@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

HalvarFlake

@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social

I do math. And was once asked by R. Morris Sr. : "For whom?"

Accidental two-time founder. Mathematician by education. Infosec luminary (has-been?).

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HalvarFlake, to random
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Today I learnt a great quote:

"The situation is shit but that's fertilizer for the future."

HalvarFlake, to random
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A woman named Amy Appelhans Gubser swam from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Farralon islands today. That is an absolutely mind-blowing achievement, and given that the Farralon islands are a seal breeding ground and given the density of great whites, I wouldn't dare swim there.

Absolutely impressive achievement. My mind is blown.

HalvarFlake, to random
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The person in front of me is an economist telling his neighbor, a pancreatic cancer drug researcher: How do you stay motivated to work on something so hopeless that the resources to do the research should be better spent elsewhere.

His job? Working for some investment fund.

A scholast in a largely political job telling a scientist that. Wow.

HalvarFlake, to random
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

Waiting for a delayed flight, some idle thoughts on what Google needs to fix itself:

  1. Find a replacement for Sundar. This person needs to be both able if articulating a coherent vision for Google as a company, and inspire great engineers to want to work on great problems.
HalvarFlake,
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar
  1. Google is a strange dysfunctional conglomerate. Search/Ads is/was one of the best businesses ever: Extremely high margin, network effects etc. - at the price of requiring heavy R&D for scale, search quality etc. -- a lot of early Google culture was built for such a business.
HalvarFlake,
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Many other businesses at Google (devices, cloud, enterprise docs) are very different: lower margins, more sales effort, tight qualitative customer feedback needed etc.

Neither early Googles culture nor pay scales are well-adapted.

HalvarFlake,
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

Google has largely killed old Google culture as a result, and the cash cow will eventually suffer. So a key step to returning Google back to health is splitting up the conglomerate.

Cloud needs to be split off, possibly devices, possibly YT or Android. The exact shape is TBD.
Several fragments of Google would be significantly sized public companies in their own right.

HalvarFlake,
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar
  1. Google has a huge amount of Parkinson's Law growth and empire-building to undo. The fastest way for mediocre people to get big salaries in the period 2011-2022 was to quickly grow...
    ... a small team into big orgs of 50-200 people. 2-4m TC as the carrot. Headcount and org size ballooned. Search/Ads success subsidized growth that was fat, benign tumors, or cancerous, and hiring quality suffered during the pandemic hiring acceleration.
HalvarFlake,
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

This was a result of the incentive structure. People got promoted for building big systems where small would have worked, and big teams when small would have worked.
Undoing this is super difficult and super painful. But if there is one lesson from history: Cut once. Cut deeply. Then let new branches sprout carefully.

The rolling layoffs that currently happen are crazy. Demoralizing, and not dealing with the actual rot.

HalvarFlake,
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

Most likely a ...
... lot of headcount reduction is needed. This might be more easily done after splitting the conglomerate, as cross-subsidies from search will become more visible.

  1. A new CEOs role is to greatly diminish their role by breaking up the conglomerate and then leading only...
HalvarFlake,
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...search/ads, and finding strong CEOs for the fragments.

  1. Search/Ads needs to restore the culture that it's the #1 place where people want to go to "make the world's information universally accessible". It needs to become the dream destination for technically ambitious ...
HalvarFlake,
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

scientists again. This requires clarity of vision, and the sort of audacity that Larry articulated as CEO: He wanted Google engineers to work right on the boundary of the possible.
6) Google somehow infected itself with Microsoft-internal-warfare-disease: When a company has few external threats, it can spin into a strange mode where most effort is on internal strife.

HalvarFlake,
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

Observing the frequency of strange reorgs with negative product or biz impact because ...
... some executive wanted a shiny piece of biz in their org/portfolio, Google has its own share of a similar disease. The loss of internal transparency exacerbates the issue. Whoever takes over needs to identify who the drivers for internal corporate warfare are, and take...
... an axe and a zero tolerance for bullshit approach to the problem.

HalvarFlake, to random
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

The reason why McKinsey/MBA types like Sundar and his recruits ruin companies is that ultimately too much focus and belief in shareholder capitalism thinks that companies are devices that produce money.

But neither do employees go to work with the wish to produce money for their shareholders, nor do customers buy products with that intent.

Employees want to help the customers and get paid for that. Customers want the value of the product. Money to shareholders is a byproduct.

HalvarFlake,
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

@dr2chase @oblomov they also have the property of diffusion responsibility effectively -- "I decided according to this metric" absolves people from responsibility for their action.

HalvarFlake, to random
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

Next time management asks you to stack-rank the members of your team, buy an electrical motor assembly kit, drop it on their desk, and ask them to rank the parts by importance/performance.

HalvarFlake, to random
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

I am over the fscking moon about this:

https://www.elastic.co/de/blog/elastic-universal-profiling-agent-open-source

This is absolutely awesome.

HalvarFlake, to random
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

As a young man I thought that I find overtly emotional people strenuous. One useful insight of my 40s is that I actually enjoy being among emotional people, it's people that externalize their traumas vs processing them that I found strenuous.

HalvarFlake, to random
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

The comedian W. C. Fields once said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.” - one of the things I have yet to master: giving up when it's reasonable to do so.

HalvarFlake, to random
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A very difficult, unfun, dark, but important read:

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

HalvarFlake, to random
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

I have just tried a voice cloning software for my own voice, and the results aren’t very good for me. Neither my timing cadence nor my intonation is mimicked properly…

Perhaps I have to try a different model, or more training data.

HalvarFlake, to random
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

My son appears to pick all the kids with behavioral anomalies as best buddies. A future in infosec awaits?

HalvarFlake, to random
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar
HalvarFlake, to random
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

I filed a FOIA to the FBI to disclose Sabus Twitter DMs from his time as an FBI sting operation a while ago (https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/twitter-dm-history-of-hector-monsegur-sabu-with-halvarflake-137919/?), but the reply was "can't confirm nor deny existence". Clearly the FBI must've had these records (they reviewed and monitored Sabus comms).

Is there a way to appeal?

HalvarFlake, to random
@HalvarFlake@mastodon.social avatar

I heard something today that is reasonably profound in analyzing communication failures:

Having thought something isn't having said something. Having said something isn't being heard. Being heard isn't being understood. Being understood isn't agreement. Agreement isn't change. Change isn't permanent change.

Keeping this list of possible failure points in mind is helpful in analyzing communication failures.

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