rantee

Claims by an unidentified author(s) replying to comments with a 4-hour old HN account.. How did this make it to the front page other than the catchy name?

Totally agree - I don't find "stunningly thin and light design" to be a selling point any more. I want to hold a durable device without feeling like it might break or slip out of my hands, without needing a chunky case.

Yes, agree that like any other technology, the artists typically get the short end of the stick regardless of the delivery platform. Even for the megastars, more money is raked in from sources other than streaming. (With notable exceptions, like megastars owning their own masters instead of a label, or blockbuster established songwriters.)

Yes, the rates vary by platform. In the US, there's a combo of statutory (or CRB-approved) rates on the publisher side, and negotiations on the label side.

On the publisher/songwriter side, streams are not "public performances" under the Copyright Act (in the US), so royalties are not handled by the court-sanctioned monopolies that have been in place since the early 20th century (ASCAP, BMI).

And if publishers and/or labels were able to obtain better rates - via direct negotiations, the CRB, or otherwise - presumably some of those fractional cents per stream would trickle down to the artists and songwriters who are already in notoriously oppressive contracts with the major label and publisher oligopoly.

Lost in all coverage of this battle of the middlemen is the effect on the artists actually making the product. How would lower prices make any difference in Spotify’s royalty rate bullying in a market saturated with alternatives that they already dominate? Are there really that many more consumers who want but aren’t already paying for a streaming service or using free alternatives? There are legit discussions to be had about app store policies, but I can’t see how the music streaming context is the place to have them.

It’s beyond laughable that the company didn’t better address these concerns beyond performative press releases without the need for regulatory intervention before rolling out in any jurisdiction, let alone the EU. Whatever one’s opinion on the privacy implications, it’s a simply embarassing business* move given the number of countries with data protection legislation (and/or active regulators).

* or whatever motive one wishes to ascribe to the mix of for- and non-profit entities involved in muddying the waters OpenAI-style

Fueling clickbait conspiracy theories is one probable outcome that comes to mind. For example, even a winning candidate may claim that a "woke" employee sabotaged the site in an effort to subvert the will of the people to have free and open discourse, they won despite the media deck stacked against them, etc.

Somebody page Kanye to say something stupid so we can flush SA out of the news cycle already. Elon's just not up to par these days.

Xoogler here - Totally agree that the bulging middle management layers and lack of crisp CEO vision have dismantled the company's ability to weather the changes of "growing up". Had a few managers and multiple reorgs in my < two years there, during a time of record profits. Peers said that wasn't an uncommon thing. Who cares about vision or management so long as the ads money printer goes brrr?

Still, there are definitely people trying to do the right thing for users despite frequent bu$iness side overrides, and IMO still some best-of-breed products amongst the sprawling graveyard/zombies. I could even get through to a real person at Nest customer support a few weeks ago!

You can still grab bl.ing for the promo price of $3,899! (11/1/23 ~3pm ET GoDaddy quote)

Great overview, thanks for sharing. Maybe this was unintentional, but I got a good laugh out of, "In 1952, the International Astronomical Union changed the definition of time"!

Release the lobbyists! Hopefully this moves forward without getting too watered down. Its limited scope is more promising than recent attempts at more comprehensive data protection legislation.

Announced in a Friday-before-holiday email. The dollar amount isn't likely to break the bank for many users, but as a percentage it's just taking advantage of a captive user base.

Regardless of the functionality and (IMO) great engineering of the products, it's amazing that the biz side has never seemed to care much for its community of users.

I've heard similar stories from others. My Nest doorbell has issues, too, unless someone is right on the porch. I'm ready to get cameras but waiting for the next Prime Day when I can probably pick up two Rings for the price of one Nest cam (and maybe even a previous gen doorbell?). The multi-app thing, as most others have noted, is also infuriating and pathetic at this point. Not OK, Google.

Nice. Now do Xcode!

Don't forget the real estate binge.. even as more and more people were WFH'ing.

Me: "How about a printer where I can scan a QR code, like an IoT device, and it 'just works'"? Tech industry: "How about AR glasses?"

While the complexity of translating screen -> paper across platforms, resolutions, etc. is huge and ever-expanding, can anyone comment on why it isn't a solved problem by now? Are there just too many ancient protocols left to support (for a large enough sales surface) so the drivers are too fragile to properly rewrite? Is it an issue of OS support for the latest protocols? It's not like printer frustration is a new phenomenon...

While privacy policies are increasingly tailored to an app's actual data usage,* there are still FAR too many out there full of the same copypasta allowing a company to do whatever they want with your data. With that in mind, it's hardly a surprise that there's a disconnect between what engineers self-report and what's buried in the policies.

* Based on my own experience over the years actually reading them as someone who both cares about this stuff and works in the space.

The bug tracker, deployment, and testing tools are very mature. It was the task tracking by spreadsheet on my teams that got to me, and lack of unified project management tooling across teams. This made tracking dependencies and planning more difficult (leading to more meetings). There are definitely in-house tools available. It's just another "YMMV considerably" element of things.

A lot of this reflects the "professional executive" MBA-ization others have mentioned. When folks who've never been engineers, or never worked on shipping products are the ones managing engineers, it creates dissonance (and BDUF[1]). I'm pretty biased, having entered the company after a decade on well-oiled scrum and XP teams - the predictability made it SO much easier to focus on the actual work. I've always believed that fewer things 100% complete are better than many things in partial states. That just isn't the case there and caused issues for me.

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

edit: formatting

Since employees, (many) customers, and investors aren't happy, seems like time for a change. It's the layers between the puppet and army that cause the most issues IMO, but vision starts at the top. And it isn't there these days.

And I totally agree on the botched demo; it's just like the stock's unfair punishment after recent great quarters. Expecting that pandemic growth would continue forever just shows the irrationality of markets.

+1 to your comment that it's time for new Googles to rise up.

[edit to fix typo]

Putting aside the product concerns, from my recent Xoogler perspective, they absolutely need a new CEO.

Start with a chaotic management style that is constantly reorg'ing and forcing manager changes. I had three managers and four reorgs during my under two years. (YMMV by team but I've heard of others even in product areas who've experienced similar.) You never know when you'll be pulled from a project, projects are developed and then handed-off vs. letting the builders continue to improve them, and promo becomes a political fantasy as you shift around.

Reorgs are a fact of enterprise life, but the frequency of them at Google is a huge sign of lack of strategic direction and bad planning. Absorbing HUGE numbers of new employees into this constantly shifting structure is a recipe for disaster. (OTOH, documentation tends to be very good.) And buying up tons of real estate when so many people either WFH full time or are hybrid? Crazy.

Then there's the way projects are managed. I never thought I'd miss JIRA so much. There are always too many cooks in the kitchen and everlasting approval processes.

To all the amazingly smart, dedicated, and user-focused people still there - you rock. To the board - time to shake things up.

[edit - fixed typo]

"No safety or surprise, the end" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXqPNlng6uI

As someone with a liberal arts degree who also, charitably, is a pretty decent developer, this is spot on. (No disrespect to those educated in different contexts, or those who have difficulty for other neurodiverse, cultural or ESL, or other reasons who excel in other areas.)

After years on non-technical or customer-facing teams, followed by a dozen years in technical roles, I've noticed that my ability to effectively communicate abstract concepts has greatly diminished. This has held even for things I deeply understand at both a micro (the technical details and dependencies) and macro (the business context) level.

Unedited, this comment full of parenthetical statements and loaded with commas, is a prime example of what's happened. Is it due to over-training one's brain to account for all the little details? Anxiety about all that could go wrong? Over-excitement about being on the precipice of nailing something? Or more general cultural trends in the way we process information? Time will tell, unless the Singularity catches up first.

(disclaimer: non-practicing lawyer here, not yours or theirs, off-the-cuff very hot take)

What part of 'A consumer shall have the right to request...' in the CCPA isn't clear? Nothing about "A fake user may request..." Looking forward to another ballot initiative to further clarify the law!

The secret shopper thing is a big red herring - at least the secret shopper actually buys something, and in real non-academic life is usually hired by the company (or marketing company by extension).

Disappointing to see the lack of judgment from a researcher who's otherwise done great work, and the IRB failure to boot. Good to see some acknowledgement but it feels like "let's build a tool to do the work and hope for good data." Not sure where this could've led other than a name-and-shame conference paper.

Paywall politics aside however one feels about them, would be great if HN mods would just never put through a link to one... Waste of time for most of us.

Like others predict, I think this will get booted because of lack of standing. Interesting that Greenspan makes the broad First Amendment argument about being able to represent his corporation as legal counsel based on political speech rights found in Citizens United.. but that case is not on point and won't help here. The court is unlikely to explain why and probably will dismiss it for reasons Grellas notes in the first comment too. The complaint isn't as long as it looks for non-lawyers - just skim over the parts where he lists all the defendants. After page 37 it's just copies of the laws, regulations and screenshots.

Assuming he hired a lawyer to file his other case claiming arbitrary enforcement of the CA law against his company (discussed in paragraph 4 of the complaint linked to above), that one seems much more likely to go somewhere although relief at this point is pretty unclear.

Also the first time I've noticed someone use "pivot" in the Lean Startup sense in a legal complaint (fn. 3).