this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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[โ€“] donnachaidh@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You get to Google pretty quickly by following links. If you look at the top of the linked issue, it links to a few things owned by Rupert Ben Wiser. If you follow the explainer link, you get this list of authors:

Authors: Ben Wiser (Google) Borbala Benko (Google) Philipp Pfeiffenberger (Google) Sergey Kataev (Google)

And in the repo, he says it's being prototyped in Chromium.

That's all written by him though, so I guess he could just be lying and making up names. So I tried looking up his name, to see if he's listed anywhere as a Google employee, but the best I could find is he's listed as a Google employee since 2022 on Facebook and LinkedIn. And he doesn't have much on his Github. (I kinda feel a little stalkery now... Don't harass anyone please). So either this is an elaborate, very late, April fool's or he's probably the fall guy for whatever exec actually thought this up.

I wasn't really doubting that he was a Google employee, rather more questioning whether the corporation (bare in mind it's huge) is aware of his efforts and this is on their immediate roadmap. It could just be a bunch of employees trying something about/proposing it internally and it might get shot down.

But I take the other commenter's point that this is how it begins