The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread

tigger

Whatever he was doing, it was blinking a lot.

Tazz

Hence the 503 window. ;)

Lob12

Tigger just admitted that this award winning forum is coded by child labour.

Great.

Gators1

@tigger Interesting approach to raising your kid. You are turning him into a nerd that nobody will want to date, but at the same time giving him the skills to build his own girlfriend.

tigger

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@tigger Interesting approach to raising your kid. You are turning him into a nerd that nobody will want to date, but at the same time giving him the skills to build his own girlfriend.

What’s actually kind of cool is that the nerds seem to be also the popular ones and the ones that do all the sports.

Gators1

True, being a nerd these days isn’t want it used to be. I guess maybe they are even getting laid by womenz trying to get a piece of their tech startup IPO.

tigger

I guess I should teach him that there are cases when a crosscheck is the appropriate solution to your problems, but otherwise he’s all good.

Testing out the Milk-V Duo - The new $9 RISC-V eSBC that runs Linux!

The above is another cheap RISC-V single board computer except this one is only $9. Then at 21:08 he says, “Oh I forgot to mention, this one has a tensor processing unit. I don’t know how good it is but it’s designed to do some sort of AI.”

Nine dollars, fuck me.

Tazz

It probably gains access to everything you own and will shut everyone down in the blink of an eye.

https://twitter.com/pdrmnvd/status/1707395736458207430?s=20

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

That’s tantamount to fraud.

I guess we can’t tell from that one email if his request went anywhere. Given the tension between attracting/retaining users with a useful product and wanting to squeeze every last dollar out of them, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that some people within google would be pushing for what he’s asking for.

I also don’t know who he is in terms of seniority but the guy he’s replying to “Anil Sabharwal” seems to be a big deal from my brief search.

Facebook appears to be on an interesting journey to destroy what made them popular in the first place. Well, they kind of already had but has anyone else been inundated with friend requests lately? I’ve gone from 500 to 1K friends in a week and. several times now when I’ve gone to confirm some of the new requests it says I can’t because the person who requested it has maxed out at 5K friends. If Facebook is behind the change, it seems they are trying to make the whole “friend” thing even more meaningless than it was. Maybe as a prelude to turning it off and making everything public? Dunno.

tigger

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

That’s tantamount to fraud.

I guess we can’t tell from that one email if his request went anywhere. Given the tension between attracting/retaining users with a useful product and wanting to squeeze every last dollar out of them, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that some people within google would be pushing for what he’s asking for.

I also don’t know who he is in terms of seniority but the guy he’s replying to “Anil Sabharwal” seems to be a big deal from my brief search.

What is the request though? As far as I can tell it’s something to do with rolling back a launch which redirected some queries from chrome away from search, e.g. if you type “Facebook” going directly to Facebook instead of Google. I’m unsure I see how that is “fraud”.

Kilemall

@tigger said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

That’s tantamount to fraud.

I guess we can’t tell from that one email if his request went anywhere. Given the tension between attracting/retaining users with a useful product and wanting to squeeze every last dollar out of them, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that some people within google would be pushing for what he’s asking for.

I also don’t know who he is in terms of seniority but the guy he’s replying to “Anil Sabharwal” seems to be a big deal from my brief search.

What is the request though? As far as I can tell it’s something to do with rolling back a launch which redirected some queries from chrome away from search, e.g. if you type “Facebook” going directly to Facebook instead of Google. I’m unsure I see how that is “fraud”.

It’s fraud because the people paying for the ad clicks are getting falsely inflated results by a manipulation of the search results from a particular browser rather than actively interested quality clicks. Conversion rate to paying customer is going to be lower, so value paid is not value bought.

tigger

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@tigger said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

That’s tantamount to fraud.

I guess we can’t tell from that one email if his request went anywhere. Given the tension between attracting/retaining users with a useful product and wanting to squeeze every last dollar out of them, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that some people within google would be pushing for what he’s asking for.

I also don’t know who he is in terms of seniority but the guy he’s replying to “Anil Sabharwal” seems to be a big deal from my brief search.

What is the request though? As far as I can tell it’s something to do with rolling back a launch which redirected some queries from chrome away from search, e.g. if you type “Facebook” going directly to Facebook instead of Google. I’m unsure I see how that is “fraud”.

It’s fraud because the people paying for the ad clicks are getting falsely inflated results by a manipulation of the search results from a particular browser rather than actively interested quality clicks. Conversion rate to paying customer is going to be lower, so value paid is not value bought.

Maybe explain what you believe is happening and what evidence the email provides? Because I am not following you at all. Everyone in the thread is, as far as I can tell, suggesting the exact opposite.

Jam

I Googled SQV related to sales (try just “SQV” without sales and see what you get) and I got, in the “headline”"

Sales Quantity Variance (SQV) Difference between the actual contribution margin and the standard contribution with sales mix and sales volume held constant. Difference between the actual product mix and the standard product mix with sales volume and contribution margin held constant.

And then I searched under “query rollback”, a new term for me and got:

The query executes a ROLLBACK TRANSACTION statement. This statement abandons all changes made inside the transaction. The query ends before reaching either of these two statements. In that case, BigQuery automatically rolls back the transaction.

If I had a very cynical mind (a condition not contrary to fact) I’d be thinking that, a query rollback on a Google search related to a product search, would end in a shorter or shallower response and allow selected ads to pop up quicker in the responses?

Would this amount to ‘putting one’s finger on the scales’ a bit or some form of query/response results manipulation?

I don’t pretend to understand all the jargon and don’t want to dig much deeper, but it seems like the search/query team and the sales of advertising team may be considering working together to be sure that the peeps buying ads get more eyeball time at the expense of more “honest” responses to queries?

As I’ve said, I do not care enough to try and dig more deeply and I can be misinterpreting what I read due to a not so deep understanding of the terms.

Stu

This reminds me of a theory I came up with last week. It’s either profound and insightful, or facile and stupid…

So we had 15+ years of tech growth based largely on the promise of data amalgamation, and mostly its use in marketing. We could target ads and even try to sell something to someone before they even knew they wanted it. Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and all the others raked in hundreds of billions towards this future. And then everyone found out there’s still not really much money in online advertising.

As marketing was falling flat, we got more and more talk about the AI revolution. And who is best positioned to move forward into this brave new future? Big tech companies with lots of data of course, like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Twitter.

While I don’t doubt AI will be important moving forward, I can’t help but think that most of this talk is from companies who want to keep the firehose of investment capital flowing.

Jam

Far be it for me to appear as if I am not woke . . .

So I won’t suggest that if I were Stu, I’d rather be seen as a typing cisgender frog (who dearly loves Miss Piggy) rather than a gay dude in a yellow shirt.

Gators1

@Stu said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

This reminds me of a theory I came up with last week. It’s either profound and insightful, or facile and stupid…

So we had 15+ years of tech growth based largely on the promise of data amalgamation, and mostly its use in marketing. We could target ads and even try to sell something to someone before they even knew they wanted it. Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and all the others raked in hundreds of billions towards this future. And then everyone found out there’s still not really much money in online advertising.

As marketing was falling flat, we got more and more talk about the AI revolution. And who is best positioned to move forward into this brave new future? Big tech companies with lots of data of course, like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Twitter.

While I don’t doubt AI will be important moving forward, I can’t help but think that most of this talk is from companies who want to keep the firehose of investment capital flowing.

Seems more like gold rush mentality to be first to the next big thing. Google and Microsoft don’t need investment cash, but they know AI potentially will reset the search market and even reinvent social media, so a few years lead could drastically change some company’s market share and stock prices would go to the moon. Investors want to be in on the ground floor of course, but the major efforts are backed by big tech already.

tigger

@Jam said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

I Googled SQV related to sales (try just “SQV” without sales and see what you get) and I got, in the “headline”"

Sales Quantity Variance (SQV) Difference between the actual contribution margin and the standard contribution with sales mix and sales volume held constant. Difference between the actual product mix and the standard product mix with sales volume and contribution margin held constant.

And then I searched under “query rollback”, a new term for me and got:

The query executes a ROLLBACK TRANSACTION statement. This statement abandons all changes made inside the transaction. The query ends before reaching either of these two statements. In that case, BigQuery automatically rolls back the transaction.

If I had a very cynical mind (a condition not contrary to fact) I’d be thinking that, a query rollback on a Google search related to a product search, would end in a shorter or shallower response and allow selected ads to pop up quicker in the responses?

Would this amount to ‘putting one’s finger on the scales’ a bit or some form of query/response results manipulation?

I don’t pretend to understand all the jargon and don’t want to dig much deeper, but it seems like the search/query team and the sales of advertising team may be considering working together to be sure that the peeps buying ads get more eyeball time at the expense of more “honest” responses to queries?

As I’ve said, I do not care enough to try and dig more deeply and I can be misinterpreting what I read due to a not so deep understanding of the terms.

Lol. Stop googling :D
A rollback simply means to revert a change. A query is when a user asks something. BigQuery is something completely unrelated. Seach platforms need a lot of queries, because then they can show ads and users click on ads. Google launched something on Chrome that reduces the number of times users are sent to the search page, and the dude is asking that change to be turned off.

Search is a very tricky thing to get right. For instance there are people in that twitter thread, stating that Google has knowledge graph (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Knowledge_Graph) and can thus answer some queries directly, but doesn’t, because that would mean fewer ads served as so they are assholes. I happen to know (through my parents) that some people within the EU are pushing for yet another lawsuit against Google for showing results from that knowledge graph altogether in search. Because they run various encyclopedias, and they say that users aren’t coming to them anymore, instead they go to Google and Google shows them the results from Wikipedia.

Ads run the internet. Before we turn of adds (for instance, by making google drop search or using ChatGPT everywhere), we need to make sure that the internet can survive that.