[HN Gopher] Google I/O 2023
___________________________________________________________________
Google I/O 2023
Author : skilled
Score : 382 points
Date : 2023-05-10 12:49 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (io.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (io.google)
| krsrhe wrote:
| [dead]
| andromaton wrote:
| [flagged]
| skinkestek wrote:
| Tell me when search works like it did in 2009.
|
| Or if they've brought back Google+ including all the communities
| I enjoyed.
|
| Oh, BTW, that cookie box on the bottom of the page is very much
| not compliant.
|
| Opting out should be as trivial as opting in, feel free to ask
| the YouTube team, they have someone on board who was smart enough
| to create a compliant solution :-)
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Goodle dev conferences used to be exciting, but now,
| unfortunately, all I care about is an update on what else did
| they break in new version of Android (that was working fine
| previously, like call recording).
| httpz wrote:
| I went to Google IO in 2014 and it was very exciting as a young
| engineer. Google Glass, Google Cardboard, Modular Smartphone, 3D
| space scanning tablet, Android Wear, and Android Auto were all
| announced there.
|
| Now it seems Android Wear never really took off and Android Auto
| is the only product that made it to somewhat mainstream.
|
| I'm not seeing much exciting experimental projects from Google
| anymore but maybe I'm just older and not easily excited.
| menus wrote:
| Hard to be enthusiastic about announcements from Google when
| there's a substantial chance of that product hitting
| https://killedbygoogle.com/ in 2 years.
| flakiness wrote:
| Google now has a separate conference for Cloud ("Next") and even
| for Android there are separate conferences (like "Dev Summit" or
| "Bootcamp"). These dilute the I/O's excitement.
|
| But this phenomenon exemplifies the incoherent nature of Google's
| dev story.
| [deleted]
| jaimex2 wrote:
| Haters gonna hate.
|
| I for one am super excited about this years chat app fail!
|
| Bring on Allo Meets with Messages! The worlds most force
| installed Chat app with as many users as its development team!
| edandersen wrote:
| Agressive pricing on the Pixel Fold is going to undercut
| Samsung's flagship most profitable phone. This will be
| interesting.
| jsheard wrote:
| A reputable leaker said the Pixel Fold will be priced
| identically to the Samsung Fold 4:
| https://twitter.com/jon_prosser/status/1648009519878774799
|
| Factoring in all the discounts and incentives that Samsung
| tends to do, the Pixel may be _more_ expensive in practice.
| That 's bold considering it has pretty middle-of-the-road
| specs, it's using the Tensor G2 SOC that launched last year and
| wasn't the best Android SOC even then, nevermind now that it's
| up against the Snapdragon 8 gen 2.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| They're speculating it's intentionally priced high so that
| the trade in deals look bigger.
| edandersen wrote:
| Samsung probably had a word then.
|
| Pixels normally are very generously priced, especially
| outside the US compared to Apple.
| [deleted]
| lawgimenez wrote:
| The skydiving demo from Google I/O 2012 is still the best.
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| For sure. The Dan Deacon AI concert at the beginning of this
| was was pretty good (mostly due to Dan being a crazy genius).
| [deleted]
| baridbelmedar wrote:
| I know I'm going against the grain here, but I'm actually looking
| forward to the event and plan to watch it :)
| verdverm wrote:
| Same here, I even took the day off, excited for the ML & Cloud
| tracks
| cloudking wrote:
| Me too, excited to see what they have planned for Bard and
| Workspace.
| elicash wrote:
| I'm excited to see anything they actually launch for
| Bard/Workspace, less so about what they have planned. But
| still excited for it.
| cloudking wrote:
| The updates to Workspace and Bard integration look great,
| what did you think?
| elicash wrote:
| Thrilled. I just need to somehow convince my large
| organization's IT team to enable the Workspace updates in
| Workspace Labs, which is likely to take some time. That's
| likely a few months, at least, but not the fault of
| google!
| majora2007 wrote:
| Me too, plus what's coming with their new phones and most
| importantly, how they are adding more and more AI into their
| cameras. I'm exclusively a Pixel user, so it's super important
| to me.
| tonymet wrote:
| My family member works for this team. Could you share what
| makes you a Pixel fan? Some like customizability, open
| platform . Some avoid Apple lock in. What draws you to Pixel?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| It's pretty simple:
|
| Pixel's are just the best "stock Android" phone there is.
| So many other Android device makers just slap a crappy UI
| on top of stock Android that offers no real value. In
| addition, Pixels always get the latest os updates, and
| Google recently improved support timeframes so they'll get
| support for years, on par with iPhones - that was a huge
| sticking point for years.
|
| There are some other specific features of Pixels that are
| great:
|
| 1. Excellent camera
|
| 2. The phone features are really fantastic, like auto "call
| screening" and "hold for me".
| JOnAgain wrote:
| And it's down.
|
| Not a good look.
| cubefox wrote:
| Who knows, maybe they announce a GPT-4 killer.
|
| I expect quite a few AI news anyway. Things are heating up.
| cubefox wrote:
| Looks like I was spot on.
| WediBlino wrote:
| Can they use that AI to drive an anti-aircraft system?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| TBH the constant cheering is a bit overwhelming.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Wow based on the comments Google IO is already dead on arrival.
| Maybe the hate will put some fire under google to come out with
| something meaningful in the years to come.
| motoboi wrote:
| Oh, my god. Google is SO lost that the guy is demonstrating a
| "Project Tailwind". TAILWIND.
|
| When you google for project tailwind you obviously get results
| for Tailwind (the css framework).
|
| Did just GOOGLE FORGOT HOW TO DO SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?!?
|
| (sorry for the capslock, but I'm lost)
|
| I feel that this comment might bother some people. But the idea
| that the company will demonstrate on stage a project and fail at
| choosing a proper googable name, when this company is google
| itself it's just mindboggling.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| To all the people who have been espousing how they appreciate
| cover letters, good luck - you'll be swimming in them, all AI
| generated.
|
| There will be a sea of all good, all positive fake text and text
| will lose its meaning.
|
| We used to appreciate a nicely written mail - now AI will be
| writing perfectly composed letters. We will learn to appreciate a
| badly written mail.
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| If AI can generate them trivially, maybe that suggests cover
| letters should not have been that important to begin with.
|
| To me, the main benefit of a cover letter is that it shows the
| applicant is engaged enough to actually make an application
| that is specific to a job posting. That is still the case with
| AI, it just saves everyone creating them a huge amount of work
| - most of which is completely wasted when the majority of
| application are thrown in the trash.
| dougmwne wrote:
| The ability to write a polite and on-topic email used to be a
| valuable skill to demonstrate. Not so much anymore.
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| Texters and readers of Homestuck have been practicing for
| decades at appreciating badly written mail. I believe human-to-
| human knowledge transfers will still be fine :). I'm fucking
| scared of the incoming spam tsunami though!
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| > I'm fucking scared of the incoming spam tsunami though!
|
| Why? Presumably with spam emails they write the email once
| and send it to a billion people. I don't see why an LLM
| meaningfully helps this process.
| hartator wrote:
| Anything exciting besides the fact that Google doesn't seem to be
| able to even release a decent UI/UX website in 2023?
| H1Supreme wrote:
| Is there a schedule for the talks? I'd like to catch a few, but I
| didn't see anything on the site.
| walls wrote:
| [flagged]
| lordswork wrote:
| . recycled_joke_count += 1 #[1]
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| computing wrote:
| In 2018 an obnoxious researcher working at a company known at the
| time as DeepMind told me (who was working in healthtech) that "AI
| in healthcare is a solved problem".
|
| It's 2023 now. AI in healthcare is a rounding error and will
| likely stay that way for a decade or longer. Google blew a 7 year
| lead of being an AI-first company to a non-profit. DeepMind is
| now a team within Google, similar to Ads, Drive, and Shopping
| Express.
| precompute wrote:
| IMO Google flunked it on the public side, I think the reason
| most of it was very hush-hush for years is because it was used
| for private, government purposes. Now, maybe they can't release
| most of their prior work without permission, so they're
| regrettably starting over with a blank slate in various
| departments.
|
| Nice username btw.
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| Agreed. It seems like they have the capabilities, but failed
| on the product side of things, as it seems they do often
| these days.
|
| I disagree with the GP that they "blew a 7 year lead". They
| still have a lot of the top industry minds in this area, and
| it's still early days; ChatGPT was launched less than 6
| months ago (which seems crazy). I'm thankful OpenAI is
| forcing them to stop resting on their laurels. How they will
| deliver on all of this remains to be seen, but this Google
| I/O has at least made me hopeful.
| TimCTRL wrote:
| I for one benefited so much from Google Developer Groups while at
| University. Google made sure we learned how to build Android
| Apps, and consume API's and services like Maps, Firebase, etc.
| Overall, I gained a good understanding of how systems work,
| Thanks Google!
|
| --From Uganda
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Google did not do this out of the goodness of their heart. They
| did it to lock you in with Firebase, Maps, etc. And believe me,
| the moment they start charging you for it, you quickly realize
| why Google is not a company to give an ounce of trust to.
| dlisboa wrote:
| Eh, I think you're underselling the value of "free" stuff.
| Even if it has an ulterior motive, giving free access to
| computing resources allows someone to learn concepts and even
| ship things that would otherwise be impossible.
|
| None of these companies are altruistic and everyone knows it,
| but by not charging upfront it gives possibilities for
| millions of developers who don't have US$ 50/month to spend
| on something (students, emerging economies, career changers,
| etc).
| cawca wrote:
| [flagged]
| dpbriggs wrote:
| I wouldn't as knowledgeable and successful in tech without
| free computing resources from various companies. My parents
| didn't have any money and I certainly didn't either.
|
| There's a lot of transferable skills gained in these
| products. You're not just operating a Maytag.
| GaggiX wrote:
| I guess you can easily transfer the knowledge to other
| libraries, APIs, etc. I think it is just a net benefit.
| precompute wrote:
| Haha, very similar to how Microsoft turns a blind eye to
| Windows piracy.
|
| After all, why care? It's not like those people were gonna
| buy it anyway, and they're _still_ using windows, aren 't
| they?
| jytechdevops wrote:
| That's fantastic to hear. The guy who leads GDG for North
| America and Canada grew up in Nigeria and got his education
| there. He's the most enthusiastic and passionate developer I've
| ever met. I love the reach google has in inspiring new
| engineers. Thanks for sharing your story.
| [deleted]
| danwee wrote:
| I was very enthusiastic about Google I/O in the past (around the
| year 2010). Full of nice tech talks; I learned a lot. These
| years, I couldn't care less. It's all business talk. I guess
| developers are not the target audience anymore (and for
| newcomers, perhaps the "I/O" may be misleading).
| i_love_cookies wrote:
| [dead]
| intrasight wrote:
| Same. Google invited me to participate and have a booth - in
| 2010 or 2011 - because we were an early business adopter of
| their APIs. It was a cool event. I think the hot new tech that
| year was NaCl. I don't think startups get invited now just for
| using new Google tech. And is a reminder that this year's hot
| new tech will be forgotten in a few years.
| malermeister wrote:
| If you want tech talks from Google, Android Dev Con is great. I
| wonder if there's anything like that for other parts of their
| business.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| tbh, I kinda blame the media for this. At some point the media
| decided that I/O was Google's competitor to Apple's consumer
| keynotes, and so it was forced to become that in order to avoid
| weeks of "Google disappoints at I/O" headlines.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Same here, it used to be quite cool, but with the multiple
| reboots on Android frameworks, lack of updstes enforcement for
| OEMs, how the Kotlin advocates talk about Java, and the sorry
| state of NDK tooling, I lost interest.
|
| Only the Web talks are relevant, as the Web is now basically
| ChromeOS.
| azangru wrote:
| I looked at the schedule for the web section, and some of the
| talks look useful. Much has been done in the browser space: new
| CSS capabilities and webgpu among them.
| kellengreen wrote:
| I completely agree. I'm a multiple year attendee, and couldn't
| be bothered with the announcements these days.
| numbsafari wrote:
| "Income" and "on-boarding" are what those letters stand for.
| jsnell wrote:
| If you pick 10 random sessions from the program[0], I'd think
| the odds are that you'll end up with like 8-9 technical
| sessions or workshops. The keynotes of course target a more
| general audience, but that's always been the case. (E.g.
| haven't they been announcing consumer hardware during the
| keynotes basically from the start?). It seems in line with
| something like the WWDC, which is a developer conference but
| with a general audience keynote.
|
| [0] https://io.google/2023/program/
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| I haven't tuned in for the past few years, but I will today
| because I'm just curious to see how (if?) Google responds to
| the ChatGPT phenomenon.
| gabereiser wrote:
| I think their response has been pretty clear so far. They
| don't have a plan.
|
| https://bard.google.com/
| https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/01/tech/geoffrey-hinton-
| leaves-g... https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/13/google_l
| amda_sentient... https://www.wired.com/story/google-timnit-
| gebru-ai-what-real...
| cubefox wrote:
| As you wrote this, they announced PaLM 2.
| int_19h wrote:
| Yeah, and the PaLM-2-powered Bard is still very meh. Not
| even GPT-3.5 level, much less GPT-4.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Yeah, and I realize my point of view is unpopular here.
| Integrating across all their services is just doubling
| down on what they already took from GPT. I didn't see
| anything that wowed me. Cool, so I can LLM in Gmail and
| workspaces. Cool, so I can build a job description based
| on what others are hiring for instead of my company's
| needs. I'm not saying that any of this is easy, just that
| it's simply novelty. PaLM 2, we'll have to see how it
| performs but it looks promising but it's just another
| GPT-4 competitor. Where's the "while the world was ogling
| over GPT-4, we built this"? PaLM 2 isn't distinctive
| enough for me to say they are paving the way. They
| totally get it, but they aren't paving the road forward.
| Maybe next year.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Update from the future: we're almost an hour in and ML is
| pretty much the only thing they've talked about.
| adql wrote:
| > The number of requests sent exceeds the quota limit.
|
| lmfao google can't host a fucking static page
| ddalex wrote:
| Forgot how to count that low.
| nr2x wrote:
| https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Same here, I lost interest
| mooreds wrote:
| It wasn't always tech talks. I remember going to Google I/O in
| 2008 and sitting in a bean bag chair about 30 feet from "Flight
| of The Conchords", who were performing live. Fun times.
|
| Ah, look, I blogged about it:
| https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/475
| atonse wrote:
| I was at Google IO 2008. Amazing times. Wore the t-shirt
| until it was so badly faded and torn.
|
| But back then Google was at the forefront of open standards
| and pushing the web forward. It was an exciting time for
| sure.
|
| Far from the Google of today who can't seem to run a project
| for more than a couple years.
| whalesalad wrote:
| it's actually really depressing for me to watch. it feels like
| google is a shell of their former selves.
| m0zzie wrote:
| Heh, yours and other comments here disparaging I/O as
| "business" or "corporate" talk these days come across as quite
| ignorant - and I don't mean this in a nasty way, more in a
| literal way. It seems perhaps you're missing the fact there are
| many different styles of talks for many audiences.
|
| At every I/O there is a "keynote" and a "developer keynote",
| and similarly there are business / product talks and developer-
| focused talks. In fact, they even create entirely separate
| playlists on YouTube for the dev/non-dev talks.
|
| As a Staff Eng who leads and mentors engineers who live in a
| world where they have no choice but to use Google SDKs and
| services, I find many of the developer-focused talks invaluable
| for getting others in my team up to speed on what's new and
| what's coming soon. Most of these talks are given by engineers
| and involve concise code examples which quickly convey the gist
| of new functionality.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| [flagged]
| hardware2win wrote:
| Why so snarky?
| ihateyouall123 wrote:
| [flagged]
| jeanlucas wrote:
| Really disappointed that most replies to this comment are
| just people attacking the person.
| ihateyouall123 wrote:
| The data shows he's an idiot
| echelon wrote:
| Google can pretend they're not IBM, but that doesn't make it
| true.
|
| Google no longer innovates or launches products of note. They
| throw ideas at the wall, like spaghetti, and hope things
| stick.
|
| Perverse incentives create competing products, dead end
| projects, and invariably everything created winds up getting
| cancelled.
|
| Google got drunk off of easy search ad revenue. Their
| founding leadership went off to do zeppelins and politicking.
| Now that golden goose looks like it may be cooked.
|
| Google had the Bell Labs of AI research, but their ability to
| build product around it looks a lot more like IBM Watson.
|
| Over the next half decade, their top tier talent will leave
| and get venture funding to do their own things with their own
| equity.
| lxgr wrote:
| > They throw ideas at the wall, like spaghetti, and hope
| things stick.
|
| Yes, and whether they stick or not, they tear down the wall
| after 2-3 years because they seemingly still haven't
| figured out how to internally incentivize KTLO/running
| stable products (other than a few flagship ones) rather
| than building shiny new things.
| m0zzie wrote:
| Did you mean to reply to a different comment? I'm not sure
| what relevance this has to my comment which you're replying
| to?
| echelon wrote:
| I meant it in response to your comment.
|
| > As a Staff Eng who leads and mentors engineers who live
| in a world where they have no choice but to use Google
| SDKs and services, I find many of the developer-focused
| talks invaluable for getting others in my team up to
| speed on what's new and what's coming soon.
|
| This sounds identical to IBM developer outreach. Or
| Ballmer-era Microsoft. Similar straightjackets, captive
| audience.
|
| We'll see if Google can excite people about AI here, but
| I'm doubtful.
| [deleted]
| devjab wrote:
| > live in a world where they have no choice but to use Google
| SDKs and services
|
| Which world is this? I'm genuinely interested not trying to
| be rude.
| m0zzie wrote:
| No problem! My team is a small subset of engineers in a
| 10yo+ startup, and the organisation chose to go all in on
| many Google services long before any of us joined the
| company. I have my issues with Google and some of their
| services but the GP stands out as an odd comment to me
| because it's at odds with my own experience of keeping up
| with I/O talks.
| criddell wrote:
| Is it still a startup after a decade? Isn't it just a
| company at that point.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Startup is just another buzzword for a business. It's
| never been anything different than that. I wouldn't make
| any assumption about it based on the term, not the age,
| size, market, etc
| ihaveajob wrote:
| I've heard some folks (angel investors!) refer to
| Telefonica as a startup, so...
| [deleted]
| tnel77 wrote:
| Related: It drives me bananas when a mega-corp makes a
| small R&D team and the job req says "we are a small
| startup in a big company." The benefits, bureaucracy,
| speed of innovation, and equity all fit the usual mega
| corporate shoes, so it's probably still a traditional
| role.
| int_19h wrote:
| It does actually work out sometimes. I had the luck to be
| on one such team at Microsoft in the past, and we
| absolutely did have the benefit of cutting through much
| of the usual red tape etc, while still having access to
| megacorp resources.
|
| But the only reason why it worked out the way it did is
| because the "owner" of the team in question 1) sincerely
| believed in this approach, 2) had enough clout with the
| top management to make it stick.
| nopenotthat wrote:
| [dead]
| steve1977 wrote:
| It's still a startup if it's not profitable yet ;)
| [deleted]
| latchkey wrote:
| I built a business that did $80m of (profitable) revenue,
| in the first year. We were profitable after 3 months. Is
| that not a startup?
| codethief wrote:
| !A (not profitable) => B (startup)
|
| does not imply
|
| A (profitable) => !B (not a startup).
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Math checks out. :D
| malfist wrote:
| So bed bath and beyond is a startup?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Just because
|
| > _!A (not profitable) = > B (startup)_
|
| > _does not imply_
|
| > _A (profitable) = > !B (not a startup)_
|
| does not imply that !A => B. In other words, the logical
| structure can be correct, but that does not mean the
| premises are themselves true. This is the difference
| between validity and soundness in formal logic [0].
|
| [0] https://iep.utm.edu/val-snd/
| neodypsis wrote:
| Your company was new. But the situation you describe is
| not typical of a startup as commonly understood.
| latchkey wrote:
| That's because most people do startups that are destined
| to fail. I've done plenty of those myself! The problem is
| that we think we can get away with building solutions
| looking for products. While a few of those do well, in
| general, that is a recipe for failure.
|
| In other words, our success was because we identified a
| critical missing piece in a profitable industry and built
| exactly what people were asking for, and more
| importantly, willing to pay for.
|
| After that success (and a couple more after it), I refuse
| to ever build something without finding customers first.
| You have to build products people want, not try to
| convince people into believing they want your product.
| ihateyouall123 wrote:
| Yeah but who are you?
| fnfjfk wrote:
| anyone that wants to ship a mobile app?
| ihateyouall123 wrote:
| Which world is this? I am genuinely interested and trying to
| be rude
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Fitting username. Have an upvote.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I'm too lazy to go through the previous agendas of I/O, but
| it would be interesting to see the burnt out remnants of
| google's various abandoned projects.
|
| I saw this headline and eyerolled. In 2010, I read the
| schedule/agenda and hype about what might be given to
| attendees. ALMOST signed up for the lottery.
|
| As I addended to google's IoT with respect to other IoT
| vendors:
|
| "It's just that Google adds completely rudderless leadership,
| its world famous utter disregard for customer support, and
| complete lack of commitment to the recipe."
|
| Google I/O was cool when you could get early access to google
| glasses.
|
| What do you get these days? Anything interesting? Or the
| latest Pixel (god, don't get me started, I am NEVER EVER EVER
| dropping more than $300 on an android phone again).
|
| Anyway, back to the eyeroll. Wow, 10 years. Android is
| buggier and its app store laden with malware, copycats,
| predatory addictware, and bureaucracy. Android hardware is
| arguably even buggier than it was. Search is FAR FAR worse.
| Their self-driving is still a non-starter. The internet has
| turned into a dystopian wasteland and they are a not-
| insignificant party to it. No longer open, no longer even
| trying to not be evil.
|
| Everything about google is worse today than it was 10 years
| ago. Does anybody actually want to work there for any reason
| besides money and resume eyecandy? Google the search is far
| worse than it was 10 years ago with maximum monetization
| policies. Advertising / information hoovering is a threat to
| democracy and perhaps human existence. The fourth estate /
| newspapers / journalism has been utterly hollowed out. It has
| directly enabled cartel and monopoly market consolidation. It
| is the shining example of locking out someone from the
| internet and providing no human contact for resolution. If it
| fails to dominate something with its horrid customer service
| and big brother creepy dominance, it strands people with
| little warning.
|
| Anyway, have fun at Google I/O 2023 everyone!
| gumballindie wrote:
| Google is a factory and software is manufacturing. They want to
| sell their goods to managers not engineers. Makes sense if you
| think about it. Most of what google does is yesterday's tech,
| the web isn't new and they aren't making bank by selling stuff
| to software devs. We want free stuff, preferably open source.
| There's so much of it anyway that it has zero value. They might
| babble a bit about how ai can replace workers and further
| reduce wages.
| capableweb wrote:
| All of that makes sense for Google in general, but Google I/O
| used to be explicitly a developer conference, with everything
| targeting developers, which no longer seems true.
| packetlost wrote:
| That was when Google thought they needed the support of the
| "developer" community that they don't write the paychecks
| for. Now they make nothing new or interesting, or on the
| off chance they do, they kill it after it proves not to be
| a cash cow.
| DrScientist wrote:
| Same sort of thing happened to WWDC.
|
| I once worked somewhere where the only people who actually
| went to WWDC where the IT admins and Apple fans,rather than
| developers.
|
| From a developer perspective - online if so good now, why
| do you need to travel? ( unless you really want 1:1 with
| Apple/Google Devs ).
|
| So the only people who travel end up being the people their
| for the 'event' and the 'one more thing' excitement.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I think conferences have long been about the socializing
| and the excuse to travel. "Learning" was the pretend
| business excuse.
| ghaff wrote:
| The getting away from the day job and serendipitous
| discovery are benefits in addition to meeting with people
| and socializing. But I think a lot of conference goers
| approach it as a sprint to maximize sessions and if
| that's your goal online is probably more efficient.
| adventured wrote:
| Representative of the shift from creation to extraction.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Google had built itself such a reputation, that no
| developers would want building stuff using their tech.
| Thus, shift to focusing on executives.
| [deleted]
| nogridbag wrote:
| The Pixel Tablet and Pixel Fold look pretty impressive to me. The
| Tablet looks like a good buy given it includes the stand.
| rvz wrote:
| Yet all of you will still watch it anyway.
| adt wrote:
| PaLM 2 paper:
| https://ai.google/static/documents/palm2techreport.pdf
| lucidyan wrote:
| Not paper, but the report that lacks any details (even more
| than OpenAI latest about GPT-4)
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| Yeah, it's more like "models used, results, example
| capabilities" and "how we're going to use this responsibly".
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| <to Google Bard>: create a Google I/O keynote on this and that
| project. Mention AI at every turn.
|
| All subtly cringe, unexciting. Presenting million ways AI takes a
| whole lot of the _real_ creation & soul out of every human-
| technology interaction. Plus feeling society not ready to handle
| this.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| I'm beginning to wonder if soulless, boring, corpspeak AI-
| generated text is going to turn out to be a huge competitive
| _disadvantage_ for those who become reliant on it.
|
| If someone sends me an email or a message that sounds AI-
| generated, it's easy to tell that it's not meaningful. So I end
| up ignoring it entirely.
|
| I'm also concerned about folks who actually try to use "AI"
| like Bard to assist with life decisions like they showed in the
| college-search presentation. Maybe that works OK right now --
| though I suspect AI has serious blind spots. But what happens
| when Google wants to milk advertisers a bit more, and starts
| pushing more Wendy's (TM) and for-profit universities and
| whatever else into your chats?
|
| The "what bike should I buy for a 5 mile hilly commute" query
| had hilarious results, too -- literally all sponsored content
| from no-name (but expensive) bike brands. No real understanding
| of what makes a decent, maintainable commuter bike. Just Bard
| spitting out whichever bike manufacturers pay Google the most.
|
| Anyone who actually relies on this garbage for decisionmaking
| is going to wind up making some very poor decisions once Google
| allows advertisers to hook into these AI features... which is
| already happening in Search.
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| A lot of negativity in the comments, but the stock is up ~5%
| today (in particular it didn't tank), so it seems like the market
| isn't as negative about the presentations.
|
| The fast integration into all products is pretty amazing, some of
| them actually useful (e.g. using search/bard to query/generate
| tables and exporting them into sheets directly is really cool).
|
| I also like that they emphasized the utility aspect and didn't
| get into AGI nonsense that OpenAI peddles so much.
| das_keyboard wrote:
| I was really hoping all these AI advancements will lead to
| significant improvements for Google Assistant... but there seems
| to be no mention of it :(
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| That surprised me too - I read that they are restructuring
| their assistant team to focus more on Bard, so I don't know if
| that means they are less focused on the core assistant or not.
| I don't use Google Assistant, but seems like a clear
| integration point for these new tools. Will be interesting to
| see what shape that takes.
| joshmanders wrote:
| All I have to say is I'm annoyed the domain is io.google instead
| of google.io. I mean I get they gotta flex the notion that they
| have TLD us peasants don't get to use, but the conf's name is
| Google IO not IO Google.
| zerocrates wrote:
| There's some political baggage associated with the .io TLD
| since it's for the British Indian Ocean Territory, an area
| whose inhabitants were forcibly removed to build a military
| base.
| c0t300 wrote:
| I'd say the .google is the biggest flex i've seen in a while,
| so why not just use it
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| It's a faux pas to flex your own massive amounts of power in
| places where it doesn't really matter all that much. Then
| again, Google has pretty much embraced their role as a comic
| book villain these days.
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| Maybe going against the grain here, but this was the best Google
| I/O I've seen in a long time.
|
| In the past, they seemed liked incremental updates on their
| hardware (which I don't care too much about) or some new products
| like the pixel watch / glasses (which I probably won't use). I
| knew there would be a huge focus on AI this year, but I was
| pleasantly surprised by many of the new features and how quickly
| these integrations are happening. This is just the tip of the
| iceberg, I'm excited to see how the industry progresses.
| toddmorey wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how the data & AI conversations
| evolve. A bit like smartphones, I'm scared we'll first see an
| explosion of features then some backtracking to figure out the
| security & privacy models. I wish we'd learned to start with
| security.
|
| I didn't get to see the entire thing, but I did see the AI-
| enabled cinematic photo backgrounds. All I could think is man
| that's a lot of analysis of my personal images for a mild
| parallax effect.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >A bit like smartphones, I'm scared we'll first see an
| explosion of features then some backtracking to figure out
| the security & privacy models
|
| When was the backtracking with smartphones?
| eclipxe wrote:
| Agreed. HN hates all things Google, but this was a great show.
| nightski wrote:
| I have a hard time getting excited about anything AI with a
| company whose main profit center is in harvesting your data.
| Incentives are just not aligned. In this case AI is simply a
| gimmick to get us to give them more data to serve their real
| customers.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I am currently in a superposition of being very excited and
| very underwhelmed. The wavefunction will collapse once I can
| actually play with the technology and find out if it is
| anywhere close to as good as they claim.
| joebiden2 wrote:
| Best time to buy MS stock. Which I just did :)
| pnw wrote:
| I remember Sergey skydiving onto the roof of Moscone in 2012, and
| everyone getting one of those cool Nexus Q media players which
| they never actually released so they all ended up as landfill.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_Q
| dekhn wrote:
| I was on stage at that Google IO (I press the button that
| "launches" 700,000 servers during the launch of GCE). My
| practice session was bumped into 2:30AM because both Sergey
| with Glass and Vic with some Google Plus feature were "more
| important presentations and needed the stage practice time
| more".
|
| Of the three products, Glass is gone, Vic and Google Plus are
| gone, and GCE is now making money for Google.
|
| As for Nexus Q- I met a guy on the team. They not only never
| released it, they never INTENDED to release it! It was just a
| marketing thing for that Google IO.
| kellengreen wrote:
| Same, that was one slick device.
| truth_seeker wrote:
| Eagerly waiting for Dart 3.0 and Flutter 4.0 announcements !
| ugjka wrote:
| I stopped caring about I/O when it became just corporate talk
| yazzku wrote:
| And the wokeness of the "diverse" cast of speakers.
| [deleted]
| jefftk wrote:
| When was that?
|
| (I expect whatever year you give other people will say it was
| already just corporate talk before then)
| clnq wrote:
| Around 2013 is when I/Os became less about showing
| technological progress and more about corporate talk.
|
| Examples of I/O topics before 2013: Android, Maps API, App
| Engine (cloud), Chrome, AJAX for their APIs, real-time
| collaboration/Wave, Google TV (early predecessor to Android
| TV), Chromebooks, Chrome Web Store, Google Drive, Google
| Docs, Google Glass, Gmail updates, Google+, YouTube updates.
|
| Most I/O topics after 2013 revolved around marginal
| improvements on a lot of things, like individual Android
| features and apps. And naturally, when there is so little to
| talk about, corporate speak fills the void.
|
| There were still some interesting topics after 2013,
| especially if you follow some specific developments in the
| Android ecosystem. But there were very few groundbreaking
| topics. Google will probably talk about Bard this year, which
| has not been a huge success, but at least it's something
| bigger that harkens back to pre-2013 days.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Almost all of the topics you listed have sessions in this
| year's Google I/O. There are 35 different sessions tagged
| "Android" alone: https://io.google/2023/program/?q=android
|
| There might be no sessions for stuff like how to use web
| APIs because these are already mature and well-documented
| technologies. I/O is about showcasing new stuff after all.
| clnq wrote:
| I don't know, it seems to me that recently in I/O,
| discussions have primarily focused on mature core
| products, indicating a shift towards iteration rather
| than invention. I would say the conference definitely
| showcases less "new stuff" or "new stuff" of smaller
| scope. Both I/O and Google now seem to prioritize safe,
| low-risk technologies from a business standpoint. And
| that just doesn't fill up an entire conference without
| some business speak padding.
|
| To my mind, the turning point towards this new, less fun
| and more corporate Google and I/O was around 2013. I
| think that's when they started thinking about shaping the
| company into Alphabet with Google as a subsidiary as
| well. Famously they removed "don't be evil" as the motto
| and expanded into hardware a lot soon after 2013, too. It
| was a time of wholistic change at Google.
| gjvc wrote:
| RIP Google Wave, we hardly knew ya.
| clnq wrote:
| It was kept alive internally by Apache for a while later
| -- https://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html. Very
| interesting why it failed as a project in two separate
| companies. There was an explosion of team collaboration
| software in the 2010s and yet these companies couldn't
| make their product compete.
| gjvc wrote:
| _" The Wave project retired on 2018-01-15."_
| shmoe wrote:
| Wave was awfully confusing. What was it even for?
| derefr wrote:
| > Most I/O topics after 2013 revolved around marginal
| improvements on a lot of things, like individual Android
| features and apps. And naturally, when there is so little
| to talk about, corporate speak fills the void.
|
| I don't understand how a corporate culture that's so
| focused on shipping new projects at the expense of
| maintenance, manages to ship so few new projects.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Bard needs API access.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| They are providing API access to at least some models in
| the same family underlying Bard, but explicitly (while
| its in preview) prohibiting production/commercial use --
| not disclaiming liability and advising against it as is
| common for pre-release products, but actually
| _prohibiting_ in the ToS.
|
| Google is taking an hypercautious approach around "AI
| safety" issues that amounts to "we should not release
| products and if we do they are just demos that no one
| should be permitted to use for any serious purpose" which
| is going to hurt them in the marketplace but also does
| nothing meaningful to deal with either the real and
| immediate issues with AI or the mixture of other (some
| real but less immediate but largely science fantasy)
| issues that typically are referred to under the "AI
| safety" umbrella (and that's even more true if you
| consider from the pov of assuming that the more science-
| fantasy-ish of those risks are real and serious.)
| verdverm wrote:
| There is Vertex AI, which some people are getting early
| access to (what i hope is) PaLM2 | ULM. The GCP offering
| only contains tools for your own models, what everyone
| wants is an alternative to ChatGPT, a pre-trained LLM
| from Google accessible via API and fine tune-able in
| Vertex.
|
| There is this in the meantime:
| https://github.com/acheong08/Bard
| packetlost wrote:
| I would say roughly around when they killed their Nexus line.
| gjvc wrote:
| Yes. This is when I felt they had veered from the path I
| was following and supporting. Nexus 5 was a great phone!
| jefftk wrote:
| Ooh, I thought we were going to be arguing about an earlier
| time. The last Nexus (pretty sure) was the 6P, released
| 2015-10 and discontinued 2016-10.
|
| I remember this complaint from the IO 2013, when I was
| there representing mod_pagespeed.
| packetlost wrote:
| I mean, you could argue that it was earlier, but I think
| that's the point where most people would agree the magic
| was dead.
| tjpnz wrote:
| The Android presentations in the early 2010s were something
| to get excited about.
| lordswork wrote:
| Which one of these talks from ML/AI at I/O 2022 would you
| describe as "just corporate talk"?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQY2H8rRoyvyY0AsvPIkb...
| danielscrubs wrote:
| I understand him. Maybe Im cynical but everything I see on
| your link looks like something a technical sales person would
| come up with... How easy is it to onboard people? Easy! Are
| we helping save the world? Yes! Can we build it ethically?
| Yes!
|
| Are those questions really what's on the mind of the
| developer? Where is the: we have a way to revolutionize the
| debugging experience when doing ML(for people with PhDs)
| talks?
|
| I know it wouldn't sell to the masses but that was kind of
| the point if you want jaded devs on your side.
| lordswork wrote:
| I think you are quick to judge the talks by their title.
| They are all technical from what I can tell, and many cover
| topics that are of interest to PhD researchers. For
| example, the distributed large model paper covers several
| papers' worth of research done at Google and how to utilize
| their implementation in JAX.
|
| ML debugging is just one topic among many. I wouldn't
| dismiss the entire lineup because Google didn't have any
| big announcements in that space for that year.
| revelio wrote:
| Maybe "A journey to protect the Great Barrier Reef using ML"?
|
| The video is five minutes long, is basically a nature advert
| complete with stirring music, has a bizarre cartoon in the
| middle of it and is all about an attempt to control the
| reef's population of starfish. We're told that the starfish
| are doing great thanks to there being fewer predators and
| more nutrients in the water, but that this is bad because
| "it's quite a nasty animal" and it eats coral. The goal is to
| find starfish "outbreaks" using ML and enable teams of divers
| to kill the starfish as quickly as possible.
|
| They appear to think this is a stirring example of protecting
| nature. There's even a diver at the end who breaks down in
| tears at the way the reef has degraded over his lifespan.
| Fortunately since the video was made it was discovered that
| the reefs are now at record-breaking coverage levels despite
| the starfish, so apparently they didn't need AI driven death-
| from-above. Also it's not really clear why Google wants to
| help implement mass animal culls in a place where people
| don't even go. Why are corals better than starfish? This
| seems like a very arbitrary judgement. Corals and crown-of-
| thorns starfish have been co-existing in nature for far
| longer than people have.
|
| So:
|
| 1. Not for developers. They use batching and quantization,
| that's as deep as it goes technically.
|
| 2. Essentially a long ad for their cloud ML services.
|
| 3. Consists mostly of people talking about how meaningful,
| awesome and filled with hope they feel.
| lordswork wrote:
| Agreed. That seems like the short high-level feel-good talk
| aimed at corporate folks, whereas the remaining 17 talks
| are technical and aimed at actual developers.
| revelio wrote:
| Guess it depends what you mean by technical.
|
| I randomly picked another, "Product fairness testing for
| developers". It seems to consist of two Googlers reading
| a codelab out loud. And I mean that literally:
|
| https://youtu.be/RcgBNkX0RjE?t=904
|
| She _literally_ reads out the title, pauses, reads out
| the subtitle, pauses again, reads out the rest of the
| document word for word. WTF? Is this person a text-to-
| speech AI? Why did Google make a video that consists of
| Googlers doing a TTS-quality video of their own
| documentation website? I 'm a developer, watched many dev
| oriented tech talks and I've _never_ seen that before.
|
| The bulk of the talk is about how important it is to be
| ethical and stuff. First time we see code that isn't just
| a snippet in some docs is at the 22 minute mark in a 34
| minute talk. It appears to be little more than running
| some regexs over some rather incoherent LLM output. The
| code isn't even explained anywhere, just what it's doing.
| No dev is going to learn anything from this even if
| they're at bootcamp level.
|
| The video has got only around 4000 views, which seems
| about right. I can't imagine anyone watching this and
| thinking, yes, awesome, let's share it around. BTW the
| bootcamp level of the code might be because neither of
| the speakers are developers. One is a product manager,
| the other is an analyst. Really don't think this is
| targeted at developers dude despite the title. It
| definitely wasn't written by one. So that's twice now.
| derefr wrote:
| > Why are corals better than starfish?
|
| Corals as a habitat host a lot of species, creating
| biodiversity. People don't really seem to care about corals
| by themselves; rather, they care about a few hundred
| species of pretty-looking tropical fish that exist nowhere
| other than within coral reefs. Anything that kills enough
| of the coral, is likely to make all of those very pretty
| fish go extinct.
|
| (I've never heard about starfish as a threat to corals; the
| wellbeing of coral reefs is usually brought up mostly in
| relation to the impacts of ocean acidification and seafloor
| trawling.)
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Those unknown tracker alerts are pretty cool, they should add
| something similar to chrome.
| nico wrote:
| So uninspiring Google is not leading anymore They are playing
| catch up It's a bit sad to see
| Jun8 wrote:
| To add one more data point to the general sentiment in the
| comments: in 2011 I was _so_ bummed that I couldn't get a ticket
| to I /O that year, I wanted to start an alternate conference
| called I/O Error "for the rest of us"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2192827 !
|
| Ahh, the naivete of the young age (I was in my early forties at
| that time, mind you). I was in technology development then, now
| moved to PdM side. Google products no longer interest me from
| either the tech or biz side.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| It's really nice to have a keynote that isn't KUBERNETES ISTIO
| BLOCKCHAIN. Lots of interesting AI integrations with existing
| products. The search and maps improvements are really exciting.
| BMorearty wrote:
| I missed the search and maps improvements. What did they say?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I have no idea how much effort Google spent preparing these
| demos, but I personally find it so much less impressive than the
| livestream OpenAI did where they actually used their tech
| following suggestions from discord.
| AndrewGaspar wrote:
| I think OpenAI is probably held to different standards than
| Google. ChatGPT hallucinates incorrect information, and it's
| kind of adorable - the tech is early, they'll improve over
| time, etc. Google Bard hallucinates incorrect information, and
| it _looks_ like a step backwards in their core product.
| rhacker wrote:
| Came for the comments, comments didn't disappoint!
| [deleted]
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Based on what has been shown so far, they should have just called
| it Google A/I.
| motoboi wrote:
| So funny to see google stressing EVERYTIME that they have been
| using AI for years.
|
| Dude, you were seated in the pot of gold and let your
| organizational disfuncionality block you from really using that.
|
| And now you come trying to get the crown of AI? Catch up and them
| we can talk.
| kernal wrote:
| OpenAI must be sweating profusely after viewing that I/O
| presentation. Not only do they not have the integration, scale
| and user base of Google, but the migration of Bard to PaLM 2 it
| will exceed whatever OpenAI currently has. Also, it's only a
| matter of time before their top employee's are poached by Apple
| and Google.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Well I guess that internal memo was true, there is no moat in
| AI, for Google, OpenAI, or any other, as long as AI continues
| to improve.
| bo-tao wrote:
| What does it mean to have no moat?
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| A "moat" is the protection company A has against company
| B building a clone of company A's product. For example,
| YouTube has the set of people who have a habit of logging
| on to YouTube to watch content. A competitor has to
| convince all those people to change their habits. This is
| known to be a hard problem, so it's a moat!
|
| Netflix thought they had a similar moat of user-habits.
| But it turns out that the more important moat in the
| streaming market is a moat of content.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Here's the article I was referring to:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322
| sweeds wrote:
| No competitive advantage that protects the business.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_moat
| motoboi wrote:
| Yeah. If people get access to It. In the meantime, OpenAI is
| hoarding GPUS for the next iteration while happily collecting
| 20 dollars from users and loads of free work from free users.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >but the migration of Bard to PaLM 2 it will exceed whatever
| OpenAI currently has
|
| I really doubt that. If Google had anything that could
| seriously compete with GPT-4 they would be shouting about it
| from the mountains. Not publishing a comparison where they
| only include GPT-4 in the two benchmarks that they win.
| int_19h wrote:
| Here's my entirely non-scientific comparison:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/HWLgu3c
|
| If that is really the best that Google can do after working
| for several months on one-upping GPT-4, that's just sad,
| and doesn't bode well for them.
| dzader wrote:
| > Not only do they not have the integration, scale and user
| base of Google, Sure, but MSFT does. Well beyond the scale
| and user base google has.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I mean, Google Translate has been basically completely AI
| powered for 5+ years, and it's one of the most used products in
| the world...
|
| The majority of what you see on SERPs has been AI generated for
| a decade, and that's Google's main money maker.
|
| This idea that Google sucks at AI and is clearly a million
| miles behind is intriguing.
|
| Google is currently the company _everyone_ loves to hate like
| MSFT was 5-10 years ago.
|
| _THAT_ is a bad sign regardless if anything the people are
| saying has any truth to it.
|
| MSFT has been the king of enterprise software since the 80s.
| But around 2000, everyone and their mother was talking about
| how MSFT can't produce any software beside complete garbage.
|
| None of that was true. But, MSFT was in for some relatively bad
| times for a decade or so.
|
| I suspect the same thing is going to happen to Google just
| because sentiment is powerful.
| coolspot wrote:
| > But around 2000, everyone and their mother was talking
| about how MSFT can't produce any software beside complete
| garbage. > None of that was true.
|
| Ummm... In 2000s MSFT was producing complete garbage.
| Internet Explorer, Windows XP then ME, Windows Phone, ASP,
| Bing.
| motoboi wrote:
| You now that, I know that, everyone knows that. And yet,
| google stresses it everytime, like the company is anxious
| that people is looking for OpenAI and not google.
| nr2x wrote:
| Some of the key people behind translate founded OpenAI.
| Don't forget it's always been about the people, not the
| brand.
|
| Google was good at attracting and retaining the best and
| brightest. Now they aren't.
| eclipxe wrote:
| Citation needed?
| nr2x wrote:
| Ask and ye shall receive:
|
| "Based in part on his work with Hinton, Sutskever was
| hired by Google. There, he implemented a neural-network-
| driven approach to language translation that produced
| fewer errors than competing efforts. His work provided
| the basis for a major upgrade to Google Translate.
| "Researchers didn't believe that neural networks could do
| translation, so it was a big surprise when they could,"
| he says."
|
| https://magazine.utoronto.ca/people/alumni-donors/heard-
| it-t...
|
| Hinton left last week as well.
| krackers wrote:
| >and it's one of the most used products in the world...
|
| And they had their lunch completely eaten by deepL
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Did they? I've never heard of deepL, and Google Translate
| still has close to 1 billion users.
| krackers wrote:
| In terms of wider userbase Google Translate is still de
| facto, but anyone who uses MTL heavily knows that DeepL
| beats Google Translate for most languages, especially
| east asian ones.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Sure - and Ubuntu is better than Windows. In business, it
| doesn't really matter.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| I find it interesting the sentiment in the comments... Yesterday
| we had an Apple post where everyone was losing their minds all
| day about Final Cut Pro on iPad (which in my opinion as a
| Software Engineer is the most boring thing I've had to read all
| week). Today we have probably a massive lineup of a bunch of new
| AI features to be announced for products most of us use on the
| regular, or could use as devs, and 90% of the comments are about
| how boring it will be.
|
| Not sure what to make of it but you would think the HN crowd
| would be slightly more interested.
| verdverm wrote:
| I'm not an Apple follower, what innovation have they produced
| in the last 5+ years that the sibling comments deride Google
| for? I would argue the TPU is far more interesting than the M1,
| other than that, is it not just marginal improvements on
| existing products?
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yep, neither one is really innovating, except for the
| examples you named. I don't know the history of TPUs vs
| similar ML accelerators; did Google blaze the trail on this?
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Airpods are in a category of their own. Multibillion dollar
| business that redefined the headphone industry
| fomine3 wrote:
| Great as a business and it's made well, but not much
| interesting for tech.
| pyth0 wrote:
| I am consistently surprised by the battery life and
| quality of noise cancellation given their size. Although
| none of that is revolutionary and just improving on
| existing tech, I think the complete package
| (hardware+software integration) was leaps better than
| what came before.
| lancesells wrote:
| There's one thing that made Google great and it was search.
| It's no longer great and hasn't been for some time. I don't
| even think it's entirely their fault, but their brand and
| sentiment has taken a hit from that.
|
| Also, the data harvesting is much more common knowledge.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I personally would argue the M1 is more interesting than the
| TPU, but I think the general answer to your question is
| "nothing". Apple and google both churn out research, google
| maybe a bit more. Beyond that though, both of their product
| lines reach such a scale that requires the tech to be mature
| (aka no longer an innovation).
|
| Apple has really strong chip prowess, eg the M1 or the
| battery efficiency vs size of AirPods and AirTags. But a lot
| of that is resting on TSMC which anyone can contract. Google
| has some impressive research into things like AI, database,
| K8, etc - but today others seem to be catching up.
| frou_dh wrote:
| I would characterise the "losing their minds all day about
| Final Cut Pro on iPad" that went on as... moaning about
| subscription pricing. So not positive either.
| joseph_grobbles wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| stcroixx wrote:
| HN crowd and devs should know better than most that you can't
| depend on anything from Google. Kind of surprised this
| conference is still being held given where they are at right
| now.
| shmoe wrote:
| This guy used reader.
| flippy_flops wrote:
| I'll be more interested in Google's ML when they use it as a
| competent spam filter for Gmail. As it stands the false
| positives and false negatives are baffling. Maybe it's unfair
| but to me that directly reflects their ML abilities
| jebarker wrote:
| I'm not denying your experience, but I have almost zero
| problems with the Gmail spam filter. Never false negatives
| and almost never false positives. I wonder why different
| users have different experiences with this?
| dekhn wrote:
| I get about one "you've been chosen! stanley tool" email
| every day. They all look the same. I click spam on every
| one. Still get 'em.
| flippy_flops wrote:
| 5-10 years ago I'd agree they were very good. My suspicion
| is that the base spam filter is not very good but it trains
| on your email history and becomes better. So my "newer"
| gmail accounts have very poor filtering.
|
| Like I get all caps subject lines with spammy content that
| my grandmother would recognize as spam, but it blocks some
| personally written emails from other gmail accounts.
| mock-possum wrote:
| > a massive lineup of a bunch of new AI features to be
| announced
|
| man I don't know about everybody else but I'm pretty burned out
| on the never-ending deluge of AI-related chatter at this point.
| basisword wrote:
| >> Yesterday we had an Apple post where everyone was losing
| their minds all day about Final Cut Pro on iPad
|
| Were we reading the same thread? My take away was mostly
| complaints about subscriptions and people asking why you would
| use it on an iPad instead of a laptop.
|
| I think the problem here is that this was posted hours before
| the keynote - meaning there is actually nothing of value to
| discuss yet. Now the thread that should be about todays even is
| full of "back in my day" comments.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| [dead]
| RedditKon wrote:
| Bc none of the features are actually live yet. We keep hearing
| about what will be released and demos - but HN is mainly do-
| ers. Their launches would have 100x the impact if people could
| see and play with it in real time right after the announcement.
| gman83 wrote:
| I've noticed that the sentiment on HN tends to skew heavily
| against Google and more towards Apple. When I go to in-person
| tech meetups it's usually not at all like that. Not sure why.
| hot_gril wrote:
| It's because I'm here.
| revelio wrote:
| It's an expectations mismatch. Google used to be the most
| loved company by developers. It was confident, strong, did
| wonders for dev comp and gave away lots of cool stuff for
| free. The only way from there was down, really. Then they did
| a bunch of things that upset people like getting buy-in into
| platforms and products only to then constantly kill them off,
| refuse to release their AI models as APIs on the grounds that
| devs weren't ethically pure enough to use them, as well as
| doing stuff that shows a lack of confidence, mostly me-too
| products like GCP or Bard.
|
| Apple was never particularly loved by developers. Respected
| yes, tolerated yes. But they were always a bit aloof,
| separate, never bought into the 2010s era of free love and
| open source. And that's exactly the way they still are today.
| Apple has been remarkably stable over time, culturally
| speaking. It consistently meets people expectations for how
| it behaves, both good and bad. So there's nothing really to
| be disappointed about there. It is what it is.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Great analysis. Stability of culture means no room to
| disappoint like Google.
| tenpies wrote:
| Even outside technology, Google went from that cool "don't
| be evil" company, to suppressing search results so that
| people would vote the way Google wanted.
|
| Add a few cases of Glassholes[1], killing products people
| loved, and it eventually piles up.
|
| I will add though, that just because the company has lost
| its lustre, doesn't mean the people working there are any
| less talented. I just think that on a long enough timeline,
| Google becomes IBM[2].
|
| ---
|
| [1]
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glasshole
|
| [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hi
| tlers...
| adverbly wrote:
| I think the sentiment is more complex than that. In general,
| I think the sentiment is against large corporate interests,
| and in favor of small, focused technical improvements. And
| improvement here is not the same as change. Often, sentiment
| is pretty negative towards changes made by large corporations
| which could be interpreted as strategic decisions made to
| control an ecosystem.
|
| In this specific case, things are high level and generic, so
| at this point the framing is closer to big corporation than
| it is to anything specific or technical.
| nopenotthat wrote:
| [dead]
| dzader wrote:
| I've been deep in the Google ecosystem for 10+ years and my
| sentiment has changed simply because their products suck now.
| Every offering they have is worse today than it was a year ago.
| Google assistant is borderline unusable in it's current state,
| and I used to sing it's praises from the mountain tops.
| bdcravens wrote:
| This is due to Google's track record on killing products.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| And Google's disregard of Android devs outside the
| America/Europe. I have been doing Android development since
| 2011 and still impossible to get my hands on a Pixel or
| Chromebook directly from Google. On the other hand, I could
| get the latest iPhone shipped in a month.
| actuator wrote:
| Google just doesn't have the volumes to provide products in
| all countries. Providing sales integrations and support is
| costly and if you don't have volumes, your amortized cost
| over a device is high.
| bdcravens wrote:
| How much support is required ship internationally? Tiny
| Shopify stores can do it.
|
| I don't feel like the parent comment was asking for
| first-class support, just access to the device.
| latchkey wrote:
| Plenty of products are still alive and kicking. AppEngine is
| a great example of that. Initial release date: April 7, 2008.
| rurp wrote:
| If you need to list out apps that _haven 't_ been killed, I
| think that kind of proves the point :)
| bdcravens wrote:
| No one wants to play the guessing game of which products
| will live and die (well, maybe those who are compulsive
| gambler do)
|
| https://gcemetery.co/
| latchkey wrote:
| Ok, so nothing in about 2.5 years and some of these I
| wouldn't even call products. They also haven't deprecated
| anything on GCP since March 31, 2021.
|
| https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation
|
| At the end of the day, I'm super glad they have
| experimented with things and it seems weird to hold that
| against them.
| shmoe wrote:
| It all goes back to reader. That's when it went sour.
| They eroded all trust. No one forgets that one.
| latchkey wrote:
| March 13, 2013, a decade ago and RSS effectively died
| along with it. Being upset at this for 10 years is right
| up there with being upset that Gopher protocol never took
| off.
| zls wrote:
| I think they've just stopped updating the cemetery page.
| Google killed Stadia this year.
| skrowl wrote:
| [dead]
| nr2x wrote:
| I tuned into the livestream for a minute and they were just
| demoing things I've been using in GPT for months. They're
| playing catch-up, it's boring.
| nirav72 wrote:
| >They're playing catch-up, it's boring.
|
| yeah, doing pretty bad at that. I just tried out Bard by
| asking it a question on an almost 10 year old .net library
| for interacting with a popular CRM platform's API. It came
| back with:
|
| "I can't assist you with that, as I'm only a language model
| and don't have the capacity to understand and respond."
|
| Went over to ChatGPT and asked it the same question in the
| prompt word for word. It came back with a concise explanation
| on how to use the library. Specifically one specific set of
| API calls. Bard is a joke.
| nr2x wrote:
| And yet the only people laughing are Altman and Nadella.
| nirav72 wrote:
| What's even more surprising is that Google has spent
| almost 2 decades collecting text, image, geospatial and
| video data. You'd think they would be ahead of everyone
| in this space. With all they've spent on research -
| they've got nothing meaningful to show for it.
| nr2x wrote:
| They never figured out how to diversify away from
| targeted ads. All that AI prowess was mainly to figure
| out how to manipulate people to click on the steadily
| increasing number of ads.
|
| Meanwhile they gamified display ads to the point that the
| web slowly turned into pure clickbait so there's nothing
| even left to search for - 99% of content from the last
| decade is dogshit.
|
| With ChatGPT my web searches are down by at least 50% and
| more than 80% of the ones I still do are on DuckDuckGo.
| electroly wrote:
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe. The features are exciting. Google I/O,
| the conference with talks, is seen as less so. Notice how all
| the comments are about the talks. Yesterday's Apple
| announcement was _not_ a conference, and the comment thread was
| about the new app. It's not the same thing at all.
|
| Here are some snippets from top-level comments in this
| discussion thread.
|
| > It's all business talk
|
| > I for one benefited so much from Google Developer Groups
|
| > looking forward to the event and plan to watch it
|
| > just corporate talk
|
| > alternate conference
|
| > separate conference
|
| > I can understand now why my company is less eager to send
| developers to events
|
| You see it, right? They're all about the talks at the
| conference and not the features. This HN post is specifically
| about the conference, that's why the title is "Google I/O
| 2023".
| sbuk wrote:
| To be fair, the comments on that article were peak 'Orange
| Site' - the discussion seemed to be mainly around
| subscriptions.
| sa46 wrote:
| What does "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" mean in this context? I
| ended up on
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images but
| I'm not sure what it means here.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| I took it to mean: "This is not the thing it looks like."
|
| But, I agree, it's not an exact match context wise.
| motoboi wrote:
| You can make fine images and fine presentations, but they
| are not the reality.
|
| The reality is what people can really use and what really
| does hit the road.
|
| Right now, everything google presented in the keynote is
| vapourware for anyone that doesn't have access to it.
| maxsilver wrote:
| Final Cut Pro is a thing people already use in their workflow,
| becoming more convenient for them. People have depended on this
| as part of their production-ready workflow for over 20+ years
| now, and FCP-folks seem to have a lot of trust in the
| application and related tooling, that Apple isn't going to
| leave or abandon Final Cut anytime soon.
|
| Google's AI features are not something most of us use in our
| workflow, and are (arguably/debatably) not making anything more
| convenient for us. That's all in addition to it being Google,
| so there's a built-in assumption that no one can depend on any
| of this, because it might be discontinued at any point with
| little notice.
|
| (I say this as someone who does not own an iPhone or Mac, and
| has been on Android for over a decade) -- I can see why Mac
| folks would be excited by the Mac announcement, and why some
| aren't that excited by Google right now.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > Final Cut Pro is a thing people already use in their
| workflow, becoming more convenient for them. People have
| depended on this as part of their production-ready workflow
| for over 20+ years now, and FCP-folks seem to have a lot of
| trust in the application and related tooling, that Apple
| isn't going to leave or abandon Final Cut anytime soon.
|
| All of that may be well and good, and yet I can't remotely
| get excited by an announcement that it's being ported from
| PC/laptop to iPad. Are professionals really going to be using
| iPads for this use case en masse? Was there a lot of people
| upset that they had to use a PC/laptop for this, and a lot of
| pent-up demand for an even more portable version?
|
| It's hard to think of _any_ platform port that would be
| amazing exciting news, let alone this one!
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| My theory is there are a lot of folks that needlessly
| bought expensive ipads that sit around and collect dust
| when their kids aren't doodling on them. Finding out that
| Apple is bringing an app that could bring potential
| productivity to a bad investment got a lot of people
| excited. People will soon learn that another app was not
| the reason why they aren't using them.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Final Cut is definitely not the industry standard - most pros
| abandoned it after they completely rebuilt it from the ground
| up years ago and it sucked hard
| elliotec wrote:
| What is? Adobe? Davinci? My assumption was also that Final
| Cut Pro was _the_ one.
| haldean wrote:
| Most big-budget feature films are cut on Avid and that's
| been the case for a while now; for indies my impression
| is that it's 50/50 Premiere and Resolve, yup.
| spopejoy wrote:
| FCP 7 was dominant but the disaster of early versions of
| FCP X forced a bunch of shops to switch to Premiere.
|
| There are still things that make Premiere better.
| Recently I couldn't get an mp4 from a Sony cam to play at
| the right speed in FCP no matter what I tried, and it
| just worked in Premiere. I'm more fluid in FCP but I will
| probably switch too as Premiere just "feels more pro" now
| to me.
|
| I've heard some great reports about Davinci, especially
| for post.
| lucidyan wrote:
| Do not know about Final Cut (it's well optimized for
| Silicon by the way), but Logic Pro is definitely one of the
| music industry standards.
| rob74 wrote:
| Since other semiconductors like Germanium aren't used to
| build CPUs, I would argue all current software is
| optimized for Silicon?
|
| SCNR...
| kyriakos wrote:
| I am slowly feeling like I should move on from HN. I used to
| find comments much more mature in the past and learned a lot.
| Lately I predict the general trend I'll see in the comments
| before even opening the page.
| nerdix wrote:
| My account is new but I've been reading HN since the late
| 00s. There has definitely been a slow redditification of HN
| over the years.
| martinpw wrote:
| I feel the same. Comments used to be more thoughtful and
| nuanced, and I often found comments that changed my
| perspective on things. Now so many comments are massively
| negative and sweepingly generalize in uninteresting ways, eg
| just to pick a random example from replies to this current
| post:
|
| "Every offering they have is worse today than it was a year
| ago."
|
| HN should be better than this.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| One of my least favorite trends about how HN comments go
| these days is that nearly all of them are reflexively
| supporting the company over the employees in any sort of
| story involving conflict between employer/employee. It's
| like, goddamn, y'all can stop bootlicking for companies
| already, as I _know_ most of you are employee class rather
| than owner class.
| amf12 wrote:
| Somehow that has been my experience as well. I used to love
| HN for the rational and mature comments. Now, I find more of
| the comments to be idealistic and biased. More of the
| comments are from people who don't seem to have read the
| linked post.
| pvarangot wrote:
| I used to like it when I didn't live in the Bay and avoided
| all the "local news" threads because it was not interesting
| to me. I kinda left after I moved because I don't wanna be in
| a site where the consensus solution to poop on the street on
| some neighborhoods is basically concentration camps.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| I've had the same feeling. I've also noticed what feels like
| an increase in shallow, emotionally driven "gotcha" replies
| that are almost always from post-2020 accounts.
|
| But I have to wonder if it's because as I have tried to quit
| Reddit and other mass market social media, I'm browsing this
| site a lot more. So I'm seeing more comment sections in
| general and clicking more threads than I would otherwise.
|
| It's even in the community guidelines.
|
| > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into
| Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
|
| And that links to comments all the way back in 07!
| spike021 wrote:
| I don't understand the point of your comment.
|
| Are you comparing discussion of a (relatively legacy) software
| application to an entire developer conference with a mostly
| singular focus on a newer, evolving technology?
|
| I'm not trying to be an Apple apologist here but maybe this
| discussion would be better discussed in roughly a month when
| WWDC happens.
| actuator wrote:
| HN tends to bias towards pro Apple.
|
| You would see people doing mental gymnastics trying to defend
| their closed anti competitive practices, disregard for
| standards. I would cheer a Sennheiser/Bose more than any
| version of Airpods, I would rather not have a multi trillion
| dollar company gobble up other industries through unfair
| advantages.
|
| Seeing a hacker crowd do this is just beyond bizzare.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| >HN tends to bias towards pro Apple.
|
| I'm not sure if I agree with that. I think being anti-Google
| and FB would be more accurate than being pro-Apple.
|
| Also, during the years I've observed the "pro-Apple" gauge
| changes as the time zones change, ie. it tends to be all-time
| high when it's noon in California - which is understandable.
| nerdix wrote:
| There are really wonky arguments here trying to justify
| rent seeking in the App Store, walled gardens, and
| completely closed ecosystems. And I'm not sure why anyone
| would be supportive of any of those things outside of being
| pro-Apple. No other company seems to get that type of pass.
|
| There was a thread the other day where some people seemed
| pretty miffed that Google requires a Pixel to connect to
| the internet before you can unlock it's bootloader.
|
| Then you go into a thread about third party app stores on
| iPhones and you see people saying that being blocked from
| installing software that Apple hasn't blessed is actually a
| feature.
|
| Different people and all that. But the general sentiment on
| HN is definitely more forgiving of Apple than others.
| cruano wrote:
| My Sennheiser HD8s and their propietary cable begs to differ.
| And also keep in mind you are favoring Bose, the multi-
| million dollar company that didn't bat an eye when they
| decided to introduce spyware on their app.
|
| Apple has done the wrong thing many times, but audio is not
| one of them. They offered a legitimate better product, to the
| point the only headphones I would rather use are IEMs that
| cost 8 times as much.
| spacemadness wrote:
| I think it depends on how you define Hacker. This site is
| very business leaning to begin with in a lot of ways which
| doesn't always draw the "hacker" crowd. I will forever think
| of hackers ideally not being so concerned with operating
| businesses but being obsessed with technology sometimes at
| the expense of business concerns.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| For YCombinator and the like, "hacker" is actually just
| code for "disruptor". It is a subtle but powerful
| conflation designed to retroactively strengthen the
| historical positioning of e.g. Jobs, Woz, Zuckerberg while
| simultaneously praising disruptive technologies that will
| "eat the world".
|
| Of course, none of those people ever fit the more common
| definition of hacker for more than a few years, if ever,
| even if you assume hacker means "good coder" or similar.
| And they certainly never fit the information security
| definition.
| dang wrote:
| > _HN tends to bias towards pro Apple_
|
| Possibly the most reliable phenomenon I've observed as a mod
| is that people believe HN is biased against what they like
| and in favor of what they dislike. This shows up most often
| with politics - for a recent example see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734307 ("HN leans
| left") followed by
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734354 ("HN leans
| left?") and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734392
| ("You're completely delusional if you consider HN to be left
| leaning"). For an amusing (to me anyway!) set of examples see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
|
| But it works the same way with other things, like $BigCos.
| Each $BigCo has a fanbase and a foebase. Each fanbase feels
| like HN is biased against "their" $BigCo and in favor of some
| other $BigCo.
|
| No doubt the same mechanism makes sports fans feel like the
| refs are biased against their team. The feelings of a sports
| fan determine not only the _direction_ of perceived bias (no
| fan ever thought "the refs are consistently biased in our
| favor") but also its intensity (the more passionately a fan
| is devoted to $team, the more strongly they are persuaded
| about the refs' "bias").
|
| Readers with no particular passion on a topic are less likely
| to perceive bias or feel much about it either way.
|
| I believe that the way this works is that if we feel strongly
| about $foo, we're much more likely than the median reader to
| notice posts about $foo, especially ones we dislike (https://
| hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and
| to weight them much more heavily. What starts as a feeling in
| us thereby turns into a perception about the world, often one
| that is very intensely held and impossible to dissuade.
|
| This is not to say that the community, the refs, the mods, or
| what have you, aren't biased! Just that the existence or
| quantity of possible bias can't be decided by this mechanism,
| which is the mechanism that drives online discussion. In
| fact, the primary concern of any serious attempt to decide or
| quantify bias would have to be making sure that it wasn't
| distorted by this psychological mechanism, which is so
| powerful.
|
| (This is a bit more than I set out to write about this! it's
| a hobbyhorse of mine, as it makes moderation moderately more
| complicated...where by moderately I mean extremely)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It seems quite the opposite: HN biases towards anti-Apple,
| often for bizarre reasons that require lots of mental
| gymnastics to justify.
|
| You don't really have to buy AirPods, there are lots of
| products out in the market that compete in that space. Just
| because Apple provides a certain product doesn't mean you are
| being forced to buy it.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| People are anti everything on HN... the question is how
| much on what.
|
| There are a lot of people that defend the far and few apple
| negative comments.
|
| The only way to prove this would be by doing some data
| analysis. Maybe worth it's own post
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I'm pretty sure everyone feels that their opinion is the
| underdog opposed to the other sheeple side.
|
| It is like people who think they are being hip for either
| hating or loving X, when lots of people love or hate X
| already, so it isn't really weird either way.
| actuator wrote:
| No one is forced to buy Airpods, but the first class
| integration that the product gets which others can't gives
| it a competitive advantage. This is besides the power to
| push the product through different channels to customers of
| iPhones, iPads etc.
|
| Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music,
| but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS
| device or Mac. In fact, even when I keep removing the
| application from the Mac, on a version update it comes back
| again. It has integrations into the system and other core
| system apps that other products can't get and defaults
| matter. On top of this they will give you free subscription
| for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well
| that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this
| behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and
| is extremely anti competitive.
|
| I don't even want to get started on iCloud etc.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple
| Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you
| buy a iOS device or Mac.
|
| I never noticed, having never bought Apple Music before
| and just using spotify instead. I guess if I wanted it to
| run on a HomePod, I would need it?
|
| > On top of this they will give you free subscription for
| 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well
| that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this
| behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify
| and is extremely anti competitive.
|
| Doesn't Spotify do the same thing?
| actuator wrote:
| Spotify doesn't get to offer you that when you are
| setting up your new phone. You have to know about the
| company and go and install it.
|
| It is good that you are using Spotify and supporting an
| independent company, but as I was saying defaults and
| ease of access matters. Spotify is not playing in a level
| field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are
| able to.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| There are plenty of non-apple speakers that come with
| Spotify trials. I get that trials are hard to back out
| of, and I've never activated my Apple Music trial.
|
| > Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators
| have failed to ensure that they are able to.
|
| Spotify is still dominating music streaming, more so than
| Apple Music or Amazon Prime Music (which we used to use
| since it came free with prime).
| actuator wrote:
| > There are plenty of non-apple speakers that come with
| Spotify trials.
|
| Spotify has to pay for these and has to compete for this
| with other music streaming companies.
|
| Also, comparison with smart speakers is disingenuous.
| There are a billion iPhone users itself. No non big tech
| company smart speaker comes even close.
|
| > Spotify is still dominating music streaming
|
| Because of nailing the product early on and being world
| class in playlists and music recommendations. Even if
| Apple music comes 80% close, just by holding distribution
| advantage, they will capture that market.
| flamwenco wrote:
| My god the increasing services push is awful; I used to
| be an Apple Music subscriber but left eventually because
| at launch it was a clusterfuck with personal libraries,
| just destroying metadata and deleting 'duplicates'. And I
| now have to use a 3rd party music app to listen to my
| local library on my phone because the system one likes to
| pop up a fullscreen ad for Apple Music what feels like
| every time I open it.
|
| I like my Apple products but this services thing is truly
| destroying a lot of the good experiences they can
| provide.
| hot_gril wrote:
| The AirPods are capitalizing on lock-in. iPhones have
| always had Bluetooth, but almost nobody used BT headphones
| cause they suck. Then Apple released AirPods with first-
| party integrations to make it usable, and to make sure
| people would buy them, they also took out the jack.
|
| I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than
| ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options
| compared to before. The end result is I don't listen to
| music from my phone anymore.
| shmoe wrote:
| Weird, I think you left out the part where they did
| include the dongle for the 3.5mm jack for at least 2
| generations after they removed it and still offer one.
| But to each his/her own.
| hot_gril wrote:
| This is always brought up by people who don't actually
| use the dongle. Anyone who's tried it doesn't consider it
| a solution, and I described in a sibling thread why.
|
| If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple
| would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack
| :)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Anyone who's tried it doesn't consider it a solution,
| and I described in a sibling thread why.
|
| Universals are always wrong of course: we actually used a
| dongle for the kid's wired iPad headphones. It doesn't
| suck for us using a dongle, so I'm guessing our
| experience was really different from yours.
|
| > If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple
| would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack
| :)
|
| Nope, our 6 year old is not getting AirPods anytime soon.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Can confirm, dongle's not an actual usable alternative
| for most situations. IRL you'll lose the little fuckers,
| they'll be in the way for any devices without missing
| hardware (and get lost when you remove them for that
| device), they're fragile, and you'll never have them when
| you need them anyway. They're _theoretically_ a
| replacement for the removed headphone jack, but in actual
| fact they 're worthless.
|
| I just use my phone for fewer music-playing situations
| than I otherwise would, and when I do use it for playing
| music, it's a mixed bag. Controls on the car console are
| nice (aside from that the UI sucks and exhibits all kinds
| of glitches, but that's not Apple's fault), but BT is BT,
| so, more annoying and less reliable than a cable. My $120
| BT headphones are... fine, but I'd rather have better
| wired headphones for the same price and not have to
| charge them. Being able to connect to a bluetooth-enabled
| receiver across the room is handy, but also janky,
| because of course it is, because it's bluetooth.
|
| If they'd just kept the jack, everyone could be happy.
| Except Apple, from the somewhat-lower sales of wireless
| audio devices and especially AirPods.
| hot_gril wrote:
| > IRL you'll lose the little fuckers, they'll be in the
| way for any devices without missing hardware (and get
| lost when you remove them for that device)
|
| 1. I plug dongle into car aux for my iPhone 12 mini to
| use.
|
| 2. Next day, girlfriend wants to play her own music from
| her iPhone 6, I say to plug the Lightning in.
|
| 3. Dongle doesn't work with iPhone 6 despite being same
| connector -_- She takes it off to plug into the 3.5mm.
|
| 4. Dongle falls beneath car seat and is never seen again.
| Presumably it's next to the other one that got lost the
| same way.
|
| Went from "it just works" to screwing up the most basic
| functionality ever, plugging in the damn aux. And it's
| while you're driving.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Yeah, I lost my first one like a week in when it _fell
| into the_ (automatic--I 'm not cool, I don't drive a
| manual) _shifter_. It was so small it managed to fit into
| the little gap in the rubber guard around it. Lost
| forever, or at least until someone tears apart the center
| console of that car for some reason. Only time I 've
| managed to lose something that particular way.
| hot_gril wrote:
| So you dropped your headphone converter next to your
| torque converter.
| hot_gril wrote:
| (The result for probably most other iPhone users is that
| they bought the damn AirPods and none of the other BT
| headphones)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than
| ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options
| compared to before.
|
| How did AirPods existing ruin your options? You can
| choose to not buy them, I don't, I like conductive head
| phones better anyways (non-Apple, before the AirPods came
| out, and they don't suck, so I don't get what you mean by
| apple producing the only BT headphones that don't suck?).
| Or do you mean you want to buy AirPods but you don't want
| to use an iPhone, or you want to use wired headphones
| only and don't care for dongles?
|
| > The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone
| anymore.
|
| Seriously, this is the mental gymnastics I'm talking
| about. None of this is really stopping you from listening
| to music on your phone.
| hot_gril wrote:
| So my chosen option before was to just plug my earbuds or
| car aux into my phone.
|
| Now my choices are:
|
| - AirPods, which I don't want to shell out more money for
| and deal with charging/caring for them, but otherwise
| they'd be the best option.
|
| - Non-AirPod BT headphones. I have nice Bose ones from
| work. These lack Apple's extensions to improve pairing
| and headset (mic) mode. In headset mode, the earphone
| quality drops to like worse than early 2000s cellphone.
| Standard pairing is annoying. It's a bit annoying having
| to charge them. I also don't want to shell out more money
| for earbuds (the headphones aren't so portable).
|
| - Dongles, which I tried. Turns out they don't work with
| inlined mics, don't work with older iPhones (so I can't
| leave them on a shared car aux), are fragile, and are
| really easy to lose. Can't charge while using one either,
| but that's nbd. My car seats ate two and the last one
| broke. It also just feels stupid having to use these.
|
| - Old iPhone. I kept my 6 until it broke. I still have a
| spare 5, no longer usable with AT&T, which I use to play
| music in the car.
|
| Yeah I want to listen to music on my phone, but they've
| made it sufficiently annoying that I don't anymore. It's
| a clear regression.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| This sounds like a bunch of unique requirements.
|
| You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a
| microphone, which I've never seen before but lets go with
| it. There are dongles that have microphone inputs
| (Cubilux Lightning to 3.5mm TRS Microphone Adapter with
| Headphone Jack), but I'm assuming you can't use those
| because the microphone and headset are sharing the same
| jack somehow?
|
| Your car doesn't support bluetooth, and you use multiple
| generations of iPhones so you can't just leave the dongle
| in the car. This is unrelated to airpods since you can't
| use those while driving anyways.
|
| AirPods are expensive, I get that, and you aren't
| satisfied with cheaper non-Apple options on amazon. I'm
| happy not using airpods, since I hate earbuds anyways,
| but I guess not everyone is like that. Would the non-
| existence of AirPods make things better? I haven't had
| trouble pairing my conductive headphones, I guess I don't
| notice any distortion because it is going through my
| bones anyways, and I'm not using mic.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I wouldn't have any beef with AirPods if Apple didn't
| remove the jack to sell them. Maybe if Apple somehow
| couldn't make their own BT extensions, they'd improve the
| BT standard instead, which would benefit those buying
| non-Apple wireless headphones (like you). That matters
| less to me, though.
|
| > You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a
| microphone
|
| No, by mic I mean taking calls and meetings on my
| earbuds/phones, which is a common requirement. Most
| earbuds have inlined mics sharing the same jack.
|
| Car aux issue is separate. One of my cars does have BT,
| but that's even worse because the phones fight over it or
| the pairing sometimes doesn't happen. Maybe "pass the
| aux" is not a thing anymore and I'm the only one who
| wants passengers to play their own music sometimes, but
| this wasn't a problem before.
| nearbygoogler wrote:
| I'm with you on the dongle issues, it's a tremendous pain
| to find consistently working equipment that allows
| charging, in-line mic, and durability.
|
| That said, I hate BT more and have been using the same
| Bose QC20 wired earbuds and Belkin adapters for 4+ years.
| There are semi-decent options out there.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Let me hit you with some anecdotes. I regularly disparage
| both Apple and Google in my comments, typically Apple for
| being user-hostile and lying in marketing and Google for
| being incompetent and user-hostile. My Apple comments get
| downvoted more than my Google comments (I'd guess due to
| fanaticism that I see with no other company), although the
| gap has been steadily closing.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Well, today I learned that it was possible to go to -4.
| But I'm not sure we can tell anything from that really,
| just that there are a lot people who (a) don't like
| apple, and (b) are sure they are in the minority rather
| than the majority. Which is a bit contradictory.
| deltree7 wrote:
| If you are on HN, you are more likely to be
|
| a) rejected in a Google interview
|
| b) worked at companies that got crushed by Google.
|
| c) have tall-poppy syndrome against success. (anti-zuck,
| anti-Elon, anti-Bezos)
|
| d) have general anti-corporate anti-capitalistic sentiment,
| thanks to university brainwashing
|
| e) mostly clueless about actual innovation and tech progress
| in areas other than their own narrow scope of work.
|
| So, any Google article is a rant/vent fest for them.
| nailer wrote:
| Worked at Google, pro Elon, anti Zuck but mainly for his
| failures (Metaverse), not from the far left and still think
| it's clear Google's last major product (major meaning
| category defining, like Search or Maps or Android) was 15
| years ago.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Transformers??? GCS is a very solid alternative to AWS
| and leagues ahead of azure.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Lot of Googlers are anti-big-tech, anti-corporation :)
|
| 1) If you think Transformers weren't category defining, I
| don't know what to say.
|
| 2) Metaverse isn't a failure. That's like saying in 2019,
| "Chat Agents are a failure"
| nailer wrote:
| 1. Wow you think transformers are a product like Search
| and Maps and Android are. That's great.
|
| 2. I think most people consider both Metaverse and chat
| agents as failures. ChatGPT isn't a 'chat agent' and most
| chat agents still don't work.
|
| Watching the keynote and Google are expecting developers
| to cut and paste code into Bard rather than releasing a
| Bard plugin for code editors and taking on Microsoft
| directly. Weak.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Most people lack the vision beyond 15 minutes. Of course
| Metaverse is a failure for them, just like how Internet
| was just a glorified fax machine for luddites. So,
| popular opinion is the worst indicator of anything. Happy
| to make a public bet that Metaverse will consume 25% of a
| person's day for at least 4 billion people by 2035
|
| If transformer doesn't excite you (mostly due to anti-
| Google bias), Google has a dozen products that has over a
| 500 Million users. It takes an unprecedented amount of
| anti-corp brainwash to say Google isn't successful or
| innovative.
| nailer wrote:
| > Google has a dozen products that has over a 500 Million
| users.
|
| So did Microsoft in 2005. That doesn't mean the Ballmer
| era was innovative. If you need other examples of
| companies with hundreds of millions of users that aren't
| relevant, there's also Oracle.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Microsoft didn't have dozen products over 500 Million
| users in 2005. They only had Windows, Office and IE.
|
| Ballmer set the foundations for many of Microsoft's
| success today, including Azure
| nailer wrote:
| Messenger? Skype? All were category defining products.
| What are Google's twelve plus?
| skeaker wrote:
| Metaverse is DoA. Public perception is that it is either
| too complicated/expensive to use or that it is
| essentially a worse VRChat. More technically inclined
| circles see it as a data harvester and crypto-scam
| breeding ground. Facebook itself does not use it for its
| supposed intended purpose of virtual conferencing,
| instead mandating that all employees return to the
| physical office to work. It has next to no adoption and
| is the butt of many jokes. Romero abandoned the project
| with a public statement saying how out of touch and
| inefficient the workforce behind it is.
|
| Your outlandish sweeping claims about the users of this
| site aside, sticking your neck out for the Metaverse is
| just not the hill to die on.
| deltree7 wrote:
| The Public's lack of imagination / vision is the worst
| indicator of anything. There is a reason there are only a
| handful of Jobs, Zuck, Elon, Bezos, Gates, Buffett in the
| world but 15 Million people on Wallstreetbets.
| qwytw wrote:
| > The Public's lack of imagination / vision is the worst
| indicator of anything
|
| So? Most great ideas end up as objective failures. Also
| great visionaries generally actually have some at least
| somewhat specific vision of what are they trying to
| achieve, neither Zuckerberg nor anyone else were yet able
| to coherently explain WTH is the Metaverse supposed to
| be.
|
| IMHO whatever Meta is doing seems much more likely to end
| up as the Apple Newton than the iPad/iPhone... (which to
| be fair is not a bad thing).
| [deleted]
| rnk wrote:
| They fired entire orgs that were working on metaverse at
| facebook. Spoke about it with a sad friend yesterday. At
| least the facebook metaverse has been cut down.
| kabes wrote:
| And they would've been right in 2019. The hype was not
| matching the technology. The fact that gpt got so good is
| pure coincidence and not a result of the chat agent folks
| being some kind of visionairies.
|
| Maybe some technological breakthrough comes along that
| makes the metaverse not suck. But if you're gonna build
| your company around such hopes and it works, then you're
| not smart, but just lucky. Or you need to build the
| breakthroughs yourself, but it doesn't look like that's
| what zuck is doing.
| badrequest wrote:
| How do you have time in the day for anything other than
| wild assumptions about strangers?
| deltree7 wrote:
| If you have a near perfect model of the universe, it
| isn't hard to predict stuff. It just needs prompting.
|
| Next question
| slater wrote:
| Have you tried prompting it for "Dunning-Kruger effect"?
| deltree7 wrote:
| yes, most HNers are affected by it. That's why you see a
| massive anti-corp, anti-tech, anti-capitalist despite
| data screaming at them the massive benefits of tech,
| capitalism and corporation.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| My hunch is that's a little less than half of HN posters.
| I notice that a _lot_ on reddit and much less here.
| shmoe wrote:
| I believe one of it's defining features is that if you
| are experiencing the effect, only the people around you
| know it.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Not that that would, by definition, affect anyone
| possessing a near-perfect model of the universe.
| deltree7 wrote:
| yes, that's why I'm the one who is pointing the following
| trait to the HN crowd who are blissfully unaware of it --
| "Irrationally Hating things / people that have provided
| net benefit to the society (utility, pension plans,
| 401(k)s, employee salary, productivity, standard-of-
| living)"
| [deleted]
| parasubvert wrote:
| Hacker crowds like to see underdogs win. Apple was the
| ultimate underdog for most of its existence, and was "doomed"
| every year up until around 2013.
|
| There's no mental gymnastics involved, no upstanding hacker
| respects "standards" unless they're better for the user
| (often they're not). It is a matter of taste and preference.
| Remember, Microsoft also was for a LONG time an attractor of
| hackers, until the early-mid 90s when Windows 3.1 became the
| focus (and it sucked for hackers, who fled to OS/2 briefly,
| then Linux, then Apple when they got tired of tweaking Linux,
| now some flowing back to Microsoft or Linux).
| nerdix wrote:
| Maybe for people of a certain age. But there is a whole
| generation of people (some of whom are on HN) who have only
| ever known a world where everyone wanted the latest iThing.
| It's been probably 15 years since you could seriously
| consider Apple an underdog in the tech space.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| This is probably the most absurd comment that I've read so
| far in 2023.
|
| Apple is a 2.73 trillion dollar company, and single-
| handedly makes up 13.3% of the entire S&P 500 index. The
| iPod was launched 22 years ago. Apple hasn't been remotely
| an "underdog" for over a generation now.
| timcavel wrote:
| [dead]
| fallat wrote:
| This is why I stopped calling HN, HN. It's YCombinator news.
| It's not news for hackers - maybe at one point, but not
| anymore and not for awhile. It may even be seen as looked
| down on because you're posting on a site run by venture
| capitalists.
| parasubvert wrote:
| the fallacy you have is that all hackers are socialists or
| folks that dislike venture capital or capitalism.
|
| I can assure you many hackers are libertarian or anarchists
| of some flavour (from mutualists to anarcho-capitalists).
| Many celebrate Apple because they want to build the next
| Apple some day.
|
| HN has always slanted for the latter crowd, though
| certainly open to everyone.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I think it's a lot less confusing when you understand that
| "hacker" doesn't describe a kind of politics, but rather
| connotes an interest in technology.
| saltcured wrote:
| Depending on who you talk to, hacking doesn't even mean
| technology. It's more of an artful blend of craftsmanship
| and trickery in whatever problem domain you face.
|
| But I think the confusing aspect of HN and the VC
| influence is the number of folks here who happily
| conflate technology, business, entrepreneurship, and
| capitalism. If you see these as separable topics, you
| find that a lot of the confused threads here are
| different cohorts in the audience who focus on one of
| these topics and treat the others as ancillary.
| fomine3 wrote:
| YC news is still weird for praising Apple
| smoldesu wrote:
| Not really. Every entrepreneur has to worship the Steve
| Jobs handbook if they want jaded middle-aged Disney
| investors to open their wallets for $TECH_PRODUCT. It's
| not uncommon or surprising to see people in the startup
| sphere who are unnaturally defensive of Apple/iOS/MacOS.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Woz and Jobs started out building Blue Boxes
| (https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/blue-box-
| designed-an...) They then created Apple as a hobbyist
| outfit in a garage, soldering chips together so they
| could demo a DIY computer programmed in Assembler at a
| computer club. As opposed to what, a company that exists
| to sell the equivalent of billboard ads on the Internet?
| Out of Big Tech, Apple has the strongest claim to any
| kind of hacker culture.
| smoldesu wrote:
| And when Jobs got the contract from Atari, he lied to Woz
| about how much it paid so he could take the lion's share.
| Fraud culture is unfortunately part of their blood too,
| something we ought to excise if we want the tech industry
| to be taken seriously in the long-run.
| esafak wrote:
| Everything I read leads me to believe that Steve Jobs was
| not a virtuous person, though I keep trying to find the
| silver lining.
|
| How should one test for ethics? A reference check comes
| to mind, but it is not a test that you can apply fairly.
| tlogan wrote:
| The Hacker News community are mainly "doers" - action-oriented
| individuals who prefer a hands-on approach. I think we yearn
| for opportunities to experiment with new technologies, not
| simply hear about their potentials.
|
| This year's Google I/O appears to be heavy on talk about new
| technologies, but light on tangible releases for us to explore.
|
| In order words, the true value lies not in the promise of a
| product, but in its practical application. So, I urge Google to
| present us with tools, APIs, products, we can actively engage
| with, rather than just talk about and endless "waiting lists".
| nailer wrote:
| Is Google relevant? They feel like Microsoft in the Ballmer era,
| coasting on products released 15 years ago.
| cyclecount wrote:
| There are certainly similarities. Google has built quite a moat
| in most of their businesses that operate like monopolies. They
| don't seem to be able to make a cohesive strategy for devices
| or services that connect these devices, but they still have
| massive market share.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Yes. They operate platforms with billions of users.
| nailer wrote:
| Indeed they do have lots of users, hence mentioning
| 'Microsoft in the Ballmer era' in the comment you are
| replying to. Lots of existing users doesn't mean a company is
| relevant.
| maxfurman wrote:
| Am I the only one excited for this conference? My Pixel 4A can't
| hold a charge any more and I've been holding out for the 7A.
| mmsnberbar66 wrote:
| yesss not many more small Android phones out there
|
| either Google comes up with something nice or I'm getting a
| used iPhone SE
| maxfurman wrote:
| Every 2-3 years I am severely tempted by The Other Side,
| especially as a very happy Macbook user. But every time,
| there's a new phone that's just nice enough to keep me
| around.
| nogridbag wrote:
| Same, I'm a Pixel user and happy Macbook user, but every
| time I use an iOS device I have such a terrible experience.
| I purchased a 10th generation iPad for my daughter. The
| parental controls are simply broken. When installing apps,
| the child has to click "Ask" and the notification never
| appears on my wife's iPhone. And only one parent can be the
| account "manager". Because I'm pretty good with Google, I
| was able to find some random Reddit post which has a
| workaround (the solutions in the Apple forum never worked).
| You can go into the iPhone's settings and rename the phone,
| e.g. from "iPhone" to "iPhone 2" then the iPhone starts
| receiving the notifications from the iPad.
|
| Well, I purchased a second iPad 10th gen for my younger
| daughter and the same exact problem. Out of the box this
| basic feature just doesn't work reliably. We're at the
| point we're renaming my wife's iPhone once a month.
|
| That's just one specific problem we've had, but really it's
| been a disaster. The setup for both iPads was full of bugs
| and random issues. Both iPads randomly fail to install
| updates overnight. I don't recall the last time my Android
| has ever failed to do a system update. It's just really
| surprising for me because I assumed a device in it's 10th
| generation with such a good reputation would be rock solid.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I'm not sure if it'll ever come back. I loved my Pixel 3 at
| 5.5" but nothing else for the past 5 years has come close. I
| eventually relented and got a Pixel 6a at 6.1"
| david_allison wrote:
| Display size isn't a consistent means of measuring the
| physical size.
|
| My S21 (6.2") is within a mm of my Pixel 3a (5.6") due to
| the reduction in bezel.
| mmsnberbar66 wrote:
| It's relevant enough if you're concerned about RSI or CTS
| and such
|
| In that case display size is a measure of how much strain
| you're putting on your hands to navigate the huge screen.
| A smaller screen means less reaching.
|
| Also smaller display size means less content, less
| instagram posts, less twitter feed, less interest on your
| phone in general in my perspective
| eertami wrote:
| I've had a 4a since launch but I was planning to wait out for
| the 9a. (The cheap OnePlus I had before survived 5 years so I'd
| hope for at least the same.)
|
| Battery degradation hasn't been an issue for me at all, but
| maybe I'm using my phone less than average. Still goes from
| morning to bedtime without me thinking about or looking at the
| charge.
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| I had a OnePlus 1 and later a 3t for an impressively long
| time. I wish they would go back to the flagship specs / mid-
| range price model with the build quality they used to have.
| Eumenes wrote:
| 6a ain't bad, got it for like $100 with a trade-in of my 3a I
| had since 3a launch
| e44858 wrote:
| The 4a battery is relatively easy to replace due to the pull
| tabs, was a fun little project:
| https://www.ifixit.com/products/google-pixel-4a-battery-genu...
|
| I'm holding on to my Pixel 4a until they make one that's
| smaller & lighter. Not liking the trend of bigger and bigger
| phones.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| It also has a headphone jack, which is getting harder and
| harder to find these days.
|
| Even if you usually use bluetooth headphones... it's still
| nice to have a backup. There's lots of situations where
| headphone jack input is simpler, easier, faster, and more
| reliable than messing with bluetooth.
| DogTweezers wrote:
| [dead]
| bilalq wrote:
| The focus on watermarking is interesting. If the major players
| embed watermarking, it probably will be meaningfully be used to
| detect cases where generated content is passed off as real.
| Unfortunately, proving authenticity isn't going to be possible.
| It's inevitable that there will be models out there built
| specifically to attempt to evade such detection. Society needs to
| adapt to the new reality that anything can be faked.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Society needs to adapt to the new reality that anything can
| be faked.
|
| It is only the price tag that has dropped. Faking stuff have
| become democracized.
| Thaxll wrote:
| $1800 the new Pixel fold, haha no shame.
| throitallaway wrote:
| ~$1900 after tax is a hard sell! That buys one heck of a gaming
| laptop (yes, I know, they're different things.)
| guyzero wrote:
| Same price as Samsung Fold 4.
| rado wrote:
| Can't reject cookies. Illegal in the EU.
| mikelward wrote:
| How does that work? What if it's only for essential purposes
| and not for advertising? Do you still need to provide an opt-
| out?
| [deleted]
| rexsteroxxy wrote:
| The hype is real \o
| neodymiumphish wrote:
| I'm betting they'll be integrating Bard into smartphones and
| Chrome ASAP. The way Bing got added into SwiftKey is pretty
| awesome, but being able to interact with Bard the same way phones
| currently interact with the gAssistant would be a huge boon for
| usability and increasing interaction with it, assuming that's
| something Google wants to increase.
| hbn wrote:
| I'm still of the opinion that just swapping current phone
| assistants with LLMs is naive and bad. For one thing, they need
| to make sure they don't break current functionality, like for
| setting timers and reminders, and and doing math calculations
| (which LLMs are not good at unless you get it to pass the query
| off to a dedicated calculator like Wolfram Alpha), etc. But
| more importantly, when you use something like ChatGPT through
| the web interface there's a bunch of warning labels all over to
| remind you "this thing will make up information."
|
| For something with such an easily-accessible interface that's
| baked-in at an OS level, I think a fail state of "sorry, I
| don't know how to help with that" is better than stating a
| bunch of false information as fact.
| neodymiumphish wrote:
| They could potentially handle that by evaluating the request
| and determining whether gAssistant can answer is without
| Bard's involvement, since that would save them bandwidth and
| time.
|
| I agree that the is massive potential for errors, but I'm
| certain those will get fleshed out soon, and Google is pretty
| well known for throwing shit and the fan and looking for the
| cleanest patch of carpet after the fact.
| tartuffe78 wrote:
| I remember going back in 2015. Biggest thing I remember were the
| "Smart" fabrics that would be integrated into your clothing for
| interacting with your devices. It was a cool demo but felt very
| silly and impractical.
|
| I enjoyed the silent disco and free concerts, but it felt very
| over the top and expensive, basically just a big ego display for
| Google.
|
| I can understand now why my company is less eager to send
| developers to events like these every year.
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| > I remember going back in 2015. Biggest thing I remember were
| the "Smart" fabrics that would be integrated into your clothing
| for interacting with your devices. It was a cool demo but felt
| very silly and impractical.
|
| I almost forgot about that! I think I pushed this into the back
| of my mind along with google glass.
| jansan wrote:
| From what I see on the website I don't think you can attend in
| person. Those online events are always a bit sad if you ask me.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Emoji wallpaper? I don't think anyone wanted this or asked for
| this.
| Demoloto wrote:
| As usual the most interesting things which actually will change
| the world is not getting any reactions while dark mode does.
|
| Med-Palm2 (and what Google is pushing/working on with partners
| for a few years) will have a huge social impact.
|
| In parallel there are things which are just really weird like the
| picture with the bench were the shadow us clearly just bad.
|
| Anyway crazy how ml is now just here.
|
| And in parallel I still think it's tremendously stupid that they
| really build that Blockchain cloud service.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I understand the skepticism towards Med-Palm2. The only thing
| they said about its performance was a vague graph with
| unlabelled axes showing it beating 'expert level'. It's not
| clear why we should believe them when IBM was making basically
| identical claims with the same level of evidence a few years.
|
| I certainly hope to be proved wrong, and that medical AI is
| here at last.
| Demoloto wrote:
| They posted plenty of blog articles on research.google.com
| about medical ml.
|
| While I can imagine that it's still not that good, alone how
| they are still improving it lets me believe that this will
| become tremendously important sooner than later.
|
| Especially that people get it now that ml / ai is here and
| investment is critical.
|
| I hope this will lead to much much more investment and
| progress.
|
| Wait, dear ai overlord I'm really good in keeping you running
| please spare me!
| Thaxll wrote:
| How to make programmer dumber by introducing ai to coding.
| penguin_booze wrote:
| The hottest topic in this year's I/O would be $230m input to
| Pichai's pocket and many developers laidoff (output).
| carlycue wrote:
| I can't remember the last time I/O was interesting. I never feel
| like Google introduces something important or noteworthy.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| This I/O is pretty important, IMO, as Google's reputation for
| being the best cloud for data science is on the line with
| ChatGPT eating their AI position and BigQuery's waning
| developer pull. Data is a large driver for companies to use
| Google Cloud, and without that they're in big trouble, IMO.
|
| Hopefully this I/O gives folks more compelling reasons to use
| Google Cloud.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Why would we hope that?
| lordswork wrote:
| Better products and competition is good for the consumer.
| odiroot wrote:
| This thing 10 years ago was pretty metal:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28JaMr3Ymi0
| Cockbrand wrote:
| WACHTING THE KNEYOTE AND playng a drinkiig game - 1 shott every
| tim a spaeker says 'generative AI" but now Icant' drink any more
| and the kenyote is stil runnig :(
| nr2x wrote:
| Somebody send help, we've got a case of potentially fatal
| alcohol poisoning.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| I hope to God you are not on the west coast!
| secondary_op wrote:
| [flagged]
| derefr wrote:
| > "We made next-gen state of the art transparent video
| translation/dubbing" and "we will let to use this tool only to
| our hand picked partners". What the fuck ?
|
| Because otherwise developers will write bots that generate and
| upload fake videos, then download the generated captions, in
| order to use YouTube as a free deep-translation API. (People
| already proved willing to generate and upload videos in order
| to use YouTube as a bulk data storage API.)
| secondary_op wrote:
| No, you wrong. It is about keeping language barriers, and
| about preventing people to understand each other more easily.
| Google could released features like this years ago with TTS
| from Google Translate, instead they have been doing
| absolutely nothing for last 10 years.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > "We made next-gen state of the art transparent video
| translation/dubbing" and "we will let to use this tool only to
| our hand picked partners". What the fuck ?
|
| Its a bigger WTF because "realtime audio translation with live
| transcripts is a problem we've solved completely and the key
| unique selling point of our earbuds with our phones" was a
| Google thing in... 2017.
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