Google Will Eat Itself (2005)

[rattlesnakedave]

Probably don’t visit this site if you have epilepsy.

Discussion from reddit (~7 years ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/htidn/til_of...

And from hn circa 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273337

Definitely a hoax (but a really cool one, indeed) by the art collective Uber morgen.

[Dylan16807]

Probably? I'll counter with very unprobably. It's mostly a blur effect and the amount it shifts is very small.

Edit: I hope whoever downvoted has actual evidence of danger.

Also the danger range is generally around 12-20Hz and that background is at 4.

[dang]

And from 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2628328

[JohnFen]

I was wondering what you were referring to (later comments clarified this).

Once again, I'm happy that I don't allow scripting to run in my browser by default -- I never saw the effect you are talking about.

[varjag]

"202.345.117 Years until GWEI fully owns Google."

In less than a galactic year!

[darepublic]

This reminds me of zeno's paradox, even though you continue to buy google stock its a smaller and smaller fraction so even if you buy google to infinity you still never own it

[EGreg]

Zeno’s paradox only seems like one before you learn differential Calculus.

That’s because dx is going to zero, true, but as dt goes to zero.

We have figured out that this converges to an actual number, in a system that is totally consistent and makes sense.

x0 + sum of all the dx converges to x1 just as t0 + the sum of all the dt converges to t1. And that’s the exact time when Achilles catches up to the tortoise.

Zeno’s paradox ignores that dt is going to zero, and always acts like the sum of all the dt is infinity, thus “Achilles will never reach the tortoise” is wrong.

Simple!

[nix0n]

You don't need 100% though, just 51%

[z3t4]

There was a time where you could actually make money by having text ads. But then the whole ecosystem got diluted by fake impressions and clicks. One easy solution would be to require people to solve "captcha", for example when logging in, before being served a text ad.

[adrianN]

Have you ever browsed the web using Tor? Cloudfare hits you with a captcha for every other site, it gets annoying very fast. You don't want this experience for the whole Internet.

[birracerveza]

I'm sorry, I don't understand this comment. You want to solve captcha in order to be served text ads? Why would you want to do that?

[kkarakk]

i actively avoid sites that serve me captchas now, clicking through images of cars/bicycles/firehydrants is the most excruciatingly boring thing i've ever done

[pjc50]

Surely you mean before serving text content, or we just block the ad and captcha and get on with our lives?

[swiley]

It looks like this ended pretty quickly.

http://www.gwei.org/pages/google/google_letter_02.html

[tyingq]

This page seems unwise: http://www.gwei.org/pages/google/check.html

A check with enough info for G to probably figure out which advertiser it is? Or maybe they have some pool of accounts?

Edit: Ahh, nevermind. They mention a pool of accounts, some already disabled: http://www.gwei.org/pages/google/google_letter.html

[Cthulhu_]

I'm confident Google doesn't have any rules against this practice; after all, if they serve legitimate ads on legitimate sites and don't do any fraud, Google still earns money themselves off of the ads.

edit: another commenter pointed out they got a letter and a disabled account due to click fraud already.

[Mugwort]

I don't know about eating itself (possible) but Google might one day not need human employees at all or be very close to 100% AI. Maybe Sergey and Larry will keep their jobs because of seniority. The rest of us are in trouble.

[tehlike]

Meh. Will never happen.

[burtonator]

they say they own $450k worth of google stock?

[jrockway]

Hey, almost as much as any one of the 100,000 employees! I am sure the process of self-eating is nearly complete!

[todd3834]

> Amount of USD: 405.413,19

That’s kind of a weird way to format it. So I double checked the math.

> Google Shares owned by GWEI: 819

> Current Google Share Price : 495.01 USD

The current share price is actually $1,287.58

So they own $1,054,528.02 of Google stock?

[myroon5]

Their listed share price is outdated by years. I'd be skeptical

[julienreszka]

That's funny

[0898]

Aside: Google Will Eat Itself seems to be a pun on the English band Pop Will Eat Itself, who I can recommend.

[jhbadger]

I suspect both names are a pun on the old Marxist slogan "Capitalism will eat itself".