> Mainly seduced by the smell of a clove cigarette, usually found in the hands of somebody from Park Slope.

For me it was the goth girls at Downtime in the Batcave days. The hipster kids around park slope and Williamsburg were big on American Spirits.

> "unconditional peace" brand after WWII.

It was not by choice.

> There are some new ones that work like landmines, too; they sit on the ground until they detect something worth going after.

Half-life 2 manhack vibes.

Plastics still requires oil along with other petrochemicals. This is just a ad wrapped up in naivety.

There are bioplastics and energy consumption of oil is about 80%.

> This is the most important point, I thought Google people are smart enough to see it.

Google just points towards the money like other bacterium and beats its flagella until it gets there. I don't know why or how anyone would EVER think Google is going to do something good for the web or humanity.

>I don't know why or how anyone would EVER think Google is going to do something good for the web or humanity.

i dislike google as much as the next guy, but sometimes it can be good to remember that actual humans work at google. some of them want to improve things for people. some of them even have a conscience.

one immediate "good" that comes to mind, from google, is the project zero team.

It doesn’t really matter what the people working there want. It matters what the higher ups say, as they control the cash flow and consequently where resources are spent.

And, surprise surprise, the higher ups are generally the ones fucking things up because they also need to see those numbers and lines go up, regardless of actual impact on people’s lives.

So yeah, there surely are good people working for Google, but Google itself is not a person nor is it a “good” company. It is evil, end of. And, unfortunately, when you work for Satan, you don’t get to go around doing charity work.

This same point should have been made to the grandparent as well... claiming some good people are working inside the system at a bad company is also a tired trope.

Nothing myself, a great innovation but with wet teagbags google/microsoft/apple et cetera running the show. How is Digital ID going?

Sure actual humans work at Google. These actual humans are actively choosing to continue doing a job that makes the web worse. I don't see how "but they're human!" means automatic forgiveness of their actions.

>I don't see how "but they're human!" means automatic forgiveness of their actions.

it doesnt, if the actions are bad.

but if your blind hatred makes you think that google will not "EVER" produce something of value to the web or humanity, then you are just being obtuse.

i have already provided one example of something good that is directly attributable to google. there are several more examples, i am sure.

That some trees in a mudslide veer to the left does not mean that your house isn't going to be plowed down the hillside.

The momentum of the mass-entity that is Google simply cannot be overridden by some outliers trying to change direction.

You probably meant "conscience" instead of "conscious"

i sure did. thanks.

Maybe it's also helpful to point out that all evil is done by actual humans, and that google will actually fire humans who don't do what google wants them to do.

Working for Enterprise 101: you are a pawn. Unless it's for the company, your just a engineer for their machine.

The sheer amount of OSS projects that have come out of Google would suggest otherwise...

Stuff like Go, Bazel, Ninja, V8, Dart, MLIR, Tensorflow, Chromium, Android, and countless others I can't remember off the top, plus their contributions to Linux, LLVM, Python, and so on... I can't think of any company that has given as much sheer volume of open source code as Google.

> tbh, i tend to use AWK over bash in 80% of cases, but i call it from bash anyway, and still call it bash scripting :/

This makes me sad and sounds very naive. AWK is a fantastic language on its own and should be called out when used as such.

I'll make you sadder: Even when I call my own AWK modules I put hours in, I still call that a bash script.

Agent coding hype is marketing to push FOMO on devs in order to trick them into turning off their brain in exchange for money. They get hooked at work where they are likely more than happy to let a machine barf out boring code they likely didn't want to write in the first place. Then they bring that practice home. It's digital crack for devs.

I find it difficult to distinguish agent coding from just a code harness. They refer to different things, but those agents dont exist without a harness that manages them.

The harness though is real; the LLM does not do anything interesting without a set of tools, specific prompts to use them, and taking a lot of forced context planning out of the dev's hands.

But yeah, usually when you mix business interests without customer concerns, those business interests develop dark patterns so they can invent concerns and then solve them.

What does Admiral Hopper have to do with this?

I live two blocks form the Rockaway A station, two stops from the Howard Beach/JFK station that hooks you into the Air train. It's at least 30 minutes on an express A to Fulton St, the first stop in Manhattan. Takes me about 45 minutes to get to Penn station from my house, an hour or more with delays. Unsure of what the Air train to LIRR Jamaica then to Penn in Manhattan takes, might be faster then the A depending.

15 minutes to fly from JFK to lower Manhattan is at least a 3x speed up, likely closer to 4-5x.

> and 6+ months is pure fantasy:)

I've seen this before. Had a vendor become helpless after their only engineer took a 6 month sabbatical. Had to cancel orders and switch vendors because they stated "Until the engineer returns, we can not quote a delivery time." Imagine being that company...

Kinda surprising they weren’t able to plan around that, surely The Engineer didn’t just decide randomly to go on a 6 month sabbatical all of a sudden.

It was a small vendor that was bought up into a larger umbrella parent so I'm sure there was no one at the helm capable of thinking ahead of making this months numbers.

Intel at one time did 6 month sabbatical if you worked 10 years.

"Just so you know, our bus number is 1. Now, about your order..."