Paul Lindner

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

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"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

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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.

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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...

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"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"
  }]
},

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"
   }]
  },

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.

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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"

https://medium.com/s/love-hate/the-death-of-google-is-tearing-its-diehard-communities-apart-ad8332f4...

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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.

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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...

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Okay... Who's adding Snark to the training data?

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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...

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Add in G+ logo choice and you can probably identify when the last refresh was..

(As seen on ticketfly.com)

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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:

http://alpha-demo.focus.corp.google.com/buzz/a/google.com/lahosken/SxUWDujDXdN/I-painted-a-bike-shed...

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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...

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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

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Though I prefer ntpm/s. (nano tentpole moments / second)

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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.

https://worldbrain.io/

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View from the 37th floor of SFO-1MST

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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

https://twitter.com/louisgray/status/1062914870696325120

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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

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