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Exactly, the legal system's job is not necessarily finding the truth. It's who can convince the judge/jury better even if they use nasty tactics.

> Exactly, the legal system's job is not necessarily finding the truth.

The system purpose is to try and find the truth, because that helps society function, but is imperfect. It is good enough, so far, to keep society functioning, though its imperfection allows injustice to happen.

> It's who can convince the judge/jury better even if they use nasty tactics.

The adversarial system[1] does result in nasty tactics emerging, and I think there is room there for improvement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_system


The story is simple:

Google communication culture started as open and relaxed so people could go on a public internal forum and say their opinion "I think if we add x, y, z feature we can kill the competition". This is nothing specific to Google, it happens perhaps everywhere but Google wasn't policing it in written communication.

Then all these written opinions were gobbled up by lawyers during the discovery phase of endless lawsuits Google has to defend. It created constant headache so they said, we'll auto delete chats older than a few days unless you opt-out.

Now a court and this article say they are destroying evidence.

I've personally lost my trust in both the media and the legal system honestly. The incentives are just not aligned with good outcomes. The incentive for the media is more and more drama and the incentives for lawyers is always adversarial depending on who they represent.


You see Google as an innocent victim?

> Google communication culture started as open and relaxed so people could go on a public internal forum and say their opinion "I think if we add x, y, z feature we can kill the competition". This is nothing specific to Google, it happens perhaps everywhere but Google wasn't policing it in written communication.

What is specific to Google is that they have monopolies, and it's illegal to use that power to kill the competition. One solution is for a manager or executive to say, 'no, we can't do that' instead of promoting the idea.


I'm talking about an internal forum. people don't ask for their manager's permission or review before leaving a comment on an internal forum.

There's precedent of this at many places.

One of the better-known instances, at least for Geeks Of a Certain Age, was "Bad Attitude", the unofficial group chat for Netscape, run personally by jwz. He'd written about the consequences of that being included within the scope of discovery by Microsoft lawyers during Netscape's actions against that company.

From 1998: <https://archive.is/1bYB6>

(Archive link to avoid jwz's treatment of HN referrer headers.)


you can disable 3rd party cookies if you want: chrome://settings/cookies


I find Safari to be a fantastic product overall both on desktop and mobile but I have stuck to Chrome to keep my options open in future in case I want to use non-Apple hardware


Is Meta or Microsoft buying Chrome a good outcome?


Why would either of those two be allowed to buy Chrome. Meta is just as much an ad business and quasi-monopoly as Google is. Microsoft has already been in legal trouble over browsers and is actively trying to recreate Google ad empire.

Governments are kinda stupid in these cases, but I think Google would be able to argue, if forced to sell, that neither of those two companies would improve the market situation.

Sell it to Opera, except they're Chinese now. Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, the co-founder of Opera and CEO of Vivaldi, should buy it, that would be a hilarious outcome.


My ideal outcome would be something like:

1) Chrome is spun out as a standalone entity. Google would originally have full ownership but be forced to sell down over time.

2) Google buys the Chrome traffic at a fair price

3) Apple sells their traffic to someone else, potentially an AI search player (Meta??)

4) MSFT makes a new browser in response to Chrome going closed source


> 4) MSFT makes a new browser in response to Chrome going closed source

Why would they? They can just continue why Chromium/Edge. Presumably the new standalone entity be able to invest as much into Google or even MS.


If Apple, Mozilla, and a stand alone Chrome sell search traffic at the fair market price and Google pays the highest price (because they have the best monetization) we're back where we started.


> MSFT makes a new browser in response to Chrome going closed source

Really? Another one after IE, Native Edge, and Chromium Edge? I dont think they really need another one.


I thought native edge was pretty good, it was disappointing when they gave it up.

Call me old fashioned but I think browsers will advance faster when we don't have a chromium monopoly outside of the apple ecosystem.


IMHO Microsoft yes, Meta no.

Microsoft wouldn't have a the kind of vertically integrated monopoly where they control both the internet properties and the browser used to access them.


Looking at this case and the recent case against SpaceX (which is required to only hire US permanent residents and citizens) for not hiring asylees, makes me think DOJ which has the bandwidth to only work on few very important cases isn't doing a good job overall.


Is Chrome being run so bad that we need even more committees, councils and bureaucrats to implement every single feature ?

Microsoft is already using the Chromium and changing the default search engine to Bing and shipping it as Edge. What else is needed?

This DOJ looks like they just want to pad their resumes with some grandiose case which might be bad for everyone else.


Chrome isn't being run bad because of committee, it's being run bad because it's used by Google as part of their web advertising empire.


Notice how their web advertising empire, which they do have a monopoly on (unlike Chrome), is not being broken up?


There is a separate, ongoing antitrust lawsuit over Google’s adtech business. Closing arguments in that case are scheduled for Nov. 25, next week: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/google-antitru...


Chrome is not run badly at all. But in its current state it gives Google the ability to singlehandedly dictate webstandards. Thats an issue.


That doesn't go away with not Google. It's the result of having a browser with such big market share.


I think the point is to stop adding more features. The web is feature complete, everything Google is adding is just stuff to make them more money through ads and lock in.


That's not true, plenty of great stuff is shipping every year. Take your pick: https://web.dev/series/baseline-newly-available https://web.dev/blog/baseline2023


This is what Microsoft thought when they released IE6, and is why we ended up still supporting IE6 into the 2010s


That is not true at all. Plenty of features added expands the capabilities of what can be built for the browser


is that based on feelings or facts?


There’s nothing wrong at all with adding features as long as more than one browser/engine actually adopts them.


There’s an argument to be made that a high pace of new feature additions effectively functions as a moat that ensures that new competitive web engines cannot be developed as a result of not being able to ever catch up.


Exactly: The part after "as long as" is both critical and hard to ensure.


Oh come on, I for one am excited about the upcoming WebKmem API that allows random websites direct access to kernel memory..


How else are web devs supposed to write kernel modules?


I believe most people use AI to help them quickly figure out how to use a library or an API without having to read all their (often out dated) documentation instead of helping them solve some mathematical challenge


I've never had an AI not just make up API when it didn't exist, instead of saying "it doesn't exist". Lol


If the documentation is out of date, such that it doesn't help, this doesn't bode well for the training data of the AI helping it get it right, either?


AI can presumably integrate all of the forum discussions talking about how people really use the code.

Assuming discussions don't happen in Slack, or Discord, or...


Unfortunately, it often hallucinates wrong parameters (or gets their order wrong) if there are multiple different APIs for similar packages. For example, there are plenty ML model inference packages, and the code suggestions for NVIDIA Triton Inference Server Python code are pretty much always wrong, as it generates code that’s probably correct for other Python ML inference packages with slightly different API.


I often find the opposite. Documentation can be up to date, but AI suggests deprecated or removed functions because there’s more old code than new code. Pgx v5 is a particularly consistent example.


And all the code on which it was trained...


Forum posts can also be out of date.


I think that too but google claims something else.


I have carefully picked the people I follow on Twitter (mostly scientists and CS people) so the feed is ok but every time I try to use it for recent news/events, it's so full of spam it's unusable.

I like the community notes feature but it doesn't show up that much. Separately I dislike the fact that Elon asked the staff to make exception for his account when it comes to ranking decisions. That's ridiculous.


The "computer use" demos are interesting.

It's a problem we used to work on and perhaps many other people have always wanted to accomplish since 10 years ago. So it's yet to be seen how well it works outside a demo.

What was surprising was the slow/human speed of operations. It types into the text boxes at a human speed rather than just dumping the text there. Is it so the human can better monitor what's happening or is it so it does not trigger Captchas ?


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