How is Bing a pile of garbage? It takes some effort to come up with a search for which it or ddg are markedly worse than google. FWIW I still use google.
That's how the BBC does their headlines. Anytime something is in quotes, prepend the headline with "Someone says:". For whatever reason they won't write headlines longer than 6 or 7 words.
I think it doesn't work well for questions with simple answers; it's meant for more open-ended questions. I got much better responses for some random questions I just thought up: "What will AI enable in the future?" "Why are so many depressed?" etc.
But spoken Chinese is quite different from written Chinese, which allows for more economy. Often a single character will be used in writing where a two-character word would be used in speech. And people's names usually can't be determined by the pronunciation; they are defined by the actual characters. If Chinese moved to a strictly phonetic writing system, a lot of culture would have to adapt: conventions around signage, poetry, proverbs, names (this is a big one!) of people and organizations, formal writing, wordplay, etc.
So what you're saying is Chinese speakers generally use two languages/registers: one for spoken language and another for written. Which is another way of saying the writing system is not actually a good match for the spoken language in the first place and mostly exists for ceremonial reasons.
I would suggest someone figure out a sane way to capture spoken Chinese in a modern (i.e. easy to digitise) writing system but I doubt it would gain any traction because of the cultural implications of the script. Most Westerners see their writing system as a simple fact of life, the Chinese seem to see it as a sacred traditional craft in the same vein as forging steel.
Your discussion of "legality" here is U.S.-centric. Google has offices in Germany, France, Poland, Russia, Turkey, U.A.E., India, and China, to name a few. How would you feel if Google worked on military technology for those countries? Would you point out that it was inevitable that their militaries would seek ways to use A.I.? Would you point out that the Turkish armed forces' activities are permitted under Turkish law? Would you lament the inability of Google employees to separate work from politics?
Google has users in almost all countries, and even our friends in other liberal democracies do not see the U.S. military the same way we do. Perhaps some Google users' family members have even been killed by the U.S. military. This presents a perfectly reasonable business reason (one that has nothing to do with "the personal, the moral, the legal, and the political") for Google to turn down AI drone contracts.
I am from one of the country you listed above and it seems perfectly fine to me that Google comply with existing laws of respective countries even if they are in contradiction to US laws.
FWIW, I am American, and I would absolutely object if Google were building weapons for the Chinese military. I would stop using Microsoft products if it turned out they supplied weapons for the Russian takeover of Crimea. I would delete my Twitter account if they were found to be building special-purpose propaganda tools to aid Turkey's Erdogan. Etc.
Complying with laws in another country is one thing. Working with a military, which necessarily has implications beyond that country's borders, is another. And of course even here there are different degrees. You can build a general-purpose secure email client and sell it to a country's military, or you can design their bombs. Where the line is I'm not sure, but at some point your activity is inherently violent, inherently adversarial to some fraction of people in the world.
I am more conflicted about at least one person I knew committed suicide because IT automation provided by Google eliminated his job. Or in general IT/industrial automation wreaking havoc on my highly populated but poor nation. Now is it just the price of progress as people here would say or should Google employees be held morally responsible for causing destruction of livelihood for many a people.
I bet neither China, nor Russia, nor the US would allow foreign citizens in foreign countries develop any serious military technology for their armies. Even their own citizens would be checked in detail before being allowed to work on it.
If a technology is not under that kind of scrutiny, chances are its military applications are... far-fetched.
Lots of military technology is traded between countries all the time, tanks, planes, guns, boats, missiles, etc. China just bought a bunch of Su35 jet fighters from Russia.
How senior are you? I would first spend some time hunting for innovative teams within Google to transfer to. There are plenty of boring jobs at Google but also plenty of ambitious small teams working on startup-like projects. Even cute experimental features on big established products (search/gmail/maps/drive/etc.) often could plausibly be the basis for an entire startup, but there are also some pie-in-the-sky projects people are working on if you look around a bit.
Why aren't you creating something interesting? Good careers don't go to those waiting to be handed a golden egg.. understand the business, understand innovative technology, and connect them, and the world will be your oyster.
If management won't let you understand enough of the business to do so, I sympathize, I've been there. But if you're allowed to understand the business and are expecting someone else to come up with the innovation, you just need to get your shit together and be an engineer.
> Why aren't you creating something interesting? Good careers don't go to those waiting to be handed a golden egg.
It sounds like you're implying that to work on innonvative projects one has to have the mind of an entrepreneur. While it's not a bad mind to have I don't think utilization of ones skills in a meaningful and interesting way should depend on that?
I think you expose yourself a bit too much. With this information, people would know who you are. At this point, I don't think you would like your boss/colleagues know you are asking this question here.
This is such a personal decision, but to me it seems like you're possibly looking for reasons to leave.
If you like the business but don't like what you're doing, can that change soon? If this is the deciding factor, why not phrase it that way to whoever can make that decision? Nothing to lose ...
If you just want to leave the company in general, than isn't your answer "yes?"
> I have this theory that they've noticed that the platform is being used less and less, and is why we're getting so much ads mixed with our friends' posts. They're milking the cow before it dies.
Um, no. Facebook remains the most popular app in the United States with a comfortable lead. It's surpassed only by its own Whatsapp and Messenger globally. I think I read that in terms of time spent in an app, Facebook still beats Whatsapp, but I can't find the stat right now. Facebook just crossed 2 billion MAUs this year.
Its advertising revenue grows at close to 50% a year. Obviously part of that is showing more ads per user, but it's also growth in app usage. I'd say the cow keeps sprouting new udders and they are feverishly trying to keep up with attaching the pumps.
That doesn’t necessarily prove your point. It’s possible that advertising and install counts are lagging indicators, and that there are leading indicators like engagement showing trouble down the road. Anecdotally I’ve heard that this is the case.
when you think about it, it's a bad simulacrum of the social encounter and experience. i use mine as a blog for issues and feelings that have provoked a big response in me but it's far from ideal
This should not be downvoted. One sees the source before the colon more often than after the colon, but it is common to see the source after the colon in some publications. I see several instances (e.g., "Corporate lobbying helped derail border tax: senior Republican") on the Reuters homepage right now.
