Wow, in the 2000's and 2010's google my impression was that this is an amazing company where brilliant people work to solve big problems to make the world a better place. In the last 10 years, all I was hoping for was that they would just stop making their products (search, YouTube) worse.

Now they just blindly riding the AI hype train, because "everyone else is doing AI".

It's almost as if car manufacturers and big oil write the laws to increase their own profit margins...

No, they just didn't kill enough whistleblowers...

Let's rather call it "Decentralized Backup fee" .

Was working on a team of 4 people, each with a different skillset (frontend, backend, design, CMS). The project manager basically just told us what we have to do in which order, without explicitly telling us who or how someone should do it, which i think everyone appreciated and worked really well for everyone.

In my last role there was no project management, and the Boss just assigned random tasks to anyone, regardless of his skillset. One week i had to work on jQuery UI from 10 years ago, next week on some exotic server language with barely any documentation, no examples and no stack overflow help. His philosopy was "fuck your skills and preferences, everyone has to know everything!".

Before I quit there was some meeting how everyone must now learn video editing, because the product documentation (still with IE 6 screenshots) was not updated anymore but instead we would teach and explain the product in videos "because tiktok is very popular nowdays".

Only if his stunt double does all the running...

Could the problem be that all the money went into building roads and car centric cities, and no money was spent on making mass transit better or rethink on how urban sprawl might cause massive traffic problems?

I still remember that in the 90s till the 2000s you would get maybe 60 to 90 minutes of battery life out of a new laptop. Then it jumped to 4 or more hours thanks to better batteries, more energy efficient CPUs and displays.

Nz is more tolerant to different cultures at least in the 3 big cities, Australia offers a higher pay and lower living costs. However as a American they will not see you as much as an outsider. Crimes in NZ are the cost of living.

The game only had 16 colors (4bit) and a resolution of 256x240. If you store it in the original dimensions and apply loseless compression it could be much smaller.

There are some apps that allow you to use your phone as a webcam, either via USB or wifi.

While i would love to travel by airship, I dont think there would be a commercial success in airship passenger travel in the near future:

• travel times of multiple days means you probably need 2-3x the crew, compared with a plane on a 8h flight
• this also means a plane that is 4x as fast can make the same trip 4x more often, bringing in more money for the airline in the same amount of time
• you probably can't land on existing airports, because an airship the size of a large building would be crawling accross your airspace blocking all flight traffic, or shaken by the turbulences behind a large jet powered airliner
• new technology without any existing infrastructure is much more expensive than building on top of existing things
• tickets would be much more expensive than a commercial plane because of the reasons above, the lower passenger capacity and the fact that you have to carry more supplies (water + food for days multiplied by people on board) for a longer trip. Each passenger with cabin and supplies was calculated as 300kg weight on a transatlantic flight on the hindenburg
• Hindenburg could not fly in a direct straight line, because it travels at a height of only 400-600m. This means you had to go around high mountain ranges, because people and the combustion engines need oxygen which you dont have much above 4000m. However i dont know if this is still a problem with modern pressurized cabins, or if there is another limitation from the lifting gas...

In every small problem are many large problems that want to come out.

They often do that to own more positions on the results page, and you don't get to see their competition without scrolling or clicking on the next page.

The 200hp engine to move the metal box at a speed of 15 kmh in city traffic from one red light to the next...

When I was young, we didn't have hex codes, we only had 1 and 0s. One time we where all out of 1s, and I had to code a whole Database system with only 0s!

Only if they have a killer app that people are willing to pay for...

That are some good points, i didnt really hear about deepmind for a long time and forgot about it. But replacing google websearch with "AI" really sounds like a decision made by marketing department, where they dont understand their own product, their customers or the techs limitations.

Unless of course they want to remove/hide all outgoing links from google search, so the user will spend more time there and google has more opportunities to show them ads from their own ad network, instead of losing the visitors to another website...

You underestimate how affordable or accessible a computer was in the eastern block. For reference, a color tv that is "mass produced" and didn't need much expensive high tech parts would cost as much as you would earn in one year - if you manage to find one in a shop.

For a computer you needed to find keyboard, drive, monitor, software and the computer itself which would be at least equally expensive to a color tv.

All the chips had to be manufactured locally in the eastern block, because there was an embargo on western computer tech. RAM alone was 10x more expensive because the manufacturing process was very inefficient.

I think this will reflect badly on ubers driver performance score if you turn down to many short or inconvenient trips...