"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.

#googplus

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...

#googplus

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.

#googplus

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...

#googplus

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

#googplus

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...

#googplus

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

(As seen on ticketfly.com)

#googplus

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...

#googplus

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...

#googplus

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

#googplus

#googplus

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

#googplus

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/

#googplus

View from the 37th floor of SFO-1MST

#googplus

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

#googplus

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

#googplus

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.

https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/0090-2616%2883%2990036-0

#googplus

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.

320 pages that say "spam address books"

#googplus

Combat outrage overload and numbness with empathy.

https://www.gofundme.com/tree-of-life-synagogue-shooting

#googplus

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

#googplus

something something mysql?

https://blog.github.com/2018-10-21-october21-incident-report/

#googplus

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

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4jl2mn

#googplus

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

#googplus