers to get rid of atmospheric distortion.
It's one of the few places on earth you can collect astronomical data with quality comparable to a space-based telescope.
Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. - Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian