[HN Gopher] Google I/O 2021
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Google I/O 2021
Author : mfrw
Score : 89 points
Date : 2021-05-18 17:31 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (events.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (events.google.com)
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| A password manager that doesn't support sharing passwords? Why
| would I bother importing passwords from another password manager
| for less functionality?
| ortusdux wrote:
| The new UI overhaul looks interesting:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/22439777/android-12-design-features...
|
| The privacy changes are a step in the right direction.
| officeplant wrote:
| Haven't heard much positive feedback from other people testing
| 12 on their pixels when it comes to the UI changes. I'm still
| kinda on the fence but a lot could change by release. The
| privacy changes seem to be the only benefit to 12 so far
| personally. Which of course makes it worth the move.
| izacus wrote:
| If they've been using the Android 12 public DP, then they
| haven't seen this new UI yet.
|
| The beta with UI overhaul was rolled out today I think.
| ortusdux wrote:
| They could win me over by putting in a rounded-corner slider.
| It looks like it would default at 11/10.
| Forbo wrote:
| Here's hoping the privacy stuff is present in AOSP and not
| dependent on Play Services.
| nostromo wrote:
| Sundar is perhaps the most uninspiring CEO from any major
| American tech company when presenting. He's talking about amazing
| tech like quantum computing, but he sounds like he's talking
| about a Ford Taurus.
|
| Is this just his external-facing persona, or is he like this
| internally too?
| dheera wrote:
| Maybe he's just down-to-Earth, honest in his emotions, and
| doesn't like artificially hyping things up? Sounds good to me.
| actuator wrote:
| Tim Cook?
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Tim Cook sounds like someone who is _genuinely excited_ to
| tell you about a Ford Taurus.
| asadlionpk wrote:
| Do you think that's your bias speaking?
|
| I find him to be very approachable, honest and calm presenter
| both internally and externally.
| nostromo wrote:
| Yes, I'm sure it's a personal preference.
|
| Musk and Page and Bezos all present with a bit of giddy
| schoolboy energy. It's clear they are all super excited to be
| building the future and can't wait to tell you about their
| cool new tech. They aren't polished presenters, but it
| doesn't matter.
|
| Cook and Nadella are both very polished and calm, but still
| manage to convey a lot of excitement about their companies.
|
| That leaves Zuckerberg and Pichai, who are, in my view, too
| flat and robotic.
| dbbk wrote:
| Panos Panay is the best at this. I think he even beats
| Apple execs at exuding earnest excitement for the products
| he's demoing.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| +Jensen Huang in the former category
| herdcall wrote:
| I'm sure, and he's an effective speaker. But that's not the
| same as being inspiring, charismatic...stuff you need to be
| an effective leader. May be Google employees can pitch in?
| mrwh wrote:
| I like that he isn't particularly charismatic. Neither are
| Larry or Sergey of course.
| dguaraglia wrote:
| Meanwhile, Google's market cap has tripled during his tenure as
| CEO.
|
| Maybe being flashy and showy isn't all that important after
| all.
| reaperducer wrote:
| You make the mistake of believing that market cap is the only
| or most important way to measure the success of a business.
| It isn't. Not even remotely.
| jedberg wrote:
| Since he became CEO, the company has gone up 234%. The S&P500
| has gone up 101%.
|
| But Microsoft went up 364%, Apple went up 320%, And Amazon
| went up 420%.
|
| So if you're just looking at market performance, while he
| outpaced the S&P500, he underperformed his biggest
| competitors.
| dguaraglia wrote:
| Meanwhile, Satya Nadella isn't flashy and Jeff Bezos hasn't
| been involved in any kind of keynote speech on anything
| related to Amazon in years.
|
| So my point stands: flashiness doesn't correlate with
| performance.
| Lammy wrote:
| If the top priority is to satisfy Worthington's law, sure.
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Worthington%27s_law
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Who the hell cares.
| nostromo wrote:
| He's not some random middle-manager, he's the CEO. Inspiring
| people to do great work and communicating the company's
| vision is part of the job description.
| pm90 wrote:
| That's just one part of the job description.
| tosh wrote:
| I like how authentic Sundar comes across (also true for the
| other speakers). I think the live format helps.
| pschuegr wrote:
| Far preferable to the "product manager over-emoting and
| constantly gesturing while trying to be genuine reading a
| script that was written for them" that characterizes most of
| the rest of the presentations, IMO.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Haha. This is my feeling. And using words they would never
| use! Max emotion, max buzzword blah.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Sundar spends most of his internal facing time talking about
| racial equity and less about actual business.
|
| Source: Googler friends.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Really? Externally Google gives the appearance that it
| doesn't care about racial equity.
| dheera wrote:
| Not a Googler but I think that's great, personally. Google
| has already found a stable business model and racial equity
| is a problem.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| That's ridiculous. There are a handful of emails about the
| former topic and there are numerous hour long events where
| Sundar talks about other aspects the business.
| dguaraglia wrote:
| Meh, the outrage crowd in Hacker News is ridiculous. Any
| level of effort to make a company more inclusive as
| criticized as the company being 'too woke'. Meanwhile,
| Google's market cap has exploded in recent years.
|
| Lots of people too scared of 'cancel culture' (read: being
| caught and having to pay the consequences) around here.
| [deleted]
| rabuse wrote:
| This is why I've turned down a couple recruiters for Google.
| It's just not worth it anymore for me.
| tolbish wrote:
| Would you consider working at Apple? They are also quite
| vocal about issues like racial justice. They still seem to
| be praised as an employer, though.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I thought Apple was looked down as a cult secret culture
| kind of place. Not sure I've heard any praise by anyone
| aside from large pay and fun to work on cool products.
| tolbish wrote:
| Both of those things apply to pretty much every big
| company. As far as reputation as an employer goes, Apple
| is certainly ahead of Facebook and Amazon.
| ipaddr wrote:
| In what regard is Apple better? Pay / Options / Wfh /
| office parties, freebies, offices, 20% personal projects?
| 1-6 wrote:
| When inflation sets food prices skyrocketing, cafes and
| microkitchens will look better than ever as part of the
| benefits.
| osipov wrote:
| It is amazing how the company went downhill in a few short
| years.
| spurgu wrote:
| Project Starline looks incredible. Wonder if it'll be
| affordable/viable for consumers.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| So... it's 8k, a big display ... ok I see they are doing
| something with depth modeling. Is that kinda like a 3d tv then?
| spurgu wrote:
| Yeah that's how I'd describe it. 3D TV with 3D cameras.
| Looking forward to reading about the tech specs.
| actuator wrote:
| Video of Project Starline: https://youtu.be/Q13CishCKXY
| achow wrote:
| Interesting thing is that they don't show the participants
| touching the glass pane 'separating' them, whereas for that
| kind of situation it would be very very natural thing to do.
|
| I guess the imagery would distort/degrade real fast when you
| start reaching out towards the glass pane (you would be out
| of camera's FoV), and that would break the magic.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| I agree with everything you've said except for "and that
| would break the magic". We've already seen proofs of
| concept of "how natural does this kind of thing seem", in
| Star Trek and so on, and I can easily imagine not even
| noticing this kind of user error after a couple of minutes.
| Even if the screen burst out in simulated blue sparks when
| the person on the other end reached past the camera, I
| think that... probably doesn't break the immersion?
|
| You "just" need conversation to be truly real-time,
| seriously low latency, and with really good audio and
| visual quality. Once you've got those, I can easily imagine
| crossing the threshold where you're speaking through a
| magic pane of glass rather than into a screen. Think of how
| you might find interacting with a literal magical artefact
| that did this.
| nebari wrote:
| You can see a bit of the visual degradation and artifacts
| when reaching toward the 'screen' in the video at
| 1:46/1:50, as the woman with a baby on her lap reaches her
| palm toward the screen.
| Laremere wrote:
| I can't quite tell if they're doing this in the video, but
| you can project things out of a 3d display. You just have
| to avoid the object touching the sides of the screen. With
| that, you could have participants feel like their hands are
| in the same place without hitting glass.
| IshKebab wrote:
| "We want you to make a video all about this amazing thing
| we've made, but don't demonstrate it. Just show people
| talking about how awesome it is."
| ruffrey wrote:
| It is a very cool idea. Also seems possible to DIY in a less
| tech advanced way.
|
| Eye contact seems like the hurdle for making it feel real. With
| a screen that large, it may feel like someone is looking below
| the head, which may feel off.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Apparently Tizen and Wear OS are merging, curious to see what it
| means in practice.
|
| Regarding Android, the usual kind of keynote as if everyone would
| be getting the last Android version.
| Shadonototro wrote:
| Their Java bloat was borderline for a constrained device that
| is a smartphone, always needed double the memory/cpu/battery
| than iOS alternative, it couldn't scale down to a smart watch,
| they are stuck and went with a partnership with SAMSUNG, what a
| shame
|
| Some people are even saying they are about to fully embrace
| tizen with Dart & Flutter as a 1st class citizen, some are even
| saying they'll use it as a foundation for their next gen
| Android smartphones
| pjmlp wrote:
| Tizen has first class support for .NET in case you missed it.
|
| And it isn't like they are that good with their C coding
| efforts.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2017/07/12/samsungs_tizen_no_lon.
| ..
|
| So I am curious what the merge means in practice.
| Shadonototro wrote:
| Tizen.NET has surface API for .net, it's totally different
|
| TizenRT is where the core lives, and that is what Google is
| talking about, coming months will be interesting
| moshmosh wrote:
| So true. I remember how big a bummer Android keynotes were when
| I did lots of mobile dev. "Oh, cool, that'll be fun to use...
| in three or four years".
| rektide wrote:
| Starting off with new collaboration tooling integration is pretty
| on target for 2021!
|
| Getting a big vibe of yesterday's "Slack Destroying American
| Companies"[1]. I didn't actually click through & read, which
| would have lead me to finding out it's Matt Taibbi having a
| discussion with Antonio Garcia-Martinez (who personally I am not
| interested in hearing from). But the title reminded me of a part
| of Ezra Klein interviewing Cal Newport about his new book, "A
| World Without Email"[2]. In the interview they spend quite a
| while discussing how it seems like the whole world is presently
| stuck with Slack, how there's so little visible mainstream
| competition. Cal has been engaged with this question of workflow
| & tech & collaboration for a number years, often from a somewhat
| anti- standpoint, with books such as "Deep Work" and "Digital
| Minimalism". Hearing two sharp minds talking about collaboration
| was incredibly enriching to me.
|
| Notably, the collaboration tools shown at the beginning of IO are
| for explicit collaboration times. They're not marketed as always
| on communication devices, not a replacement for slack. But they
| both are about modern tech-enabled collaboration, which is an
| interesting topic, and one that seems like we're only just
| starting to really dive into. Long long long after Engelbart's
| Mother of All Demos (52.4 years after).
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27191181
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/podcasts/ezra-klein-
| podca...
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| They still haven't launched a lot of the Google Workspace
| features they announced last year. Don't hold your breath. Some
| of the features, loke Meet in Docs, are just the same features
| they announced last year just announced again.
| tosh wrote:
| The assistive technology showcases are super impressive and
| inspiring. Is there like a website to get an overview of these
| efforts?
| actuator wrote:
| I am really intrigued to see how this will work.
| https://health.google/health-research/imaging-and-diagnostic...
|
| For me at least, minor dermatological issues have been something
| that I feel lazy enough(also a bit conscious) to not go to a
| dermatologist about. If there is something that can quickly help
| me figure out any OTC solution to it or some home remedy, I would
| love that.
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| From their Keynote today I definitely saw the renewed focus on
| their mission: "to organize the world's information and make it
| universally accessible and useful". The new features introduced
| in Translation, Search, Photos and Health diagnosis along with
| that cool feature to search/find a specific clip within a video
| etc. by utilizing AI and ML at scale is pretty good.
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