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Love the emphasis on people behind successful companies and humble beginnings that all of them have!

> brazenly manipulated

Interesting talking point, but I guess the far right talking points are gaining traction on HN as well.


> gaining traction on HN

Not new in the slightest.


You can argue that people outside of China don't get to choose something other than Google. Sure, there are recent pushes with default search engine choices and similar initiatives, but there is a reason why Google is paying hundreds of millions of dollars to be the default search engine.

It’s reasonable to see a distinction between the great firewall and the default browser search engine

Safari on latest Sequoia doesn't support this. Given that many people will not upgrade to the latest version, it is a shame Safari is behind these things.

Wait until you hear about the pixel size restrictions on safari canvases.

And this is news why? Isn't this always been the case, sure CS majors were employed, but so many people in the industry have no formal degrees.

It's somewhat relevant in the context of Google only because the mythos behind the early part of the company (two Stanford PhDs, etc) and also because the general vibe at least in the early part of the company was really like it was kind of a big university of its own. Boatloads of Masters and PhD students, lots of talk about which school you came from, blah blah blah. Complete with a form "publish or perish" and "poster board sessions" and stuff that all felt very foreign to me when I joined (as someone not coming from academia).

It was always seen, in the first decade of the millennia, as a kind of very academia friendly/focused place.

I had impostor syndrome the whole time I was there as a result.

I think that reputation has lessened.


Only thing is that Google already publicly announced this exact same fact nearly 15 years ago, and it already filled the news cycle back then[1]. To have it show up again now is like today's news reporting on the movie Frozen being released.

But, whatever attracts the most clicks goes, I suppose.

[1] For example,

- https://www.businessinsider.com/google-hiring-non-graduates-...

- https://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-to...


For sure, I 100% agree and see my other comment, it's questionable how much Brin even really knows about hiring practices or anything else happening inside Google these days anyways.

I can't believe people actually bring BRICS in serious discussions.

HN is great for technical discussions, but is below average for political or macroeconomic discussions. A HN comment thread on those topics is essentially indistinguishable from a NYT comments section, which I mean as an unfavourable comparison.

Turns out that being good at SQL does not make one good at the subtle social art / science of power and governance. If anything, the correlation is inverse. This shouldn't be surprising.


>BRICS has implemented initiatives that could reform the global financial system, such as the New Development Bank, the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement, BRICS PAY and the BRICS Joint Statistical Publication. BRICS has also advanced de-dollarization to reduce the use of the U.S. dollar as reserve currency. In its first 15 years, BRICS has established almost 60 intragroup institutions and an extensive network including think tanks and dialogues.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRICS

So what is the problem mentioning a future BRICS possibility while discussing de-dollarization. Not a challenge want to understand.


Explain why. That's more than half the world's population

> My current hypothesis is that the growth in the _price_ of the US Stock market (eg S&P 500) is actually devaluation of the dollar.

You mean devaluation is causing the growth of SP500, or the other way around?


the S&P is only growing when the denominator is USD. Not Euro or Gold.

It's kinda like saying during "My bread appreciated!" during hyper inflation.

IMO we're in one of the cases where "Number go up" is actually bad.


In the UK we have a convenient way of observing this phenomenon.

The FTSE100 is mostly multinational companies valued in pounds. The FTSE250 is mostly British companies valued in pounds. If the FTSE100 goes up while the FTSE250 stays flat or falls then it means the currency got devalued and there's no real growth.


How can that be? Maybe gold, but the euro has fallen relative to the dollar.

I can't believe you are making an office complex renovation argument.

FED has been instrumental is keeping the monetary policy sane in the recent years, unlike some pushes from the orange person you are taking talking points from.


Home market for iPhones is the whole world.

In India IOS has 4% of the market share of mobile devices whereas Android has 96%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/india


Sure, that is still millions of devices. What about other countries?

Home market would imply one country, but given there are billions of iOS/Apple devices throughout the world, this is not really a valid argument to make.


I mean yeah technically you can buy them pretty much everywhere, but outside of the US there are very few countries where they're above 50% of market share. They're below 30% in the vast majority of countries actually

Given the recent threats from Cloudflare against Italy and siding with Vance, Musk and co., this is definitely not a far-fetched reality. Big Tech has demonstrated which side they are going with.

Not submitting to state censorship requests is not a great example of what is the problem with Big Tech as discussed here.

I wasn't referring to the state censorship request, but rather to the 'flocking' to self-proclaimed champions of free speech in the current Trump administrations as a cry for help.

I personally find that the fact that a private company compels a list of IPs and domains that they want blocked to get blocked more alarming than that.

When did CF do this?


How much of internet can Cloudflare turn off in italy? They picked a fight with the cloud gorilla.

About 20% of sites, and there’s some big services behind Cloudflare so that percentage doesn’t even tell the full story.

When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them.

> When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them.

Mafia has a vested interest in broadcast rights of football matches in Spain?

Spain blocks Cloudflare because the football league La Liga has a court order that allows them to point to IP ranges that are hosting/fronting live streams of football matches, and get ISPs to block access to those ranges.


If the sports league is influential enough to have a standing court order to be able to unilaterally block IP ranges for the entire country, I'd imagine that organized crime might take an interest. I have no idea if it's the case but when something already seems to have an outsized influence it wouldn't be crazy to imagine that others interested in that power would also take an interest.

Moreover, I think the point of the parent comment is that they're blocking quite a bit more than just football games. It sounds like the claim is that the blocking is willfully broad because of other influences, not necessarily the the purported more narrow intent is necessarily from those influences.


Which directly contravenes the Digital Services Act. And is only in place because LaLiga has strong ties to the mafia.

More than mafia, ex-francoists oligarchs. And these could be stomped down tomorrow from CF by cancelling all the tangent services for those, even for Spanish banks and related industries (tourist and construction avoiding both attacks and serious disbalancing harms). The Ibex 35 would near collapse overnight and Tebas being kicked out from their own people.

In case of Spain, not the Mafia but ex-Francoist idiots. And if you want to know, our (ex?)-Fascists even bribed European mafias. Literally.

It is more about government tax warfare. They fined CF because it didn’t censor what the italian government wanted them to censor, so they fined CF.

Big Tech is going to optimize for profits. They are gonna bow down to whomever is in charge.

Not really, you are framing this issue and dropping key words to make it political, are you a bot farming for engagement, please stop.

Not OP but, oh common. This entire thing IS political. Big Tech IS in bed with the authoritarian US apparatus, they have been very transparent about it. What are you expecting to gain from your message? Pedantry points?

OP, not a bot. CF definitely chose to be political in the message, so regardless of what Italy did or who is right and wrong, posting that message is just a message that reliance on CF can just be a bad idea long-term.

Just for context, did you see this from CF's CEO? https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492

The bits about Vance, Musk and "freedom of speech" are not only completely unnecessary, but well over the top.


There were strong signals from the CF CEO that they align with the Trump administration.

They threatened to pull the plug on all Italian customers.

This is relevant to this conversation: CF recently acted in a way that makes some people think it might cut its services to people for political reasons.

I don't find your comment particularly well articulated or continaing anything besides name calling (the "bot farming"). Can you articulate your opinion on the matter?


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