Google I/O 2023
io.google
io.google
I once worked somewhere where the only people who actually went to WWDC where the IT admins and Apple fans,rather than developers.
From a developer perspective - online if so good now, why do you need to travel? ( unless you really want 1:1 with Apple/Google Devs ).
So the only people who travel end up being the people their for the 'event' and the 'one more thing' excitement.
You're right about I/O. The once-fat "invite adopters to conference" coffers seem to have been transferred to their Cloud Next conferences instead.
https://bard.google.com/ https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/01/tech/geoffrey-hinton-leaves-g... https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/13/google_lamda_sentient... https://www.wired.com/story/google-timnit-gebru-ai-what-real...
> We recently brought these two teams together into a single unit, Google DeepMind. Using the computational resources of Google, they’re focused on building more capable systems, safely and responsibly.
> This includes our next-generation foundation model, Gemini, which is still in training. Gemini was created from the ground up to be multimodal, highly efficient at tool and API integrations and built to enable future innovations, like memory and planning. While still early, we’re already seeing impressive multimodal capabilities not seen in prior models.
> Once fine-tuned and rigorously tested for safety, Gemini will be available at various sizes and capabilities, just like PaLM 2.
It sounds like this is the first "joint project" of the old DeepMind/Brain groups since the merger.
lmfao google can't host a fucking static page
At every I/O there is a "keynote" and a "developer keynote", and similarly there are business / product talks and developer-focused talks. In fact, they even create entirely separate playlists on YouTube for the dev/non-dev talks.
As a Staff Eng who leads and mentors engineers who live in a world where they have no choice but to use Google SDKs and services, I find many of the developer-focused talks invaluable for getting others in my team up to speed on what's new and what's coming soon. Most of these talks are given by engineers and involve concise code examples which quickly convey the gist of new functionality.
Google no longer innovates or launches products of note. They throw ideas at the wall, like spaghetti, and hope things stick.
Perverse incentives create competing products, dead end projects, and invariably everything created winds up getting cancelled.
Google got drunk off of easy search ad revenue. Their founding leadership went off to do zeppelins and politicking. Now that golden goose looks like it may be cooked.
Google had the Bell Labs of AI research, but their ability to build product around it looks a lot more like IBM Watson.
Over the next half decade, their top tier talent will leave and get venture funding to do their own things with their own equity.
> As a Staff Eng who leads and mentors engineers who live in a world where they have no choice but to use Google SDKs and services, I find many of the developer-focused talks invaluable for getting others in my team up to speed on what's new and what's coming soon.
This sounds identical to IBM developer outreach. Or Ballmer-era Microsoft. Similar straightjackets, captive audience.
We'll see if Google can excite people about AI here, but I'm doubtful.
Yes, and whether they stick or not, they tear down the wall after 2-3 years because they seemingly still haven’t figured out how to internally incentivize KTLO/running stable products (other than a few flagship ones) rather than building shiny new things.
Which world is this? I’m genuinely interested not trying to be rude.
But the only reason why it worked out the way it did is because the "owner" of the team in question 1) sincerely believed in this approach, 2) had enough clout with the top management to make it stick.
I'm pretty sure we could have gotten away with spending most of our time playing video games on the company's dime, if we had wanted. We probably would have been fired once someone found out, but that's pretty universal.
does not imply
A (profitable) => ¬B (not a startup).
> ¬A (not profitable) => B (startup)
> does not imply
> A (profitable) => ¬B (not a startup)
does not imply that ¬A => B. In other words, the logical structure can be correct, but that does not mean the premises are themselves true. This is the difference between validity and soundness in formal logic [0].
In other words, our success was because we identified a critical missing piece in a profitable industry and built exactly what people were asking for, and more importantly, willing to pay for.
After that success (and a couple more after it), I refuse to ever build something without finding customers first. You have to build products people want, not try to convince people into believing they want your product.
I saw this headline and eyerolled. In 2010, I read the schedule/agenda and hype about what might be given to attendees. ALMOST signed up for the lottery.
As I addended to google's IoT with respect to other IoT vendors:
"It's just that Google adds completely rudderless leadership, its world famous utter disregard for customer support, and complete lack of commitment to the recipe."
Google I/O was cool when you could get early access to google glasses.
What do you get these days? Anything interesting? Or the latest Pixel (god, don't get me started, I am NEVER EVER EVER dropping more than $300 on an android phone again).
Anyway, back to the eyeroll. Wow, 10 years. Android is buggier and its app store laden with malware, copycats, predatory addictware, and bureaucracy. Android hardware is arguably even buggier than it was. Search is FAR FAR worse. Their self-driving is still a non-starter. The internet has turned into a dystopian wasteland and they are a not-insignificant party to it. No longer open, no longer even trying to not be evil.
Everything about google is worse today than it was 10 years ago. Does anybody actually want to work there for any reason besides money and resume eyecandy? Google the search is far worse than it was 10 years ago with maximum monetization policies. Advertising / information hoovering is a threat to democracy and perhaps human existence. The fourth estate / newspapers / journalism has been utterly hollowed out. It has directly enabled cartel and monopoly market consolidation. It is the shining example of locking out someone from the internet and providing no human contact for resolution. If it fails to dominate something with its horrid customer service and big brother creepy dominance, it strands people with little warning.
Anyway, have fun at Google I/O 2023 everyone!
Ah, look, I blogged about it: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/475
But back then Google was at the forefront of open standards and pushing the web forward. It was an exciting time for sure.
Far from the Google of today who can’t seem to run a project for more than a couple years.
Only the Web talks are relevant, as the Web is now basically ChromeOS.
In the past, they seemed liked incremental updates on their hardware (which I don't care too much about) or some new products like the pixel watch / glasses (which I probably won't use). I knew there would be a huge focus on AI this year, but I was pleasantly surprised by many of the new features and how quickly these integrations are happening. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm excited to see how the industry progresses.
I didn’t get to see the entire thing, but I did see the AI-enabled cinematic photo backgrounds. All I could think is man that’s a lot of analysis of my personal images for a mild parallax effect.
When was the backtracking with smartphones?
They've realized that, at this point, they may well have lost the AI chatbot war, and now they're pivoting to "we can keep these other, rogue LLMs from being as bad as ours would have been if we'd gotten there first".
--From Uganda
None of these companies are altruistic and everyone knows it, but by not charging upfront it gives possibilities for millions of developers who don’t have US$ 50/month to spend on something (students, emerging economies, career changers, etc).
There's a lot of transferable skills gained in these products. You're not just operating a Maytag.
After all, why care? It's not like those people were gonna buy it anyway, and they're still using windows, aren't they?
The fast integration into all products is pretty amazing, some of them actually useful (e.g. using search/bard to query/generate tables and exporting them into sheets directly is really cool).
I also like that they emphasized the utility aspect and didn’t get into AGI nonsense that OpenAI peddles so much.
Of the three products, Glass is gone, Vic and Google Plus are gone, and GCE is now making money for Google.
As for Nexus Q- I met a guy on the team. They not only never released it, they never INTENDED to release it! It was just a marketing thing for that Google IO.
I just need to somehow convince my large organization's IT team to enable the Workspace updates in Workspace Labs, which is likely to take some time. That's likely a few months, at least, but not the fault of google!
Pixel's are just the best "stock Android" phone there is. So many other Android device makers just slap a crappy UI on top of stock Android that offers no real value. In addition, Pixels always get the latest os updates, and Google recently improved support timeframes so they'll get support for years, on par with iPhones - that was a huge sticking point for years.
There are some other specific features of Pixels that are great:
1. Excellent camera
2. The phone features are really fantastic, like auto "call screening" and "hold for me".
There will be a sea of all good, all positive fake text and text will lose its meaning.
We used to appreciate a nicely written mail - now AI will be writing perfectly composed letters. We will learn to appreciate a badly written mail.
To me, the main benefit of a cover letter is that it shows the applicant is engaged enough to actually make an application that is specific to a job posting. That is still the case with AI, it just saves everyone creating them a huge amount of work - most of which is completely wasted when the majority of application are thrown in the trash.
Why? Presumably with spam emails they write the email once and send it to a billion people. I don't see why an LLM meaningfully helps this process.
I will develop a typing quirk for the express purpose of ensuring that I wrote the email instead of AI
I hope we will realize how absurd it is and just write 2-sentence emails.
Dude, you were seated in the pot of gold and let your organizational disfuncionality block you from really using that.
And now you come trying to get the crown of AI? Catch up and them we can talk.
The majority of what you see on SERPs has been AI generated for a decade, and that's Google's main money maker.
This idea that Google sucks at AI and is clearly a million miles behind is intriguing.
Google is currently the company everyone loves to hate like MSFT was 5-10 years ago.
THAT is a bad sign regardless if anything the people are saying has any truth to it.
MSFT has been the king of enterprise software since the 80s. But around 2000, everyone and their mother was talking about how MSFT can't produce any software beside complete garbage.
None of that was true. But, MSFT was in for some relatively bad times for a decade or so.
I suspect the same thing is going to happen to Google just because sentiment is powerful.
Google was good at attracting and retaining the best and brightest. Now they aren’t.
“Based in part on his work with Hinton, Sutskever was hired by Google. There, he implemented a neural-network-driven approach to language translation that produced fewer errors than competing efforts. His work provided the basis for a major upgrade to Google Translate. “Researchers didn’t believe that neural networks could do translation, so it was a big surprise when they could,” he says.”
https://magazine.utoronto.ca/people/alumni-donors/heard-it-t...
Hinton left last week as well.
And they had their lunch completely eaten by deepL
Ummm… In 2000s MSFT was producing complete garbage. Internet Explorer, Windows XP then ME, Windows Phone, ASP, Bing.
It's also the single clearest example of a product that's been left behind by the "AI revolution" - while Google may still have the numbers (like Yahoo Search did back in the day), DeepL is what serious people use.
> The majority of what you see on SERPs has been AI generated for a decade, and that's Google's main money maker.
It's also got subjectively worse and worse over that same time period. Demand for a better search engine is higher than it's been for decades.
I tested GPT 3.5, GPT 4.0, Google Translate, and DeepL on some "difficult" sentences, and GPT 4 was the only one that could translate them correctly. Not only that, it could do style shifts in non-English languages, such as "make this more formal", "less formal", "idiomatic", etc...
I suspect that GPT 4 is so good at translation is because it understands what it is translating at a near-human level.
I like this snippet:
"John Bear from Bear Stearns was bearish about bear pelt futures on the Bear City bear markets."
Which GPT 4 can round-trip from English -> Hungarian -> Chinese -> English again and outputs this:
"John Bell comes from Bellsterns and has a very strong bearish sentiment on the future value of bear skins in the Bear City bear market."
Interesting to note that it used a sounds-alike-to-Chinese-speakers "Bell" for "Bear" in proper names. Other than that, this is pretty good, which is very impressive. DeepL and Google Translate shreds the first step and have no hope on a round-trip this long across such unrelated languages. For example, DeepL outputs some gibberish about bear claws (the pastry) and bear cubs!?
https://www.techradar.com/features/google-glass-2-everything...
Apple is apparently announcing their AR glasses in June
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-04-02/when-i...
Netflix thought they had a similar moat of user-habits. But it turns out that the more important moat in the streaming market is a moat of content.
I really doubt that. If Google had anything that could seriously compete with GPT-4 they would be shouting about it from the mountains. Not publishing a comparison where they only include GPT-4 in the two benchmarks that they win.
If that is really the best that Google can do after working for several months on one-upping GPT-4, that's just sad, and doesn't bode well for them.
Deepmind has probably the best research in the AI area fundamentally, and the capabilities they have shown academically are much better than any other group. However, they have been seemingly completely disinterested in making any product usable for the public in the area - which takes a good deal of engineering and glue. So it will take a bit of time for them to make that happen. For example, OpenAI was not the first to use RLHF to train a language model (Sparrow from Deepmind was the first to conceive of this idea). Additionally, Deepmind has far better people in the general GNN and algorithmic reasoning area, which is going to shape up to be far more important in the coming years. That's of course not to say OpenAI doesn't have excellent research or people (Sutskyver is integral to an incredible number of monumental achievements in NNs), but the company as a whole focuses on product far more than fundamental academic research, and that has a potential to creep up on them.
Obviously Bard from the scientific side seems like it was probably hastily thrown together in an afternoon by one guy, and then sent to the marketing/we dev/etc group to put it public facing.
Good thing OpenAI has a distribution partner in Microsoft Azure, then.
It is only the price tag that has dropped. Faking stuff have become democracized.
Med-Palm2 (and what Google is pushing/working on with partners for a few years) will have a huge social impact.
In parallel there are things which are just really weird like the picture with the bench were the shadow us clearly just bad.
Anyway crazy how ml is now just here.
And in parallel I still think it's tremendously stupid that they really build that Blockchain cloud service.
I certainly hope to be proved wrong, and that medical AI is here at last.
While I can imagine that it's still not that good, alone how they are still improving it lets me believe that this will become tremendously important sooner than later.
Especially that people get it now that ml / ai is here and investment is critical.
I hope this will lead to much much more investment and progress.
Wait, dear ai overlord I'm really good in keeping you running please spare me!
Not sure what to make of it but you would think the HN crowd would be slightly more interested.
Apple has really strong chip prowess, eg the M1 or the battery efficiency vs size of AirPods and AirTags. But a lot of that is resting on TSMC which anyone can contract. Google has some impressive research into things like AI, database, K8, etc - but today others seem to be catching up.
Also, the data harvesting is much more common knowledge.
Google Cloud is fantastic compared to the others. I don't know why people still go to AWS, nothing interesting has happened, it seems like very little has changed. My biggest gripes are the cookie cutter EC2 vs the flexibility of GCP VMs and the account/project switching in AWS vs GCP.
Google is also one of the few companies at the forefront of AI. There is definite innovation there.
Like I get all caps subject lines with spammy content that my grandmother would recognize as spam, but it blocks some personally written emails from other gmail accounts.
Apple was never particularly loved by developers. Respected yes, tolerated yes. But they were always a bit aloof, separate, never bought into the 2010s era of free love and open source. And that's exactly the way they still are today. Apple has been remarkably stable over time, culturally speaking. It consistently meets people expectations for how it behaves, both good and bad. So there's nothing really to be disappointed about there. It is what it is.
Add a few cases of Glassholes[1], killing products people loved, and it eventually piles up.
I will add though, that just because the company has lost its lustre, doesn't mean the people working there are any less talented. I just think that on a long enough timeline, Google becomes IBM[2].
---
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glasshole
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...
In this specific case, things are high level and generic, so at this point the framing is closer to big corporation than it is to anything specific or technical.
https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation
At the end of the day, I'm super glad they have experimented with things and it seems weird to hold that against them.
I don't feel like the parent comment was asking for first-class support, just access to the device.
Here are some snippets from top-level comments in this discussion thread.
> It's all business talk
> I for one benefited so much from Google Developer Groups
> looking forward to the event and plan to watch it
> just corporate talk
> alternate conference
> separate conference
> I can understand now why my company is less eager to send developers to events
You see it, right? They're all about the talks at the conference and not the features. This HN post is specifically about the conference, that's why the title is "Google I/O 2023".
But, I agree, it's not an exact match context wise.
The reality is what people can really use and what really does hit the road.
Right now, everything google presented in the keynote is vapourware for anyone that doesn't have access to it.
You would see people doing mental gymnastics trying to defend their closed anti competitive practices, disregard for standards. I would cheer a Sennheiser/Bose more than any version of Airpods, I would rather not have a multi trillion dollar company gobble up other industries through unfair advantages.
Seeing a hacker crowd do this is just beyond bizzare.
You don’t really have to buy AirPods, there are lots of products out in the market that compete in that space. Just because Apple provides a certain product doesn’t mean you are being forced to buy it.
Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS device or Mac. In fact, even when I keep removing the application from the Mac, on a version update it comes back again. It has integrations into the system and other core system apps that other products can't get and defaults matter. On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive.
I don't even want to get started on iCloud etc.
I never noticed, having never bought Apple Music before and just using spotify instead. I guess if I wanted it to run on a HomePod, I would need it?
> On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive.
Doesn't Spotify do the same thing?
It is good that you are using Spotify and supporting an independent company, but as I was saying defaults and ease of access matters. Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.
> Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.
Spotify is still dominating music streaming, more so than Apple Music or Amazon Prime Music (which we used to use since it came free with prime).
Spotify has to pay for these and has to compete for this with other music streaming companies.
Also, comparison with smart speakers is disingenuous. There are a billion iPhone users itself. No non big tech company smart speaker comes even close.
> Spotify is still dominating music streaming
Because of nailing the product early on and being world class in playlists and music recommendations. Even if Apple music comes 80% close, just by holding distribution advantage, they will capture that market.
I like my Apple products but this services thing is truly destroying a lot of the good experiences they can provide.
There are a lot of people that defend the far and few apple negative comments.
The only way to prove this would be by doing some data analysis. Maybe worth it’s own post
It is like people who think they are being hip for either hating or loving X, when lots of people love or hate X already, so it isn't really weird either way.
I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options compared to before. The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.
How did AirPods existing ruin your options? You can choose to not buy them, I don't, I like conductive head phones better anyways (non-Apple, before the AirPods came out, and they don't suck, so I don't get what you mean by apple producing the only BT headphones that don't suck?). Or do you mean you want to buy AirPods but you don't want to use an iPhone, or you want to use wired headphones only and don't care for dongles?
> The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.
Seriously, this is the mental gymnastics I'm talking about. None of this is really stopping you from listening to music on your phone.
Now my choices are:
- AirPods, which I don't want to shell out more money for and deal with charging/caring for them, but otherwise they'd be the best option.
- Non-AirPod BT headphones. I have nice Bose ones from work. These lack Apple's extensions to improve pairing and headset (mic) mode. In headset mode, the earphone quality drops to like worse than early 2000s cellphone. Standard pairing is annoying. It's a bit annoying having to charge them. I also don't want to shell out more money for earbuds (the headphones aren't so portable).
- Dongles, which I tried. Turns out they don't work with inlined mics, don't work with older iPhones (so I can't leave them on a shared car aux), are fragile, and are really easy to lose. Can't charge while using one either, but that's nbd. My car seats ate two and the last one broke. It also just feels stupid having to use these.
- Old iPhone. I kept my 6 until it broke. I still have a spare 5, no longer usable with AT&T, which I use to play music in the car.
Yeah I want to listen to music on my phone, but they've made it sufficiently annoying that I don't anymore. It's a clear regression.
You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone, which I've never seen before but lets go with it. There are dongles that have microphone inputs (Cubilux Lightning to 3.5mm TRS Microphone Adapter with Headphone Jack), but I'm assuming you can't use those because the microphone and headset are sharing the same jack somehow?
Your car doesn't support bluetooth, and you use multiple generations of iPhones so you can't just leave the dongle in the car. This is unrelated to airpods since you can't use those while driving anyways.
AirPods are expensive, I get that, and you aren't satisfied with cheaper non-Apple options on amazon. I'm happy not using airpods, since I hate earbuds anyways, but I guess not everyone is like that. Would the non-existence of AirPods make things better? I haven't had trouble pairing my conductive headphones, I guess I don't notice any distortion because it is going through my bones anyways, and I'm not using mic.
> You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone
No, by mic I mean taking calls and meetings on my earbuds/phones, which is a common requirement. Most earbuds have inlined mics sharing the same jack.
Car aux issue is separate. One of my cars does have BT, but that's even worse because the phones fight over it or the pairing sometimes doesn't happen. Maybe "pass the aux" is not a thing anymore and I'm the only one who wants passengers to play their own music sometimes, but this wasn't a problem before.
That said, I hate BT more and have been using the same Bose QC20 wired earbuds and Belkin adapters for 4+ years. There are semi-decent options out there.
If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)
I just use my phone for fewer music-playing situations than I otherwise would, and when I do use it for playing music, it's a mixed bag. Controls on the car console are nice (aside from that the UI sucks and exhibits all kinds of glitches, but that's not Apple's fault), but BT is BT, so, more annoying and less reliable than a cable. My $120 BT headphones are... fine, but I'd rather have better wired headphones for the same price and not have to charge them. Being able to connect to a bluetooth-enabled receiver across the room is handy, but also janky, because of course it is, because it's bluetooth.
If they'd just kept the jack, everyone could be happy. Except Apple, from the somewhat-lower sales of wireless audio devices and especially AirPods.
1. I plug dongle into car aux for my iPhone 12 mini to use.
2. Next day, girlfriend wants to play her own music from her iPhone 6, I say to plug the Lightning in.
3. Dongle doesn't work with iPhone 6 despite being same connector -_- She takes it off to plug into the 3.5mm.
4. Dongle falls beneath car seat and is never seen again. Presumably it's next to the other one that got lost the same way.
Went from "it just works" to screwing up the most basic functionality ever, plugging in the damn aux. And it's while you're driving.
Universals are always wrong of course: we actually used a dongle for the kid's wired iPad headphones. It doesn't suck for us using a dongle, so I'm guessing our experience was really different from yours.
> If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)
Nope, our 6 year old is not getting AirPods anytime soon.
Of course, none of those people ever fit the more common definition of hacker for more than a few years, if ever, even if you assume hacker means “good coder” or similar. And they certainly never fit the information security definition.
But I think the confusing aspect of HN and the VC influence is the number of folks here who happily conflate technology, business, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. If you see these as separable topics, you find that a lot of the confused threads here are different cohorts in the audience who focus on one of these topics and treat the others as ancillary.
Exactly this. I use the term hacker in its original form.
How should one test for ethics? A reference check comes to mind, but it is not a test that you can apply fairly.
You ask if that's how you'd like to be treated.
I can assure you many hackers are libertarian or anarchists of some flavour (from mutualists to anarcho-capitalists). Many celebrate Apple because they want to build the next Apple some day.
HN has always slanted for the latter crowd, though certainly open to everyone.
I'm not sure if I agree with that. I think being anti-Google and FB would be more accurate than being pro-Apple.
Also, during the years I've observed the "pro-Apple" gauge changes as the time zones change, ie. it tends to be all-time high when it's noon in California - which is understandable.
There was a thread the other day where some people seemed pretty miffed that Google requires a Pixel to connect to the internet before you can unlock it's bootloader.
Then you go into a thread about third party app stores on iPhones and you see people saying that being blocked from installing software that Apple hasn't blessed is actually a feature.
Different people and all that. But the general sentiment on HN is definitely more forgiving of Apple than others.
There's no mental gymnastics involved, no upstanding hacker respects "standards" unless they're better for the user (often they're not). It is a matter of taste and preference. Remember, Microsoft also was for a LONG time an attractor of hackers, until the early-mid 90s when Windows 3.1 became the focus (and it sucked for hackers, who fled to OS/2 briefly, then Linux, then Apple when they got tired of tweaking Linux, now some flowing back to Microsoft or Linux).
The days of Apple basing their business on shiny new iThings are mostly past it, Airpods notwithstanding. Now they’re in pure optimization mode, and going deep into content and services.
Apple is a 2.73 trillion dollar company, and single-handedly makes up 13.3% of the entire S&P 500 index. The iPod was launched 22 years ago. Apple hasn't been remotely an "underdog" for over a generation now.
Apple’s valuation and PE ratio only became in line with its peers around 5-6 years ago. It was priced as if it were about to go bankrupt for much of its history , even after the iPhone was released, convinced that Apple just HAD to go out of business, or hit a ceiling, or whatever.
History is also littered with quotes from competition that didn’t take them seriously: Dell, HPE, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Facebook.
The absurdity isn’t that Apple was thought to be an underdog, it’s that so many never took them seriously. Perhaps the main reason Apple is as big as it is now is because wall street and the competition refused to take them seriously? If they did, we’d have a more balanced industry.
Apple has done the wrong thing many times, but audio is not one of them. They offered a legitimate better product, to the point the only headphones I would rather use are IEMs that cost 8 times as much.
Possibly the most reliable phenomenon I've observed as a mod is that people believe HN is biased against what they like and in favor of what they dislike. This shows up most often with politics - for a recent example see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734307 ("HN leans left") followed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734354 ("HN leans left?") and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734392 ("You're completely delusional if you consider HN to be left leaning"). For an amusing (to me anyway!) set of examples see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
But it works the same way with other things, like $BigCos. Each $BigCo has a fanbase and a foebase. Each fanbase feels like HN is biased against "their" $BigCo and in favor of some other $BigCo.
No doubt the same mechanism makes sports fans feel like the refs are biased against their team. The feelings of a sports fan determine not only the direction of perceived bias (no fan ever thought "the refs are consistently biased in our favor") but also its intensity (the more passionately a fan is devoted to $team, the more strongly they are persuaded about the refs' "bias").
Readers with no particular passion on a topic are less likely to perceive bias or feel much about it either way.
I believe that the way this works is that if we feel strongly about $foo, we're much more likely than the median reader to notice posts about $foo, especially ones we dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and to weight them much more heavily. What starts as a feeling in us thereby turns into a perception about the world, often one that is very intensely held and impossible to dissuade.
This is not to say that the community, the refs, the mods, or what have you, aren't biased! Just that the existence or quantity of possible bias can't be decided by this mechanism, which is the mechanism that drives online discussion. In fact, the primary concern of any serious attempt to decide or quantify bias would have to be making sure that it wasn't distorted by this psychological mechanism, which is so powerful.
(This is a bit more than I set out to write about this! it's a hobbyhorse of mine, as it makes moderation moderately more complicated...where by moderately I mean extremely)
I was making the point of the HN users. Specially the characteristic of downvoting and negating criticism in this case.
You are right though, because I strongly feel about the anti competitive issues Apple indulges in, maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them.
Although, I think there is a positive bias as well, which I care less about. Like one of the commenter mentioned that Final Cut Pro being launched on iPad was the top post through large parts of the day.
> maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them
You may be the first person who has ever indicated that they've gotten that point!
man I don't know about everybody else but I'm pretty burned out on the never-ending deluge of AI-related chatter at this point.
Were we reading the same thread? My take away was mostly complaints about subscriptions and people asking why you would use it on an iPad instead of a laptop.
I think the problem here is that this was posted hours before the keynote - meaning there is actually nothing of value to discuss yet. Now the thread that should be about todays even is full of “back in my day” comments.
"Every offering they have is worse today than it was a year ago."
HN should be better than this.
But I have to wonder if it's because as I have tried to quit Reddit and other mass market social media, I'm browsing this site a lot more. So I'm seeing more comment sections in general and clicking more threads than I would otherwise.
It's even in the community guidelines.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
And that links to comments all the way back in 07!
Google's AI features are not something most of us use in our workflow, and are (arguably/debatably) not making anything more convenient for us. That's all in addition to it being Google, so there's a built-in assumption that no one can depend on any of this, because it might be discontinued at any point with little notice.
(I say this as someone who does not own an iPhone or Mac, and has been on Android for over a decade) -- I can see why Mac folks would be excited by the Mac announcement, and why some aren't that excited by Google right now.
SCNR...
There are still things that make Premiere better. Recently I couldn't get an mp4 from a Sony cam to play at the right speed in FCP no matter what I tried, and it just worked in Premiere. I'm more fluid in FCP but I will probably switch too as Premiere just "feels more pro" now to me.
I've heard some great reports about Davinci, especially for post.
All of that may be well and good, and yet I can't remotely get excited by an announcement that it's being ported from PC/laptop to iPad. Are professionals really going to be using iPads for this use case en masse? Was there a lot of people upset that they had to use a PC/laptop for this, and a lot of pent-up demand for an even more portable version?
It's hard to think of any platform port that would be amazing exciting news, let alone this one!
yeah, doing pretty bad at that. I just tried out Bard by asking it a question on an almost 10 year old .net library for interacting with a popular CRM platform's API. It came back with:
"I can't assist you with that, as I'm only a language model and don't have the capacity to understand and respond."
Went over to ChatGPT and asked it the same question in the prompt word for word. It came back with a concise explanation on how to use the library. Specifically one specific set of API calls. Bard is a joke.
Meanwhile they gamified display ads to the point that the web slowly turned into pure clickbait so there’s nothing even left to search for - 99% of content from the last decade is dogshit.
With ChatGPT my web searches are down by at least 50% and more than 80% of the ones I still do are on DuckDuckGo.
Are you comparing discussion of a (relatively legacy) software application to an entire developer conference with a mostly singular focus on a newer, evolving technology?
I'm not trying to be an Apple apologist here but maybe this discussion would be better discussed in roughly a month when WWDC happens.
This year's Google I/O appears to be heavy on talk about new technologies, but light on tangible releases for us to explore.
In order words, the true value lies not in the promise of a product, but in its practical application. So, I urge Google to present us with tools, APIs, products, we can actively engage with, rather than just talk about and endless "waiting lists".
(I expect whatever year you give other people will say it was already just corporate talk before then)
I remember this complaint from the IO 2013, when I was there representing mod_pagespeed.
Examples of I/O topics before 2013: Android, Maps API, App Engine (cloud), Chrome, AJAX for their APIs, real-time collaboration/Wave, Google TV (early predecessor to Android TV), Chromebooks, Chrome Web Store, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Glass, Gmail updates, Google+, YouTube updates.
Most I/O topics after 2013 revolved around marginal improvements on a lot of things, like individual Android features and apps. And naturally, when there is so little to talk about, corporate speak fills the void.
There were still some interesting topics after 2013, especially if you follow some specific developments in the Android ecosystem. But there were very few groundbreaking topics. Google will probably talk about Bard this year, which has not been a huge success, but at least it's something bigger that harkens back to pre-2013 days.
There is this in the meantime: https://github.com/acheong08/Bard
APIs are available since the middle of the presentation!
Google is taking an hypercautious approach around “AI safety” issues that amounts to “we should not release products and if we do they are just demos that no one should be permitted to use for any serious purpose” which is going to hurt them in the marketplace but also does nothing meaningful to deal with either the real and immediate issues with AI or the mixture of other (some real but less immediate but largely science fantasy) issues that typically are referred to under the “AI safety” umbrella (and that’s even more true if you consider from the pov of assuming that the more science-fantasy-ish of those risks are real and serious.)
There might be no sessions for stuff like how to use web APIs because these are already mature and well-documented technologies. I/O is about showcasing new stuff after all.
To my mind, the turning point towards this new, less fun and more corporate Google and I/O was around 2013. I think that's when they started thinking about shaping the company into Alphabet with Google as a subsidiary as well. Famously they removed "don't be evil" as the motto and expanded into hardware a lot soon after 2013, too. It was a time of wholistic change at Google.
I don't understand how a corporate culture that's so focused on shipping new projects at the expense of maintenance, manages to ship so few new projects.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQY2H8rRoyvyY0AsvPIkb...
Are those questions really what’s on the mind of the developer? Where is the: we have a way to revolutionize the debugging experience when doing ML(for people with PhDs) talks?
I know it wouldn’t sell to the masses but that was kind of the point if you want jaded devs on your side.
ML debugging is just one topic among many. I wouldn't dismiss the entire lineup because Google didn't have any big announcements in that space for that year.
The video is five minutes long, is basically a nature advert complete with stirring music, has a bizarre cartoon in the middle of it and is all about an attempt to control the reef's population of starfish. We're told that the starfish are doing great thanks to there being fewer predators and more nutrients in the water, but that this is bad because "it's quite a nasty animal" and it eats coral. The goal is to find starfish "outbreaks" using ML and enable teams of divers to kill the starfish as quickly as possible.
They appear to think this is a stirring example of protecting nature. There's even a diver at the end who breaks down in tears at the way the reef has degraded over his lifespan. Fortunately since the video was made it was discovered that the reefs are now at record-breaking coverage levels despite the starfish, so apparently they didn't need AI driven death-from-above. Also it's not really clear why Google wants to help implement mass animal culls in a place where people don't even go. Why are corals better than starfish? This seems like a very arbitrary judgement. Corals and crown-of-thorns starfish have been co-existing in nature for far longer than people have.
So:
1. Not for developers. They use batching and quantization, that's as deep as it goes technically.
2. Essentially a long ad for their cloud ML services.
3. Consists mostly of people talking about how meaningful, awesome and filled with hope they feel.
I randomly picked another, "Product fairness testing for developers". It seems to consist of two Googlers reading a codelab out loud. And I mean that literally:
https://youtu.be/RcgBNkX0RjE?t=904
She literally reads out the title, pauses, reads out the subtitle, pauses again, reads out the rest of the document word for word. WTF? Is this person a text-to-speech AI? Why did Google make a video that consists of Googlers doing a TTS-quality video of their own documentation website? I'm a developer, watched many dev oriented tech talks and I've never seen that before.
The bulk of the talk is about how important it is to be ethical and stuff. First time we see code that isn't just a snippet in some docs is at the 22 minute mark in a 34 minute talk. It appears to be little more than running some regexs over some rather incoherent LLM output. The code isn't even explained anywhere, just what it's doing. No dev is going to learn anything from this even if they're at bootcamp level.
The video has got only around 4000 views, which seems about right. I can't imagine anyone watching this and thinking, yes, awesome, let's share it around. BTW the bootcamp level of the code might be because neither of the speakers are developers. One is a product manager, the other is an analyst. Really don't think this is targeted at developers dude despite the title. It definitely wasn't written by one. So that's twice now.
Corals as a habitat host a lot of species, creating biodiversity. People don't really seem to care about corals by themselves; rather, they care about a few hundred species of pretty-looking tropical fish that exist nowhere other than within coral reefs. Anything that kills enough of the coral, is likely to make all of those very pretty fish go extinct.
(I've never heard about starfish as a threat to corals; the wellbeing of coral reefs is usually brought up mostly in relation to the impacts of ocean acidification and seafloor trawling.)
it's a well-known thing.
2023: https://www.scubadivermag.com/9-8-million-program-to-protect...
2020: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2258714-coral-eating-st...
2018: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/world/australia/starfish-...
I enjoyed the silent disco and free concerts, but it felt very over the top and expensive, basically just a big ego display for Google.
I can understand now why my company is less eager to send developers to events like these every year.
I almost forgot about that! I think I pushed this into the back of my mind along with google glass.
Ahh, the naïveté of the young age (I was in my early forties at that time, mind you). I was in technology development then, now moved to PdM side. Google products no longer interest me from either the tech or biz side.
either Google comes up with something nice or I'm getting a used iPhone SE
Well, I purchased a second iPad 10th gen for my younger daughter and the same exact problem. Out of the box this basic feature just doesn't work reliably. We're at the point we're renaming my wife's iPhone once a month.
That's just one specific problem we've had, but really it's been a disaster. The setup for both iPads was full of bugs and random issues. Both iPads randomly fail to install updates overnight. I don't recall the last time my Android has ever failed to do a system update. It's just really surprising for me because I assumed a device in it's 10th generation with such a good reputation would be rock solid.
My S21 (6.2") is within a mm of my Pixel 3a (5.6") due to the reduction in bezel.
In that case display size is a measure of how much strain you're putting on your hands to navigate the huge screen. A smaller screen means less reaching.
Also smaller display size means less content, less instagram posts, less twitter feed, less interest on your phone in general in my perspective
Battery degradation hasn't been an issue for me at all, but maybe I'm using my phone less than average. Still goes from morning to bedtime without me thinking about or looking at the charge.
I’m holding on to my Pixel 4a until they make one that’s smaller & lighter. Not liking the trend of bigger and bigger phones.
Even if you usually use bluetooth headphones... it's still nice to have a backup. There's lots of situations where headphone jack input is simpler, easier, faster, and more reliable than messing with bluetooth.
It's 2023 now. AI in healthcare is a rounding error and will likely stay that way for a decade or longer. Google blew a 7 year lead of being an AI-first company to a non-profit. DeepMind is now a team within Google, similar to Ads, Drive, and Shopping Express.
Nice username btw.
I disagree with the GP that they "blew a 7 year lead". They still have a lot of the top industry minds in this area, and it's still early days; ChatGPT was launched less than 6 months ago (which seems crazy). I'm thankful OpenAI is forcing them to stop resting on their laurels. How they will deliver on all of this remains to be seen, but this Google I/O has at least made me hopeful.
Also: birdeye view of suggested direction paths that shows a better feeling for them.
For something with such an easily-accessible interface that's baked-in at an OS level, I think a fail state of "sorry, I don't know how to help with that" is better than stating a bunch of false information as fact.
I agree that the is massive potential for errors, but I'm certain those will get fleshed out soon, and Google is pretty well known for throwing shit and the fan and looking for the cleanest patch of carpet after the fact.
Or if they've brought back Google+ including all the communities I enjoyed.
Oh, BTW, that cookie box on the bottom of the page is very much not compliant.
Opting out should be as trivial as opting in, feel free to ask the YouTube team, they have someone on board who was smart enough to create a compliant solution :-)
But this phenomenon exemplifies the incoherent nature of Google's dev story.
Factoring in all the discounts and incentives that Samsung tends to do, the Pixel may be more expensive in practice. That's bold considering it has pretty middle-of-the-road specs, it's using the Tensor G2 SOC that launched last year and wasn't the best Android SOC even then, nevermind now that it's up against the Snapdragon 8 gen 2.
Pixels normally are very generously priced, especially outside the US compared to Apple.
Hopefully this I/O gives folks more compelling reasons to use Google Cloud.
But I wish Google would come out with a world-shifting technology like they used to. Maps, YouTube, Search. Surely they could do some crazy stuff with AI this year.
Google is in the post-MBA-invasion phase where they are focused on value extraction from their market dominance and existing products, not in taking big risks and building big new things.
i.e. They did a speedrun of the IBM playbook in record time.
(Obviously I'm exaggerating a bit here, lots of good people still at Google, but the Google that made the products you're referring to doesn't exist anymore - look elsewhere for that stuff).
Now it seems Android Wear never really took off and Android Auto is the only product that made it to somewhat mainstream.
I'm not seeing much exciting experimental projects from Google anymore but maybe I'm just older and not easily excited.
All subtly cringe, unexciting. Presenting million ways AI takes a whole lot of the real creation & soul out of every human-technology interaction. Plus feeling society not ready to handle this.
If someone sends me an email or a message that sounds AI-generated, it's easy to tell that it's not meaningful. So I end up ignoring it entirely.
I'm also concerned about folks who actually try to use "AI" like Bard to assist with life decisions like they showed in the college-search presentation. Maybe that works OK right now -- though I suspect AI has serious blind spots. But what happens when Google wants to milk advertisers a bit more, and starts pushing more Wendy's (TM) and for-profit universities and whatever else into your chats?
The "what bike should I buy for a 5 mile hilly commute" query had hilarious results, too -- literally all sponsored content from no-name (but expensive) bike brands. No real understanding of what makes a decent, maintainable commuter bike. Just Bard spitting out whichever bike manufacturers pay Google the most.
Anyone who actually relies on this garbage for decisionmaking is going to wind up making some very poor decisions once Google allows advertisers to hook into these AI features... which is already happening in Search.
I expect quite a few AI news anyway. Things are heating up.
I for one am super excited about this years chat app fail!
Bring on Allo Meets with Messages! The worlds most force installed Chat app with as many users as its development team!
Not a good look.
When you google for project tailwind you obviously get results for Tailwind (the css framework).
Did just GOOGLE FORGOT HOW TO DO SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?!?
(sorry for the capslock, but I'm lost)
I feel that this comment might bother some people. But the idea that the company will demonstrate on stage a project and fail at choosing a proper googable name, when this company is google itself it's just mindboggling.