That means you're a peasant, and don't matter.
Don't worry, they'll work with telecoms and carriers to ensure devices matching your budget are subsidized and made available at every possible opportunity.
I expected mostly snark from my earnest question, And got it.
Ok, concrete scenario. What about homeless people using the computer at the library? Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Google would throw homeless people in a furnace to generate electricity for their datacentres if they could. No, this is not sarcasm, I fully expect they would if they could.
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Sure they would. Cloudflare has already arbitrarily blocked entire swathes of the internet. Captcha as well. Your average user ends up going to the path of least resistance, and end up with a compliant ISP or carrier that's doing all sorts of censorship and gatekeeping and siloing and funneling.
And if they did get noticed, they'd whip up some sort of program through their cronies like the Obama phone, and get subsidized service to some token groups, heavily favoring political funneling and defaults supporting whatever party won the grift for that particular round of conspicuous do-gooding.
It's bad, man. For technically savvy people, they can get around things, switch up DNS, muck with vpns, etc. Normal folks are kept firmly within the walled gardens.
Then there's the information silos, platforms, and psychological shit they use. People don't have a chance in hell of getting a free and open link to the internet, what they see is tied to their identity, tied to their service provider, tied to their geographic location, and it's all done seamlessly in the background so they never even notice what they're missing, by design.
It wasn't snark. It's the awful, honest truth, and I have things to suggest involving wire brushes for anyone at Google or any other company involved in this shit.
We need a digital bill of rights, outlawing commercial trafficking in user data, mandatory ephemerality, and penalties involving prison time for CEOs and fines that are rapidly and unavoidably fatal even for companies like Alphabet or Amazon if they screw up even a little bit. Otherwise, this whole pretense at a free and open internet is just a convenient talking point and marketing schlock.
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they? Please don’t respond with sarcasm.
Honestly, if you ask such terminally naive questions don't be surprised to get sarcasm in reply. Google does cut off access to chunks of people if it deems it profitable to do so!
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Why wouldn't they? Google is notorious for making marginalized people's lives harder if it can make them money. Some examples:
- Hosting Palantir's ImmigrationOS, used by ICE to track immigrants
- Actively removing tools marginalized people use to protect themselves against ICE, such as ICE-tracking apps on the play store
- Intentionally aided Israel in committing genocide as part of Project Nimbus
- LGBTQ creator censorship on YouTube
Cutting off a small group of people they've repeatedly shown not to care about in the first place is a small price to pay to further cement their position as gatekeeper of the internet.
Well, it depends on the application and context. I don't think a homeless person at the library is going to be booking a $1000-a-night room in downtown Los Angeles.
However, services that homeless people will be using should factor in their target audience (such as the homeless not having a phone at all, or maybe not one that's up to date even).
However, like it or not, having a modern up to date device is becoming essential for even rudimentary basic access to society. Whether that's right or wrong it's where we are.
I shuddered when I realized that Google would require (smart)phones for recaptcha.
I say this because I used to have a dumb-phone for an year and more and I only stopped using it when it broke (its battery fried but its replacable but I don't find battery its size). No smart-phone period,(I am a teen so I can afford to do that)
Recently, I wanted to make a google account, guess-what, I literally couldn't make a google account without having an (smart)phone. Google's new feature on making a google account also requires you to qr code your way into, similar to this re-captcha.
I tried to somehow find ways to have a phone number OTP but even when I finally managed to do that after so much PITA, I didn't get the OTP (at all).
I am pretty sure that my phone number works as I got another OTP from google when I had finally given in and used an android device to make an account and even then, there is so much friction.
Even though I have verified my phone number on google, I had to verify the phone number on youtube again to upload a video >15 minutes iirc and yknow I tried to add my number and it didn't send my OTP. So I tried again, and it said that I had tried too much, yes their rate limit of too much is 1
I was sharing all of this with some of my online friends with screenshots. I probably wished to write a blogpost about it that you can't use google without having an (smart)phone.
and now, you are telling me, that Google is gonna force me/us the same but for viewing the open internet, the content and websites that they don't even control. There was one thing about google doing this BS in their own websites because I thought that although really sh.tty, but they don't care about me enough to want me as a user so fine (it wasn't but still)
But this just takes it to an extremely completely next level. I can't stress how bad this all is.
Even after all of the previous things, I still was like, well this problem of google account can still be fixed/isn't thaaat large more than its annoying/frustrating and Google as a company is still mostly fine as compared to other tech giants except from their locking down android thing but this all changed with this move.
With age verification, locking down android, requiring android, recent Utah/UK laws which somehow threaten websites. Internet is turning into Dystopia. We are gonna slowly move towards a allowlist internet where only select few websites are used. For a large swath of the population this is already the case so the voices protesting are quite few but we must do what we can to protest them all from killing the internet. Sorry this got long but I can't stress how bad of a move this is as someone who used to use dumbphone, Google is basically saying that I can't use the internet if I have a dumb-phone.
What do you mean by enterprise cloud? The default GitHub enterprise cloud plan is hosted on the same infra as “public github.” Do you have a link to what you mean?
It sounds like they're talking about "GitHub Enterprise Cloud with Data Residency." This is a separate product to the standard "GitHub Enterprise Cloud" (including Enterprise Managed Users) which runs on normal github.com infrastructure.
If you have a Data Residency tenant, you access it through an endpoint like octocorp.ghe.com
GitHub seems to try to use specific language here to avoid this confusion, because they are quite different products, but it seem to me they were named confusingly in the first place...
It'd make sense if there was a "you get what you pay for" attitude at MS re: public GitHub. It's not a good position for the free users, but, what else are you gonna do? Stand up your own? Retrain yourself on your SDLC in a new platform?
> That uncanny valley is there for a reason: to protect us from inferring agency
You’re committing a much older but related sin here: assigning agency and motivation to evolutionary processes. The uncanny valley is the product of evolution and thus by definition it has no “purpose”
I didn’t say any such thing like the universe has no purpose. Merely that in a scientific sense evolution has no motivation. It is an emergent phenomenon which tends to maximize fitness to reproduce and cannot be said to do anything for a reason. Saying otherwise is just anti-science.
Do Hindus and Buddhists generally agree there is a purpose? Perhaps too escape suffering and reincarnation? Sounds more like a western theistic view of existence. Like the deity has a plan for everyone's life kind of thing.
Well yes because just like your earlier point, we can't help but anthropomorphise the world around us.
Just like we see a person in an LLM, it's easy to assume that because we create things with a purpose, that the world around us also has to be that way. But it's just as wrong and arguably far more dangerous.
The "we the theists (or I guess non-nihilists?) all agree that..." falls apart once you start finishing the thought because they don't agree on much outside of negative partisanship towards certain outgroups before splintering back into fighting about dogma. Buddhists and Baptists both think life has meaning, and that's a statement with low utility.
Is it even true? I assume he’s referring to religion but I thought the irreligious population of the planet had broken 20% between China already and the West becoming increasingly agnostic/athiestic.
What do you think it means to “capture intent” and where do current models fall short on this description?
From my perspective the models are pretty good at “understanding” my intent, when it comes to describing a plan or an action I want done but it seems like you might be using a different definition.
Let’s state the obvious. You have an account that was just created. Are posting specific details internal to a company with what is typically a biased area. And now throwing vulgarities out. No credibility.
Traffic is not homogeneous in total transfer cost. CDN-hosted data at the edge, close to the user is much cheaper than data that has to transit many hops. At the asymptote, transferring data between machines on the LAN is essentially free.
I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, GitHub had to figure out how to monetize at some point.
Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, MS Windows), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making GitHub worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about GitHub.
"IP from a datacenter" doesn't work in practice to detect VPNs.
At work we set up a compliance-related service recently and used the AWS WAF rules to block known datacenter ranges with the goal of blocking bots and VPNs.
We had to disable that rule almost immediately because a large majority of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solutions are hosted in or at least egress from big cloud providers.
It wasn't possible to block AWS/GCP IP ranges without also blocking legit usage from real customers.
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