Um, yes?

Following Google’s corporate restructuring under the conglomerate Alphabet Inc. in October 2015, Alphabet took “Do the right thing” as its motto, also forming the opening of its corporate code of conduct. The original motto was retained in Google’s code of conduct, now a subsidiary of Alphabet. Between April 21st and May 4th of 2018, the motto was removed from the code of conduct’s preface and retained in its last sentence.

Between 21 April and 4 May 2018, Google removed the motto from the preface, leaving a mention in the final line: “And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”

They kept it within their internal code of conduct, but it’s been quite a while since that was their public motto.

Here’s this from 2021. They say they have about 200PB of raw storage across some 20k spinning drives at the time of writing (with more being added constantly, about 25%/yr), and capacities are mixed from 4TB to 16TB, across 750 servers housed on about 75 racks. I have 6x16TB WD red pros that ran me about $355/ea new with tax, and my bill was a smidge over $2100. Assuming you used all 16TB, you’d need about 12,500 16TB disks, which would run you about $4,437,500 without a bulk discount. How much of that is redundancy I’m not sure, but that’s just HDDs, not the hardware to actually run everything between storage enclosures, OS, disks, memory, clustering, etc. They say they say a single copy with 16TB drives would be about 15 racks., but how that breaks down I’m not sure.

That’s unfortunately a very valid point. Iirc the big problem IA has is the sheer amount of disk space required to store everything.

Apparently we all did. Outside of individually storming the white house and getting shot in the process, turns out all of us might as well have been sitting on our thumbs. I mean really,how exactly were we supposed to counter some of the absolute dumbest people on the planet that might as well have marked a ballot with a crayon?

If not wanting to format my machine every year to keep it from bogging down makes me a terrorist, well, shit.

I mean it makes sense. Both M$ and Apple (and Google with vanilla Android) are quite surveillance-centric, it only makes sense to try to keep the population under a watchful eye to stay ahead of any potential challenges to their authority. They hate the thought of people doing anything digitally that they can’t keep tabs on.

What pisses me off is the way they pass movies and shows amongst each other and arbitrarily drop them from their platforms to pull this artificial scarcity nonsense. Oh you want to watch this movie? We don’t have it anymore, better sign up for that other service. Or, sorry this movie from the 60s is unavailable on any service, but you can “rent” it for $10/24hrs. Then there is the app causing grief for no good reason (cough Paramount), or two many people are watching the same thing and the CDN isn’t scaled appropriately for a service you already pay too much for, or you can’t watch Netflix in a browser on Linux because DRM, or we decided your HDMI cable is not up to our spec requirements, even though it was gone 5 minutes ago, because fuck you. And then on top of it all, the quality from every streaming provider is dog shit.

And do the companies care? Nope, not one bit. What are you gonna do about it, not watch TV? In 2025? Get with the program pleb, now bend over and shit benjamins to keep your wife and kids occupied.

You know which service doesn’t have all these issues? My damn home server, and the quality is fantastic. And all it costs me is the electricity (but let’s not talk about my power bill).

Look at the cost you’re paying for Prime and consider how many orders you’d have to place to break even (using the Prime membership money just to pay for shipping when you need it faster, etc).

I exceed the hell out of that in probably a couple weeks for my business. I hate it, but I’m pinched to keep costs down and time is valuable, and unfortunately Amazon fills that requirement too well. I live in a small town, I don’t have time to dedicate an entire day to driving to civilization and back, plus fuel costs. Plus, Amazon gets it to my mail depot faster than I can get it from other suppliers, without having to pay shipping.

Jergens is industry standard

Roll tide

I’m honestly amazed they didn’t have ads out of the gate, Meta’s whole schtick is advertising and data.

America as we know it might also not be around much longer.

Or Cloudflare is on their knees drinking orange juice for a more favorable seat at the table. Iirc they’re responsible for ~20% of web traffic, so it’s certainly something to keep an eye on.

Wait, we were supposed to be following rules?

Spoken like a true Romulan

I, for one, welcome our Vulcan overlords

No doubt there’s a major push globally to descend into authoritarianism, arguably under the auspice that people are fed up with capitalism and voting for something different. But it’s hard to convince billions of people that the real root is a handful of billionaires playing Pinky and the Brain. We’ll just have to see, unfortunately.

Sounds about right. My wife has friends abroad that have been calling and asking if everything is alright, then start the questions of how we let this happen, why don’t we do anything about it, etc. And I’ll be honest, I do feel pretty helpless at the moment and very uneasy about the next period of time. I’ve been reading quite a bit about WWII and how Germany got into their situation, and almost too much if it parallels. Most of the population was sick of the status quo and wanted change, those who spoke up and tried pointing certain things out were labeled as worrying lunatics, and most of society was too ignorant to care until it was too late. I mean, what the hell is an individual to do? I could grab my rifle and take to the streets, and immediately get gunned down by cops, or start writing letters that will pretty just get me added to a list at this point.

I have such low standards for media these days that it doesn’t really phase me, and I get to be pleasantly surprised when something is good. I don’t really watch much TV outside of a few select shows that I throw on in the background, I’ve never been much of a gamer so I’m kinda glad I’m not really clued in to how bad it’s gotten, and with movies I’ll wait for a recommendation or just work through my server library of old and new. I think I’ve just kind of accepted media enshittification at this point and there’s already several lifetimes of great movies and books I’ve yet to experience that it’s no big loss, and anything truly awesome that comes along in the interim is a welcome light.

11/5/2024