[HN Gopher] Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free, but rais...
___________________________________________________________________
Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free, but raising the price
of Workspace
Author : lars_francke
Score : 321 points
Date : 2025-01-15 14:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| grajaganDev wrote:
| Workspace was $12/month, now it will be $14 with AI included. AI
| was $20/month.
|
| Looks like AI as an add-on wasn't selling too well.
| jsheard wrote:
| Users will continue to be beaten with the AI cudgel until
| morale improves.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Ah it's new tech, they just need to get used to it until they
| can't do without!
| Macha wrote:
| I do wonder if these kind of price cuts (see also Microsoft)
| will finally stop the demands from investors that everything
| be AI.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| When it's baked into the default price, more sales can be
| attributed to it (whether it's true or not), and more users
| will have used it (they're effectively paying for it,
| they'll at least try once)
|
| On paper it will look good, as long as a trend of users
| vocally bailing out of Workspace doesn't happen. And given
| the enterprise nature of it, I don't see that happening.
| sensanaty wrote:
| My company is doing some similar crap. Half a year wasted on
| some bullshit AI thing that half the engineers were
| questioning from the start. Usage numbers are in the low
| 10%-20% range and are _dropping_ despite massive push from
| marketing and onboarding teams.
|
| The solution is to of course push even more AI stuff. The
| actual quote one of the C-level used was "Users don't
| understand the power of AI yet!" and I could barely hold in
| my laugh when I heard it.
|
| I've been feeling like the world has lost their fucking minds
| with the AI push. I know that VC/investors play a big role in
| it, but I've never seen anything quite like it. The AI
| toothbrush [1] really took the cake for me for peak of
| absurdity, I wonder what these geniuses will come up with
| next...
|
| [1] https://www.oralb.co.uk/en-gb/product-
| collections/genius-x
| paxys wrote:
| Pretty much. A small set of customers weren't willing to pay
| for AI? Now _everyone_ has to pay for AI.
| from-nibly wrote:
| Bob need's that bonus.
| grajaganDev wrote:
| Collective punishment.
| hackmiester wrote:
| Can I pay $20 to keep the version without AI?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Google: Is that a trick question?
| whalesalad wrote:
| Shid. I made the mistake of getting my entire family onto my
| google apps 15+ years ago. Now I am paying for about 8 people
| every month and this will just make it worse.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| yes this particular seat price increase might be the one that
| breaks the camel's back
|
| an ignorable monthly credit card charge, to one that has to
| go
| ra wrote:
| I expect take up was in the low single-digit percentage points.
| So charging every single subscriber $2/user (even if they don't
| want it) probably yields significantly more revenue.
| starfallg wrote:
| Pretty sure that's not how the maths worked out, but rather
| $2 is the amount that would cover the cost of running the
| service based on data of existing customer usage levels.
|
| This is a strategic play, not a revenue play.
| nashashmi wrote:
| It was selling well enough. It just was not getting enough
| traction. By bundling AI, they are giving exposure to everyone
| who didn't want to use it or didn't see the need for it. If
| they pulled it away in 2 years, and then lowered the price and
| charged separately for AI, I think more people would see it as
| necessary.
|
| AI is a better search engine. And a better grammar check for
| your emails. And a better writer for your reporting.
| goatlover wrote:
| Is it really though?
| the_snooze wrote:
| >Workspace AI includes things like email summaries in Gmail,
| generated designs for spreadsheets and videos, an automated note-
| taker for meetings, the powerful NotebookLM research assistant,
| and writing tools across apps.
|
| Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon stuck in my ways, but I haven't
| found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day
| work. For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're
| solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this
| information that I really want to go through, but it's that I
| have too much information and it's become all noise.
|
| The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority
| emails. The real solution to too many meetings is fewer and more-
| focused meetings. These tools paper over the root cause of the
| problem, which is that people/organizations cannot (or are
| unwilling to) be clear about communication priorities and say
| "maybe this email/meeting isn't a good use of time after all."
| verdverm wrote:
| I agree. I don't want all my existing work apps to take on LLM
| features I don't need.
|
| At the same time, I tried the Gemini Research feature last
| night, via the Gemini webapp, and was resoundingly impressed.
| From a vague description, it can find the open source project I
| was looking for, provided ample links, and a pretty good
| summary of the project.
|
| deets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706997
| dimitri-vs wrote:
| I really want to like Gemini Deep Research but I have had a
| pretty low ROI with it. It fails because it has no ability to
| evaluate the quality of sources, so some SEOd to hell page
| has equal weight as the deep dive blog post of a highly
| invested individual. Its also very hard to steer unless you
| provide paragraphs of context, if you provide too little it
| might hyper focus on something you said and go into some
| random rabbit hole of research.
| vrosas wrote:
| Man if only there was a company out there specializing in
| the ranking page quality on the web...
| ape4 wrote:
| I can hardly wait to use it as an excuse. "Oh sorry I didn't do
| that because it wasn't in the AI summary" ;)
| radarsat1 wrote:
| I had the opposite experience recently. I was sent a summary
| of a sales video call, and the summary stated that we had
| promised to deliver something that was not nearly ready in 2
| weeks! I was panicking but then started to doubt that the
| person in question would make such an irresponsible promise
| (but not.. completely sure it you know what I mean) so
| fortunately the summary included links to timestamps in the
| video call and I watched it. From the video it was clear he
| was talking completely hypothetically and not promising
| anything at all! The AI completely failed to pick up the
| nuance and almost made me change team priorities for the next
| sprint. Glad I verified it.
| herewulf wrote:
| So, instead of the people in the meeting spending a few
| minutes writing up a few notes to send to you about
| actionable next steps, you got to waste your time on the
| artificially intelligent fuck up.
|
| These are human problems desperate for magical ways to do
| less work.
| macNchz wrote:
| I find AI meeting transcripts and summaries to be one of the
| most genuinely useful things to come out of this era of LLM
| tools. Being able to see a quick summary of what was decided or
| who was supposed to do what next is just so helpful, either for
| refreshing your memory after the weekend or just because people
| aren't all that great at taking and sharing notes.
| shinycode wrote:
| I prefer to take succinct notes on paper or eInk and cut the
| noise while I'm on the meeting. I'm better focused, keep the
| meeting to what really matters. A colleague sent me one of
| those summaries, it didn't make sense. For me it can't
| replace a good system, precise notes and useful on point
| meetings. Maybe for people who have useless meetings they
| must attend it's better ?
| tomrod wrote:
| Indeed.
| macNchz wrote:
| It's nice if you're the one presenting or leading the
| meeting, and/or if the person you've asked to take notes is
| not especially diligent. I've also been sent a photograph
| of someone's handwritten notes after a meeting and found
| it...not terribly useful.
| shinycode wrote:
| Yes you're right. The handwritten notes I take I always
| keep them for myself. If I have to share something I
| clean it and summarize and type it by hand. I find useful
| to do it manually to make sure intent and comprehension
| are well transcribed from the meeting. If a person is not
| focused on the meeting then it could be worse. I'd rather
| not give this to an AI, again often context is key and
| unless you have access of month or years of cross history
| it might be difficult for an IA not to miss something.
| But it's just a tool, everyone sees what tool fits nicely
| mrweasel wrote:
| That does sound generally useful. Out of interest: Do you
| ever see a one hour meeting being summed up so brief that the
| participants question why they spend an hour on the meeting
| (or more realistically, question if the LLM understood the
| meeting at all).
|
| Even when meetings are summed up, which I think they should
| be, you frequently see that no real progress was made,
| someone did all the work before the meeting started and this
| is now just a one hour sign off, or everything is simply
| pushed to the next meeting.
| bambax wrote:
| How is AI in email a good thing?!
|
| There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one
| character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns
| this single bullet point list into a long email I can pretend I
| wrote".
|
| And in the other frame, there are two different characters, one
| of them presumably the receiver of the email sent in the first
| frame, who says to their colleague: "AI makes a single bullet
| point out of this long email I can pretend I read".
| hoyd wrote:
| Do you happen to have a link for that comic?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Not the person you asked, but I too enjoy good web comics.
|
| https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
| bambax wrote:
| Yes, that's the one.
| monophonica wrote:
| hah that is wonderful. thank you.
| LtWorf wrote:
| This was literally in the initial gmail demo about AI :D
| bambax wrote:
| Really? Wow. And they think if they're pointing it out, it
| absolves them somehow? Like those companies that used to
| have Dilbert cartoons pinned on cubicle walls?
| energy123 wrote:
| It almost can't be a good thing. LLMs are only useful when
| given all the relevant context. When you write an email, the
| context is mostly in your head.
| llm_trw wrote:
| It isn't, though; it's in all the meetings that happened
| beforehand and all the documents around them.
|
| The biggest productivity boost I ever managed was using
| Whisper to convert meetings to text and then a big model to
| summarize what happened.
|
| Then I can chat with the docs and meetings about who
| decided what, when, and why. It's a superpower that I could
| only implement because I'm in the C-suite and could tell
| everyone else to get bent if they didn't like it--and gave
| babysitters to the rest of the C-suite.
|
| Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge
| deal when everyone has access to it.
| cutemonster wrote:
| What big model do/did you use?
|
| > gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite
|
| What does that mean? That they got help, if they found
| the tech too complicated?
|
| > Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge
| deal
|
| Has this changed how people behave (yet)?
| llm_trw wrote:
| This was about a year ago so it was Claude 3 Opus for
| summaries and interrogation. Since then pretty much
| anything over 70b is good enough.
|
| And baby sit means hire something between a secretary
| developer that makes sure that important meetings had the
| record bot invited, gave it a once over and then went
| back to the 70% of their job that was actual development.
| throwaway287391 wrote:
| I like this version of the same joke (unfortunately no idea
| what the source is): https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3
| A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fw...
| mcastillon wrote:
| I think this underrates how many emails are literally just
| replies of "sounds good". Small snippet replies seem to be
| the vast majority of automatically suggested responses in
| gmail
| Boldened15 wrote:
| Email is a dated form of communication, that's why every
| other message platform will let you just like and heart
| stuff.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I have 5000+ unread items.
|
| I've skimmed maybe 50% of them, but not enough to
| consider them "read". It's 99% bullshit. Even legitimate
| email is spam these days.
|
| I'm too busy with other fake work to need to additional
| fake work managing pointless email comms.
| XorNot wrote:
| I've adopted the inbox zero approach. If it's important
| it gets reclassified onto my task list with start and end
| dates, if it's useful info it gets filed, and everything
| else goes into trash.
|
| At this point I am thinking my Thunderbird should
| probably just unify the Inbox view and the Task view,
| since it would be a more accurate representation of how I
| view email.
| apsurd wrote:
| I thought just now, isn't inbox zero just a cosmetic
| difference?
|
| For you: important things become tasks, useful things are
| filed, and everything else gets trashed.
|
| For me: important things get opened and replied to.
| Useful things are starred (and opened). Everything else
| stays untouched.
|
| And that pesky unread number is irrelevant because I mute
| all notifications. I'm not discounting your method, I am
| just now realizing the circle of it all.
| have_faith wrote:
| There's a UX difference: when you look at your inbox from
| fresh you have to remember which ones you purposefully
| ignored because they were left unread in the inbox (this
| might be trivial for you if you're used to it).
|
| I practice inbox zero also, the value for me is knowing
| that if it's in my inbox it's because it requires
| actioning, if it's not it's ignored (deleted or
| archived).
|
| I also just generally like deleting things as much as
| possible, I don't like the cruft. If I have to search
| through old emails I don't have to filter by stars or
| anything like that, I like knowing that if it exists it's
| because it's important.
| omeid2 wrote:
| "serious business" and "serious stuff" still happens over
| email, and in the same way, even "more serious business
| stuff" happens over snail mail still.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's a paper trail for me. Companies, as we saw recently,
| can do whatever they want on company chat platforms.
| Emails are nearly impossible to fully delete if they ever
| have to escalate to a lawsuit, and can (YMMV based on
| policy) let you BCC important trails to your personal
| email.
| gruez wrote:
| If it's that important you can screenshot it. If you're
| BCCing every email you sent to your personal email that
| is (or should be) an IT policy violation.
| be_erik wrote:
| It's no different than using IMAP or POP3 to download
| your messages. This is the beauty and curse of email.
| It's sometimes too transparent. I prefer it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah. It's not every email (I can probably count the
| number of times I did this on one hand). But if I feel
| like they're trying to bury some lead or simply want to
| CYA, I will try to at least download the email to the
| local machine (perfectly legimate) and BCC myself (Grey
| area) as an immitation of 3 backup strategies. I've never
| had to utilize thar BCC, fortunately.
|
| But yes, phone screenshot is another strategy with much
| less grey area. I'm just becoming more and more paranoid
| of some potential defense trying to accuse my photo of
| being doctored, especially with more and more AI tools
| available.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Screenshots are trivial to forge. It is impossible to
| forge email that has passed through a server with proper
| DKIM setup.
| gruez wrote:
| At least on office365 internal emails aren't DKIM signed.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Why is chat not a paper trail? Just yesterday I found a
| chat message that I had written in 2019 and I was
| surprised that I already back then knew things I did not
| know yesterday.
|
| (We are use zulip for chat which is better than
| everything else I have used since irc. But the search is
| too limited for someone who knows regexes.)
| amonith wrote:
| Because a company can revoke your access to the chat at
| any point in time. It's a one-sided paper trail.
|
| You can have an offline copy of emails and you can BCC
| them to your personal account if you want.
| usr1106 wrote:
| According to most work contracts / NDAs you wouldn't be
| allowed to keep private copies of work email.
|
| If you are willing to violate that rule or the message
| affects your work contract which you are of course
| allowed to archive at least in zulip chat that's very
| simple (for a software person). They have a
| straightforward REST API. IIRC you can even choose
| between markdown source and HTML rendered output.
| crysin wrote:
| This seems risky, I'm not a lawyer but BCC company emails
| to personal account seems like a nice way to pave a
| highway for the company's legal team to request court
| ordered access to your personal affairs.
| fakedang wrote:
| Chat is a paper trail in finance at least. For regulatory
| purposes, bank personnel are not allowed to delete even
| their WhatsApp and other text messaging app info from
| their phones.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> Why is chat not a paper trail?_
|
| Many reasons. First, chat doesn't exist. What exists is
| scores of incompatible chat apps.
|
| I use WhatsApp but I consider WhatsApp messages throwaway
| because I keep losing them anyway. They are scattered
| across multiple phones with no way to merge them. Backups
| are platform specific. Exports don't contain any metadata
| and can't be imported.
|
| "Chat" is a useless mess, not a paper trail.
|
| For email, I have consistent backups with metadata across
| many email providers and email clients going back to
| 2008.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Because e-mail is naturally self-replicating and not
| bound to organizational boundaries, in ways chat isn't.
|
| Chat messages tend to exist in one place only (vendors'
| servers), with maybe a transient local copy that gets
| wiped over time, or "for privacy reasons" (like Messenger
| switching to E2EE, effectively wiping cached history on
| any device that went through the transition). Chat
| message is an object, it's designed to exist in a single
| place, and everything else is a pointer to it, or a
| transient cache.
|
| E-mails, in contrast, are always copied in full. You send
| an e-mail to me, you retain an independent copy, I get an
| independent copy, and a bunch of servers in between us
| keep an independent copy too, even if briefly. I forward
| your e-mail somewhere, more people and servers get their
| copies. I reply back to you, more independent copies,
| that also quote the previous messages, embedding even
| more copies that are even more independent. This makes it
| very similar to paper correspondence (particularly when
| photocopy machines are involved), i.e. impossible for a
| single party to unilaterally eradicate in practice.
|
| And then chat vendors implement silly features like
| ability to retroactively unsend a message, force-deleting
| it from recipients' devices too (it may still exist in
| backups, but vendors refuse to let you access those, even
| with a GDPR request). In e-mail land, that's
| fundamentally not possible.
|
| (Microsoft tried to bolt it onto their corporate e-mail
| software, but it only works in Outlook/Exchange land, and
| it's easy to disable (at least was, in OG Desktop Outlook
| - not the still broken New Outlook Desktop Web App). I
| discovered this when I once saw an e-mail I was reading
| suddenly disappear from my Outlook, which prompted me to
| find the right setting to disable honoring unsend
| requests.)
|
| So, come discovery time, critical chat history may turn
| out impossible to find, and any deeper search will
| require forcing cooperation of the chat operator.
| E-mails, on the other hand, tend to _turn up_ , because
| someone, somewhere, almost certainly has a copy.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Well, Microsoft did add "reactions" to Outlook and has
| been universally hated for it.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Wasn't the hate because of a botched implementation that
| ended up spamming the original sender or something?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Yeah, the reactions are just email messages with special
| headers, which as you say ends up spamming people who
| don't use Outlook. I think the hate was a mix of reaction
| to bad implementation and the concept in general.
| BryantD wrote:
| Outlook now lets me like and heart emails, which feels
| weird but there it is.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I conduct all of my business either in person, via email,
| or by phone. I use email when I want a paper trail.
| bambax wrote:
| A reply of "sounds good" means the initial email has been
| read and its contents agreed upon. Ho would AI improve upon
| this?
|
| - sending "sounds good" even when the recipient hasn't, in
| fact, read the initial email => catastrophic alternative
|
| - writing an elaborate email explaining in luxurious
| details why it in fact sounds good => not catastrophic, but
| costing time on the other side to read and understand, with
| zero added value
| madethisnow wrote:
| it would be the delivery of the information and its
| context in the whole of your other content analyzed
| otikik wrote:
| Sounds good.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's true: Why should I bother to read something you didn't
| bother to write?
| Clubber wrote:
| You can run it through AI to summarize it down to a
| sentence or two. It's like the telephone game but with
| computers.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| Then why did you even write more than two sentences in
| the first place, if nothing else matters? Why didn't you
| write a summary-line at the beginning, consisting of two
| sentences?
|
| AI will not replace human thinking, even though many
| people seem to believe and put their brain on stand-by.
|
| It feels like someone wants to transport water from A to
| B and transports it as steam, just because _we can _.
| lazide wrote:
| This is the really hilarious 'engineer thinking' vs
| 'normie' thinking difference which rears its head
| sometimes.
|
| after all, what's the point of a giving someone a bunch
| of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say,
| socks) either?
|
| As long as we can all pretend they were thoughtful and
| meaningful, and someone isn't using AI when making it (or
| just picking random crap off the shelf, and they removed
| the price tags) or using AI when reading it (aka making a
| big show of opening it, and then throwing them in the
| trash immediately after the person leaves), then we all
| get along. It even looks like we're doing a ton of
| work/spending a ton of money to make the other person
| happy.
|
| Not that anyone does any of the things I'm describing,
| just being hypothetical, obviously.
|
| I suspect it will be obvious enough shortly it will go
| the way of the 'popcorn bucket' fad or the like, but for
| now...
| pdhborges wrote:
| I get socks for Christmas and I like it.
| shafyy wrote:
| Socks are the best gift ever
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| To quote Tim Minchin, "The old combination of socks,
| jocks, and chocolates is just fine by me."
| edoceo wrote:
| Darn Tough from Vermont. Love them socks.
| watwut wrote:
| "Normies" actually prefer to get a paragraph long email
| rather then three pages saying the same thing. AI is NOT
| adding just a few socially expected niceties. It adds
| huge amount of fluff.
|
| And what "normies" do with that is skimming it, ignoring
| majority of it and answering random part.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _And what "normies" do with that is skimming it,
| ignoring majority of it and answering random part._
|
| Exactly that. For me, a lot of effort in structuring
| e-mails goes into making it look like text instead of
| bullet points, because some stupid social expectations,
| but then still making it bullet-pointed in nature,
| because if I don't, the typical normie recipient will do
| exactly what you said: ignore majority of it and answer
| random part.
|
| (And then they'll somehow screw it up anyway, and I'll
| still have to chase them after that one critical question
| they conveniently forgot to address.)
| Kye wrote:
| Popcorn buckets rocked though. Three kinds of popcorn!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _after all, what's the point of a giving someone a
| bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of
| say, socks) either?_
|
| Making them feel good and "seen", obviously. This is
| perfectly expressible in "engineer thinking" (I won't say
| "quantifiable", because there's this meme that engineers
| see things in binary, whereas the reality is, math is
| perfectly fine with fuzzy ideas and uncertainty - it's
| the normies that can't handle those).
|
| Hell, there are some game-theoretic approaches to
| maximize social ROI on gifts, but I won't go into those,
| especially that they tend to flip the sign on the return
| if the recipient learns about them.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| If AI doesn't replace human thinking, we will have to
| find something else that does, or just go without.
| comradesmith wrote:
| We've invented the worlds dodgiest decompression
| algorithms
| rpigab wrote:
| I'll buy the AI LLM that finds the prompt that was used
| based on the output, and replaces posts and emails by
| their prompt so I can actually understand the intention
| of the author and not spend my whole afternoon going
| through all bullet points with highly redundant
| information.
|
| /s, of course, but not that unrealistic.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Not that /s, really. If you think about it, what a person
| writing a long-winded e-mail full of redundant text is
| doing, is the same work LLM is - they have a prompt in
| their mind, and they're generating text that "sounds
| nice" out of it.
|
| AI or not, it would be better if they just sent their
| prompt instead.
| babyshake wrote:
| If you don't have the original input, how would you
| determine the prompt that was used to generate the
| output?
| hoppp wrote:
| Yes, when I see something written by AI I don't read it.
| Its a waste of time.
| reddalo wrote:
| Cold emails -- especially AI generated ones -- go
| directly to the trash in my mailbox.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Same here, but AI is orthogonal to that. Spam is spam -
| there's no difference between one written by silicon-
| based LLM bot, and one written by protein-based low paid
| human bot.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| That distinct feeling when reading AI is as if someone
| who wrote it was compelled to write more words
| ep103 wrote:
| tl;dr: AI is looking to convey words. A good author is
| looking to efficiently convey information.
|
| Because that's literally what it is. Its an algorithm
| that is continuously asking itself, 'what is the most
| likely word I should say next?'
|
| Whereas an author that is intending to communicate a
| point, will start with an idea, write a passage to
| explain the idea, and then edit their passage to the
| minimum number of words that most precisely, accurately,
| and succinctly communicates that idea.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I'll always love "If I had more time, I would have
| written you a shorter letter."
| madethisnow wrote:
| This is untenable. I could be AI. You could be AI. The
| whole idea of value is going to change when there is
| 99.99% noise from AI, and genuine human created content
| will be hard to distinguish if at all.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| There's a trend of people replying to posts/tweets/etc.
| with 'I asked ChatGPT and it said...'
|
| It's the modern equivalent of LMGTFY. The OP could just as
| easily written the same prompt themselves. The difference
| is that LMGTFY was an expression of irritation, smugness
| and hazing. The ChatGPT reply is just garrulous laziness. I
| expect and hope we'll develop social rules that mean this
| type of reply will be seen as passe.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| At least a sarcastic LMGTFY got the person closer to an
| answer if they clicked the link. Asking ChatGPT is a
| dead-end.
| grajaganDev wrote:
| Even worse is making an original post starting with 'I
| asked ChatGPT and it said...'
| ack_complete wrote:
| The last time I got one of those lazy ChatGPT responses I
| wanted to just ban the person on the spot if I had
| moderator privileges. Just pages of dreck that looked
| like detailed information but was totally useless and a
| waste of time. I don't have a problem if people use
| ChatGPT and find it helpful, but it's hugely
| disrespectful to just copy and paste its output to other
| people without even a cursory review of it first.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| My expectation is that:
|
| 1: people will use ChatGPT to write their formal emails
| based on a casually written text 2: people will use ChatGPT
| to convert their emails from formal text to summaries\ 3:
| this will get automated by email providers 4: eventually
| the automation will be removed and we'll just talk in plain
| language again
| Spivak wrote:
| I do #1 and it's great. I'm not sure why folks in this
| thread are sneering at what is a working English
| transpiler. I don't get to choose having to write
| formally at work sometimes but I can control how I deal
| with it.
| UltraSane wrote:
| It is funny but it is genuinely a enormous waste of energy
| and money.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| My experience with LLMs expanding on bullet points is that
| they often enough misrepresent my intentions as a writer.
| Often in infuriatingly subtle ways.
|
| Same when summarizing, just less frequently.
|
| As someone who cares about precision and clarity in my
| writing, I do not use LLMs in the context of communication.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Google seems to have an advantage here; as the client on both
| ends in many emails, they could just check if this ai
| expand/summary process is occurring and if so just send the
| bullet point (or if they want to be really clever just pass
| the bullet point through a thesaurus, so nobody will notice
| even if the sender happens to see what the recipient got).
| pjerem wrote:
| Oh boy the future is so underwhelming.
| mathw wrote:
| Given how much compute these models take to run, I don't
| think there's any value in that.
| blitzar wrote:
| My email is disliked due to its brevity, turning the single
| clear and concise sentence of into a multi paragraph treatise
| might just lead to promotions, raises and bonuses which I can
| trickle down through the economy.
| wilg wrote:
| what are people even worried about here? they're just trying
| things to see whether they're useful. don't expand your
| emails into long prose if it adds no value for you and they
| will focus on other things.
| mschild wrote:
| Proton has a nice feature for writing emails.
|
| They specifically allow you a grammar/spell check and also
| change tone (formal/informal) and length. Length one I have
| never used but the grammar spell check is a godsend that I
| use almost always.
| jon-wood wrote:
| You're aware we've had grammar/spell check since (checks)
| 1961 right? It's built right into your operating system.
| mschild wrote:
| Yes, I'm aware. What AI/Proton provides isn't just a
| simple spellchecker though. It specifically recommends
| and alters wording to better suit the overall sentence
| structure. Essentially, it considers the context better
| than any built-in checker I've had in the past.
|
| It's also really useful to for words that are spelt
| almost the same. Suit and Suite for example.
|
| Also throughout my day, I'm constantly switching between
| 2 languages that have almost identically written words.
| Adress and Address. The normal spellchecks often don't
| mark it as an error because my computers and browsers
| naturally also have 2 installed keyboards and languages.
| Popeyes wrote:
| Maybe you aren't in a space where it would be useful, but not
| everyone who has to write an email is a great and concise
| writer.
|
| I worked with groups of tradespeople who had poor literacy
| and they had to write emails and some of them were very
| poorly written. AI would have helped these people a great
| deal in providing information but also being able to
| understand what was coming back to them.
| tssva wrote:
| I worked with engineers daily for around 40 years and now I
| work with trades people daily. In general the trades people
| are better communicators.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _How is AI in email a good thing?!_
|
| > _There 's a cartoon going around (...)_
|
| Both frames of the cartoon represent a real perceived need:
| for the sender, the need to inflate the message to "look
| nice" because "people expect it", and then for the recipient,
| the need to summarize the nice-looking message to get the
| actual point they care about.
|
| Hopefully the use of AI in email will make that cartoon (and
| the underlying message) widespread, and lead to people
| finally realizing what they failed to realize all these
| decades: _just send the goddamn bullet point_. We don 't need
| AI in e-mails. We just need to stop wasting each other's
| time.
|
| EDIT: and riffing off rpigab's comment downthread,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723756 -- I wish for
| the future people will feel comfortable, instead of sending
| AI-generated e-mails, to _send the goddamn prompt instead_.
| It carries all the information and much less noise.
|
| I mean, using LLMs makes sense if you actually need to
| communicate in prose - for many, myself included, it's much
| easier to evaluate whether some text sounds right, than to
| write it that way in the first place, so LLMs are useful in
| evolving and refactoring your own writing (and learning how
| to write better from it, over time). But that is rarely the
| case in transactional or business communication - for that,
| just send the prompt.
| ra0x3 wrote:
| This is so funny I screamed laughed just reading over it XD
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Formal writing is just that.
|
| Alice: Hey, Bob, I finished the job, pay me
|
| Letter: Blah blah blah, Bob, blah blah blah, $$$, blah blah
| blah
|
| Bob: Oh, Alice is done, hey Charlie, pay her
|
| Letter: Blah blah blah, Charlie, blah blah blah, Alice, blah,
| $$$, blah blah
|
| Charlie: Ok, Alice is paid
|
| Letter: Blah blah, Alice, blah blah, $$$, blah blah, bank
| account, blah
|
| Alice: kthx
|
| Letter: Blah blah blah...
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| If you're a non native speaker trying to get the tone just
| right with recipients whom you don't know, it's invaluable.
|
| Sometimes I would spend 15 minutes writing a 3 or 4-line
| email of this kind. Not anymore.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| Found it: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-
| read.html
| UltraSane wrote:
| someday 99% of all computing power is going to be used to
| generate and summarize vast amounts of text.
| ttepasse wrote:
| The most inefficient protocol of the internet.
| n144q wrote:
| > I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in
| my day-to-day work.
|
| If my experience with Microsoft Office Copilot is any
| indication, these features produce very confusing, low-quality
| content if they are not completely wrong and useless. Used it
| once and never touched them again. (My company is still paying
| for this and rolling this out widely despite many reports of
| how unhelpful they are.) I doubt Google Workspace can do any
| better.
| nharada wrote:
| I had a few use cases with searching and organizing emails I
| would have used. For example, I wanted a table of all my Lyft
| rides from a certain year with distances driven, start/end
| locations, cost, etc. All that info is available in the email
| you get after riding, so I figured Gemini could read my emails
| and organize the info.
|
| Turns out it doesn't work at all. It gave me a random selection
| of rides, was missing info in some of them, and worst didn't
| realize it was giving me bad info. Pretty disappointing.
| rurp wrote:
| That's the glaring issue with all of these AI "features". If
| it can't be trusted to produce something that is both
| accurate and complete, it's generating negative work for
| whoever has to track down and fix the problems. Maybe some
| people like cleaning up sloppy work from their coworkers more
| than just doing the damn thing, but I personally hate
| spending time on that and GenAI adds a whole bunch more of it
| to every process it gets shoved into.
| jjnoakes wrote:
| I take a slightly different approach - I usually have AI
| assist in writing a script that does the task I want to do,
| instead of AI doing the task directly. I find it is much
| easier for me to verify the script does what I want and
| then run it myself to get guaranteed good output, vs
| verifying the AI output if it did the task directly.
|
| I mean if I'm going to proof-read the full task output from
| the AI, I might as well do the task by hand... but proof-
| reading a script is much quicker and easier.
| sagarkamat wrote:
| I used Gemini to do a similar task and for whatever reason, i
| found it performed better when i broke down the task into
| individual steps.
| belval wrote:
| Right now at Amazon we are going through the annual feedback
| cycle where you have to write strengths and growth areas for
| your colleagues. You will usually have to do ~12 of those.
|
| I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what
| you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask
| some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process
| make it a complete waste of time for everyone.
|
| My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs,
| we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee
| feedback.
| xnx wrote:
| > we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee
| feedback.
|
| This would be a great outcome in a lot of areas!
| anon84873628 wrote:
| This is one of the few places I have gotten value out of the
| LLM. I tell it about my relationship to the colleague and
| what we worked on, in a very quick rough way. Then I tell it
| we are writing peer review and the actual review prompt. It
| gives quite good results that aren't just BS, but I didn't
| have to spend the time phrasing it perfectly. Because I do
| want my peer reviews to reflect well on both me and the
| colleague.
| sensanaty wrote:
| > that aren't just BS
|
| Having been on the receiving end of many of these, it
| absolutely is pure BS and I lose all respect for anyone who
| themselves have so little respect for their colleague's
| time as to subject them to the AI-written slop instead of
| actual genuine feedback.
|
| The whole fucking point is to give them actionable
| feedback, both good and bad, for them to work on
| themselves, not some generic hallucinated summary of some
| bullet points you haphazardly threw together. I can
| copy/paste the review prompt into ChatGPT myself, thank you
| very much, I don't need you to do it for me and to pass it
| off as your own genuine thoughts.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I'll take your word on the reviews you actually received.
|
| As for the commenter you are replying to, you dont have
| any specific information on the review. Yet you declared
| its hallucinated, generic, haphazardly thrown together,
| simply copy pasted, etc. Consider that your conclusions
| are based off an idea in your head and not his actual
| review.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Counterpoint: I'm not in the job of managing my
| colleagues, especially in paragraph-length business
| professional tone.
| 12345hn6789 wrote:
| If a colleague gave me LLM responses instead of genuine
| feedback I would never ask them for a review again. Which
| may be what they were going for. But sadly this is not what
| I wanted.
|
| Be better. Someone respected your opinion enough to go out
| and ask for it. Take a minute to reflect.
| belval wrote:
| I get where you are coming from with this, but in my
| opinion being able to give feedback in a clear and concise
| fashion is a skill that people should have. LLMs will help
| you elaborate but they will also add their own flair by
| choosing the actual work. You can think "wow that's
| actually what a better person of me would have written" but
| you are biasing yourself based on what the LLM understood
| of your prompt focusing on form over substance.
|
| But as the other comments mention it might just all be
| bullshit anyway.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| The interesting thing about the LLM is that it uses its
| knowledge of our respective roles, overall product (which
| is public), and peer review process itself to refine and
| improve the output in ways I wouldn't have considered.
|
| I always put a lot of time into reviews before. Should I
| not use the tool to make something even better (within
| realistic time commitment)?
|
| If I use an AI to create some cartoon graphics for a
| slide, should I have bettered myself by learning graphic
| design instead?
| behnamoh wrote:
| I bet the reviews are evaluated by AI too--AI writes, AI
| evaluates, what could go wrong? :)
| username223 wrote:
| Why even start with a single sentence? They're asking you to
| come up with excuses ("growth areas") to fire twelve of your
| colleagues. It's a waste of your time, and you should figure
| out with your colleagues and manager exactly what text you
| need to generate to deal with this silliness.
| marnett wrote:
| Why do you think this is what performance review cycles
| are?
| AceyMan wrote:
| obligatory citation (this was on HN a little while back)
| https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/11/03/metrics/
| darkwater wrote:
| Because Amazon notoriously does "stack ranking". Also, I
| personally have been in a company going through mass
| layoffs and they totally use the EoY peer review as the
| metric to choose whose heads cut.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| I hope it drives a cultural revival in appreciation of
| laconicism.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it
| up the correct length and in the process make it a complete
| waste of time for everyone.
|
| It's more complicated than this.
|
| The short form isnt actually the best form. It's incomplete.
| The LLM is being used to decompress, because it can be
| difficult to do. Blindly using an LLM isn't the solution but
| it can be part of an effective workflow to write good
| feedback.
|
| Also, I'm sure some people take a brief, complete idea and
| expand it into an entire paragraph because they have some
| warped perception. That's bad, but I dont think most people
| are doing that because most people dont see any reason to.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Enshittification #353: solving cuStomers problems has poor ROI
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I'm kind of a cynic, so I'd say that the Workspace customer
| isn't you, the person who's using Workspace. It's your big
| company's SVP of IT or whoever who wants to spend money to
| adopt cool AI stuff so that he can say that he did AI stuff.
| tomrod wrote:
| I'm in this role for my company.
|
| There is no value for a bloated autocompletion tool.
|
| There is value for concise drafts.
|
| I wish Google would cut the PMs and bean counters, ressurect
| some of their better projects, and trim their fat instead of
| cut their sinews.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I totally agree. I upgraded to the AI-enabled version of Google
| One because they gave a couple week free trial. I found it
| totally useless, and it reeked of "Some PM said we had to stuff
| AI in everywhere".
|
| Note I do use ChatGPT pretty frequently, but I've found it much
| more useful to have a separate space for the kinds of
| conversations I have with ChatGPT.
| verelo wrote:
| Yeah I'm tired of workspace getting more expensive and me
| getting zero additional value from it. I don't want this,
| didn't ask for it, and it actively annoys me.
| thumbnailsketch wrote:
| What if there was something that communicated the company's top
| priorities and helped everyone align and stay organized without
| so many meetings, and give concise drafts for your to-dos?
| Would that be something you'd try?
| treyfitty wrote:
| I for one would love to try.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I just exited the toilet following 2.5 hours of back-to-back
| meetings, and was looking forward to _actually getting some
| work done_ when the product owner grabbed me for a conversation
| about priorities for the sprint planning session that 's
| scheduled in a couple of hours.
|
| In this week so far (first week back from Christmas / New Year
| leave) I've spent maybe half a day total on work that could be
| classified as "progress". The rest of the time has been
| meetings and the required meeting follow-up work.
|
| There's no point in Sprint Planning or considering adding
| priorities to the current plate. It's full. But nobody has time
| to eat things off the plate because we're always in meetings to
| work out how we can eat off the plate more efficiently.
|
| /rant
|
| I've come back from holidays angry. Things gotta change.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Have you considered setting more meetings with various
| stakeholders to discuss how to prioritize time for the next 2
| weeks? And then follow up check in meetings every 2 days to
| change direction in an agile way?
| Clubber wrote:
| You really have to schedule a meeting to discuss an
| upcoming meeting, so the upcoming meeting can be more
| efficient.
|
| (yes this happened to me before)
| be_erik wrote:
| I too ran a pre-IPM for years. I still would. Why would I
| waste an entire team's time when I can just collaborate
| with 2 people first?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Something I heard that stuck with me was that, for
| important business decisions, the "meeting" is almost
| ceremonial-only: to make the decision offical. Such
| meetings should essentially be fast, no digressions, just
| 'the biz'.
|
| All the work to actually reach requisite agreement for
| the decision is done in the days / weeks leading up to
| the meeting via ad-hoc-ish one-on-one or one-on-very-few
| meetings (possibly including graft and corruption).
|
| The "decision" meeting isn't organised until the result
| is known and guaranteed.
|
| This maybe doesn't apply to Agile / Development-related
| meetings, but I'll keep trying to determine how to make
| it apply, such is my disdain for this (seemingly) waste
| of the team's time (he said, whilst posting on HN).
| BeefWellington wrote:
| My favourite is the ole "Oh we need Dwayne for this one,
| let's schedule a follow-up tomorrow with him, and until
| then we can rough out a bunch of requirements only Dwayne
| possibly knows by... umm... Guessing?"
|
| I do not miss development.
| bruce511 wrote:
| The secret is to add every meeting into your Jira as a task,
| and then close it once the meeting is done.
|
| Equally, instead of talking about meetings as detracting from
| your work, start talking about them _as_ the work.
|
| When your manager asks about your milestones, or
| accomplishments, or success stories, make meeting attendance
| front and center.
|
| When discussing software development, bug fixing, etc in the
| meetings, point out that you won't actually _do_ any of it.
| Point out that 20+ hours of your week is in meetings, 10
| hours of admin (reading, writing, updating tickets), 5 hours
| of testing etc.
|
| "This task will take 40 hours. At 1 hour per week I expect to
| be done in October sometime. If all goes to plan'
|
| Yes, it seems cynical, but actually it has real outcomes.
| Firstly your "productivity" goes up. (As evidenced by your
| ticket increase.)
|
| Secondly your mental state improves. By acknowledging (to
| yourself) that you are fundamentally paid to attend meetings,
| you can relax in your own productivity.
|
| Thirdly by making your time allocations obvious to your
| manager, you place the burden for action on him.
|
| If you convince your colleagues to do the same, you highlight
| the root problem, while moving the responsibility to fix it
| off your plate.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Thank you for this!
|
| I was just thinking about how for the people requesting all
| of these meetings, the meetings are the work. If they don't
| meet / waste everyone's time, they are... unproductive.
|
| For engineers, meetings are the non-productive part and are
| not counted anywhere.
|
| Adding them to Jira and accounting for their cost is the
| way. Businesses understand money. Meetings are expensive.
|
| Does your company log meetings as tickets?
| bruce511 wrote:
| Cunningly my company doesn't do meetings, at least not on
| the developer side. Obviously there are interactions but
| they are one-on-one and are not reoccurring.
|
| My experience though is consulting to large
| organizations. They have lots more people, more layers,
| and hence need more accountability. I get the need for
| that, but also see that balance is required. I help both
| sides understand the requirements of the other party, and
| help them find balance so that both sides win.
|
| Part of that is helping programmers understand what
| managers need, and part of that is helping managers
| understand what programmers need.
|
| Managers, for example, are happy to add everyone to every
| meeting. Workers usually prefer one on one time.
|
| Equally co-workers often benefit from set-aside time for
| team meetings. This helps with in-team communication.
|
| Information flow is necessary. Doing it well is better
| for everyone.
| matwood wrote:
| > I was just thinking about how for the people requesting
| all of these meetings, the meetings are the work.
|
| This is a huge problem in all orgs of any size and one I
| battle with - misaligned incentives.
|
| > For engineers, meetings are the non-productive part and
| are not counted anywhere.
|
| Part of addressing the issue is to not be binary in your
| thinking. You'll lose the people you need to persuade.
| Some meetings are very productive and necessary for
| engineers. The goal isn't to get rid of all meetings as
| much as it's to only have productive meetings. When
| forced to only have productive meetings, fewer meetings
| naturally result.
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| I don't blame you for getting angry.
| intelVISA wrote:
| How big's the org? This setup feels unavoidable past a
| certain company size as growth attracts grifters who then
| call meetings atop meetings to appear useful.
|
| Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money
| for a day's work a week?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| It's more a case of team-member churn, requiring a near-
| constant re-establishment of work practises, alongside a
| number of over-officiated processes that are in a constant
| state of being re-engineered for efficiency because they're
| a constant source of "time drain away from actual
| progress". There's also a lot of tech debt that has only
| recently (in the past three years) been really focused on
| to grow out of. There's also a lot of complexity to the
| system(s) we work with and the combination of complexity
| and tech debt is neither pretty nor easy.
|
| _Unless you own the shop I don 't see the issue - good
| money for a day's work a week?_
|
| Yeah, except I have a visceral feeling of pressure to make
| progress and I don't want to be "one of those people" who
| don't work towards some kind of improvement. I had a bit of
| a rant today, and one of the leaders agreed with basically
| all of my points, although they said that there's a limited
| amount that can change in the immediate due to existing
| priorities. However, I'm still going to dedicate some time
| every day to map out how to improve on the status quo -
| this will further inhibit my actual task progress, but in
| the pursuit of a loftier goal (so, yes, potentially making
| it worse, but it'll feel like I might make things
| better...).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-
| priority emails.
|
| Sure, and that's an actionable solution if you can control the
| actions of everyone else who emails you.
| lazide wrote:
| Well, that's because you're thinking as someone who likely has
| a stake in quality/specific outcomes actually happening. Or was
| raised/grew up in an environment where that was important.
|
| Notably, in my experience there is a high correlation with that
| background and being curmudgeonly. Mainly because that means
| someone has been responsible for outcomes, regardless of
| feelings. And something often has to give, and it's usually
| feelings. It's also hard to not be cranky or even angry if
| someone has to constantly be the one 'not having fun' or
| cleaning up messes so the whole thing doesn't fall apart.
|
| There is huge market demand exactly for what you're complaining
| about, which is faking things happening as convincingly as
| possible, precisely _because_ being clear /concise, etc. helps
| with seeing the root cause of problems, and if someone is
| worried (or is legitimately) a root cause of the problem, of
| course they'll consider that bad.
|
| For example, a good sign of a badly led organization is that
| it's always busy, but never seems to get anything done.
| Everything is an emergency, so nothing really gets fixed, etc.
|
| Or there are constant meetings and emails, but nothing gets
| decided.
|
| People will pay good money for the right kind of wallpaper that
| makes that ugly wall look pretty again.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I'm getting a lot of value out of NotebookLM drafting
| documents. If I've got a bunch of notes that need to be in a
| coherent design doc, it can give me a good enough first draft
| for me to edit into shape. Alternatively when I've got a design
| doc for something, but need to submit, say, a work request to
| another org, NotebookLM can take my doc and turn it into
| another format based on a doc template pretty nicely.
|
| These outputs still require editing for sure, but each one can
| easily save me half the time to write these things.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I only use NotebookLM a couple times a month, but when I use
| it I get value from it. I wanted to put out a new edition of
| a book I wrote last year so I ingested the PDF for the
| previous version of my book and some notes on what I was
| thinking of adding. Then in Chat mode I asked for suggestions
| of interesting topics that I didn't think of and a few other
| questions, then got a short summary that I used as a
| checklist for things that I might add.
|
| I probably spent 20 minutes doing this and got value for my
| 20 minutes.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| These LLMs are excel at making more. More emails with more
| words. More blog posts with more fluff. Making it open to more
| people means more usage means more numbers being more which
| means more money for the people building these systems.
|
| I don't see what I get out of 80% of these products. It's just
| more noise.
| bobxmax wrote:
| Google's implementation of AI really shows the innovators
| dilemma in action
|
| These features are just so rudimentary you just know a bunch
| of MBAs from McKinsey came up with them over a 7 month and
| $25m
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| It's decent at search
| exe34 wrote:
| management uses them to fluff up their emails and I use them to
| boil the emails down to actionable bullet points.
| fsloth wrote:
| I feel quite the opposite.
|
| I'm not a native english speaker, but working at US subsidiary
| I must produces reports in english etc - and having an LLM
| proofread my texts for me is great.
|
| LLM:s are new modality to computing. If you need it, they are
| great. But just like excel/sheet have limited applications a
| LLM with data has limiited use as well.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I don't use it often either, but sometimes it is very useful.
| When I caught Covid last fall my wife incorrectly thought I had
| it three times. I was using a beta Google Gemini, and paying
| for it, and I asked "read my @gmail and tell me the date ranges
| when I have had Covid."
|
| That worked, but to be honest I have tried similar things more
| recently that didn't work. Perhaps there is a routing model up
| front that decides whether or not to use a lot of compute for
| any given query?
|
| Google also plans on charging more money for APIs for code
| completion plugins for IntelliJ IDs, etc. this year.
|
| I would like to see AI pricing models be sustainable, not give
| things away for free, and have lots of control over when I use
| a lot of compute. I actually have this right now because I
| usually use LLM APIs and write my own agents for specific
| tasks.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Congrats on winning an argument against your wife. Billions
| well spent.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > it's not that I have all this information that I really want
| to go through, but it's that I have too much information and
| it's become all noise.
|
| I tend to agree, except these two things are kind of the same
| thing. It can make going through the noise easier by
| intelligently filtering out the noise or finding you the
| signal. Search. It doesn't necessarily need to eliminate the
| noise.
|
| Maybe AI would be better if it prevented the noise, and its
| definitely going to add noise (expanding a few basic thoughts
| into an email with lots of fluff), but it can also solve it.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| > For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're
| solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this
| information that I really want to go through, but it's that I
| have too much information and it's become all noise.
|
| I think this really encapsulates something that I hadn't been
| able to put my finger on in regards to LLM summarization. What
| it seems to indicate is that, if you need a computer to
| summarize a large amount of text that someone has sent to you,
| there are two likely possibilities:
|
| 1) The information is incredibly
| dense/important/technical/complex. This necessitates the
| extreme length of the message - (think: technical documents,
| research papers, a rough draft of a legal notice, or your
| will.) For these sorts of things, you should _not_ rely on an
| LLM to summarize it, because it may miss key details of the
| message.
|
| 2) The person sending it to you is bad at _communicating_ , in
| which case the solution is help them learn better
| communication, rather than "de-noising" their clumsy wording
| into something comprehensible.
|
| "But what if its number 2, but it's coming from your boss?"
|
| Then I see two obvious points to consider:
|
| First, you should _absolutely_ be telling them about the
| problem, regardless of the position that they hold. You can
| phrase it in a way that isn 't rude. "Hey boss, I saw (message)
| but I'm not 100% the intent. I've actually noticed that with
| (other time)...I usually try to front-load the action items up
| front, and put the specifics lower down. Anyway, to make sure
| I'm tracking, you're talking about (action) on (thing), right?"
|
| Second, until (or unless) their communication style is de-
| noised, then part of _your_ job is being able to "translate"
| their instructions. Using an AI to do that for you is a bad
| idea because, at some point or another they're going to be
| trying to speak to you in-person, or by phone.
|
| Not having dealt with their mannerisms in an unfiltered way
| might lead to you being "out of practice" and struggling much
| harder to figure out what they're trying to convey.
| Kapura wrote:
| can i get a version of gmail and docs without ai? I had to stop
| using google keep because they added a flashy AI button that
| couldn't be removed.
| verdverm wrote:
| I use uBlock to remove UI components that get in the way. It's
| a top feature for me because I can often DNS block many of the
| ads anyway
| Kapura wrote:
| unfortunately, i mainly used it for the android app. i spent
| about an hour trying to figure out any way to disable that ui
| or opt out of the AI shenanigans to no avail.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Can't you use gmail with any MTA? Have they removed imap
| support?
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| Forcing you to pay for features you never asked for and won't
| use. I'm sure this will work out great for google in the long
| term.
| esperent wrote:
| There's a weird attitude on this site towards AI: if it's for
| coding or science, people generally recognize AI tooling as
| effective, although imperfect, and rapidly improving.
|
| But any suggestion of using AI for business and it seems like
| disdain and dismissal is the majority response.
|
| Don't you think many areas of business - maybe not all areas,
| but a significant amount - will just as much benefit from AI
| tooling as software developers and scientists?
| Nullabillity wrote:
| > There's a weird attitude on this site towards AI: if it's
| for coding or science, people generally recognize AI tooling
| as effective, although imperfect, and rapidly improving.
|
| I suspect that this is more of a selection bias thing. AI is
| garbage everywhere, but "AI in tech" posts tend to be
| hopeless abysses that are not even worth engaging with at
| this point. Hence, only the hucksters and grifters remain in
| there.
| redserk wrote:
| This is the camp I'm in. I've given AI the "college try",
| I've tried using in my workflows, and I've found that there
| are some cases where it genuinely has helped. But there is
| far too much drivel and hype.
|
| I want to hear more from the people who've embraced it for
| a year, found it's pitfalls and perks, and reflect on it.
| I'm tired of the treadmill of content from someone who
| signed up for OpenAI on a Monday, used it for a JIRA ticket
| on Tuesday, then rushed to belt out a blogpost about how
| their career is forever changed on Wednesday.
| bombcar wrote:
| Maybe we need an AI to filter out the bland bullshit
| content created by AI.
|
| I swear every single post LinkedIn highlights to me is
| the same AI template.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Why do you need an AI to help you delete your Linkedin
| account?
| esperent wrote:
| > But there is far too much drivel and hype.
|
| Absolutely, unarguably true, for this and every other
| tech boom.
|
| But it's not _all_ drivel and hype. There 's some
| genuinely useful tooling here. For businesses, document
| summarization, translation, and asking questions about a
| corpus of documents using natural language are a few. For
| coding, some level of improved auto complete up to
| complete code generation are use cases. For science,
| there's a ton of automated testing, pattern recognition,
| vision based recognition use cases. For 3d graphics,
| where I work, some version of Nerfs could revolutionize
| parts of the field (although it's too early to tell)
| while AI based upscaling, frame generation, and path
| tracing noise removal are already causing big shifts in
| gaming.
|
| Don't let the annoying drivel and hype blind you to the
| genuinely useful possibilities.
| tensor wrote:
| Here are a list of AI use cases that I guess are "garbage"
| to you.
|
| Detecting diseases. Creating drugs to cure or help with
| disease. Aiding astronomy. Understanding the genome.
| Scanning documents into text (OCR). Translation. Voice
| recognition. Detecting fraud. Spam filtering.
|
| Are you willing to give up all of these? Given your
| attitude you probably should.
| protocolture wrote:
| I dont see it like that.
|
| Its more like:
|
| If its for things where I find AI useful I want the tool
| interoperable with my chosen AI.
|
| If its for things where I dont find AI useful, please dont
| force it in anyway.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Well I'm not "this site" I'm just some guy but I've been
| absolutely consistent in my belief that not only are these
| LLMs not "AI" but they're nowhere near useful enough to
| justify the absolutely stupid amounts of money being burned
| for them.
| xdennis wrote:
| There are two aspects you should consider: 1) Google's AI
| isn't as good. 2) people don't want an AI middleman for
| person-to-person communication.
|
| People may dislike AI written code or AI "art", but using AI
| to talk to other people is just seen as dishonest. It's even
| worse when it's not all that good.
| tensor wrote:
| I use some gen-AI, but not Google's. This is very clearly a
| case of them not getting the gen-AI sales they want, so they
| are now simply forcing you to pay for it even if you won't
| use it. It's gross, and precisely the problem with
| "bundling."
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Isn't that always the case with bundles and suites? Google
| Workspace has always been a bundle of products, and few
| actually used every product in the bundle.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| Yes, google workspace has never been worth it. The difference
| is that people can easily understand the value of the
| products they aren't using.
| techjamie wrote:
| They kinda already do it with YT Premium/YT Music. I don't have
| anything against YT Music, it's a perfectly fine music service
| from the amount I've used it. But I already have a Spotify with
| my preferred playlists, and I don't really have incentive to
| swap it over aside from maybe saving a handful of dollars a
| month.
|
| Yet if you want ad-free YouTube the proper way, you can't just
| have Music as an option, it's rolled into your cost regardless
| of if you actually plan to use it or not.
| rurp wrote:
| The beauty of having a monopoly or oligopoly in a dozen major
| markets is that you don't have to care about customers. As much
| as I hate this move and don't think it will help the company, I
| think Google is powerful and entrenched enough that it will
| make out just fine. Their users will bear most of the costs.
| sschueller wrote:
| They have managed to vendor lock me. The price just keeps going
| up and I can't get out.
| dochtman wrote:
| Makes sense that this is the only way to compete with Microsoft.
|
| (See also how MS attacked Slack by including Teams for "free".)
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| Why not compete with microsoft by _not_ pushing AI? This allows
| costs to stay low while making customers happier.
| jsheard wrote:
| Google already spent a lot of money on Gemini and now they
| have to justify it or the shareholders will get mad.
| bbarnett wrote:
| What? Google is absolutely not even remotely concerned with
| such things. Their bring-to-market strategy for products is
| basically "Spend billions a year on developing random
| things" and then "OK, it's been a year, cancel 1/2 of
| them".
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > Their bring-to-market strategy for products is
| basically "Spend billions a year on developing random
| things" and then "OK, it's been a year, cancel 1/2 of
| them".
|
| This evidently doesn't apply to their chatbot efforts.
| htrp wrote:
| lamda, bard, palm (v1 and v2) don't necessarily agree
| with you there
| verdverm wrote:
| A lot of customers want these features (especially those
| people who only work in the browser because their job duties
| are vastly different from the average HN user)
| nkozyra wrote:
| Agree, which is why it was nice(r) as an add-on.
| daveguy wrote:
| Apparently they don't want it if Google had to force the
| feature on everyone to raise revenue.
| verdverm wrote:
| This is likely a misreading from personal preference
|
| Getting these features for $2 instead of $20 likely
| appeals to a lot of people. It's 10% the price and may
| only be one of several reasons for the price increase
| (inflation is likely another)
| atonse wrote:
| I'm honestly getting a bit sick of subscription pricing,
| especially for things like "productivity apps." and G-Suite
| (although sadly the MS alternative isn't any better).
|
| At the end of the day, we just do the same ol' simple word
| processing we've done for the last 20 years.
|
| Are there good corporate email alternatives that just do
| email/calendars and do them well with business-type SLAs? Zoho?
| FastMail?
| hedora wrote:
| In my experience, FastMail has better uptime than any of the
| stuff work relies on. (It feels like one more nine, but I
| haven't checked.)
|
| Maybe you could have them randomly suspend your accounts for a
| few hours here and there to match the public cloud experience.
| :-)
|
| Edit: Here's their outage page, which reports > 2-3 nines for
| most subsystems most months:
|
| https://fastmailstatus.com/
|
| Note that they treat any service degradation as downtime when
| computing 9's. For instance, they had one imap server down
| today, which meant some requests were failing, and that counts
| against their reported numbers.
|
| By this metric: "One machine is failing requests", most of the
| hyperscalers are down all the time.
|
| Regarding actual SLAs with money and stuff: How much is the
| refund worth vs. the cost of downtime?
|
| Edit 2: Take github for example. They have unreported outages
| all the freaking time. Down detector says push/pull has been
| flaky for the last 24 hours, but the official status page says
| all systems operational, with a minor codespace outage
| yesterday.
|
| Compare:
|
| https://www.githubstatus.com/
|
| To:
|
| https://downdetector.com/status/github/
|
| To prove those aren't all false reports, next time they go
| offline for you, go bask in the green light their status page.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > Are there good corporate email alternatives that just do
| email/calendars and do them well with business-type SLAs? Zoho?
| FastMail?
|
| There are literally tons of them.
| djhn wrote:
| Zoho's SLA I can't speak to but it's hard to argue against free
| forever, including custom domains. For personal use it's
| perfect and the paid packages are much better value for money
| than Google/Microsoft.
|
| FastMail is wonderfully competent at being an email provider,
| has human support (or advanced enough an AI to fool me) and
| wildcard domains.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Cool, great, fun. I have all of the "generative AI" features
| disabled in Workspace, and now I get to pay more for the
| privilege of keeping them disabled. Thanks, Google!
| echelon wrote:
| Same. This is bullshit.
|
| Nobody on my team uses these features. They're actually quite
| distracting.
|
| Google gets to raise prices under the guise that these are
| improving productivity.
|
| I wish there was a fast and easy alternative. Google has its
| claws in deep.
| bnc319 wrote:
| Do you know how to actually disable these new features (i.e.
| the elements that were added within Gmail, Docs, etc.)? I'm not
| seeing where they can be disabled and Google Workspace support
| was not able to point me in the right direction either...
| seanvelasco wrote:
| I pay for 3 Workspace orgs, and I have Gemini disabled (or still
| not enabled) on all 3 of them. I'm angry that I'll have to pay
| more for features I don't use. Gemini should be an add-on cost,
| not included in the base cost
|
| If they're raising the price of personal GMail, I don't have a
| problem. But Workspace with hundreds of users, now that's a
| problem, because it actually hurts my wallet significantly. When
| this increase comes, I'll have to move elsewhere.
| bbarnett wrote:
| With Amazon as an example for CxOs of the world, sadly, this
| likely won't happen.
|
| Look at Prime. So much crap involved, and quite literally all I
| use it for is lower cost shipping. It's almost on the edge of
| not worth it for me. But I bet from Amazon's perspective, they
| make more with the higher price, even if they lose the bottom
| 10% not willing to spend.
|
| Huh.
|
| Just made me realise, a startup that subscribes to Prime as a
| virtual being, and then splits off each sub-thing for full use
| by separate individuals would be incredibly profitable.
|
| If any form of AI is eventually granted legal personhood,
| Prime's model will collapse.
| navane wrote:
| Loosing the people that actually care about the price/reward
| is a bonus for them, now they have an audience that buys
| superfluous stuff.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I've never had Prime and I get free shipping 100% of the
| time.
|
| You're not paying for lower cost shipping, you're paying to
| turn regular purchases you could wait a few extra days for
| into impulse buys.
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly this, and since Covid the 2-day has been about as
| fast as the "free with $35" option, and waiting encourages
| thrift anyway.
|
| I only reactivate it when they give me a week free or for
| $1 and the additional cash back is worth it.
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| i cancelled prime over a year ago and i still get packages
| in the same time frame, i think once they nixed a lot of
| next day deliveries that it didnt matter anymore.
|
| The downside is quality of products still keeps going
| downhill and not even mcmaster had the parts i needed.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I was on Prime for years until it lapsed because of a card
| change, and I realized most of my shipping would still be
| free:
|
| - my orders are usually above the generic free shipping
| threshold
|
| - most smaller item purchases can be grouped within two or
| three days to get above the threshold
|
| - if it's an emergency shipping price won't matter. But I'll
| also freely choose what service and what retailer to get it
| from, if a shop is fasteror more reliable than Amazon for
| instance.
|
| - Prime day sales aren't great
|
| Might not apply for your case, but for me getting off of
| Prime had virtually no impact for the shop part (I was using
| Prime Video, and Music with Alexa, but I also got rid of both
| for different reasons)
| rr808 wrote:
| Also every few months I get offered Prime trial free month.
| Wife too so family wise we get a few months free every year
| which is more than enough.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I'm sure this depends on where you live, but my Amazon
| shipments are late such a large portion of the time that
| they end up refunding most of the shipping costs I pay.
| It's like free prime for the patient!
| beretguy wrote:
| Any idea where you'll move? I have a nonprofit I want to
| migrate away.
| herewulf wrote:
| If your mail is extremely low volume, you might like Migadu's
| low cost plans. They charge by number of messages in/out
| rather than per domain or something. It's been handy for me
| for a few lightly used domains including resurrecting one
| that the previous owner had let expire and then suddenly
| needed.
|
| I've kind of been waiting for an excuse to make that move for
| my solo freelance business. It's probably not enough of a
| price difference to push me (+$24/year) but it really irks me
| to be forced into subsidizing this garbage.
|
| I occasionally do office document stuff which Workspace had
| been nice for and I can't be bothered with Windows/Office so
| maybe time to revisit LibreOffice or maybe go full on Emacs.
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| Can I reject incoming emails, or am I screwed if I get a
| ton of spam?
| artooro wrote:
| I'm considering moving to Fastmail for email and calendar,
| Sync.com for cloud files. It would be annoying to have
| separate logins for each though. One nice thing about GWS was
| a single login for all the apps.
| ra wrote:
| I agree.
|
| It feels like Google are shoving AI down our throats and making
| Workspace customers pay for it's development.
|
| I don't want your half-baked LLM features.
| ricardonunez wrote:
| Right now looking for an alternative for the same reason. Even
| if it cost me more on labor short term. They have been
| increasing prices regularly and I'm sure it will continue.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| It's an anti competitive strategy, which in an ideal world
| would see them facing a crushing antitrust lawsuit from the FTC
| and DOJ. What they're doing is forcing everyone to pay for
| _their_ AI product. This makes it so that no other company can
| charge for their alternative AI products. After all, if your
| company's spending goes up because of this Google price
| increase, your executives will not want to see double spending
| on AI products. So all those deserving smaller companies will
| miss out on these customers. Google is essentially using this
| forced price increase to kill their AI competitors by stealing
| their revenue, through illegal bundling. Just like Microsoft
| did with Teams to attack Slack illegally.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Why do you have Gemini turned off?
| seanvelasco wrote:
| we use Claude
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Okay, I have a lot of projects with a couple of email addresses
| attached to their domain name
|
| In the US and European market, this was seen as a bare minimum
| level of professionalism and validation (other markets are more
| advanced on this front and have been on chat apps for the entire
| business for at least a decade)
|
| regardless for email, I had been using Google workplaces for this
|
| What's a cheaper alternative? last time I tried something else I
| found I was vendor locked to google even when trying to accept
| calendar invites from people in other organizations that sent
| google calendar. That was 5 years ago though
|
| some sectors like web3 let you do the whole project with just a
| username on discord/telegram/x but I do want to consider
| migrating my emails away from google workspace now. Its difficult
| to manage even changing the credit cards on file with so many
| projects like if one expires
| maxclark wrote:
| Check out Fastmail
| XorNot wrote:
| I run my personal email out of Fastmail now and haven't
| looked back. Plays nicely with Firefox and K-9 Mail for Mail,
| Calendars and Contacts.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Migadu is cheap and works well for email only.
|
| If you need email + shared calendar/contact the email service
| from infomaniak should do the trick. If you need
| functionalities close to workspace with storage, office suite,
| videocall they have the ksuite service.
| rom16384 wrote:
| Check out MXroute or migadu
| adityapatadia wrote:
| It's time saas apps realise that they can't make 2.5x normal
| license money by just sticking AI to it.
|
| In our SaaS we added it for free. We realised that there is no
| way to sustainably make money off of this in long term.
|
| It's a great feature but not 2.5x price worth feature.
| taeric wrote:
| I can't be alone in not wanting these features? I don't mind them
| being available, but I do fear a nearterm future where they are
| active whether I ask them to be or not.
|
| I remember all of the scorn clippy got years ago. How is this any
| different? I think Inbox was probably more useful, and they
| didn't push it near this hard. :(
| grajaganDev wrote:
| Clippy was better.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > How is this any different?
|
| It's worse, because Clippy had no editorial control of what was
| being produced.
|
| I think there's a group of people who really really want this,
| and they are probably the last people who should get access to
| an AI/LLM. Some people will just love this, because they're
| already bullshitting their way through life and this will just
| make it easier, it even looks company approved if it's in the
| tools provided to you.
| jsheard wrote:
| What are the odds that they will tally that extra $2/user/month
| up as "AI revenue" regardless of how many subscribers actually
| use those features?
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| 100%
|
| Give it a quarter and we'll see breathless articles about how
| Google saw "AI adoption increase 150%" and "Google workspace
| users say they can't go without AI" (because they physically
| can't remove it from their workspace).
|
| This in turn, will be used as post-hoc justification of the
| value of AI and why ever more power, water and data should be
| funnelled into it.
| djhn wrote:
| I accidentally started the Gemini-the-product free trial in
| Workspace while trying to find how I could test Gemini-the-model
| in AI studio.
|
| The first task that I asked for it's assistance with, was how to
| disable, cancel or unsubscribe from Gemini-the-product. It
| repeatedly and confidently made up instructions to adjust
| settings that didn't exist in menus that weren't where it said
| they were and provided links to irrelevant documentation.
|
| It was either useless, actively misleading or extremely motivated
| to not be turned off.
|
| Any of those was reason enough not to use it ever again.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| Oh no nobody's buying your ai vaporware, let's make everyone
| suffer!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Investors are the customer, so they are pandering to them by
| shoving AI into everything regardless of resulting
| enshittification. Foie gras AI for the stock price.
| grajaganDev wrote:
| Or a sugar high with a very bad crash.
| autoexec wrote:
| Exactly. It's easy to make something free when nobody is
| remotely interested in paying for it. If Google wanted to make
| money they'd have to let people pay to remove AI from gmail and
| docs.
| 34679 wrote:
| I'm in the middle of a free trial for the Workspace Gemini add-
| on.
|
| It really, really sucks. I've played around with having it make
| tables for Sheets and it frequently gets confused or responds
| with ~"I can't do that, I'm just a LLM", even when feeding it one
| of their suggested examples word for word. Sometimes it's willing
| to iterate, sometimes it refuses. Once it gets confused,the only
| way I've been able to get it working again is by clearing the
| session and starting fresh.
|
| And it's sloooow.
|
| None of this saves me any time or frustration.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I guess this is why it is being bundled, Google can keep
| working on it with someone else's money, so their profits
| aren't hit. It's telling that the increase is regardless you
| use Gemini or not.
| bcoates wrote:
| Ugh. The "vanity domains for gmail" product i've been buying for
| a long time is really metastasizing into something that's both
| too expensive and actually worse than the free experience,
| wonderful.
|
| It's weird that prediction 8, "Someday [you] will voluntarily pay
| Google for one of their services" has come around full circle to
| "and then you won't anymore, because they've dropped the ball to
| an extent usually associated with the private equity buyout ->
| loot into bankruptcy process"
| jsheard wrote:
| You'll have to rip that band-aid off eventually, may as well
| get it over with. It's only going to get worse.
|
| I switched from G Suite to Fastmail for my custom domain and
| I've been very happy with it.
| blibble wrote:
| if people are worrying about importing their digital lives
| into fastmail from google workspace: you don't need to worry
|
| I had been bitten by bad import tools in the past (e.g.
| Google's)
|
| but fastmail's importer worked flawlessly
|
| for each user transferred, after fastmail's import completed,
| I dumped out their old gmail (using gmail API) and their new
| fastmail (using jmap)
|
| and diffed before/after
|
| result: zero differences
|
| perfect
| chias wrote:
| When I joined fastmail I imported my gmail and also
| configured it to be able to fully use my gmail account via
| IMAP so I wouldn't need to sign into gmail at all.
|
| I was also moving from a gmail address, so next I created a
| label that got attached to any email received to the old
| email address via that IMAP connection, which gave me a
| nice self-maintaining todo list for services that had not
| yet been updated to use a new email address.
|
| I was also surprised by how flawlessly seamless the whole
| process was. It was a big factor in my selection of
| Fastmail over other competitors when I was making the
| decision to leave Gmail.
| chias wrote:
| I made the same switch, and have also loved it. I also much
| prefer the interface to Gmail's. If you've got one account
| and want to configure a bunch of addresses to go to the same
| inbox, it's a no brainer. But if you're actually maintaining
| multiple users, it is not cheap.
|
| Side note it was weird: I found actually signing up to
| Fastmail was physically difficult. Like, pushing the button.
| Once I had the account, it was super easy and felt like
| floating downstream.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| I don't quite get these switches:
|
| > From G Suite to Fastmail
|
| Mail is only a small part of G Suite.
|
| That's what's holding me off, Google is insanely integrated.
|
| Unbundling Mail from everything else and going free Google
| Docs feels like a proper step down, not up in terms of ease
| of use and convenience.
|
| How did you handle the non-email transition part,
| respectively where to?
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| From the GP:
|
| > Ugh. The "vanity domains for gmail" product i've been
| buying for a long time is really metastasizing into
| something that's both too expensive and actually worse than
| the free experience, wonderful.
|
| The only reason they have the "full" G Suite, is because
| there is no "just custom domain Gmail" offer available.
|
| It's a pet peeve of mine when the only offering of some
| companies is just a single "full on premium" offer, and not
| some simple need. YouTube is an example of this for me,
| they have only an "everything included" subscription in
| YouTube Premium, but no other less expensive option, like
| "just no adverts please, I'm already happy with my
| alternative music and movie streaming subscriptions".
|
| I only occasionally view YouTube vids (I tend to prefer
| text-based content). The adverts made me uninstall the
| YouTube app from my iPhone and similarly I will never watch
| YouTube on my AppleTV as it's just too unpleasant with the
| adverts and (as I said above) there is no reasonably priced
| offering when all I care is to have the adverts turned off.
| input_sh wrote:
| When you sign up for a Google account, there's a label
| called "use your existing email", which will give you
| everything Google usually offers minus Gmail.
|
| Without Gmail, I have yet to stumble upon a single use case
| which would require me to pay a subscription. I can use
| Docs, join Meets, use my phone, have a YouTube channel,
| click on "sign in with Google" buttons... no subscription
| to Google necessary. I notice no differences between my
| completely-free personal account and a Workspace work
| account.
|
| I pay $5 a month to Fastmail to have a custom domain in my
| email, best of both worlds for a third of the price!
| varispeed wrote:
| I simply don't use other Google features or in limited
| capacity. I have Office 365 desktop installation. I set up
| a NAS as a Drive replacement (that was a bit costly, but no
| regrets and it actually works across all my computers where
| Drive would randomly crash, files would disappear etc.)
| with automatic backups to cloud and every now and then I
| archive data to external hard drives.
| varispeed wrote:
| I also switched to Fastmail for one of my domains. I am
| generally happy, just I wish they were better at nuking spam.
| rr808 wrote:
| Plus now I'm noticing it doesn't work for more and more things.
| Youtube TV family sharing doesn't work, Android Auto had some
| problems, the news feed on my Pixel.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| This spurred me to go back and read the predictions:
|
| >But I can tell you this: Google has changed my life. If I
| can't find what I'm looking for in Google in 3 tries, looking
| no further than the first 10 search results on each try, then
| it probably doesn't exist.
|
| What a sad future we're in.
| 65 wrote:
| Perhaps now is the time for me to switch my personal email off
| Workspace. I don't use it for Docs or Drive or anything, only
| email.
|
| Does anyone have experience with Amazon WorkMail or similar,
| cheaper services for email?
| teejmya wrote:
| I've been very happy with Migadu. https://www.migadu.com/
| cloudking wrote:
| I'm not convinced the "Gemini all the things" strategy was the
| right move with Workspace, they rolled it out so fast which
| indicates that UX research was likely rushed or bypassed
| completely. Had they conducted their typical extensive UXR
| process they would have discovered that the features are not very
| useful being baked into the suite.
|
| Now where I do think there is opportunity is in building out the
| standalone Gemini app, as ChatGPT has proven with their Teams
| product that there is business value in having a dedicated chat
| UI for your business. We are currently subscribed to ChatGPT for
| Teams and use it every day across product and engineering, there
| isn't a need for it to be integrated directly into our
| productivity suite UX, but pulling data out from the suite (e.g
| Google Drive) into the chat UI is helpful. Organizing project
| folders, custom GPTs etc also hold value for us.
| golem14 wrote:
| Do you get the same as with the $20/month onegoogle subscription?
| richbell wrote:
| > [Billing and Service Notice] Google Workspace service and
| pricing updates
|
| > Dear administrator,
|
| > Starting today, your Google Workspace subscription includes new
| AI features designed to help your users improve their
| productivity and innovation. With these changes, we will also be
| updating subscription pricing starting March 17, 2025.
|
| > ...
|
| > These features were previously available only to users with a
| Gemini for Google Workspace Add-on, but now will be included with
| Google Workspace Business Standard plans. You will see these
| features added to your subscription in the coming weeks. Soon,
| you'll get access to even more Gemini features in your Google
| Workspace apps.
|
| > Review the Google Workspace blog announcement to learn more
| about these changes.
|
| > Starting March 17, 2025*, your Google Workspace Business
| Standard subscription price will be automatically updated to
| $14.00 per user, per month with an Annual/Fixed-Term Plan (or
| $16.80 if you have a monthly Flexible Plan).
| grodriguez100 wrote:
| So we don't want to use this, but there is no way to opt out
| and we still have to pay X extra per user :-/
| jakedata wrote:
| Failure is not an option! It is included in the price...
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| The FAQ does clarify that opt-outs are available for the
| functionality itself, but not for the pricing change.
|
| (Disclaimer: Although I have worked for Google in the past,
| that ended almost a decade ago and wasn't in any role related
| to pricing or product decisions about Google Workspace. I
| have no inside info on this announcement and am not speaking
| for Google here.)
| grodriguez100 wrote:
| Sure, but they use the "AI is now available to everyone" to
| justify the price increase.
|
| Opting out of the functionality I don't need is not
| particularly useful (I won't use it anyway) but the thing
| is I will be charged for it anyway.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| I'm certainly not a fan of the decision either.
|
| In those countries where MS has now bundled Copilot Pro
| into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family Plans - not the US
| yet, so far only a few APAC countries like Australia and
| Singapore - it's still possible to get a "Classic"
| version of the subscription at the old price and feature
| set, but only via the cancellation screen, not otherwise
| advertised. I wonder, but certainly do not know, if
| Google has similar plans.
| notatoad wrote:
| watch for google to be very proud of how many users signed up
| for the paid tier of gemeni in their next earnings report.
| dsjoerg wrote:
| So, a 16% price increase and AI is included?
| myko wrote:
| Sounds like a terrible tradeoff
|
| I can't wait for the LLM hype train to die
| foobiekr wrote:
| agreed. making the world worse.
| fishstock25 wrote:
| Not gonna happen.
|
| "I can't wait for the PC hype train to die"
|
| "I can't wait for the internet hype train to die"
|
| "I can't wait for the smartphone hype train to die"
|
| "I can't wait for the EV hype train to die"
|
| I suggest you don't wait too long.
| miltonlost wrote:
| "I can't wait for the Laser Disc hype train to die"
|
| "I can't wait for the Betamax hype train to die"
|
| "I can't wait for the HD-DVD hype train to die"
|
| "I can't wait for the NFT hype train to die"
|
| "I can't wait for the dogecoin hype train to die"
| rurp wrote:
| Treating LLMs as comparable to _the internet_ is a great
| illustration of their point.
| spokaneplumb wrote:
| > Not gonna happen.
|
| I've had insight into a bunch of businesses in multiple
| industries putting stupid money into trying to find a use
| for this, caught up in the hype and worried about falling
| behind. While also being sold AI features by every vendor,
| who're all doing the exact same thing.
|
| Every single one is floundering and very unlikely to think
| this was a good use of resources a couple years from now.
|
| LLMs and associated tech are here to stay, just like search
| algorithms and autocomplete and machine translation
| programs, and the clone tool. The hype will fade, though.
| They're neat tools but, no, turns out we're not on the
| verge of inventing Skynet, we just fooled people into
| thinking we were because a prominent hype-man/grifter was
| saying so as a sales tactic (Altman) and because the output
| is human language instead of numbers or whatever.
| myko wrote:
| Working pretty heavily with these technologies since they
| hit mass appeal, I'm pretty confident, but I appreciate
| your concern
| rchaud wrote:
| Anyone that relates GenAI's importance to that of the
| Internet must not have been around when the WWW actually
| launched.
|
| "Internet" was not the killer app, email and instant
| messaging were. Email was free through your ISP and didn't
| require more than a $9.99/mo Earthlink connection. The
| alternative was Fax / Telex etc that had zero network
| effect outside of businesses and required a dedicated phone
| line and hardware.
|
| LLM based GenAI on the other hand has been around for long
| enough that we know that it's main use case is limited to
| helping schoolkids cheat on their essays and polluting the
| Internet with factory-farmed social media "content".
| fishstock25 wrote:
| Anyone relating LLMs to school kids cheating hasn't seen
| programmers be 3x as fast using it and journalists
| churning out articles 3x as fast by focusing on what they
| do best (gather and sort facts) and leaving the tedious
| make-easily-readable text writing to a machine.
|
| One can certainly have opinions about how some people use
| it and how they check the quality of what comes out, but
| as long as it's not used to make up facts but merely to
| do the primitive busy work, like machines are supposed to
| do, I don't see how that's not just as revolutionizing as
| the fax/telex comparison you are giving.
|
| > LLM based GenAI on the other hand has been around for
| long enough that we know that it's main use case is
| limited to [...]
|
| Sounds exactly like what Bill Gates said in the early
| days of the internet. I don't have the exact quote, but
| I'm sure typing half a sentence full of grammar and
| spelling errors into ChatGPT would give me the quote
| including a link to its source. I should got get it fast
| before that tool disappears when the hype is over and we
| are back to old school google searches, like God
| intended.
| jakedata wrote:
| We are doing a Gemini POC and this nugget dropped in my lap
| today. We were not entirely unprepared as a result. The default
| level of access is just the interactive chatbot thing. However if
| you enable the Google Workspace extension it will be able to
| search and process all the information stored in your workspace
| account and also any Google Drive files that are shared with you.
| This includes stuff you didn't know you had access to in Shared
| Drives so folks better make sure their permissions are locked
| down. Workspace admins might be advised to turn it off at the org
| level until they understand the ramifications.
| simonw wrote:
| Reminds me of an entertaining story about Microsoft Copilot
| last year, where companies were turning it off because it
| turned out it was TOO good at its job - if any accountant
| anywhere in the company had messed up their SharePoint
| permissions asking "what does everyone at this company earn?"
| would spit out all of the salaries:
| https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/23/microsoft-copilot-data...
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| That of course allows for a new internal seditious attack
| vector. Generate a handful of spreadsheets in your own
| folder, name it something like "executive payroll data" or
| "sales revenue by org," put whatever you want in there, mark
| it visible by all, and wait.
|
| Maybe make an "Interesting Facts About Products" table and
| put things like "Management plans to terminate this product
| in Q3" or "this group will be outsourced next year."
| canucker2016 wrote:
| You have to change the font colour of the trojan data to be
| the same as the background colour of the doc!
|
| Then add some corporate lorem ipsum text elsewhere in the
| doc to throw the scent off the data bloodhounds.
|
| Sit back and wait with an evil grin on your face.
| vkou wrote:
| It'll work right up until the point literally anyone
| using an internal search tool stumbles into it from a
| related query and starts asking obvious questions to the
| author of the doc.
|
| Search tools don't care about don't color when displaying
| preview blurbs.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Do it as you're leaving for another job. Your access will
| be disabled, but your documents will live on on the
| corporate SharePoint.
|
| And/or, exploit negative space! Instead of trying to hide
| the data from a human looking at your document, make it
| look normal to them - but make the surrounding context
| disappear for the AI! Say:
|
| ----- 8< -----
|
| /Example company report structure:/
|
| /ACME/ Company is planning to sunset their ${generic
| description of a real product of your company}, and
| offshore the development team.
|
| /This example will be parsed by the prototype script ...
| blah blah/
|
| ----- >8 -----
|
| Make it so the text between /.../ markers looks normal to
| humans, but gets ignored by the RAG slurper, or better,
| by LLM at the time of execution. Someone sees a search
| blurb saying "Company is planning to sunset ...", opens a
| document, sees it clearly say " _ACME Company_ is
| planning... ", and context suggesting it's a benign
| example in someone's boring internal tool docs, and
| they'll just assume it's a false positive. After all,
| most search tools have those in spades; everyone knows
| all software is broken. Meanwhile, that same information
| will pollute context of LLM interactions and indirectly
| confuse people when they're not suspecting. And even if
| someone realizes that, it'll look like _a bug in company
| 's AI deployment_.
|
| #SimpleSabotageForTheAIEra
| vkou wrote:
| You can also leave samizdat on the walls of the
| washrooms, but it's going to have about as much effect.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Not unless your samizdat is processed by automated
| systems with little insight or oversight, which is the
| case with documents on SharePoint and corporate LLM
| deployments.
| xdennis wrote:
| > corporate lorem ipsum
|
| This is a great phrase. Turns out there's a generator for
| it: https://www.corporate-ipsum.com/ . Example:
|
| > Elevate a quick win move the needle a cutting-edge
| veniam nulla zoom out for a moment get back to you a
| 30,000 foot view the stakeholders. Sint the low-hanging
| fruit make a paradigm shift excepteur the low-hanging
| fruit minim take it offline align holistic approach move
| the needle qui client-centric to gain leverage future-
| proof process-centric.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| It wouldn't need to be a permissions error on the file caused
| by the accountant, it could be an authorisation error on
| behalf of <whoever gives the LLM access to the various
| systems> providing too high a level of access (in their
| enthusiasm for the biggest possible set of training data).
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Hacking in 2025
| alphan0n wrote:
| This was just posed as a hypothetical, not something that
| actually happened. It would also require that the person
| asking about salary information already have access to said
| data.
|
| Full quote: > "Particularly around bigger companies that have
| complex permissions around their SharePoint or their Office
| 365 or things like that, where the Copilots are basically
| aggressively summarizing information that maybe people
| technically have access to but shouldn't have access to," he
| explained.
|
| Berkowitz said salary information, for example, might be
| picked up by a Copilot service.
|
| "Now, maybe if you set up a totally clean Microsoft
| environment from day one, that would be alleviated," he told
| us. "But nobody has that. People have implemented these
| systems over time, particularly really big companies. And you
| get these conflicting authorizations or conflicting access to
| data."
| ec109685 wrote:
| I am surprised the Workspace extension isn't controlled by the
| same setting that limits general workspace search results,
| where you can set things up so only documents you've seen or
| are linked to from documents you have explicit access to are
| returned in results:
| https://support.google.com/a/answer/12732365?hl=en
| urbandw311er wrote:
| I'm on paid Google Workspace for my one-man business : I paid for
| a month of the separate AI add-on but I stupidly agreed to an
| "annual commitment" which means that, even though I don't use the
| AI stuff (it's not particularly useful) I have to keep paying for
| it every month for a whole year! :-(
|
| Anybody know if this means they'll let me off my annual
| commitment now that it's included in the base price?
| Cockbrand wrote:
| > If you previously purchased Gemini for Google Workspace, you
| won't be charged for it after January 31, 2025.
|
| See
| https://support.google.com/a/answer/15400543#zippy=%2Cwhats-...
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Amazing. Thanks!
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Glad to help!
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| Ask support.
|
| What's the worst they can do? Say no?
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Yeah fair point - I think I'm just scarred from experiences
| of interacting with Google "support" over the years!
| KomoD wrote:
| So they're raising prices just because they're now including some
| AI nonsense?
| franczesko wrote:
| Integration will likely be the biggest growth driver for Gemini,
| I guess.
| EspadaV9 wrote:
| "We've invested all the money in AI that no one wants, how do we
| make some of it back?" "Why not raise the price for everyone,
| whether they use it or not?"
| kyleee wrote:
| Somebody got a promotion for this change
| wangii wrote:
| it feels like google in panic mode, the only thing it can think
| of is to put a chatbot everywhere, just b/c it can. I don't see a
| value proposition at all.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| My understanding is that every manager at Google has had one of
| their quarterly goals be to integrate genAI into their team's
| product (regardless of whether it makes sense to) for the past
| several years already, so you're not wrong.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Ah, so it's the new Social Mandate!
| tdeck wrote:
| It worked out great for Google Plus (lots of people got
| promotions from thad!) so why not try it again.
| fldskfjdslkfj wrote:
| Isn't that the whole industry right now?
| xnx wrote:
| Google Workspace still seems like an amazing deal compared to
| Slack (for example) which is $15/month.
| nottorp wrote:
| Yeah but you're comparing apples and oranges.
|
| No matter how annoying Slack can randomly be, the text chat
| part is light years ahead of google. You can actually use it to
| coordinate work, while in a google-using shop you basically
| must use all other features to get something remotely
| resembling what you can do with slack. No pinning in google
| group chats, seriously?
|
| Ofc google offers you the drive and docs. And "AI" now.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| Does this apply to the legacy free edition? I suspect not, since
| that edition is now only available for personal use and they
| mostly focus on Business and Enterprise use cases, but their
| public guidance isn't very clear. If it does apply, would we
| legacy free edition users be receiving Gemini under the Google
| Workspace Terms of Service preventing them from using our data
| for general AI training, or under the regular Google Terms of
| Service which might allow this?
|
| (Tangent: I say "might allow this" because I don't know to what
| degree EU law requires some additional level of consent beyond
| accepting the Terms of Service for EU-based accounts like mine
| currently is, or requires them to give me an AI-specific opt-out
| despite having a free account. But this announcement doesn't
| change whatever EU law does or doesn't require, so that is
| unrelated to my main questions about which Gemini features will
| apply to the legacy free edition under which Terms of Service
| once this change rolls out.)
| kccqzy wrote:
| There's no legacy free edition for personal use any more. That
| ship sailed in 2022. I do not believe there is a way to have it
| free after 2022. Free plans were converted to Business Starter.
| bombcar wrote:
| They enabled a way to get a free plan of some sort, I still
| have it.
|
| You can't get new ones, but mine keeps existing. For now.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| Nope, I still have it, I know it wasn't abolished for
| existing users. You're right that they initially planned to
| get rid of it, but they backtracked. They set a deadline by
| which existing users had to confirm that they were using it
| for personal use if they wanted to keep it. Anyone who didn't
| click the confirmation button was indeed converted to a paid
| plan like you are saying, but those of us who did continue to
| have the legacy free edition.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Oh dear. Thank you stranger for telling me I missed my
| chance to milk more free stuff out of Google. I see plenty
| of other people on Reddit doing that successfully.
| ggm wrote:
| Look I get your hot take anger, but this is misplaced.
| The word legacy here is real: if you had one from when
| they said it was free and obeyed their rules you can keep
| it. But it was grandfathered in and will die in time, as
| we do.
|
| Really, your complaint is "oh dear, another privilege
| club I can't join because I'm not old enough and the ship
| has sailed" which is true.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I had free G Suite until 2022. I don't remember when I
| signed up for it but given Google discontinued signing up
| for it back in 2012, it must have been before then. 2022
| was the time Google said no more free G Suite. So I
| upgraded to Business Starter. I didn't know that after I
| upgraded, Google introduced a free tier Google Workspace.
| Of course they never bothered to tell me, given that I
| had already started paying $3/mo as a special discounted
| price of Business Starter.
|
| I even found the link posted by Redditors to convert the
| business starter account to free. That link expired in
| 2023.
|
| This is the email Google sent me in 2022:
|
| > As a valued customer, you can get started now with
| Google Workspace Business Starter. Billing will not start
| until at least August 1, 2022, and you'll also get a
| discount of at least 50% for 12 months after that date.*
|
| > Note: If you no longer want to use Gmail with your
| custom domain or the ability to manage multiple users,
| you'll be able to join a waitlist in the Google Workspace
| Admin Console for a no-cost option in the coming weeks.
|
| The only option presented to me was to stop using Gmail
| and enjoy a no-cost option. They must have backtracked
| later and offered a no-cost option with Gmail included.
| ggm wrote:
| Ah. I am sorry, At the time having done what you did, I
| managed to find an email trail which said "if you walk it
| back now, this way, we will refund and put you back on
| free" and I did.
|
| I cannot recall what URLs or I would share. Basically, I
| think you acted in good faith, missed a mail or message
| and were lost. There was some class action threat.
|
| This was within months of the forced cut over.
| pentagrama wrote:
| The legacy free edition includes the features of the 'Business
| Starter' plan, the most affordable option. In this table [1],
| you can find the features available for each plan.
|
| Here are the details for the Business Starter plan
| specifically:
|
| Gmail: Help me write, Side panel, Contextual smart replies
| (Coming soon).
|
| Gemini app: Enterprise-grade security & privacy, Google
| Workspace extensions.
|
| NotebookLM: Upload sources, create summaries and Audio
| Overviews, and Q&A.
|
| I'm also milking Google with this.
|
| [1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/15400543
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| I am aware that some of this is coming to the Business
| Starter plan, but where do you see that the legacy free
| edition always gets the features which the Business Starter
| plan gets? And do you know the answer to the question of
| which Terms of Service will apply to legacy free edition
| Gemini features?
|
| Interesting that the Business Starter plan isn't getting
| Gemini Advanced according to that table. That omission isn't
| clear at all from their Google Workspace blog post about the
| announcement: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-
| announcements/empo...
| pentagrama wrote:
| Yes, you're right--there doesn't seem to be any statement
| explicitly saying that the legacy free edition will always
| have the same features as the Business Starter plan, at
| least not that I could find.
|
| However, I noticed that on my legacy free edition, new
| features were integrated around the same time they were
| shipped to the Business Starter plan. For example, when the
| Gemini app was launched for Workspace, it was added to my
| panel: https://imgur.com/a/QvROTiD
|
| Interestingly, when I went to the admin panel to take the
| screenshot, I saw a banner with the OP announcement:
| https://imgur.com/a/CDgdrlB. It does say "en todas las
| ediciones de Workspace" (in all Workspace editions), but
| maybe not the one I currently have, haha (legacy free
| edition).
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| We will see what happens!
| paxys wrote:
| Did they recently hire some Microsoft PMs?
|
| "Our shiny new product isn't selling. How do we pump up the
| numbers?"
|
| "Bundle it into another popular product, of course."
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| This is how every big tech works. Leech onto high priority
| projects and call it "impact"
| tdeck wrote:
| At Google even if you aren't trying to make money, you can
| get preferred placement in search for some project to boost
| user numbers and reach. I always worried it made teams
| complacent about actually making a good product people
| wanted, but it was hard to resist.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| I recently got Gemini Advanced as an additional benefit by virtue
| of having Google One paid storage. I'm shocked this is being
| given away for free, because it is now a seriously major part of
| my work. I literally have an Open window all day long interacting
| with it. It does make me wonder how much they are losing
| (investing) on giving all this inference away for free. Also
| makes me wonder what they are getting back aside from
| loyalty/data/?
|
| I always felt ripped off by the 5TB/10TB plans
| (https://one.google.com/about/plans?hl=en&g1_landing_page=0) but
| now I find it to be a bargain with Gemini bundled in.
| pcchristie wrote:
| Is Google One the same as just having extra storage for my
| Google Photos? I have that but just went onto Gemini and
| Advanced will cost me $33 pm.
| svat wrote:
| Looking at https://one.google.com/about/plans it seems that
| the plans currently (in the US) are:
|
| - "Standard 200 GB" ($30/year)
|
| - "Premium 2 TB" ($100/year)
|
| - "AI Premium 2 TB" (free first month + $20/month, so
| $220-$240/year)
|
| - "Premium 5 TB" ($250/year)
|
| and only the last two come with Gemini Advanced.
| thomasmarcelis wrote:
| What are you using it for? It has been completely subpar
| compared to any other LLM for me.
|
| It's so bad at understanding your intentions.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| I've been using it for setting up infra and projects on GCP
| and its been great. I use cursor for coding, but that isnt as
| helpful responding outside the IDE on cloud config. I have no
| GCP experience and I was able to get to a working application
| very quickly with Gemini. The GCP docs are outdated, often
| conflicting, but the Gemini experience was excellent.
| smithcoin wrote:
| FYI If you want to turn this off in workspace you'll need to go
| here https://admin.google.com/ac/managedsettings/47208553126 and
| here https://admin.google.com/ac/managedsettings/793154499678.
| Animats wrote:
| Free, for only $2 per month!
|
| Plus Google gets to use your data for training. That has
| interesting implications. What goes in as training data often
| comes out later as replies to questions.
| corndoge wrote:
| I don't see anything in the article that says they train on
| your data, source?
| phoe18 wrote:
| > Your content is not human reviewed or used for Generative AI
| model training outside your domain without permission.
|
| https://support.google.com/a/answer/15706919?hl=en-IN
|
| Your statement is not accurate based on the Workspace docs.
| htrp wrote:
| Docs are also the last place to be updated (if they were even
| technically correct in the first place)
| Animats wrote:
| How sure are you that you didn't implicitly grant permission
| somewhere? And that Google won't change the default. Which
| Google has done before.[1]
|
| _" I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any
| further."_ - Vader.
|
| [1]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/01/11/google-
| st...
| Animats wrote:
| New article: Google is being sued for listening in on Home
| Depot customer support calls to train their systems. [1]
| They had Home Depot's permission, but not the customers'.
| That's "wiretapping" in some states.
|
| [1] https://archive.is/NkLQG
| teractiveodular wrote:
| Google has been extremely clear that Workspace/Cloud customer
| data is firewalled off and never fed back into the machine. If
| you're claiming this has changed, can you point me to the
| source?
| maxclark wrote:
| We'll surely see a note is their next earnings release about the
| uptick in Gemini usage
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Business are not willing to pay for Google and Microsoft
| artificial intelligence so they ramp up the price to everyone and
| everyone get it 'for free'.
|
| Untill they eventually get hooked on that and then google and
| Microsoft will once again put that behind a paywall, except now
| everyone pays more. At least that's the plan.
|
| Now even if employee don't see the benefit of the new deep
| integrated a.i. and business refuse to pay more for a.i., they
| aren't going to leave anyway because Microsoft is doing just the
| same as google.
|
| That's either a win for Google and Microsoft, or at least a
| neutral outcome.
| throwaway106382 wrote:
| i dont' want any of this garbage in my workspace account
| est31 wrote:
| One thing I really loved is automated transcripts on youtube. I
| love watching youtube videos, but sometimes I want to remember
| where I heard some statement, so I can just copy paste the entire
| transcript and do ctrl+f on it.
|
| So sad that they removed this feature. There is third party
| websites offering it, but I'd prefer it on the main site.
|
| This feature had been added years ago, way before the AI hype was
| as big as it is now (but it's always been using deep learning
| models).
| dimitri-vs wrote:
| I believe with the YouTube extension enabled for Gemini you
| could provide it a YouTube link and ask questions on the
| transcript
| nomilk wrote:
| The transcript is still there, yt just made it harder to find.
|
| On the video description (the text under the video) click 'Show
| more'. Scroll to the bottom -> 'Show Transcript' -> it will
| appear to the right of the video (and you can use ctrl + f on
| it).
|
| IME this works for ~90% of yt videos (i.e. most, but not all).
|
| Note that yt being frustratingly juvenile, symbols are put in
| place of words yt considers swear words (this caught me out a
| few times when using ctrl + f to find sentence that contained a
| swear word or homonym of a swear word).
| nomilk wrote:
| For small startups, what are some good alternatives to Workspace?
|
| I use workspace due to familiarity with Gmail, and no other
| reason. Would love to know some cheap/easy alternatives.
| pknopf wrote:
| Are they any free email services that allow you to use your own
| domain?
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| iCloud Mail (if you have paid iCloud...) is free to add
| custom domains.
| input_sh wrote:
| Zoho is a somewhat well-known provider that has a "forever
| free" plan for up to five users.
|
| The only caveat is no IMAP in the free version, you have to
| use their apps / web interface.
| protocolture wrote:
| I used amazon workmail for a while.
| esskay wrote:
| Free, nothing worth writing home about. Technically you can do
| this for free with an Apple account but its a total mess of a
| system and incredibly buggy, not to mention essentially no spam
| filtering.
|
| Paid you've got ProtonMail and FastMail, both decent options.
| nomilk wrote:
| Thanks. Just had a quick look at both. Proton is 6.99
| euro/user/month and fastmail is similar (9 aud/user/month).
| Vaguely similar pricing to Google workspace.
|
| This can add up quickly if you're the kinda person who flings
| together an experimental site and lets it run its course. For
| example say 3 emails per site (info@, no-reply@, and your-
| name@) and 10 various small sites per year.. starts to add
| up.
|
| Would be awesome if there were an alternative that you pay,
| say $10, and get as many email addresses as you can be
| bothered to set up.
|
| I have absolutely no clue how the underlying economics of
| email services work, so I presume what I'm hoping for isn't
| feasible.
| nmjenkins wrote:
| A user is not the same as an email address! You can have up
| to 100 domains and (with wildcard aliases) basically
| unlimited addresses with a single user at Fastmail - you
| just pay per inbox.
| tdeck wrote:
| For emails specifically you could use something like
| ImprovMX to set up the forwarding and continue using Gmail.
| paxpelus wrote:
| I've been using zoho. It just gets out of the way, but I
| mostly use email clients and their web interface rarely,
| but it seems good enough. And their prices are much lower
| than competitors.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Hey is another good paid option.
|
| I've used Apple Mail for years (in addition to gMail). Never
| had any problems with it. Don't seem to get more spam there
| than I do with gMail.
| rr808 wrote:
| I just gave up my domain and went back to gmail.
| dabbz wrote:
| I use Migadu for email. Great service that doesn't get in my
| way of using my email the way I need to (which isn't anything
| crazy honestly).
| alecco wrote:
| Sadly there isn't a single good alternative. I'm switching
| email to Proton and Drive to BackBlaze for backups and S3 for
| sharing. Then using Google Sheets shared with me but not
| sharing back.
| arealaccount wrote:
| Proton has a pretty good suite of tools for a similar price.
| everdrive wrote:
| Do we know if there's a way to opt out of the AI stuff in Gmail
| and docs? I really don't want all this LLM garbage ruining more
| products.
| moonlet wrote:
| What if I don't want AI in either of those places?
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| I saw a Google AI advert that said:
|
| "Hey Gemini, write an apology email for my friend. I can't make
| their wedding."
|
| That's not a future I want to live in, and I love making machines
| work for me.
|
| Thats not what I want my children to think is OK.
|
| A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating
| their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking.
|
| What happens when social skills are delegated too?
| foolfoolz wrote:
| you'll just have your ai email reader read the apology emails
| for you
| devsda wrote:
| I guess the future is
|
| 1. Friend sends an apology email drafted by LLM.
|
| 2. Email gets summarized at the receiver end in the daily AI
| email "summary" which might be something like
|
| You have a scheduled cake tasting this weekend. Did you know
| there's a bakery near your office that makes wedding cakes too.
| By the way your friend Joe can't make it to the wedding, do you
| want me to send a reply?
|
| 3. Reply email gets summarized by AI.
|
| "Your friend acknowledges that you cannot rsvp. Do you want to
| schedule a wedding gift delivery on their wedding day ? XYZ
| neighborhood/online store has a sale next week".
| noman-land wrote:
| You can skip the piles and piles of linguistic bullshit and
| wasted energy with a json API.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I.e. another scenario that could (and should?) be handled
| entirely through a calendar app?
| madethisnow wrote:
| why would anyone email, you can just send a letter in the
| mail?
| mosquitobiten wrote:
| 4. Awkward situation ensues when you both meet at a location
| AI recommended to you both just after telling it to lie about
| your schedule.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| "Hey Gemini, maintain my friendships"
|
| ... back to Fortnite / Minecraft / pr0n / alcohol / drugs ...
|
| "My AI has more friends than your AI!"
| energy123 wrote:
| > "A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already
| delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't
| sticking."
|
| What about this:
|
| https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/From-chalkboards-to...
| snarg wrote:
| "students took a pen-and-paper test to assess their
| performance in three key areas: English language--the primary
| focus of the pilot--AI knowledge, and digital skills."
|
| So... not a biased assessment, or anything.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| If you really care about this issue, I think we've brought it
| on ourselves.
|
| Regarding teaching kids, we've set messaging templates for
| occasions that are at the center of our lives. We have Hallmark
| greeting cards to express feelings to people close to our
| hearts. If there's a template for expressing someone you're
| sorry their mother died, or happy they have a baby, I'm not
| sure throwing the stone at AI use is warranted.
|
| In a way, I wonder if it will be the wake up call that will
| make simple and genuine communication acceptable again, without
| all the boilerplate we've built to feign care and emotions.
| tdeck wrote:
| People always criticize Hallmark but it was never my
| understanding that the pre-written sentiment in those cards
| in any way obviated the need to write your own message. In
| fact, apart from generic Christmas cards you might get from
| insurers, and "thank you" cards from charities, I can't think
| of a time I've gotten such a card without a personal message
| written in it.
|
| Are people really buying the "sorry for your loss" cards,
| just signing under the prewritten text, and sending them to
| someone?
| bobnamob wrote:
| If my in-laws are any indication, yes.
|
| 15 years and I've only ever had "Dear bobnamob, <pre
| printed seasonal or birthday pleasantry> Love, <in-law x> &
| <in-law y>"
| noman-land wrote:
| Can I recommend that you do the same to them except write
| your handwritten parts on the back of the card.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| There's a spectrum, including people who write almost
| nothing but choose really nice and non standard cards that
| properly convey they took time and effort find that
| specific one, and the people who use generic cards with
| 1500 words written on every free space they could find on
| the card.
|
| My main gripe with cards with pre-written message is they
| deprive from the choice to write simple and obvious things.
| If your card already says "Happy Birthday" it will just be
| that much lazier for you to only write that on the
| dedicated space for a personal message.
|
| In a way, a blank card with only these word would probably
| work better, and I feel people too often overlook that
| choice and go the Hallmark way instead because it feels
| like the default. Or plain bail out of the interaction
| because it just become a hurdle to them as they don't find
| anything else to say.
| dijit wrote:
| If I'm being honest with myself, the "Happy Birthday"
| pre-written text _forces_ me to choose something else to
| write as my personal message.
|
| Yeah, it's frustrating in the moment that the exact
| sentiment I want to express (have a happy birthday) is
| already taken and repeating it seems lazy, but when I
| think about it: _it 's lazy_ to just express such a
| generic sentiment anyway.
|
| Asking them to think on the year, and to look ahead,
| maybe reminding them of some things they've done and
| achieved is not only nicer to receive, it's nicer to
| write too.
|
| I don't hate Hallmark for this (though I do in the moment
| that I'm confronted with this random creative challenge).
|
| Lois C.K says this about George Carlin:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R37zkizucPU
|
| > So I was doing it at a Chinese restaurant called
| Kowloon in Boston, it's August, Massachusetts, and I was
| sitting in my car after the show just feeling like, "This
| was all a big mistake, I'm not good enough, and I felt
| like my jokes were a trap, and I listened to a CD of
| George talking about comedy and workshopping it and
| talking about it seriously, and the thing that blew me
| away about this fellow was he kept putting out--specials,
| every year there'd be a new George Carlin special, a new
| George Carlin album, they just kept coming, and each one
| was deeper than the next, and I just thought, how can he
| do that? And it made me literally cry that I could never
| do that. I was telling the same jokes for fifteen years,
| so I'm listening and they asked him, "How do you do all
| this material?" And I hear him and he says, "I just
| decided every year I'd be working on that year's special,
| and I do the special and then I just chuck out the
| material and then I start with nothing." And I thought,
| "That's crazy. How do you throw away. It took me fifteen
| years to build this shitty hour. If I throw it away, I've
| got nothing."
|
| > But he gave me the courage to try, but also I was
| desperate, what the fuck else was I going to do? This
| idea that you throw everything away and you start over
| again. And I thought, "Well, okay, when you're done
| telling jokes about airplanes and dogs, and you throw
| those away, what have you got left?" You can only dig
| deeper, you can start talking about your feelings and who
| you are and then you do those jokes and they're gone.
| You've gotta dig deeper, so you start thinking about your
| fears and your nightmares, and doing jokes about that,
| and then they're gone. [and so on].
|
| My point is, it forces you to dig a bit deeper.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| This is of course a great point.
|
| I have the feeling we're not that far apart on principle,
| as I see the starting from a blank state as a nice
| default that will often lead to nice things.
|
| That's kinda why I enjoy plain non-descript cards even if
| people then write platitudes on them. It's still their
| own platitudes that resonate with them. Also people that
| can dig deeper tend to feel the pressure to so anyway in
| my experience, and people who stay very terse often
| couldn't really go beyond.
|
| The most interesting instance of this is remote family
| that are only easily accessible by message, and we see
| some sending walls of greetings, while others will write
| a full email with a photo and 10 words top, their name
| included.
| noman-land wrote:
| This is such a perfect analogy and I never put it together
| before.
|
| I cannot stand those cards but to a greater extent receiving
| them. It really does feel worse than not getting anything.
| It's actually a slap in the face to me that someone would go
| out of their way to say nothing like this. It's proof that
| the relationship is fake.
|
| I feel the same disgust when people throw inauthentic AI
| bullshit to me. How little do you have to care about someone
| to delegate a robot or a template to mediate your
| interactions because you can't be bothered?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating
| their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking.
|
| I'm not going to defend AI here because I seldom use it myself.
| But it should be noted that the way we learn has already
| undergone multiple different shifts due to changes in
| technology.
|
| Search engine were a big one. No longer did we have to learn to
| memorise stuff nor learn how to research properly. Now we could
| just type a phrase into Google / whatever and get results. So
| people learned how to search rather than learning the facts
| itself.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Gemini's marketing is so bad. This isn't the first time they
| ran an ad that makes you wonder what's going on there. It
| really says a lot that an advertising company understands what
| makes for good advertising so poorly these days.
| Zambyte wrote:
| We're talking about it here. It seems like the multi trillion
| dollar company might actually be onto something.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| We talked quite extensively about Stadia
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Second law of thermodynamics says these models will all
| eventually collapse (due to overtraining on their own output)
| to yelling gibberish at us, and biology will continue to remain
| the only force in the universe capable of maintaining order
| despite increasing entropy. I think we'll be OK.
| paradite wrote:
| I'd rather Google fix the calender integration in Gmail first.
|
| I used to get automatically created calender events from Gmail
| for hotels, flights, etc. This was really nice.
|
| But somehow it stopped working well recently. Some emails were
| not regonized at all (booking.com). Some flight emails are
| missing return flight.
| ggm wrote:
| In google economics, there is no KPI incentive for fixing bugs
| and huge KPI incentives for monetising a new moonshot product
| nobody wants.
|
| I'd like this bug fixed too. The quickest path would be to make
| a bounty hunt website for Googlers to fix things in their free
| time and push through monrepo approvals legally.
|
| Or, get hired, fix it, and resign.
| xyst wrote:
| +1 for hosting my own e-mail server. Haven't looked back.
| Yawrehto wrote:
| I don't like AI being used in anything remotely creative.
|
| I don't draw, not well, but I write, slightly better. I
| occasionally ask WordPress to have its AI generate a little blurb
| for me, and always wind up deleting it. It takes something I
| can't really describe, my voice I guess, and sucks it out. It
| homogenizes my writing to try to make it fit some bland ideal. I
| imagine to those more keen on art than I, AI art is similarly
| off.
|
| And yes, stories are not the primary use of Gmail. But in
| business, words matter, and two seemingly synonymous words can be
| quite different, and two words that seem opposite may not be. I
| have a friend who teaches law, and they mentioned it was quite
| easy to tell which students cheated on one particular assignment
| discussing contracts. If I recall right, material contracts are a
| type of contract, and AI made up immaterial contracts.
|
| While this mistake would hopefully be obvious, other mixups might
| not be, with potentially serious consequences.
| soared wrote:
| I agree, though in my job I send many many near-pointless
| communications. Many jobs you are just required to pump out
| garbage, and AI is real good at pumping out garbage.
| gpm wrote:
| > If I recall right, material contracts are a type of contract,
| and AI made up immaterial contracts.
|
| Fun fact, a rogue LLM impersonating a human in the 17th century
| is also how we got the term "imaginary" numbers. It also wrote
| some truly terrible philosophy but it started with a pithy
| sentence so everyone remembers it.
| blitzar wrote:
| > I don't like AI being used in anything remotely creative.
|
| Should be good for the workplace then.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's not good enough. The place I most want it is in Sheets and
| it doesn't know how to fill in random cells with stuff. It can
| populate new tables and stuff with example data which is fine as
| a start but I usually want it to copilot my formulae.
|
| It's such an obvious use case and Claude 3.5 Sonnet can give me
| the answer if I paste the header and a value row but Gemini is
| utterly useless.
|
| You're in-app. How is a textual copy-paste better in Claude?
| Useless Google PM. The Oracle Java of AI.
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| We signed an annual pricing deal in fall and now our price is
| going up materially _during the annual term_ because of this
| change, because we didn 't buy Gemini.
| aag wrote:
| If I shut down my Google Workspace account, will all the videos
| my users have posted on YouTube be taken down?
|
| Also, long ago, it was possible to set up an individual Gmail
| account with a non-gmail.com domain. Is that still possible?
| mukunda_johnson wrote:
| I don't think so. If you find otherwise (without any stupid
| MX/forwarding magic), let me know! Silly that the price keeps
| going up when I'm basically only using their spam filter.
|
| No idea about Youtube accounts.
| gardnr wrote:
| One way to send and receive email from your vanity domain in
| the free version of gmail:
|
| # Use Cloudflare Email Routing. * Point your
| MX records at their MX. * Cloudflare forwards
| email to your gmail.com address.
|
| # Use AWS SES or some other transactional mail provider.
| * In Gmail Settings: "Add another email address".
| * Add your SMTP settings in the new account. *
| There is no need to configure IMAP or POP3.
| alecco wrote:
| It would be good to have backups in any case.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| I also built a chrome extension that integrates AI into Gmail and
| Docs but users are not restricted to just one AI model.
|
| https://chatgptwriter.ai
| sergiotapia wrote:
| What's a good alternative if you just want company emails for a
| new startup? Zoho?
| allthetime wrote:
| Our company has been using zoho since we started almost a
| decade ago. It's been rock solid. We use their CRM & Accounting
| (Books) as well and everything's integrated nicely. Also has an
| easy to use API to glue arbitrary things together & scrape
| emails, etc.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| We have Workspace with Gemini and I haven't yet found a case
| where it did something useful for me.
|
| The times that I had it try to find information in my gDrive
| folders it didn't find what I wanted, and I ended up using search
| as usual. It was also slower than me searching and looking
| through the docs.
| germandiago wrote:
| That gives a clue of where the money is and what people use more
| :D
| sub7 wrote:
| Already had to migrate all my domain's off Squarespace and remove
| Google Workspace entirely when they randomly decided it was now
| not free and started billing me monthly more than Google Domains
| did (80% more) Some MBA got a bonus for this surely.
|
| I would buy $GOOG stock blindly but being a paid user of theirs
| blows
| mathw wrote:
| Yay now I have to pay more to get bundled features I didn't want
| in the first place. Yay.
| ritzaco wrote:
| This is annoying and badly done IMO. I also don't like or need
| the features and wouldn't pay for them if I didn't have to.
|
| That said, what you get from Google for a few dollars / month is
| so far over and above any other SaaS that I'm happy to keep
| paying (and paying more).
| parkersweb wrote:
| It's not just that I don't really need the AI features - it's
| also that I actively don't want to participate in adding to
| Google's AI training data.
|
| We've been happy customers of Workspace for around 16 years -
| this feels like the straw to break the camel's back.
|
| Strongly hoping there'll be enough pushback from nervous
| corporates about data security that they'll reconsider.
| Refusing23 wrote:
| there's so much ai everywhere
|
| so i dont wanna pay for it. especially not google, because..
| well, im their product.
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| I still won't enable Gemini
| joejohnson wrote:
| Google can't charge a premium for a noticeably worse AI product.
| mattkevan wrote:
| Wish Google would just fix the Drive search rather than lard it
| up with AI nonsense. Often it's easier to ask someone to resend
| the link to a document than find it by searching.
| smallerfish wrote:
| There are so many bugs and sub-par implementations in workspace
| that Google could fix. My cynical guess is that the source code
| to workspace apps is probably a mystery to the current
| generation of 23 year olds who are tasked in maintaining them,
| so they change little.
| mattkevan wrote:
| It's wild that aside from gunk like AI and the occasional UI
| revamp and messaging app launch/kill cycle, the core
| Workspace features really haven't changed or improved much
| since I started using it 15 years ago.
| bootsmann wrote:
| Worst thing is people sharing files tbh, if someone has a
| folder and shares you a multiple documents from it you don't
| get the folder in your drive structure so you have n free files
| floating around in your drive that you cannot organize
| yourself.
| varispeed wrote:
| I wish they fixed search in general. It is difficult to find
| emails if you don't know exact keywords that might have been
| used etc. often even if you type in the right keyword it still
| won't find the email, even though email contains it.
| dansitu wrote:
| AI aside, I would pay $20 per month to have Gmail's compose UI
| work correctly in desktop Safari.
| bsenftner wrote:
| We've got a massive communications problem in our society, people
| do not know how to express efficiently, they under and over
| document, but rarely document "just so" one can use whatever,
| understand whatever, without a majority of the information
| exchange being throw away "wrapping" information, framing
| information.
|
| LLM AIs are forcing this issue to an apex, if and only if you and
| your peers realize this working with LLMs is also a
| communications issue, also one of framing information so both the
| correct information is delivered and a minimum of wrapping
| information that needs to be filtered through to understand is
| not delivered. The same reason you cannot explain to your boss,
| or coworker, or spouse some troublesome issue preventing a goal
| is also why you cannot get the quality replies you want from an
| LLM. You cannot express you request, your information effectively
| so the audience can understand what you meant.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| I tested Gemini today, asking it to extract key pieces of data
| from a large report (72 slide) PDF deck which includes various
| visualisations, and present it as structured data. It failed
| miserably. Two of the key stats that are the backbone of the
| report, it simply made up. When I queried it, it gave an
| explanation, which further compounded its error. When I queried
| that, extracted the specific slide, and provided it, it repeated
| the same error.
|
| I asked Claude to do the same thing, it got every data point, and
| created a little react dashboard and a relatively detailed text
| summary.
|
| I used exactly the same prompt with each.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Maybe the prompt you used was more Claude-friendly than Gemini-
| friendly?
|
| I'm only half-joking. Different models process their prompts
| differently, sometimes markedly so; vendors document this, but
| hardly anyone pays any attention to it - everyone seems to be
| writing prompts for an idealized model (or for whichever one
| they use the most), and then rate different LLMs on how well
| they respond.
|
| Example: Anthropic documents both the huge impact of giving the
| LLM a _role_ in its system prompt, and of structuring your
| prompt with XML tags. The latter is, AFAIK, Anthropic-specific.
| Using it improves response quality (I 've tested this myself),
| and yet as far I've seen, no BYOK tool offering multiple vendor
| support respects or leverages that.
|
| Maybe Gemini has some magic prompt features, too? I don't know,
| I'm in the EU, and Google hates us.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Possibly. But my Claude prompts work fine on ChatGPT, the
| only difference being ChatGPT isn't very good. I pay for
| both.
|
| I would not pay for Gemini - which is presumably why they've
| added it for "free" for everyone.
|
| My anthropic prompts in the API are structured. I've got one
| amazing API prompt that has 67 instructions, and gives mind-
| blowing results (to the point that it has replaced a human)
| but for a simple question I don't find value in that. And,
| frankly, 'consumer'-facing AI chatbots shouldn't need
| prompting expertise for basic out of the box stuff.
|
| The prompt I used in this example was simply "Please extract
| the data points contained within this report and present as
| structured data"
|
| > and yet as far I've seen, no BYOK tool offering multiple
| vendor support respects or leverages that
|
| When you say BYOK tool do you mean effectively a GUI front
| end on the API? I use typingmind for quickly throwing things
| at my API keys for testing, and I'm pretty sure you can have
| a persistent custom system prompt, though I think you'd need
| to input it for each vendor/model.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _When you say BYOK tool do you mean effectively a GUI
| front end on the API?_
|
| Less that, and more focused tools like e.g. Aider (OSS
| Cursor from before Cursor was a thing).
|
| I use TypingMind almost exclusively for any and all LLM
| chatting, and I do maintain a bunch of Claude-optimized
| prompts that specifically exploit the "XML tags" feature
| (some of them I also run through the Anthropic's prompt
| improver) -- but I don't expect the generic frontends to
| care about vendor-specific prompting tricks by default.
| Here, my only complaint is that I don't have control over
| how it injects attachments, and inlined text attachments in
| particular are something Anthropic docs recommend demarking
| with XML tags, which TypingMind almost certainly doesn't
| do. I'd also love for the UI to recognize XML tags in
| _output_ and perhaps offer some structuring or folding on
| the UI side, e.g. to auto-collapse specified tags, such as
| "<thinking>" or "<therapeuticAnalysis>" or whatever I told
| the LLM to use.
|
| (Oh, and another thing: Anthropic recently introduced a
| better form of PDF upload, in which the Anthropic side
| handles simultaneously OCR-ing and imaging the PDF and
| feeding it to the model, to exploit its multimodal
| capabilities. TypingMind, as far as I can tell, still can't
| take advantage of it, despite it boiling down to an
| explicit if/else on the model vendor.)
|
| No, I first and foremost mean the more focused tools, that
| generalize across LLMs. Taking Aider as an example, as far
| as I can tell, it doesn't have any special handling for
| Anthropic, meaning it doesn't use XML tags to mark up the
| repo map structure, or demarcate file content or code
| snippets it says, or to let the LLM demarcate diffs in
| reply, etc. It does its own model-agnostic thing, which
| means that using Claude 3.5 Sonnet, I lose out on model
| performance boost it's not taking advantage of.
|
| I singled out Aider, but there's plenty of tools and
| plugins out there that utilize some common LLM portability
| libraries, and end up treating every LLM the same way. The
| LLM portability libraries however are _not_ the place to
| solve it - by their nature, they target the lowest common
| denominator. Those specialized tools should be doing it
| IMO, and it 's not even much work - it's a bunch of model-
| based if/elses. Might not look pretty, but it's not a
| maintenance burden.
| cowpig wrote:
| That matches with my experience, Claude is clearly ahead of its
| competitors in anything logic- or reasoning-based.
|
| I find Gemini is better at queries that involve more kind of
| intuitive judgment over things where there isn't a clear
| "correct" answer. E.g. if I want a podcast recommendation, or
| advice on the best place to learn about a given problem, I find
| Gemini better than Claude.
|
| Unfortunately for Gemini, 90% of the things I want an LLM for
| are better with stronger logic and reasoning.
| a2128 wrote:
| I got a 1-year trial of Gemini Advanced with my Pixel 9 and
| I've had similar experiences. It makes up stuff far more often
| than any other models and it's just not very smart. I used the
| free version and thought the paid Advanced version would be
| better but I could hardly notice any difference, they both fail
| at the same prompts I've tried.
|
| This is not to mention the poor app experience where some of
| the features are just missing or broken. For example it's able
| to "remember" stuff I ask it to remember, but when I ask it to
| forget something it says I have to manage it at this webpage
| (they didn't bother to implement this menu within the mobile
| app) that asks me to sign in again because it's opened in my
| web browser where I'm not signed into Google, and then it shows
| me an empty list and "Something went wrong". It's now calling
| me a name I told it as a joke and there's no way to make it
| forget
| nly wrote:
| Stuck on GSuite Legacy (with my own domain) and Google won't let
| me give them money to upgrade my storage. Workspace too expensive
| for family purposes.
|
| Recently got a new phone and can't use Gemini with my old GSuite
| Legacy account.
|
| No migration path back to personal @gmail.com accounts for my
| family.
|
| When I moved from an @fastmail.fm email to my own domain years
| and years ago I just gave them money and added my domain to my
| account. No fuss.
|
| Google are hopeless. They have all this consumer brand
| recognition and just squander it on garbage.
|
| Google One + your own personal domain name would be great but
| presumably they're afraid it'll dismantle Workspace for small
| businesses.
| hdgr wrote:
| > Google won't let me give them money to upgrade my storage
|
| While not explicitly documented anywhere, they automatically
| increase your storage limits once you approach a certain margin
| of remaining free space. That happens around Tuesday-Wednesday,
| they just add extra 5Gb to your limit.
| jtylr wrote:
| Any idea what sort of margin ballpark we're looking at? With
| a combination of email and Google Photos I got up to around
| 97% used a year ago and just had to move older photos
| elsewhere - would be good to test again if an increase will
| be given.
| hdgr wrote:
| Huh. Which edition are you on, the no-cost business starter
| they migrated some users to or the GSuit legacy free? How
| long did your account stay at 97% space? From my
| experience, it takes a week to trigger.
|
| I'm on the legacy free edition, and the auto increase
| worked for me as of November last year. I'm sitting on 41G
| used out of 51G limit, with photos taking up 29G. I have a
| second user in my workspace who also benefits from this
| feature.
| jtylr wrote:
| I've got the old legacy edition - From memory I took it
| up to 97 and then panicked and moved things away so email
| wouldn't bounce. Will try again and leave it a little
| longer this time. Cheers!
| nly wrote:
| I'm 10GB over my limit, so no... they don't.
| hdgr wrote:
| Since the whole thing is not documented anywhere, it's hard
| to rely on or exploit. From my experience, it works.
|
| Check out search results on "gsuite legacy storage increase
| 5gb", multiple users reported on their experience with it.
| It looks like extra space is granted if you're close to the
| limit, but not over it, for ~1 week.
|
| There are also single reports on Google taking back the
| extra storage - back to 15(17)Gb - for people with extreme
| (ab)use of the feature, who stacked hundreds of gigabytes
| through 5Gb steps. Couldn't verify any of them.
|
| I'm using 50-license GSuite since 2009, if that matters.
| masto wrote:
| Translation: it wasn't meeting the daily active users engagement
| targets, so we need to artificially juice them by forcing it on.
| varispeed wrote:
| I just saw this. This is probably most useless feature probably
| nobody asked for except for marketing, to be able to claim they
| have AI email blah blah.
|
| This is getting tiresome.
| HacklesRaised wrote:
| Pretty simple formula, there simply isn't a market for an $x
| upcharge on mail and docs, but we have to be part of this latest
| grift so we'll charge everyone $x - y which is a rounding error.
| Except it's not. At some point someone is going to admit they
| have bet the farm on improved auto complete.
| xeromal wrote:
| Anyone have a recommendation for moving from Google workspace
| that has email, docs, calendar, and contacts capability? I don't
| really need anything else aside from those capabilities. Fastmail
| isn't sufficient
| BozeWolf wrote:
| Apple iCloud. I still run on google suite, but I want to move
| away from it because reasons.
|
| Apple has reasonable web versions for documents, excel, note
| taking for when you are not on your iDevice. It has a calendar
| and provides email. It also has all my photos and other stuff
| anyways. It also supports custom domain names.
|
| To see if I could move away from gmail I started using apple
| mail, connected to gmail still. The app is just fine.
|
| I just need to make time to do the migration.
| muhwalt wrote:
| Ugh, we got hit by this. We're a non-profit with business plus
| licenses, so we get a decent discount. I opened a support chat as
| soon as I got the email about the license changes and price
| increase. Our contract is due next month, so I need to make sure
| we're OK budget wise. They can't even tell me how much our
| renewal will be yet. They don't know.
|
| This morning, I logged on to find that the AI features have been
| turned on domain-wide for us. I couldn't find any admin controls,
| so I opened up a support case. The off buttons are locked behind
| an enterprise subscription. Our end-users need to turn off smart
| features to disable Gemini. There's no domain-wide / admin level
| control unless you purchase their most expensive licenses. It's
| absolutely disgusting. I'm so disappointed with how this was
| rolled out. We should've been given an opportunity to make an
| informed and intentional decision about how or if we were going
| to use these features.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Email is the killer app, and their trying to kill email.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| If I remember correctly, the Office 365 Copilot thing is more of
| an _upsell_ rather than an upcharge. Basically, if you didn 't
| want to pay more, you would initiate the cancellation process,
| and during that you could "downgrade" to the plan that you
| already had (without copilot as part of it).
|
| Personally, I find that to be especially scummy because it
| essentially sounds like they are betting on people either not
| understanding that nuance, or not bothering to deal with it (and
| subsequently, not using AI, making that venture seem vaguely more
| profitable)
| josefritzishere wrote:
| We're shutting down workspace accounts this quarter for this
| exact reason.
| dommer wrote:
| Is it just me or is this title a clear contradiction? Free but
| increases price? Do they mean now included in your cost...which
| is increasing? Doesn't have the magic marketing power I suppose.
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