2k16 what's the worst enormous tech company?

Comcast has been valiantly rebranding as Xfinity, because the very name Comcast now stirs such deep hatred among tens of millions of people who have dealt with them over the decades that mobs of peasants bearing torches and pitchforks spontaneously gather whenever the name "Comcast" is spoken aloud.

Last year, in a fit of pique while recording a payment check to Comcast in our check register, under the name of the check recipient I wrote the notation "Bloodsuckers!" A week later while I was writing another entry in the register I noticed my wife had added the notation "Too right!"

lol nice

http://m.globallegalpost.com/corporate-counsel/hyperloop-one-faces-colossal-lawsuit-from-co-founder-37202632/

Not the worst tech company but it's interesting and idk where to put this:

It's paywalled but the gist is that one of Germany's big success stories in online travel bookings, Unister, which apparently had revenues in the hundreds of millions of Euro, got into financial trouble and the founder started moving money between subsidiaries to avoid creditors and insolvency proceedings. As a last ditch effort to save the company, he agreed to get a €10m loan from an "Israeli diamond dealer" on the understanding that he'd offer €1.5m to cover fees and insurance. The €1.5m was handed over but the first tranche of the loan, which was paid in a hotel lobby in cash, turned out to be made up almost entirely of counterfeit notes. Having discovered this, he chartered a small plane to fly back from Venice to Germany - which crashed in Slovenia, killing everyone on board.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e47a376e-5f04-11e6-ae3f-77baadeb1c93.html#axzz4HNqGAtB3

Not enormous but there was just a story in the news about Instacart -- it basically decided to start keeping its shoppers' tips as a "service fee" or something, but then there was so much outcry they backed down.

It's so obvious that their business model makes no fucking sense whatsoever -- paying a personal shopper even a minimal wage to pick up and deliver your groceries on demand is always going to be too expensive to be anything but a niche service, and it's never going to scale to the point of something like Uber. There's already this thing called Fresh Direct which is hugely more efficient and sells groceries at competitive prices, only difference being you need to have your shit together enough to order like 1 day in advance. Latest attempt to take more money out of workers' pockets seems like probably evidence of that.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/adobe-voco-photoshop-for-audio-speech-editing/

Adobe has demonstrated tech that lets you edit recorded speech so that you can alter what that person said or create an entirely new sentence from their voice. It seems inevitable that it will eventually be referred to as "photoshop but for audio."

want

adobe is the pits

from the pinboard guy: http://idlewords.com/talks/robot_armies.htm

We're now several generations in to this technology, and soldiers now have smaller, portable UAVs they can throw like a paper airplane. You launch them in the field, and they buzz around and give you a safe way to do reconaissance.

The topic in general is pretty depressing to me (like a lot of news these days I guess) but I really do want to play with one of these. Some of that stuff is really headed to the uncanny valley. The guy just goes on and on tho. Bullet points, dude.

Funny how much weirder some of this stuff is than the fictional universe of say Westworld.

"Nothing gives you peace of mind like connecting something inside your body to the outside of your clothing."

gallows lol @ Chad and Brad. Move fast, Chad! Break things, Brad! Ship it ship it ship it now!

http://i.imgur.com/aKPPKki.jpg

Google omits to say that trusting such a machine requires one to trust the experts who constructed it, hold it in their custody, and would be able to alter it without us non-experts understanding what they did or how they did it.

xp only if it looks like that sexy ex machina machine amirite

http://i.imgur.com/gkXp5ST.gif

game changer! innovation! the world is a better place thanks to: http://nyti.ms/2h8fXB5

This seems like a dumb business idea:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-takes-on-techs-white-whale-grocery-shopping-2016-12-05

I mean, IDK, the RFID checkout thing is neat, but the lack of human presence could creep people out and it seems like there will be ways of gaming it for shoplifting, just like with self-checkout. Also, just sounds like Amazon going outside its wheelhouse by getting into expensive long-term leases in prime RE shopping centers.

I support this.

For example, I'm guessing you could have a few grocery bags and just have one of them be made of RFID blocking material. Put the most expensive stuff in there, pay for the other stuff. Boom.

I support this

You Jeffs, always sticking together.

Also just feels a little too much like a double-down on a failure, i.e. Amazon Fresh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA2-iMz479o

i hate the future so much

same

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/044/247/297.png

An AWS cloud.

I just don't think that replacing what is one of the last refuges for the non-educated worker with automation is going to help our already dire situation wrt wealth inequality and social safety, especially it is a kind of automation we have no need for.

like at this point it's not even disruption or innovation, it's just trying to go back to the early 20th centuries level of disdain for low wages worker.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/23/mark-zuckerberg-hawaii-land-lawsuits-kauai-estate

what a dick!

as neoimperialist symbols go if we can't have "anything built on oahu in the last decade" i much prefer zuck's driveway to the mauna kea summit access road

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/technology/google-in-post-obama-era-aggressively-woos-republicans.html

otoh

Patrick O'Neill ‏@HowellONeill 30m30 minutes ago

Google founder Sergey Brin is at the SFO protest against Trump's order.

zuckerberg is really failing hard at the turing test

answer is still facebook

https://medium.com/@jitbit/facebook-is-terrifying-8dc4a016b64b#.kfkgzsjjx

do we need a 2017 thread

only if we can agree to finally poll Oracle

as usual for me this is a choice between amazon's terrifyingly well-updated 19c-style vertically-integrated ghoulish capitalist totalitarianism in the service of getting you cheap stuff from anywhere by the end of the week even if you live in almost the exact middle of the pacific ocean, and facebook's idealistic innovation in the service of driving you to suicide

― denies the existence of dark matter (difficult listening hour), Thursday, February 11, 2016 12:13 PM (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm tho otherwise, Uber is too doomed to be truly terrifying, the non-doomedness of Amazon and Facebook remain threatening

someone come up with a definitive list

i fuck with oracle so i can't say anything truly bad about them

how much does your contract specify as a messageboard shit-talking fee

i know where you're coming from though iatee

lol silby

Is it time for the 2k17 thread yet?

Oh, Uberpaws: http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/6/14791080/uber-sexism-scandal-strike-waymo-lawsuit-travis-kalanick

• January 28th: The company was accused (falsely, it turns out) of breaking a New York City taxi driver strike during the anti-immigration protests at JFK airport.
• January 28th–29th: Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s decision to participate in an economic advisory committee for President Trump led to a grassroots backlash among customers, spawning the hashtag #DeleteUber.
• January 30th: Lyft, Uber’s main rival, tops Uber in the iOS and Android app stores for the first time ever. The company also announces its plan to expand to 100 new markets in 2017.
• February 2nd: Kalanick ultimately backed out of the Trump committee, and promised $3 million in aid for drivers stuck overseas. But not before at least 200,000 users delete their accounts.
• February 16th: Jeff Jones, president of ride-sharing at Uber, was supposed to take an hour to conduct a public Facebook Q&A to try and address driver complaints. In the face of angry complaints, he cut it off after 12 questions and 30 minutes.
• February 19th: An ex-Uber engineer named Susan Fowler publishes a scathing blog post detailing systemic sexism and harassment at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, as well as a complete failure by the company’s human resources department to address her concerns. Her story goes viral.
• February 20th–21st: Kalanick promises a swift investigation, tapping former Attorney General Eric Holder and Uber board member Arianna Huffington, among others, to lead it. He also holds an “raw, emotional” all-hands meeting, where he apologies for Uber’s toxic culture and cries.
• February 23rd: Two early investors in Uber, Mitch and Freada Kapor, publish an essay expressing their deep “disappointment” in Kalanick’s decision to entrust the investigation to company insiders and supporters.
• February 23rd: Waymo, Google’s driverless car spinoff, files an explosive lawsuit against Uber, alleging that an Uber vice president named Anthony Levandowski stole thousands of documents from Google when working there as an engineer. Uber calls the charge “baseless.”
• February 24th–March 3rd: Several other female Uber employees come forward with their own tales of sexism and harassment, some on the record and some anonymous. Meanwhile, The New York Times publishes an explosive account of Uber’s cultural failings, including anecdotes of male managers groping female employees, drug use, homophobic slurs, and threats of assault with a baseball bat.
• February 25th: A self-driving Uber that was caught on video running a red light in San Francisco last December turned out to be under autonomous control, not manual as Uber claimed when the clip first surfaced. Meanwhile, emails between Uber and the California DMV reveal that the company was warned months in advance that its self-driving testing violated the law.
• February 27th: A top Uber executive was asked to resign by Kalanick after failing to disclose harassment allegations from his tenure at Google.
• February 28th: Bloomberg published a video of Kalanick arguing about prices with an Uber driver. Kalanick appears to blame the driver rather than take responsibility for his company’s fare decreases. After the video goes viral, Kalanick promises to seek leadership help.
• March 3rd: Uber’s global “Greyball” program used to hide from government employees looking to catch Uber cars operating in violation of local regulations is exposed by the Times.
• March 3rd: Uber VP for Product and Growth Ed Baker resigned amid rumors of a sexual relationship with another employee, Recode reported.

The BBC has been investigating secret child porn rings on Facebook for years. And last week a representative from Facebook, Simon Milner, finally agreed to sit down for an interview about moderation tools on the network. There was just one condition: Facebook asked that the BBC reporters send the company images that they’d found on Facebook’s secret groups that the BBC would like to discuss.

The BBC journalists sent Facebook the images they had flagged from private Facebook groups. And not only did Facebook cancel the interview, the company reported the journalists to the police.

I think we need a 2k17 thread

https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/05/facebook-helped-advertisers-target-teens-who-feel-worthless/

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/technology/daily-report-too-late-to-run-from-techs-frightful-five.html

My order: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple

I think I'd put Microsoft at the back end of that list

Oracle always belongs somewhere in there, they just aren't a consumer firm so we don't think about them as much

My stores run on Microsoft-only software so I guess that has to be last. A few years ago that would be aggravating, but I kind of like my Windows 10 desktop.

Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft for me.

Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Apple

I realize I depend on google for email, but facebook is pretty much my social life so i couldn't lose that. I'd just have to use messenger for email!

I suppose losing microsoft and alphabet mean I'd have to use iWork or something for documents, which is total bullshit, but I'd survive.

why is apple maps bad? i kno they got bad press w the australians who almost went off a cliff or whatever but google maps takes me into dangerous ways all the time in the city

apple takes me through major roadways and it feels easier to drive on those streets

wasnt gmail hacked before? i dont remember hotmail ever being hacked

why is apple maps bad, I dunno, cause it's clumsier, slower and just not as powerful as gmaps, kinda like why is Libre Office not as good as Microsoft Office

Here is a great link why Apple Maps is way behind Google Map:

https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-apple-maps

all i see there is google overoptimizing probably to gather more data for whatever evil way they want to take over the usa then the world

Google is gathering data at a significantly faster rate than Apple is with regards to Maps. Their machine learning capabilities are significantly above Apple's, which means that Google's is not only gathering more data but able to do more with it.

specifically, more able to sell advertisements against your behavior patterns

are they able to do more w it though? how many people actually use all those little functionalities? its the same w all their failed products

https://www.computerworlduk.com/galleries/it-vendors/google-graveyard-3508070/

machine learning is a fake idea

that google has an absurdly ubiquitous reach or that they have an insatiable thirst for data isn't what's evil about them -- it's their abdication of responsibility of using that power explicitly for the public good. if anything, they should get more data and beef up their ability to analyze such data.

some real fuckin challops itt atm

xp so what's evil about Google is that they are a for-profit corporation and not the state?

they're a de-facto public utility with a duty of care that people looking up cures for tummy aches and global warming don't end up at flat-earth homeopathy sites

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/18/facebook-to-restrict-australian-users-sharing-news-content"> https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/18/facebook-to-restrict-australian-users-sharing-news-content

I think I’ve learned some valuable lessons today about posting on a phone while walking in the city

Does Facebook expect a critical mass of late Xers and Boomers to riot because they can’t see news links on Facebook?

i think they expect news sites will see a drop in traffic

I don’t know if this is just starry-eyed Utopianism but if feels that this move coooould really turn public opinion (here) against the Zuck - which given FBs seeming impregnability thus far is actually an exciting prospect