$50 million? That is a good tee shirt budget! Like “spot something evil, report it and get a fancy tee shirt!” If it were $500mil it could be spot bonuses...

Google’s email (when I was there, I was a layoff victim ~2 years back) has something like a year long self delete policy, and anything you apply an archive tag to gets kept “forever”. So it is modestly durable. Plus of corse if Google gets sued and you or a work area you are involved in gets identified as a discoverable asset you get to be on discovery hold and all the mail gets retained until that process is over (and it can last years or decades).

Google’s chats self deleted in more like 45 to 90 days. Seldom long enough to survive into a litigation hold. The chats didn’t have an archive hold tag you could apply (one of the chat systems had a possibly accidental loophole, groups had their own retention policies settable per group, so if you had stuff you wanted to save you could make a group to discuss a document or design and set a year retention policy or whatever).

Google also quite deliberately had internal communications about “communicate with care” and pushed employees to discuss things in person and via chat and not email if it was business related as opposed to purely technical. It was very obvious we were being told to communicate anything that might be the topic of a lawsuit over chat (or in person) and never email. Durability of the messages and discoverability was mentioned. It wasn’t “do all the illegal stuff in chat”, it was “be aware that business practices can be very legally sensitive and are best conducted in person or if by electronic means in chat and never in email”, very nudge-nudge-wink-wink.

I mean nothing strictly illegal about reminding people what forms of communication work how, and all the documents had a retention policy, it just happened that the policy was generally “burn in a month and a half” which for a typical business would be very very suspicious.

To give Google a little break though with the volume of business Google use to conduct via email it is extremely different from companies that one would accuse of being shady with a 45 day burn policy: most traditional companies have “some” email, Google like many tech companies and especially tech companies where most of the management layers were ex-technical did communications relentlessly by email. At most phone companies if it would have been a phone call it would be an email chain. Meetings well, google still has way too many, but meetings got summarized in email (frequently by several people). If it happened it was probably in at least 8 if not 300 emails.

Post chat change though, things got memory holed. If it happened maybe there is an email, maybe. Likely lots of chat about it, all vanished into the mists go time (45 days back). Aruments about the 300th time a button name got changed? Chat, maybe a little email. Discussions about who a “target audience” for a product was? Absolutely in chat, never in email. Never never, never ever in email. What kind of user does a proposed feature appeal to? All chat, never email...

A vital part of alcohol production.

The problem is the shareholders want Google to be profitable. They are owners, and generally owners with the hopes that the value of the shares will go up, and they can sell at a profit.

An admission of guilt is a legal artifact that can be discovered in other lawsuits and used as a bludgeon. So having a “yeah, we totally admit we violated a whole bunch of laws” document signed by the CEO and board means Google is going to all but automatically lose lawsuits that turn on those facts. Like “please skip the guilt phase and proceed directly to the penalty phase -- how big a check do we need to write”. This is fantastic if you were impacted by some illegal behaviour of Google’s and are currently suing them and would like to skip the least certion 90% of the process and skip directly to the part where you convince judge and jury that a multibillion dollar company should write you a check big enough that they can feel it and will stop doing this to others.

It is pretty awful if you are a shareholder and absolutely don’t want Google to write any checks bing enough to notice let alone feel. You want huge profit piled into more R&D or advertising, or dividends, not the pockets of harmed parties suing Google!

So no, no way the shareholders want this at all. It isn’t a matter of letting them get away with it, it is a matter of making sure they don’t get punished in the future for it. The most reliable way to not get punished for a thing is to not do it a bunch more, and to not brag about having done it in the past, and to not get caught checking to see if the bodies are still securely buried. Google’s share holders absolutely don’t want it marching into court and yelling “I did it! I did it judge! I killed them all! It was me! It was me all along!”

Google’s shareholders are better served by a coverup and future improvements (either not being as evil in the future, or merely hiding it better). Google’s shareholders are not your ally for justice, don’t look at them to improve things for you except by accident.

You also get a streamlined setup in a lot of cases. I run a small business ($200k to $400k/year revenue). I personally know how to set up servers, I like geeking out about things like ZFS and spool and RAID-Z. On the other hand for the business I write iOS apps, and that means Macs with MacOS. They have a backup system (Time Machine) that is fiddly to set up a NAS to support. I know because I’ve bought commodity Linux hardware, set up file sharing (I have tried both NFS and AFP) and attempted to get my little Linux system to be a target for Mac Time Machine, and invariably the Macs don’t see the Linux system after a while and stop backing up.

I know how to debug tech issues, and expect if I spent a few hours a week on it I would eventually figure out I have something configured wrong, or one of the 20 packages involved have a bug and a fix (or a bug I could fix). Except if I do that those are house I’m not billing. “A few hours a week” rapidly becomes much more money then paying to buy a NAS.

I’m not likely to buy any subscription stuff for my NAS, and if I outgrow my disk space and can’t put commodity drives in to expand I’ll give commodity hardware and a self install another run. Maybe it will “just work” next time. That would be cool, I like ZFS and I could set it up to resilver every month I know I would feel better about that then even a RAID-Z that isn’t set to resilver.

When you are making money paying someone else money in order to get time can cost a lot less then spending the time you need to get the service (NAS and/or backups in this case) for free.

The word “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. That isn’t a trivial operation for a lot of people. Consider someone running a photography business who buys a NAS so they can have all their work product backed up locally. Yes, in theory they could follow some canned instructions on how to install and configure TrueNAS, but it is going to take them a lot of time, and they may get derailed at any point and not manage to complete the process because the software they loaded is maybe slightly newer (or older) then the step-by=step they are using, and the UI has changed in some way _you_ might find trivial and take 15 seconds to adapt to, but the part of the brain you use to interpret UI and figure out what it means they have “wasted” on understanding color temperatures and how to adjust focus depth. Which to be fair to them is much more valuable in their day-to-dayand to be fair to you, you have a lot less need to understand color tempatures then a photographer.

So the value of all the stuff TrueNAS offers v having a user friendly UI and support channel differs depending on who you are, and what you are good at. Even my solution of “put the disk in the old NAS and format it first” isn’t exactly easy for some people. Not because they are dumb, but because they are going to add drives to it every what five years? That is a long time to remember an extra set of hoops to jump through. (It won’t be too hard if they think about it in advance, and put a sticky note on the back of the old NAS “format all new disks in old NAS first!” And on the old NAS “don’t throw out, needed to format new disks before using in new NAS!”)

Don’t discount how important “easy UI, phone support” is to some people.

Er, if I read this stuff right, you “just” need to keep the old NAS around and start each drive in it. Once formatted in a 2024 or prior Synology the not-branded disks will be allowed to do everything the branded disks are required for, even after you move it to the new Synology. So you are “stuck” keeping an old Synology around to “bless” every disk before you use it...

Having a smartphone isn’t the same as having anything like broadband speeds on it at home.

I moved form CA to VT three years ago. The phone I had did 5G, maybe even 5GUWB. In CA it was regularly quite fast. Fast enough that if the home internet went out I could swap over and still “do stuff”, including low resolution video conference calls (i.e. the kind of stuff you needed to WFH during a pandemic). After I moved same phone, same service and at home it was zero to one bars of 3G, and while 3G is much much faster then what people considered broadband in the 1990s, it is kind of marginal for video conferencing (even low resolution). At one bar it isn’t marginal, it just doesn’t have the oomph. Hell it is slow loading “regular” web pages.

So having a smartphone isn’t the same as having boradband.

You can disagree on what the government definition of broadband should be, but if you are looking at “does this qualify for a government subsidy” it really ought meet the government definition. Also while I might agree that 100up/20down is more then most people need, there is a limit where it stops being useful for things people need, and while 30 years ago “videoconferencing” wouldn’t have been defined as a need, it has more or less gotten to that point now. People that can do it can do WFH jobs, and people that can’t generally can not.

Even my current job which is WFH and I don’t have any weekly video conferences, I do occasionally get on a video conference with a client and watch them reproduce a bug, or whatever so I can see what is going on, or see their expression. (cellular connections around here may not be all that fast, but I can and do have a reasonable wired connection)

It benefits customers.

If you make the not unlikely assumption that Apple won’t accept lower margins moving production from China to here will make iPhones cost more. My guess is around 2x. It also will likely increase the cadence between new phones form 12 months to 14. It may also be hard to produce at the same rate, so look forward to shortages.

Even if you assume that Apple will be ok with taking a margin hit on it’s largest volume product even cutting the margins to zero might not be enough to avoid a price increase (if my 2x price hike guess is right, only around 30% of the 1x price is margin, so we are looking at what a 1.8x price hike as Apple drops it’s margins to 0%).

Apple was the last US computer manufacturer to offshore production doing it in the early 2000s not the 1990s. That is part of how they almost went bankrupt, because customers do not like higher prices. So higher prices are definitely not an advantage in any useful way.

Nope. That's why I changed all my players to BlueOS.

Eh? Apple has supported moving the dock to the left or right sides for well over a decade (bottom/left/right are all supported, not top though). You can’t move the menu bar off of the top with Apple’s standard software thoguh.

Agreed, the translucent menu bar with the blur effect carefully chosen by Apple to minimize the damage of the translucency is nuts. Like they spend so much effort to make the translucence less damaging when they could just...make a black background on the bar, or anything that contrasts well with foreground color of the lettering (case in point: menu bar is exceptionally readable if you choose a desktop like live satellite earth view that has a solid black background; if you use one of the default Apple colorful backgrounds the menu bar is instantly less readable)

Ok, fine. I mean I don’t want more bitcoin mined. I’m not super excited by most AI products, so I don’t need any of those. On the other hand the people being told to “conserve” are frequently the same people that buy products that involve AWS, or but something they can yell “Alexa what is the weather like!” or “Ok Google when will it snow next”.

Want conserving to work, don’t buy/use the products that require data centers. Then nobody will be excited to build them.

I’m not sure how this is “surprising” given that most people either loathe QR menus, or are at best neutral.

In the abstract I lean neutral, like a restaurant with a QR menu is going to have an up to date menu online which makes it easier to decide what to have in advance of going. In “the real world” I’m negative since frequently whatever little underpowered server the is hanging onto the menus tends to be slow to cough it up, or maybe the restaurants “hosting provider” intentional bandwidth limits the thing hoping to squeeze some sort of upgrade fee onto the restaurant. At any rate it tends to be far slower then t has any right to be, and harder to flip around in.

I have never encounter someone who goes “QR menus! I love those!”, I rarely encounter someone who doesn’t complain. Maybe not enough to say they won’t go, but if they complain it clearly plays into their choice a little bit. Like “I want the fried chicken...but not at the QR menu place, bah!”, just most people don’t give their entire restaurant selection thought process out loud...

That may come to pass, but they were not taking a class that was teaching that. They took ”how to think”, and fobbed it off onto AI. More over they didn’t even use the tools you are claiming are of value well enough not to get caught.

AI being tech advances, but to me right now there are two key parts of “using AI well”, figuring out how to phrase a prompt that gets plausible seeming answers, and perhaps more importantly being able to understand the answer well enough to know if it is crap or not. I assert (without proof!) that the students that get caught using AI are running aground on the rocky shores of “AI produced total crap for an answer”. The equivalent of the AI inventing non-existent papers and citing them, or not existent law cases. Or miscounting the r’s in strawberry. Or maybe even advocating that one glue cheese to the crust to keep it from running off of one’s pizza. Or advising one eat a non zero number of rocks.

Maybe in the future AI will be better at not producing factually incorrect answers (LLMs do it basically by design as a byproduct of avoiding hill climbing and stale prose). That doesn’t seem to be in the cards in the short term though.

Ok, ok, ok I’m way out on a limb here about _why_ they got caught, but I’m perfectly fine with having some classes about how to use AI. I’m also fine having classes where one should not be using AI, and for people who do so to face the consequences (which ought not be more severe from plagiarizing in general, or other forms of cheating),

Also won’t make much difference if you assume that social media will be assessed in bad faith, and refuse to post anything that could be remotely misinterpreted.

In other words if you keep your head down and assume you live in a police state it’ll all work out ok.

Unless of corse you are a fan of the wrong sports ball team and an immigration official decides to “not have anymore JETS fans” in the country. So maybe the best policy is not to have an social media footprint at all if you are an immigrant...

(note: I once applied for a job somewhere that wanted to do a “background check” and you had to cough up social media handles so they could do a scan...I was disqualified because I didn’t have a facebook presence or twitter at the time, or anything else they recognized, and they decided that was suspicious & merited a failing “grade"...no reason an immigration official couldn’t decide someone with no social media footprint is just as suspicious as a potential new citizen...so keep in mind it may not be enough just to keep your head down, you may need to find the right social medias to join, follow a statistically correct number of people, and post just a few of just the right memes, or get out of the country)