[actually it's the exploded wiring cabinet for my neighborhood that's transitioning to AT&T fiber...]
Alt Text in Action
Would be nice if all of our products supported Alt text as well as Mastodon does...
And if sharing with Louis Gray I'd say "Image of a rack mount server with long fsck times"
Red Hat, 20 Years
Red Hat turns 20 so they asked former folks for their memories. Here's something I dug up that might be of interest to folks 'round these parts..
... I never got a response on this email; but that might be because Red Hat was always late paying Google Invoices..
Looks like Joan is still here. Ray does not show up in Epitaphs.
'stories' from 'Github'
"stories" from. "GitHub"
In the developer ecosystem, branch conflicts are considered especially heinous.
On Github, the dedicated developers who resolve these vicious conflicts are members of an elite squad known as the Special Merge Unit.
These are their stories.
Dun Dun
News Archiving
""What we found was that the majority of news outlets had not given any thought to even basic strategies for preserving their digital content, and not one was properly saving a holistic record of what it produces.""
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/the-dire-state-of-news-archiving-in-the-digital-age.php
G+ Museum Pieces...
Before we bury G+ it might be worthwhile to collect some memorabilia...
Marc Weber from the Computer History Museum asked if we wanted to contribute Google+ artifacts to CHM. They don't care about swag, but I could think of a few things that they might be interested in:
- The Obama + Dalai Lama framed print.
- The Buffalo? (Too big?)
- The Emerald Sea painting (did anyone save it?)
Open to suggestions....
[Too bad the Apiary whiteboard is long gone....]
Circles Circles Circles
So I thought I'd write an apps-script macro to help find Twitter profiles of my G+ circled people. [I'm assuming these contacts will go away on April 2nd, right Greg Wolfe ?]
Code works, but App Script barfs on the Twitter javascript used to render the follow buttons. So I just grabbed the html output and stuck it on a server and clicked the follow bu
tton...
If someone wants to poke at it and/or publish it (I have no time for either) have at it...
You can access it here:
https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbz8RJl6qIS6x1PTQss_O1Xz69l1_bp1QcyJPoxnW9qITvFYTEI/exec
And the xss-riddled code looks like this:
function doGet() {
var html = '<!DOCTYPE html>';
do {
var pageToken;
var connections = People.People.Connections.list('people/me', {
pageSize: 100,
personFields: 'names,urls',
pageToken: pageToken
});
connections.connections.forEach(function(person) {
// Skip people without URLs in their profile.
if (!person.urls) {
return;
}
person.urls.forEach(function(url) {
if (url.value && url.value.match(/twitter.com/)) {
var name = url.value;
if (person.names && person.names.length > 0) {
name = person.names[0].displayName;
}
html += '\n<br><a class="twitter-follow-button" href="' + url.value + '">';
html += 'Follow ' + name + '</a>\n';
}
});
});
pageToken = connections.nextPageToken;
} while (pageToken);
html += '\n<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>'
var output = HtmlService.createHtmlOutput(html);
output.setTitle('Google+ Follower Finder');
return output;
}
Orkut Community Archive
Whatever happened to the Orkut Community Archive?
+116817942633187704506 ?
http://web.archive.org/web/20160413222454/http://orkut.google.com/en.html
Consumer G+ Wake
Anyone up for an HIRL before consumer G+ is gone for good?
This ceremony allows one last interaction with the corpse, providing a time for the living to express their emotions and beliefs about death with the deceased.
Take Care
CW: health, cancer, stuff like that.
So yeah, I've spent the past 5 days living at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland. I spent my waking hours caring for my wife's basic needs as she recovers from an infection and progression of bone mets that caused much pain and suffering. We have a plan forward and are headed home today.
But that's neither here nor there. I don't want sympathy or anything like that; I post these updates to normalize and make visible the caretaker role that we all assume. Please use your sick leave, vacation, vacation donation time and finally short-term/long-term disability to care for your loved ones. You've earned it (and in the case of disability you're even paying premiums for it.)
I'll have a few more stories to share later on once I get caught-up. But for now behold the disco-light aesthetic of the Stanley Healthcare Bed-Check®. (It's basically a bed sensor and an alarm used to prevent people from falling). I highly doubt that it uses a cloud based TensorFlow prediction model.
Caregiver-SRE
The human body is more varied and complex than even the largest metro cell.
This Philips IntelliVue MP50 has graphs that are butterfly smooth, multi layer alerts, trending, color coded heads up display and much more. Whatever is the latest replacement for BorgMon would do well to learn from this adjacent field ..
Caregiving support
Just a reminder that if you're faced with the task of caring for a loved one at Google I am available to talk.
Also I signed up to donate my excess vacation but I've yet to participate.
Pre-mortem for Postmortems
Looking for a home for the public G+ Postmortems community. Is there a good place to host this? It's not a huge group, only 250 posts, but I would like to see it land in an appropriate place for the participants.
Is there a community of practice around Postmortems that I could reach out to?
Chrome Scamware 2019 edition
Removed a New Tab Page Extension and some other junk. Which led to a bad set of search results that led to this modal that blocked the entire browser..
- Force Quit, restart Chrome
- Remove shitty extensions
- Install uBlock Origin
- Add site to custom blocklist
- Restore Tabs
- Cry a little.
Blitzscaling
This mentality applies to internal projects too....
The losses from the blitzscaling mentality are felt not just by
entrepreneurs but by society more broadly. When the traditional
venture-capital wisdom is to shutter companies that aren’t achieving
hypergrowth, businesses that would once have made meaningful
contributions to our economy are not funded, or are starved of further
investment once it is clear that they no longer have a hope of becoming a
home run.
https://qz.com/1540608/the-problem-with-silicon-valleys-obsession-with-blitzscaling-growth/
Team Human with David Pescovitz of Boing Boing
This is an easy event for folks in the SF Office. Tickets are still available for this Jan 30th event at the Commonwealth Club.
The https://www.npr.org/2019/01/28/689215618/team-human-stresses-that-the-future-lies-in-connection-and-... sums why I think Team Human is important:
In the last few chapters he offers a vision that is neither anti-technology or techno-utopian. There are many ways to create the future (a word which Rushkoff says should be considered a verb). "Human beings can intervene in the machine," he tells us. "That's not a refusal to accept progress. It's simply a refusal to accept any particular outcome as inevitable."
https://commonwealthclub.org/index.php/events/2019-01-30/douglas-rushkoff-team-human
Be Hopeful, Be Human
"The first step toward reversing our predicament is to recognize that being human is a team sport. We cannot be fully human alone. Anything that brings us together fosters our humanity. Likewise, anything that separates us makes us less human, and less able to exercise our individual or collective will."
In 100 psalms-like entries Rushkoff's manifesto presents a way forward for the situation we find ourselves in.
The two takeaways everyone should understand are
- The inversion of "Figure and Ground"
- Mechanomorphism - treating humans like machines.
It's a breezy, short read and has my highest recommendation. It also gives me hope that we can rediscover
Available at:
https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Douglas_Rushkoff_Team_Human?id=4Y5gDwAAQBAJ
http:///
https://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294997566
Grow with Arcs
2 openings on the Arcs team - one Android-ish, one Cloud-ish. Come work with me and the rest of the Arcs team in SFO...
https://grow.googleplex.com/jobs/e8f3fd1f-59d5-4bfe-9a95-0fb706947891
https://grow.googleplex.com/jobs/bb80a320-2a69-4236-8618-21f5799a8b15
The http://go/arcs is part of the http://go/cerebra team in Google AI. Arcs is an early stage project creating a new open ecosystem for privacy-preserving, AI-first computing. In this vision the user owns their data, software comes to the device and runs on the data locally, and data egress is carefully managed. The user has a Personal Cloud server that acts as a secure, reliable data repository while also acting as another device with greater resources (power, storage, bandwidth, etc.) than the user’s phone.
We develop software across server (TypeScript/JavaScript, Node.js, Docker, GCP, C++), Android (Java, WebView, TypeScript/JavaScript), and desktop/mobile web (TypeScript/JavaScript, CSS). Much of our work is done in the open on GitHub at https://github.com/PolymerLabs/arcs.
Youtube Annotations
You have a week left to see these creative uses of Youtube Annotations before they're gone forever..
https://waxy.org/2018/11/a-tribute-to-youtube-annotations/
Seems like a missed opportunity to keep the data available for someone to implement a video.js/chrome extension to provide the overlay...
Takeout of Takeout
"We must go deeper"
Also a little surprised that we're logging IPs here..
$ more Takeout/My\ Activity/Takeout/MyActivity.json
[{
"header": "Takeout",
"title": "Initiated a Takeout",
"subtitles": [{
"name": "Requested the following services: Data Shared For Research (all resources) and My Activity (all resources)"
}, {
"name": "You specified that you wanted the archive in zip format, split into 2.00G files, and requested that the output be sent to your email"
}],
"time": "2018-12-28T23:00:00.582Z",
"products": ["Takeout"],
"details": [{
"name": "From IP 100.119.151.149"
}]
},
Play Music History
Looks like you can get Play Music activity with Location History for free :-/
Visit https://takeout.google.com/
- Select My Activity
- Click on Edit products
- Toggle All
- Select Google Play Music
Downloaded Json has searches, opens and listens going back to ~ June 2017.
Here's an example:
{
"header": "Google Play Music",
"title": "Listened to Wait so Long",
"description": "Trampled By Turtles",
"time": "2017-07-13T21:28:54.126Z",
"products": ["Google Play Music"],
"locations": [{
"name": "From your current location",
"url": "https://google.com/maps?q%5Cu003d37.804363,-122.271111"
}]
},
Sensory Metrics of Neuromechanical Trust
To the top of the reading/study list...
https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08916
This paper describes something I've known in my gut, especially as someone that can remember the pre-internet analog world, and wonders if we've though through the knock-on effects of the technology we are creating....
Businesses also optimize: a business as a whole optimizes marginal revenue, data science finds best-fit models, and websites iteratively improve
click counts by random A/B testing. Unfortunately, optimizing a business
goal often involves sculpting customer perceptions and behaviors, thereby
reducing the entropy of human behavior, choice, and autonomy. In short,
to calibrate our brains, we need autonomy; to submit it to organized optimization, we must forgo it.
Stewards
Some days I dream that we renamed Google Assistant to Google Steward,... as in:
3. a person employed to manage another's property, especially a large house or estate.
synonyms:
(estate) manager, agent, overseer, custodian, caretaker;
historical reeve
"the steward of the estate"
a person whose responsibility it is to take care of something.
"farmers pride themselves on being stewards of the countryside"
Festive 50
Instead of reflecting on the past year think about what's happened for the last 50 years. I finally got around to listening to a 4 part series about computing in 1968. Highly recommended, very very well done and will blow your mind.
Makes you realize that most of what we've been doing has been riffing on groundbreaking things from that era.
Art? Computer Animation? It all started then with some #cybernetics .. (Ep 1)
https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/11/23/1968-when-the-world-began-part-one-the-pivot/
Google Glass? Augmented Reality? Ivan Sutherland's "Ultimate Display" conceived of it. (Ep 2)
https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/11/30/1968-when-the-world-began-part-two-sword-of-damocles/
Hangouts? Shared Docs? Remote Collaboration? Doug Engelbert's The Mother of all Demos was already there. (Ep 3)
https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/12/07/1968-when-the-world-began-the-mother-of-all-demos/
And the impact felt, with +110664632946820915121 and others:
https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/12/16/1968-when-the-world-began-return-to-a-square/
Sadly I missed out on the retrospective at the Computer History Museum (was fighting urgent legal/policy fires then)
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
To Page or Not to Page?
Trying to figure out if some Google Feed issues rise to a pageable threshold. go/whodoinotify has escalation paths, but go/news-policy is locked down.
This is regarding:
https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/1076666201521180672
and some Moma searching reveals an internal escalation path here:
https://sites.google.com/corp/google.com/interest-feed/teams/quality
and another escalation doc "https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GxGqThElJyrQ0odnSYpGLx1RhRN5w4xNuzITTnOOhvE/edit?ts=5ae0ab73" I also found an A/C Privileged doc that I won't link here.
Also found a related https://b.corp.google.com/issues/29310297 in 2016, but that was before the Interest Feed reorg...
Google Store Issues/Escalation Help?
See b/121203202 about a horrific experience ordering from Home Hubs from the Google Store. Appears to be stuck over one month in Ingram-Micro Limbo-land.
The sad part is that there's hundreds of these devices in Target Stores nearby. We also happen to run a kick-ass shopping system: "Google Express".
If I felt empowered as an employee I'd buy three hubs from Target, expense them to the Google Store cost center and fix this. I hope someone on the Store team *does* feel empowered to do so; since I know that the playbook reading CSRs won't be able to...
Carbon dating for web sites..
Add in G+ logo choice and you can probably identify when the last refresh was..
(As seen on ticketfly.com)
An update on go/culture
Looks like the old go/culture, which was frozen in amber in is here.
https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/google-culture/home/google-at-the-edge-of-chaos
Of course that site has links to some old Buzz content that's gone forever:
Memento Mori.
I've kept a Webvan pen in my bag as a reminder to never get too comfortable. And a reminder to never pay Bechtel a billion dollars to build warehouse infrastructure...
History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure rhymes.. Back in early 2000s Microsoft temps were organizing against the raw deal they were getting** They won, but that then led to the onerous, exclusionary caste system we have today instead of more full timers.
The really sad part is that many advocacy groups turned towards reactionary, nationalistic, anti-India racism. (see programmersguild.org if you can stomach it.)
I hope that this time will be different and better outcomes are the result.
** techsunite.org which is now washtech.org
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/05/googles-shadow-workforce-demands-more-from-ceo-sundar-pichai.html
Memex
Testing this fancy extension on my non-corp browser. (Could possibly be used on corp since it stores all data locally.)
I've always wanted to search the documents I read and this does it very, very well. Full text search, annotations, notes and more.
More than smoke in my eyes...
Thank you Louis Gray for giving this horrible fire a human perspective.
and hey Googlers: there's still 60k of funds for the matching at
https://g-give.googleplex.com/campaign/2018-California-Wildfires
Targeting, segmentation, and conversion oh my!
A good way to keep up with changes in the Ads/Sales part of the org is via go/saleshub -- click the gear icon and enable 'Receive SalesBulletin'
This week contained a comprehensive overview of all the upcoming features.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1z5_z3IgiOqwA75uj5Y-LhvNO__SIQmlGpbnXBPiczMs/edit
Why America needs, but cannot have, corporate democracy.
This is an older paper (1983), but it's very spot-on showing the power dynamics that exist at macro/micro level that predate technical solutions. Recommended.
ACEs
Sit back a spell and let me tell you a story about the Association of Concerned Employees (ACEs).
Back in 1991 the academic computing teams at the University of Minnesota were set to be laid off and we could "apply" for a job with the new quasi-private sector outfit the "Minnesota Supercomputer Center" (MSC).
So none of us liked that. Over 300 of us set up an effort to stop it. The VAX/Unix/MVS/Unix/PC/CDC units stopped fighting for crumbs and joined forces. Letters to the editor were written, politicians where contacted, petitions were circulated.
Mailing lists, and even a BBS were put into use to coordinate.
Even, ahem, a listening device was placed in the Board of Regents office.
We were not in a union but AFSCME supported our demands and upped the pressure.
The efforts worked. The privatization was called off. There were job losses, but we had a voice that we used to make the best of the situation. We had input into how we could reorganize the units and better support the students and faculty.
Oh and we finally got the audit of the corrupt MSC a few years later:
https://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/ped/1994/backgrd.htm
`U' backs off of plan to privatize computer services
Published: October 23, 1991
By Jim Dawson; Staff Writer
Intense pressure from many of the 330 civil service employees who
operate the University of Minnesota's computer systems apparently has
forced school officials to back away from a plan to privatize computer
services and place them under the Supercomputer Center.
Ettore Infante, vice president for academic affairs, who
announced the privatization plan last week met with computer workers
Tuesday.
He told them that because of concerns regarding his
original plan, a reorganization of computer services would occur
"without the involvement of the Minnesota Supercomputer Center or a subsidiary of it."
Instead, Infante said, an outside consultant will be hired to
determine the best way to consolidate and reorganize the university's
several computer service centers.
About half of the 330 computer specialists would have been laid off at the end of the year under Infante's privatization plan.
There will probably be layoffs under any new plan, but how many and when hasn't been determined.
Infante's privatization announcement caught the computer
specialists by surprise last week, but they quickly used a computerized
electronic mail network to organize their opposition.
Their main objection focused on the involvement of the Supercomputer Center.
The center, a quasiprivate corporation partially owned by
the university, is not subject to public accounting. Gov. Arne Carlson
recently cut $8 million in state funding from the center's budget, and
many of the computer specialists believed that Infante's move was simply
a way to funnel new funds into the center.
Infante denied that charge and cited the inefficient,
outdated computer systems and networks throughout the university as his
reason for consolidation.
His move yesterday was welcomed by most employees, but many remained skeptical of his motives.
"I was encouraged that they seem to be backing down," said
Cheryl Vollhaber, a specialist with academic computing services.
The employees demanded to be involved in the planning for
consolidating the computer systems, something most agree is badly
needed.
However, Infante was noncommittal about employee participation.
The computer specialists said that they have been calling for
a consolidation and reorganization of computer services for a long
time, but that the administration has ignored them. They are
frustrated, several said, because although they are the computer
experts, they are not being consulted.
"Our focus will be having an employee representative on the
planning board," said Stephen Collins, of the university's
micro-computer center.
Tree of Life Shooting’s Victims
Combat outrage overload and numbness with empathy.
A seat at the table
I'm seriously thinking about starting a shareholder initiative to add employee representation to Alphabet's Board of Directors. We'd at least have an elected board rep that could be accountable for bad decisions.
In the long run I also believe Alphabet is going to need to think long and hard about their governance structure. My hope is for something durable, similar to the Bosch/Zeiss model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_representation_on_corporate_boards_of_directors
Digital immortality: How your life’s data means a version of you could live forever
Some interesting takes here, including this:
Should we treat digital remains by the same code that museums use for human remains? Doing so would severely limit the ways in which companies can use (or exploit) our data. If digital remains are like “the informational corpse of the deceased,” they write, they “may not be used solely as a means to an end, such as profit, but regarded instead as an entity holding an inherent value.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612257/digital-version-after-death/
Of course mentions the Black Mirror episode. However I always go back to the original Max Headroom episode: Deities
s/decentralized/accountable/
This is a key insight from Nathan Schneider.
We should also ask ourselves "How do we make Google's hardware, software and services more Accountable." (and also find a metric that describes this...)
We should care less about whether something is centralized or decentralized than whether it is accountable. An accountable system is responsive to both the common good for participants and the needs of minorities; it sets consistent rules and can change them when they don’t meet users’ needs.
https://hackernoon.com/decentralizing-everything-never-seems-to-work-2bb0461bd168
Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer
A little gem from 1988 talking about automation, way way before self driving cars...
It is at this point that you have this relatively new choice: either
to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable humans a
delegated nonhuman character whose only function is to open and close
the door. This is called a door-closer or a "groom." The advantage is
that you now have to discipline only one nonhuman and may safely leave
the others (bell-boys included) to their erratic behavior. No matter
who they are and where they come from-polite or rude, quick or slow,
friends or foes-the nonhuman groom will always take care of the door
in any weather and at any time of the day. A nonhuman (hinges) plus
another nonhuman (groom) have solved the hole-wall dilemma.
A radical proposal for Consumer G+ preservation.
I've been involved with a number of turndowns, Buzz (1st time, and then the double-tap project). Orkut, Hangouts on Air, Google+ Stories, +1s on the web and more. As stewards of user data I would like to propose that we do something different this time.
While we can't keep the service active we can at least do something useful with the output and give back agency to the users that created the data. So here's my proposal.
1) Create the Plus Cooperative(*), owned by the users of Google+. Each post you made prior to a cutoff date gets you one share in the new entity. Decisions are one-user, one-vote.
2) Transfer the plus.google.com domain over to this new entity or redirect to a new plus.coop domain. Generate a static dump of the public** contents and transfer that to new infrastructure run by the Plus Cooperative. In addition Google provides a full dump to the Internet Archive.
3) Google funds the organization for at minimum 10 years off a one time grant.
4) Google publishes a set of identifiers/claims that would allow a user to gain access to the public data in question. The user could choose to remove data from the plus.coop domain or add their own redirect (a super idea suggested by +104122652599862501408)
5) The Plus Coop would be governed by it's user-owners and could choose how to invest in their infrastructure/product. They could create migration tools, publishing tools -- they could even revive the service starting with the seed data.
To me this is full-on "Respect the Opportunity". There are enough passionate users out there to keep the spark of G+ going; let's not get in their way.
And let's not 404 8 years of cultural history.
* There was an attempt to transform twitter into a Co-op, so this idea is not really my own.
** We could conceivably export private data if it was suitably encrypted and a user could claim it at a later point. But that's very much a stretch goal.
*** I also think that all products should buy Bonds that would fund a similar data preservation effort upon failure/cancellation.
cc: +110664632946820915121 / +115753604102260948135 / +101587921131889992978 / +110940801340246898787 / +115283013747081617765