Ex-googler: I doubt it, but am curious for rationale (i know there was a round of PR re: him “coming back to help with AI.” but just between you and me, the word on him internally, over years and multiple projects, was having him around caused chaos b/c he was a tourist flitting between teams, just spitting out ideas, but now you have unclear direction and multiple teams hearing the same “you should” and doing it)
the rebuke is that lack of chaos makes people feel more orderly and as if things are going better, but it doesn't increase your luck surface area, it just maximizes cozy vibes and self interested comfort.
My dynamic range of professional experience is high, dropout => waiter => found startup => acquirer => Google.
You're making an interesting point that I somewhat agree with from the perspective of someone was...clearly a little more feral than his surroundings in Google, and wildly succeeded and ultimately quietly failed because of it.
The important bit is "great man" theory doesn't solve lack of dynamism. It usually makes things worse. The people you read about in newspapers are pretty much as smart as you, for better or worse.
I actually disagreed with the Sergey thing along the same lines, it was being used as a parable for why it was okay to do ~nothing in year 3 and continue avoiding what we were supposed to ship in year 1, because only VPs outside my org and the design section in my org would care.
Not sure if all that rhymes or will make any sense to you at all. But I deeply respect the point you are communicating, and also mean to communicate that there's another just as strong lesson: one person isn't bright enough to pull that off, and the important bit there isn't "oh, he isn't special", it's that it makes you even more careful building organizations that maintain dynamism and creativity.
Yeah people seem to be pretty poor at judging the impact of 'key' people.
E.g. Steve Jobs was absolutely fundamental to the turn around of Apple. Will Brin have this level of incremental impact on the Goog/Alphabet of today? Nah.
The difference is: Apple had one "key person", Jobs, and yes the products he drove made the company successful. Now Jobs has gone I haven't seen anything new.
But if you look at Google, there isn't one key product. There are a whole pile of products that are best in class. Search (cringe, I know it's popular here to say Google search sucks and perhaps it does, but what search engine is far better?), YouTube, Maps, Android, Waymo, GMail, Deep Mind, the cloud infrastructure, translate, lens (OCR) and probably a lot of others I've forgotten. Don't forget Sheets and Docs, which while they have been replicated by Microsoft and others now were first done by Google. Some of them, like Maps, seem to have swapped entire teams - yet continued to be best in class. Predicting Google won't be at the forefront on the next advance seems perilous.
Maybe these products have key people as you call them, but the magic in Alphabet doesn't seem to be them. The magic seems to be Alphabet has some way to create / acquire these keep people. Or perhaps Alphabet just knows how to create top engineering teams that keep rolling along, even when the team members are replaced.
Apple produced one key person, Jobs. Alphabet seems to be a factory creating lots of key people moving products along. But as Google even manages to replace these key people (as they did for Maps) and still keep the product moving, I'm not sure they are the key to Googles success.
In Assistant having higher-ups spitting ideas and random thoughts ended up in people mistakenly assume that we really wanted to go/do that, meaning that chaos resulted in ill and cancelled projects.
The worst part was figuring what happened way too late. People were having trying to go for promo for a project that didn't launch. Many people got angry, some left, the product felt stale and leadership&management lost trust.
Isn’t that what the parent is describing? “Ill and cancelled projects” <==> “luck surface area”, and “trying to go for promotion” <==> “cozy vibes and self-interested comfort”?
I'm in a similar position and generally agree with your take, but the plus side to his involvement is if he believed in your project or viewpoint he would act as the ultimate red tape cutter.
And there is absolutely nothing more valuable at G (no snark)
(cheers, don't read too much signal into my thoughts, it's more negative than I'd intend. Just was aware it was someone going off PR, and doing hero worship that I myself used to do, and was disabused over 7 years there, and would like other people outside to disabuse themselves of. It's a place, not the place)
Please, Google was terrible about using the tech the had long before Sundar, back when Brin was in charge.
Google Reader is a simple example: Googl had by far the most popular RSS reader, and they just threw it away. A single intern could have kept the whole thing running, and Google has literal billions, but they couldn't see the value in it.
I mean, it's not like being able to see what a good portion of America is reading every day could have any value for an AI company, right?
Google has always been terrible about turning tech into (viable, maintained) products.
What's striking is the sheer scale of Epstein's and Maxwell's scheduling and access. The source material makes it hard to even imagine how two people could sustain that many meetings/parties/dinners/victims, across so many places, with such high-profile figures. And, how those figures consistently found the time to meet them.
AI works as a better tool for teaching humans than to do the work themselves.
While someone experienced in fighting fires can take intuitive leaps, the basic idea is still to synthesize a hypothesis from signals, validating the hypothesis, and coming up with mitigations and longer term fixes. This is a learned skill, and a team of people/AI will work better than someone solo.
Github can get pretty sluggish as well; if you have a pull request with lots of comments page loads begin to take a dozen seconds or more. AI code review bots make it painful for humans to use it.
UKLG deliberately wrote Earthsea in the guise of a Western high fantasy, but its philosophical core is the Tao Te Ching. It was set in the archipelagos similar to SW Asia, with similar ethnicity.
The producers who made the movie casted the crew ignoring UKLG though I think contractually, they were supposed to listen to her. I wouldn’t be surprised if they swapped out the philosophical core.
More generalized, any kind of symbol representing something is not the something. The social labelling is very accessible, true now and true then.
There’s a Zen koan about that (with Zen coming from Chang which came from a meeting of Buddhism and Taoism in China) — about the finger pointing to the moon, and how all but one student looked at the finger.
In a different example, there is the distinction of virtue signaling and virtue (the “Te” in “Tao Te Ching”)
Not the original OP — I had been thinking about this for years, though my interest is in resiliency rather than a sovereignty (though they overlap):
- is there a mirror adapter to push to a non-radicle node, such as Github or say, sourcehut? (Mirroring nixpkgs, for example)
- is there a mechanism to control syncs so it can be used on low-bandwidth, unreliable networks, or ad-hoc bluetooth networks?
- is offline seeding possible or in the works?
- language package managers often can reference a git or github. Would I be able to directly reference my local radicle node and have it manage (or perhaps even discover) the correct repos? (Or maybe this is a different problem and package repos themselves could be decentralized and sovereign)
On that last point, I mean that the whole build chain and supply chain can be made sovereign: I see radicle is written in Rust, which means dependencies on Cargo, the Rust toolchain, and so forth.
You can also create remotes with multiple push URLs, so that with one `git push`, you push to all of them at once.
Apart from that, it's possible to use e.g. systemd path units to run `git push` automatically whenever a repository gets updated by `radicle-node`.
This works reasonably well. What else would the adapter have to do?
> is there a mechanism to control syncs so it can be used on low-bandwidth, unreliable networks, or ad-hoc bluetooth networks?
No. The data itself usually is quite small, as the common use case is to send commits. It's not optimized for unreliable networks or Bluetooth in any special way yet. It would certainly be useful.
> is offline seeding possible or in the works?
That's contradictory in my mind. What do you mean? Offline in the sense of "not connected to the internet"? That works just fine. Currently, you still have to connect your node to the existing network by connecting to another known node (via IP address or a DNS name that resolves locally). There are plans to integrate DNS-SD, also via mDNS.
> language package managers often can reference a git or github. Would I be able to directly reference my local radicle node and have it manage (or perhaps even discover) the correct repos?
> If the internet is down and you want to onboard someone with say, a usb thumbdrive.
All the data being synced is in a Git repo, which is in a directory on your filesystem we call "Radicle Storage". You can use `git bundle` or a plain `cp` to copy that directory over. You can also use plain Git to push. Note that for these use-cases there is no polished UX. You need to know what you are doing. The bigger issue will be to install Radicle.
> With the mirroring: does radicle have any kind of event hooks?
Yes. You can connect to `radicle-node` via a socket and subscribe to events. This is how Radicle CI, and in particular the Radicle CI Broker was implemented. You can implement your own event broker, it's just JSON over a socket.
