He wasn't the one who merged ads and search into the same org. The blame has to fall on Sundar, surely.

> promoted to a cushy do-nothing role

The people who this happens to are not perceived as successes. Everyone knows they are gentle firings.

They own the JS on the page, they don't need the redirects to know where you clicked...

You've been awarded one (1) Dunning-Krugerrand.

They own the JS but that is not enough. Don't assert so confidently that they can do this without redirects.

Like the OP says, it's being hidden form scrapers. Like you I don't see a reason for normal users to be concerned.

Unless I want to see what the link is before clicking. Or copy the link.

Or navigate to the link without waiting for however long it takes for Google's redirect endpoint to respond.

Well, they already know your credit card issuer, it's not that wild. Really Visa/MasterCard should offer age verification on their network... They have all the necessary components.

GNSS signals can be relatively easily faked because the original signals are very weak so overpowering them doesn't require much broadcast power.

Jamming them is easy, replaying them so as to trick unacquainted receivers is easy, but "faking" a network of signals so as to precisely control present a specific location is not easy or feasible.

"Overpowering" (as to jam) inherently means detectable, these signals are arriving below the noise floor anyway. And if you aren't overpowering, the original signals will leak through. Also, depending on the sophistication of the receiver, your ability to present an implausibly different location may not exist at all (AGPS.)

It seems feasible for state actors, at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNSS_spoofing#Ocurrences

ah, damn.

And only 1852m at sea level; since it's an angular distance it's a bit longer in the air and a bit shorter underwater (~ 29 cm per km of elevation change).

Mercator is also useful for tiled maps, which is why web Mercator is a standard. The tiles always have nice north/south and east/west bounds and there is no difference in rendering depending on longitude or latitude. For software maps the better approach, as done by Google, is just to postprocess the Mercator tiles into a sphere at rendering time if the user is zoomed out enough.

Allegations that the model plagiarised itself, while reflecting poorly on humans, don't make the AI any less impressive. It was the one doing the breakthrough on both sides, after all, not the human prompters.

I mean... none of these humans have priority. The result is due to the team of LLM agents.

BTW, Australia has shown the limits of sin taxation with our very high tobacco taxes. They got so high we induced a criminal black market in tobacco, that now is very hard to eradicate and is causing gang warfare, etc. Given we now have the crime anyway, maybe banning tobacco would have better outcomes than taxing it at this point.