lemmyvore

Whatever they need. Alphabet Inc. is made up of a dozen companies with thousands of products. There’s always something that can benefit from such insight.

The location data that Google collects through Android phones, alone, is mind-blowing. Just from your daily movement they can figure out where you live, where you work, shop, eat, drink, vacation. Indirectly they can figure out who your friends and relatives are, your partners, extra interests and hobbies etc. They sell all that to advertisers, there’s a reason why so much of Alphabet revenue comes from ads. Then there’s more complex patterns like traffic for example that they can sell to city planners and so on. And that’s just location data.

All DNS servers have “fast record changes”. They publish the records instantly on their own servers (if they don’t they’re a crappy service). But they can’t force other DNS server to update, each server does that at its own pace. In theory they have to obey the TTL for each record but in practice many cache the information and update much slower than the TTL.

I’ve heard a conspiracy theory that says that the apps and services that Google dumps were experiments in data gathering and correlation. So basically they make a music platform like GPM, they use it to get a great music prediction algorithm, then kill the platform because what they wanted was the algorithm. They have money to burn so they don’t care about one more tiny revenue stream or about making a great music platform.

Are all those packages available in binary format? Not familiar with Nix but that’s certainly not the case for Arch. Arch has 85k packages in the AUR as source recipes but not as binaries.

I still think Debian makes a better use case for a server since it provides everything as binaries.

If you’re going to use binaries what’s the point of using Nix anyway? The declarative aspect is nice in an abstract sort of way but you can achieve a system deploy or restore just as fast by installing a vanilla system and a few config files.

Just that compiling packages on a server is not ideal.