they left us reeling with their abrupt product decisions
This is what happens when you put a McKinsey consultant in the role of CEO of an organization where product managers run the asylum instead of engineers.
“Over time, though, more people might be included, as intermediate rights organizations—unions, guilds, professional groups, and so on—start to play a role.”
the big AI labs are very actively doing a lot of crawling.
Crawling isn't the same as search. Crawling is just the very bottom of a proper search stack.
There's a lot of layers and a shitton of infrastructure to run and/or pay for.
Mind you, it's possible they actually did re-implement all the layers, but why would they when there are already lots of suppliers out there and they are all already chronically short on compute resources.
I'm actually very curious to learn what they actually do wrt Search.
Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment.
That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world.
Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack.
how it's require to hand-implement floats to get constant-time operations.
That and not be at the mercy of someone changing the current rounding mode behind your back.
Also hand-implement floats ... not likely to be particularly efficient, no ?
I took a quick glance at the section "About those floating points". Whomever designed that algorithm used the biggest footgun ever. I mean floating point numbers? For crypto?
Even if he can mathematically prove is algorithm is solid, he's going to lose 99% of his intended audience the moment he's going to use the words crypto and floating point in the same sentence.
I mean I know djb managed at some point to coax an x86 CPU floating point unit to perform weird integer operations to speed up some of his algorithms, but I would never have expected people to use floats the "intended way" to implement crypto algorithms.
"Standard" German people have an deeply ingrained, culturally inflicted belief that administration is inherently a good thing, and that the more of it there is of it, the better the system functions.
Worse, when you try to gently and constructively engage them on the topic, their mind is so deeply dyed with the idea, that they either simply don't understand what you're talking about or when they do, refuse to engage because they find you so weird, it's a waste of time to discuss with you.
"Was nicht dokumentiert ist, ist nicht passiert". Yeah, right, except that "Alles erstickt im Papierkram" and nothing ever fucking happens.