There's nothing wrong with a Google employee participating in a Google-related discussion (edit: I mean in an HN thread of course), same as with any company. It's nice if they say so, which jefftk did.
Nothing wrong with that, sure, but making comments related to ongoing antitrust litigation against company employing you, while not being any official spokesperson and not having your comments vetted by legal and PR, can be really, really detrimental to one's career if Google decides that it doesn't like your comments. Google is very explicit in its internal trainings to never make any public comments like that unless you're officially empowered to do so. You can say or write anything you want on HN... on the last day at your job.
Yes, in the EU employees are more protected and it is much more limited what an employer are legally allowed to do. In fact they have to prove that your intention was malicious.
No, why would they? He's not whistleblowing. The commenter even admits that he has no context on the link in question and just suspects it's what's being implicated.
It seems possible that in the history of internet forums, some of them might occasionally receive subpoenas because forum members posted something essential to one side's case in some litigation. It also seems possible that some of those forums receiving subpoenas would rather not deal with the burden of responding.
Do I understand correctly that the 1-second delay existed in both AMP and non-AMP case? And later, someone found a way to remove the 1-second delay for AMP since it could be done without a negative UI impact (unlike for the non-AMP case)?
The first article I found about this was https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-03-19-how-fast-is-amp-r..., which claims that AMP is actually faster in practice, probably mostly because it encourages good habits. Where are you seeing that it's not faster? This article is from '18 so perhaps there has been a change in how well AMP performs versus the baseline.
Also worth noting that we should probably judge AMP as a whole product. What if it didn't make things faster at all, but did make them predictable and amenable to prerendering? The product is AMP+Cache+Prerendering. Prerendering unquestionably gives huge speed advantages in many scenarios. If you don't have AMP, you don't have prerendering, which means AMP-as-a-product gives significant speed advantages, since it's on the critical path to prerendering. (All of this is of course predicated on the idea that you can't practically prerender normal HTML pages, which perhaps you can, I don't know. I'm just saying if that justification for AMP is correct, it shouldn't necessarily matter that HTML+AMP markup is not faster than HTML markup.)
> mostly because it encourages good habits. Where are you seeing that it's not faster?
You just answered it yourself. If someone follows good habits already, then AMP isn’t faster for them (aside from Google not allowing non-AMP loads to start sooner).
So tl;dr: Traditional HTML+JS ads have always needed an extra second delay to load because of cross-domain UX degredation, but because AMP is pre-caching pages, they're able to pre-cache the ads too?
I believe that the idea is that if the ad is amp, you can be sure it will load fast and not impede the ux of the page, whereas if it's html/js, you can't. It isn't about whether it is cached or not.
But this sounds like a technical limitation that makes sense? This entire comment chain is mostly people interpreting the lawsuit as claiming this was a deliberate artificial delay for business reasons and getting outraged about that, not a technical issue.
It's a little murky. If the status quo comes with a cost, because of practical uncertainty, and you provide an alternative that eliminates the uncertainty (and the cost), and then you use the elimination of the cost to prefer your own method... at minimum, that feels "not fair."
If the top-line goal is to make the page as responsive as possible, I'm a little stumped as to what the alternative would be beyond delaying the loading of arbitrary html and JS. Can you think of a way to load arbitrary HTML immediately and not cause any page responsiveness issues on, say, a three year old Android device?
Such artificial delays are already intentionally inserted for the purposes of allowing header bidding, regardless of AMP. Are most users aware of that. What this alleges Google is doing with AMP is making the delay worse, but there is still a delay. This is part of the price the user pays for online advertising. Not just (potential) visual distraction of advertising, but (real) time waiting for advertisers to bid before an ad can be shown. (What does a message like "Page loading..." really mean. Imagine if the message was "Advertisers bidding...") Advertisers might fail to get the user's attention or click, but they are always successful in stealing the user's time, with help from "ad tech" companies like Google. Regardless of whether the user ever looks at the ad, or clicks, she still has to wait for header bidding to complete.
That'll probably just get you penalized by Google Search...
This whole AMP mess just shows how insidiously evil a HugeCorp can be through sheer system complexity. Was it intentional? Well, I guess court cases will show that, but sheesh... even if unintentional it's extremely chilling.
> That'll probably just get you penalized by Google Search...
How about a pop-up telling the user that the UX of this website is better on Firefox? (which is true because e.g. it will not show the annoying pop-up)
Yeah but I really doubt they're using latency discrepancy as a signal. I can think of plenty of ways poor latency could come up on their verification requests but not affect the normal Googlebot requests. Also that's not really something any black hat SEO would involve so Google doesn't really have an incentive to look for that in the first place.
If you and/or your organization can keep up with all of that... then good for you. That's not the reality for most of the world. And in "world", I include most IT organizations, btw.
EDIT: Btw, do note that I'm not even sure if the alleged issues/problems are even intentional or not... and that in itself is problematic... which was my larger point.
This is already a prominent section of Google's search console and they fire off warnings with with the perceived issues which you validate after fixing, etc. I'm sure it will become a major factor very soon.
Google probably crawls with non-Googlebot User-Agent strings periodically to test if sites are serving different content to Googlebot and regular browsers.
I have no insider knowledge, but I'm going to guess that they even crawl using actual Chrome browsers once in a while... and penalize deviations from what you serve to the GoogleBot... and also factor in response times for either.
I don't think any single person can predict/know what's actually going on at this point.
But this mitigation would still fail. They might test for different content, but they probably don't include a periodic test like this in their timing tests, and if they did, it would just be an outlier.
Completely wrong, doesn't even make sense. You can easily have BoD individuals with tiny minority stakes in corporations. Sorry to be abrupt, but I really just don't advise making huge sweeping statements on things if your take is just blatantly wrong and misleading.
So then how is this the CEO when the board actually controls who the CEO is? The CEO is employed by the grace of the board. The performance and decision making of CEO is implicitly approved or disapproved by the board of directors decision on a rolling basis to maintain or terminate the employment of the CEO. The same CEO that meets with the board on a regular basis to answer questions and provide updates .
People are way too quick to defend Google around here - and I'm saying that as a former Google evangelist.
Google does a LOT of crap like that these days. Most people just aren't aware just how "evil" they've become, or prefer to defend them with nonsensical arguments like "see, Google still throws the Don't Be Evil motto somewhere at the very end of their multi-page work of conduct document, so technically they still believe in it!"
That is beyond hyperbole. These are people implementing a caching feature not individuals leading human being into death camps. A false equivalency seldom matched.
The crimes are not equivalent, but the "I was just following orders" excuse is just as bogus in both cases.
If you believe that people are responsible for their actions, and they have a choice of what to do, then just because someone gives them an order doesn't mean they have to follow it. They could refuse. If they accept they are then responsible for their own decision and its consequences.
It is not an excuse. What they did sets the nature of the penalty which may or may not even come out to being a substantial punishment. That they were told to do it, and knew it was wrong, but did it anyway merely fails to absolve them of guilt.
Not at all. It was a prevalent defense there, and their view of those crimes was the the Superior Orders defense was a mitigating factor, but that the crimes were too severe to allow them to escape all culpability like that.
It was used prior, and has been used since, with outcomes ranging from being ignored to being absolved of all responsibility.
It comes down to the scope of the crime. If you helped murder 6 million people (apologies if that's not the correct number), "I was told to" is not an appropriate defense. If it's Karen's birthday and she's lactose intolerant, but your boss says to get an ice cream cake anyways, "I was told to" is a perfectly valid excuse.
Slowing down ads falls somewhere in between, but far closer to pissing off Karen's lactose intolerance than attempting genocide.
"I wonder how the team adding in that extra delay justified it to themselves?"
A nice fat paycheck will often be enough to quiet a lot of people's doubts. And if it still bothers them, they can make themselves feel better by donating some of the money to charity.
Also, people who do things they know are wrong can mollify their consciences by comparing themselves to people who do even worse, and then patting themselves on the back for not being as bad.
They think things like, "at least I'm not literally robbing anyone", and the robbers think, "at least I'm not physically hurting anyone", and those that hurt people think "at least I'm not killing anyone", and then killers think, "at least I'm not torturing anyone to death," and the torturers tend to have some excuse too, like doing it for the greater good.
Unless you are literally the worst of the worst there'll always be someone worse you could compare yourself to and think that at least you're better than them.
There are already some examples of this kind of justification in this very thread.
"These are evil, vile people I am torturing to death. In fact, it's debatable if they're even people!" tends to be the justification, and it tends to be based on mental gymnastics surrounding some old book :-/
I see your point, and I agree. "In the end, it's better for the consumer this way, we're just giving the process the tiniest of nudges." has fueled a lot of anti-consumer hogwash over the years, I'm sure.
The design of it was discussed in https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133. It wasn't done nefariously. AMP prioritizes the page content and verified elements first over non-AMP content (including non-AMP ads).
This is interesting and sounds eerily similar to the justifications made by the anti-net-neutrality lobby: "Here at Comcast, we're not penalizing your content, we're just prioritizing traffic from our Valued Partner sites..."
They justified it by earning very high salaries. Turned around, it is very difficult for a person to see a problem, if their salary depends on not seeing the problem.
Not even that: a culture where you are expected to meet your goals, deadlines and performance criteria can lead to shortcuts and ethical breaches when the company is relying on you "making it happen".
For an engineer the end justifies the means when it involves putting food on the table and ensuring there's a roof over your families head - whistle-blowing is not an option, and quitting mid-project is never a good look either.
> For an engineer the end justifies the means when it involves putting food on the table and ensuring there's a roof over your families head - whistle-blowing is not an option, and quitting mid-project is never a good look either.
Every time I hear this ... no. Google engineers could get a job elsewhere easily. It is not like software engineers would be like miners in dying industry struggling to survive. We are well paid and can get jobs easily.
I am not saying that everyone should leave Google. I am saying that if your company demands something unethical from you, rationalizing it through "ensuring there's a roof over your families head" is just lie for most of us.
Well, working in ad-tech is pretty much bad from the get-go, this just seems like more of the same to me. To be fair, unlike VW diesels, it's also not directly damaging anyone's health, but it's still a nasty business.
It's common practice in the advertising industry to exploit people's feelings of inadequacy. This is an industry that doesn't think twice about making an emotionally vulnerable teenager feel like a loser if they think it will help them sell some shitty product as the 'solution.' This is directly harming people's health.
Yes, I considered that, and I agree that it's an industry that does cause psychological harm to make a buck. But that still seems a little different than causing respiratory illness - maybe not that different, really...
With regard to particulate emissions, consider the role advertisers play in the deaths attributable to the tobacco industry. I'd wager more have been killed by tobacco industry advertisers than by VW engineers.
I've worked at a startup in the past where the design team requested we put artificial delays / fake progress bars in. I told the design team that 1) Its just bad design / hostile to our users, and 2) that I'd quit before I'd build it for them.
It's a hill I'd be happy to die on. I feel like 6/10 engineers wouldn't care to have that fight, let alone risk their job over it. I'm lucky to be in a position that I am even able to. So many are not. Yet another example for the banality of evil.
I agree, I've heard of artificial delays being introduced because some loading of things was deemed 'too quick'- something about the user expects some delay and anything quicker than that gives the feel that nothing has really happened. I can see the logic in it a wee bit, I'll try find a link to their thinking on it.
