I was very enthusiastic about Google I/O in the past (around the year 2010). Full of nice tech talks; I learned a lot. These years, I couldn't care less. It's all business talk. I guess developers are not the target audience anymore (and for newcomers, perhaps the "I/O" may be misleading).
If you pick 10 random sessions from the program[0], I'd think the odds are that you'll end up with like 8-9 technical sessions or workshops. The keynotes of course target a more general audience, but that's always been the case. (E.g. haven't they been announcing consumer hardware during the keynotes basically from the start?). It seems in line with something like the WWDC, which is a developer conference but with a general audience keynote.
Yeah, and I realize my point of view is unpopular here. Integrating across all their services is just doubling down on what they already took from GPT. I didn’t see anything that wowed me. Cool, so I can LLM in Gmail and workspaces. Cool, so I can build a job description based on what others are hiring for instead of my company’s needs. I’m not saying that any of this is easy, just that it’s simply novelty. PaLM 2, we’ll have to see how it performs but it looks promising but it’s just another GPT-4 competitor. Where’s the “while the world was ogling over GPT-4, we built this”? PaLM 2 isn’t distinctive enough for me to say they are paving the way. They totally get it, but they aren’t paving the road forward. Maybe next year.
Yeah, but it seems their real "big new model" is Gemini, not PaLM 2:
> 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.
Heh, yours and other comments here disparaging I/O as "business" or "corporate" talk these days come across as quite ignorant - and I don't mean this in a nasty way, more in a literal way. It seems perhaps you're missing the fact there are many different styles of talks for many audiences.
At every I/O there is a "keynote" and a "developer keynote", and similarly there are business / product talks and developer-focused talks. In fact, they even create entirely separate playlists on YouTube for the dev/non-dev talks.
As a Staff Eng who leads and mentors engineers who live in a world where they have no choice but to use Google SDKs and services, I find many of the developer-focused talks invaluable for getting others in my team up to speed on what's new and what's coming soon. Most of these talks are given by engineers and involve concise code examples which quickly convey the gist of new functionality.
No problem! My team is a small subset of engineers in a 10yo+ startup, and the organisation chose to go all in on many Google services long before any of us joined the company. I have my issues with Google and some of their services but the GP stands out as an odd comment to me because it's at odds with my own experience of keeping up with I/O talks.
Related: It drives me bananas when a mega-corp makes a small R&D team and the job req says “we are a small startup in a big company.” The benefits, bureaucracy, speed of innovation, and equity all fit the usual mega corporate shoes, so it’s probably still a traditional role.
I was in one of these. We got equity and benefits, but we were explicitly exempted from normal bureaucracy. Our exec sponsor (and nominal manager) asked that we tell him before we launched or signed a big customer, and that was about it. Otherwise, we could do whatever we wanted with basically no oversight.
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.
It does actually work out sometimes. I had the luck to be on one such team at Microsoft in the past, and we absolutely did have the benefit of cutting through much of the usual red tape etc, while still having access to megacorp resources.
But the only reason why it worked out the way it did is because the "owner" of the team in question 1) sincerely believed in this approach, 2) had enough clout with the top management to make it stick.
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].
That's because most people do startups that are destined to fail. I've done plenty of those myself! The problem is that we think we can get away with building solutions looking for products. While a few of those do well, in general, that is a recipe for failure.
In other words, our success was because we identified a critical missing piece in a profitable industry and built exactly what people were asking for, and more importantly, willing to pay for.
After that success (and a couple more after it), I refuse to ever build something without finding customers first. You have to build products people want, not try to convince people into believing they want your product.
Startup is just another buzzword for a business. It's never been anything different than that. I wouldn't make any assumption about it based on the term, not the age, size, market, etc
I'm too lazy to go through the previous agendas of I/O, but it would be interesting to see the burnt out remnants of google's various abandoned projects.
I saw this headline and eyerolled. In 2010, I read the schedule/agenda and hype about what might be given to attendees. ALMOST signed up for the lottery.
As I addended to google's IoT with respect to other IoT vendors:
"It's just that Google adds completely rudderless leadership, its world famous utter disregard for customer support, and complete lack of commitment to the recipe."
Google I/O was cool when you could get early access to google glasses.
What do you get these days? Anything interesting? Or the latest Pixel (god, don't get me started, I am NEVER EVER EVER dropping more than $300 on an android phone again).
Anyway, back to the eyeroll. Wow, 10 years. Android is buggier and its app store laden with malware, copycats, predatory addictware, and bureaucracy. Android hardware is arguably even buggier than it was. Search is FAR FAR worse. Their self-driving is still a non-starter. The internet has turned into a dystopian wasteland and they are a not-insignificant party to it. No longer open, no longer even trying to not be evil.
Everything about google is worse today than it was 10 years ago. Does anybody actually want to work there for any reason besides money and resume eyecandy? Google the search is far worse than it was 10 years ago with maximum monetization policies. Advertising / information hoovering is a threat to democracy and perhaps human existence. The fourth estate / newspapers / journalism has been utterly hollowed out. It has directly enabled cartel and monopoly market consolidation. It is the shining example of locking out someone from the internet and providing no human contact for resolution. If it fails to dominate something with its horrid customer service and big brother creepy dominance, it strands people with little warning.
Google can pretend they're not IBM, but that doesn't make it true.
Google no longer innovates or launches products of note. They throw ideas at the wall, like spaghetti, and hope things stick.
Perverse incentives create competing products, dead end projects, and invariably everything created winds up getting cancelled.
Google got drunk off of easy search ad revenue. Their founding leadership went off to do zeppelins and politicking. Now that golden goose looks like it may be cooked.
Google had the Bell Labs of AI research, but their ability to build product around it looks a lot more like IBM Watson.
Over the next half decade, their top tier talent will leave and get venture funding to do their own things with their own equity.
> They throw ideas at the wall, like spaghetti, and hope things stick.
Yes, and whether they stick or not, they tear down the wall after 2-3 years because they seemingly still haven’t figured out how to internally incentivize KTLO/running stable products (other than a few flagship ones) rather than building shiny new things.
> 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.
Google is a factory and software is manufacturing. They want to sell their goods to managers not engineers. Makes sense if you think about it. Most of what google does is yesterday’s tech, the web isn’t new and they aren’t making bank by selling stuff to software devs. We want free stuff, preferably open source. There’s so much of it anyway that it has zero value. They might babble a bit about how ai can replace workers and further reduce wages.
All of that makes sense for Google in general, but Google I/O used to be explicitly a developer conference, with everything targeting developers, which no longer seems true.
That was when Google thought they needed the support of the "developer" community that they don't write the paychecks for. Now they make nothing new or interesting, or on the off chance they do, they kill it after it proves not to be a cash cow.
The getting away from the day job and serendipitous discovery are benefits in addition to meeting with people and socializing. But I think a lot of conference goers approach it as a sprint to maximize sessions and if that’s your goal online is probably more efficient.
It wasn't always tech talks. I remember going to Google I/O in 2008 and sitting in a bean bag chair about 30 feet from "Flight of The Conchords", who were performing live. Fun times.
Same. Google invited me to participate and have a booth - in 2010 or 2011 - because we were an early business adopter of their APIs. It was a cool event. I think the hot new tech that year was NaCl. I don't think startups get invited now just for using new Google tech. And is a reminder that this year's hot new tech will be forgotten in a few years.
Same here, it used to be quite cool, but with the multiple reboots on Android frameworks, lack of updstes enforcement for OEMs, how the Kotlin advocates talk about Java, and the sorry state of NDK tooling, I lost interest.
Only the Web talks are relevant, as the Web is now basically ChromeOS.
I looked at the schedule for the web section, and some of the talks look useful. Much has been done in the browser space: new CSS capabilities and webgpu among them.
tbh, I kinda blame the media for this. At some point the media decided that I/O was Google's competitor to Apple's consumer keynotes, and so it was forced to become that in order to avoid weeks of "Google disappoints at I/O" headlines.
Maybe going against the grain here, but this was the best Google I/O I've seen in a long time.
In the past, they seemed liked incremental updates on their hardware (which I don't care too much about) or some new products like the pixel watch / glasses (which I probably won't use). I knew there would be a huge focus on AI this year, but I was pleasantly surprised by many of the new features and how quickly these integrations are happening. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm excited to see how the industry progresses.
I am currently in a superposition of being very excited and very underwhelmed. The wavefunction will collapse once I can actually play with the technology and find out if it is anywhere close to as good as they claim.
It rubs me the wrong way that Google fired their whole AI ethics team and then got on stage and talked about how AI can be bad for people and we need to guard against people using it unethically.
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".
It will be interesting to see how the data & AI conversations evolve. A bit like smartphones, I’m scared we’ll first see an explosion of features then some backtracking to figure out the security & privacy models. I wish we’d learned to start with security.
I didn’t get to see the entire thing, but I did see the AI-enabled cinematic photo backgrounds. All I could think is man that’s a lot of analysis of my personal images for a mild parallax effect.
Maybe wrong word I just meant permissions were wider and more universal (for say location access or notifications) and now we’ve learned to make each granular permission opt in.
I have a hard time getting excited about anything AI with a company whose main profit center is in harvesting your data. Incentives are just not aligned. In this case AI is simply a gimmick to get us to give them more data to serve their real customers.
I for one benefited so much from Google Developer Groups while at University. Google made sure we learned how to build Android Apps, and consume API's and services like Maps, Firebase, etc. Overall, I gained a good understanding of how systems work, Thanks Google!
That's fantastic to hear. The guy who leads GDG for North America and Canada grew up in Nigeria and got his education there. He's the most enthusiastic and passionate developer I've ever met. I love the reach google has in inspiring new engineers. Thanks for sharing your story.
Google did not do this out of the goodness of their heart. They did it to lock you in with Firebase, Maps, etc. And believe me, the moment they start charging you for it, you quickly realize why Google is not a company to give an ounce of trust to.
Eh, I think you’re underselling the value of “free” stuff. Even if it has an ulterior motive, giving free access to computing resources allows someone to learn concepts and even ship things that would otherwise be impossible.
None of these companies are altruistic and everyone knows it, but by not charging upfront it gives possibilities for millions of developers who don’t have US$ 50/month to spend on something (students, emerging economies, career changers, etc).
I wouldn't as knowledgeable and successful in tech without free computing resources from various companies. My parents didn't have any money and I certainly didn't either.
There's a lot of transferable skills gained in these products. You're not just operating a Maytag.
A lot of negativity in the comments, but the stock is up ~5% today (in particular it didn’t tank), so it seems like the market isn’t as negative about the presentations.
The fast integration into all products is pretty amazing, some of them actually useful (e.g. using search/bard to query/generate tables and exporting them into sheets directly is really cool).
I also like that they emphasized the utility aspect and didn’t get into AGI nonsense that OpenAI peddles so much.
I remember Sergey skydiving onto the roof of Moscone in 2012, and everyone getting one of those cool
Nexus Q media players which they never actually released so they all ended up as landfill.
I was on stage at that Google IO (I press the button that "launches" 700,000 servers during the launch of GCE). My practice session was bumped into 2:30AM because both Sergey with Glass and Vic with some Google Plus feature were "more important presentations and needed the stage practice time more".
Of the three products, Glass is gone, Vic and Google Plus are gone, and GCE is now making money for Google.
As for Nexus Q- I met a guy on the team. They not only never released it, they never INTENDED to release it! It was just a marketing thing for that Google IO.
At least the 2012 live demo went better than the 2010 keynote live demo when they unveiled Google TV... and the lead presenter was stuck on stage for 10 or 15 minutes because no one could figure out how to pair the wireless keyboard. Apparently having 5,000 people in the audience all with Bluetooth and WiFi-enabled devices was not accounted for when preparing for the live demo...
Me too, plus what's coming with their new phones and most importantly, how they are adding more and more AI into their cameras. I'm exclusively a Pixel user, so it's super important to me.
My family member works for this team. Could you share what makes you a Pixel fan? Some like customizability, open platform . Some avoid Apple lock in. What draws you to Pixel?
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".
Thrilled. Of course, I want to see Bard for myself. I pay for OpenAI to use unlimited GPT4 right now. Maybe I end up not having to do that, we'll see, it depends on how it performs. I wasn't impressed previously but with each update I'll give it another try.
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!
If AI can generate them trivially, maybe that suggests cover letters should not have been that important to begin with.
To me, the main benefit of a cover letter is that it shows the applicant is engaged enough to actually make an application that is specific to a job posting. That is still the case with AI, it just saves everyone creating them a huge amount of work - most of which is completely wasted when the majority of application are thrown in the trash.
It took me many years to have enough emotional intelligence to neutralize anger or frustration I was feeling out of my professional communications. What a wonder that you are doing it with a click!
Texters and readers of Homestuck have been practicing for decades at appreciating badly written mail. I believe human-to-human knowledge transfers will still be fine :). I'm fucking scared of the incoming spam tsunami though!
I mean, Google Translate has been basically completely AI powered for 5+ years, and it's one of the most used products in the world...
The majority of what you see on SERPs has been AI generated for a decade, and that's Google's main money maker.
This idea that Google sucks at AI and is clearly a million miles behind is intriguing.
Google is currently the company everyone loves to hate like MSFT was 5-10 years ago.
THAT is a bad sign regardless if anything the people are saying has any truth to it.
MSFT has been the king of enterprise software since the 80s. But around 2000, everyone and their mother was talking about how MSFT can't produce any software beside complete garbage.
None of that was true. But, MSFT was in for some relatively bad times for a decade or so.
I suspect the same thing is going to happen to Google just because sentiment is powerful.
You now that, I know that, everyone knows that. And yet, google stresses it everytime, like the company is anxious that people is looking for OpenAI and not google.
“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.”
Google could also integrate their translation service into their consumer AR product that's coming out in 2024 to do live translations, directions, and other real-time image "AI" analysis stuff. A ChatGPT type assistant built into your day-to-day life could be interesting. If not for Q&A other use cases we don't yet know about.
In terms of wider userbase Google Translate is still de facto, but anyone who uses MTL heavily knows that DeepL beats Google Translate for most languages, especially east asian ones.
> I mean, Google Translate has been basically completely AI powered for 5+ years, and it's one of the most used products in the world...
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.
And DeepL translate is blown out of the water by Chat GPT 4.
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!?
OpenAI must be sweating profusely after viewing that I/O presentation. Not only do they not have the integration, scale and user base of Google, but the migration of Bard to PaLM 2 it will exceed whatever OpenAI currently has. Also, it's only a matter of time before their top employee's are poached by Apple and Google.
A "moat" is the protection company A has against company B building a clone of company A's product. For example, YouTube has the set of people who have a habit of logging on to YouTube to watch content. A competitor has to convince all those people to change their habits. This is known to be a hard problem, so it's a moat!
Netflix thought they had a similar moat of user-habits. But it turns out that the more important moat in the streaming market is a moat of content.
>but the migration of Bard to PaLM 2 it will exceed whatever OpenAI currently has
I really doubt that. If Google had anything that could seriously compete with GPT-4 they would be shouting about it from the mountains. Not publishing a comparison where they only include GPT-4 in the two benchmarks that they win.
Google in some ways is far better than OpenAI in their AI capabilities, but it mostly comes down to the fact that they weren't making products, when OpenAI was.
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.
Yeah. If people get access to It. In the meantime, OpenAI is hoarding GPUS for the next iteration while happily collecting 20 dollars from users and loads of free work from free users.
WACHTING THE KNEYOTE AND playng a drinkiig game - 1 shott every tim a spaeker says 'generative AI" but now Icant' drink any more and the kenyote is stil runnig :(
The focus on watermarking is interesting. If the major players embed watermarking, it probably will be meaningfully be used to detect cases where generated content is passed off as real. Unfortunately, proving authenticity isn't going to be possible. It's inevitable that there will be models out there built specifically to attempt to evade such detection. Society needs to adapt to the new reality that anything can be faked.
I understand the skepticism towards Med-Palm2. The only thing they said about its performance was a vague graph with unlabelled axes showing it beating 'expert level'. It's not clear why we should believe them when IBM was making basically identical claims with the same level of evidence a few years.
I certainly hope to be proved wrong, and that medical AI is here at last.
They posted plenty of blog articles on research.google.com about medical ml.
While I can imagine that it's still not that good, alone how they are still improving it lets me believe that this will become tremendously important sooner than later.
Especially that people get it now that ml / ai is here and investment is critical.
I hope this will lead to much much more investment and progress.
Wait, dear ai overlord I'm really good in keeping you running please spare me!
I find it interesting the sentiment in the comments... Yesterday we had an Apple post where everyone was losing their minds all day about Final Cut Pro on iPad (which in my opinion as a Software Engineer is the most boring thing I’ve had to read all week). Today we have probably a massive lineup of a bunch of new AI features to be announced for products most of us use on the regular, or could use as devs, and 90% of the comments are about how boring it will be.
Not sure what to make of it but you would think the HN crowd would be slightly more interested.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe. The features are exciting. Google I/O, the conference with talks, is seen as less so. Notice how all the comments are about the talks. Yesterday's Apple announcement was _not_ a conference, and the comment thread was about the new app. It's not the same thing at all.
Here are some snippets from top-level comments in this discussion thread.
> It's all business talk
> I for one benefited so much from Google Developer Groups
> looking forward to the event and plan to watch it
> just corporate talk
> alternate conference
> separate conference
> I can understand now why my company is less eager to send developers to events
You see it, right? They're all about the talks at the conference and not the features. This HN post is specifically about the conference, that's why the title is "Google I/O 2023".
I just meant that the conference is not the features. The conference is about the features, but they're different things. Much like the Magritte painting is not a pipe, it's a painting of a pipe. The analogy was not very good.
Final Cut Pro is a thing people already use in their workflow, becoming more convenient for them. People have depended on this as part of their production-ready workflow for over 20+ years now, and FCP-folks seem to have a lot of trust in the application and related tooling, that Apple isn't going to leave or abandon Final Cut anytime soon.
Google's AI features are not something most of us use in our workflow, and are (arguably/debatably) not making anything more convenient for us. That's all in addition to it being Google, so there's a built-in assumption that no one can depend on any of this, because it might be discontinued at any point with little notice.
(I say this as someone who does not own an iPhone or Mac, and has been on Android for over a decade) -- I can see why Mac folks would be excited by the Mac announcement, and why some aren't that excited by Google right now.
> Final Cut Pro is a thing people already use in their workflow, becoming more convenient for them. People have depended on this as part of their production-ready workflow for over 20+ years now, and FCP-folks seem to have a lot of trust in the application and related tooling, that Apple isn't going to leave or abandon Final Cut anytime soon.
All of that may be well and good, and yet I can't remotely get excited by an announcement that it's being ported from PC/laptop to iPad. Are professionals really going to be using iPads for this use case en masse? Was there a lot of people upset that they had to use a PC/laptop for this, and a lot of pent-up demand for an even more portable version?
It's hard to think of any platform port that would be amazing exciting news, let alone this one!
My theory is there are a lot of folks that needlessly bought expensive ipads that sit around and collect dust when their kids aren't doodling on them. Finding out that Apple is bringing an app that could bring potential productivity to a bad investment got a lot of people excited. People will soon learn that another app was not the reason why they aren't using them.
Final Cut is definitely not the industry standard - most pros abandoned it after they completely rebuilt it from the ground up years ago and it sucked hard
FCP 7 was dominant but the disaster of early versions of FCP X forced a bunch of shops to switch to Premiere.
There are still things that make Premiere better. Recently I couldn't get an mp4 from a Sony cam to play at the right speed in FCP no matter what I tried, and it just worked in Premiere. I'm more fluid in FCP but I will probably switch too as Premiere just "feels more pro" now to me.
I've heard some great reports about Davinci, especially for post.
Most big-budget feature films are cut on Avid and that's been the case for a while now; for indies my impression is that it's 50/50 Premiere and Resolve, yup.
I've noticed that the sentiment on HN tends to skew heavily against Google and more towards Apple. When I go to in-person tech meetups it's usually not at all like that. Not sure why.
It's an expectations mismatch. Google used to be the most loved company by developers. It was confident, strong, did wonders for dev comp and gave away lots of cool stuff for free. The only way from there was down, really. Then they did a bunch of things that upset people like getting buy-in into platforms and products only to then constantly kill them off, refuse to release their AI models as APIs on the grounds that devs weren't ethically pure enough to use them, as well as doing stuff that shows a lack of confidence, mostly me-too products like GCP or Bard.
Apple was never particularly loved by developers. Respected yes, tolerated yes. But they were always a bit aloof, separate, never bought into the 2010s era of free love and open source. And that's exactly the way they still are today. Apple has been remarkably stable over time, culturally speaking. It consistently meets people expectations for how it behaves, both good and bad. So there's nothing really to be disappointed about there. It is what it is.
Even outside technology, Google went from that cool "don't be evil" company, to suppressing search results so that people would vote the way Google wanted.
Add a few cases of Glassholes[1], killing products people loved, and it eventually piles up.
I will add though, that just because the company has lost its lustre, doesn't mean the people working there are any less talented. I just think that on a long enough timeline, Google becomes IBM[2].
I think the sentiment is more complex than that. In general, I think the sentiment is against large corporate interests, and in favor of small, focused technical improvements. And improvement here is not the same as change. Often, sentiment is pretty negative towards changes made by large corporations which could be interpreted as strategic decisions made to control an ecosystem.
In this specific case, things are high level and generic, so at this point the framing is closer to big corporation than it is to anything specific or technical.
I am slowly feeling like I should move on from HN. I used to find comments much more mature in the past and learned a lot. Lately I predict the general trend I'll see in the comments before even opening the page.
Somehow that has been my experience as well. I used to love HN for the rational and mature comments. Now, I find more of the comments to be idealistic and biased. More of the comments are from people who don't seem to have read the linked post.
I feel the same. Comments used to be more thoughtful and nuanced, and I often found comments that changed my perspective on things. Now so many comments are massively negative and sweepingly generalize in uninteresting ways, eg just to pick a random example from replies to this current post:
"Every offering they have is worse today than it was a year ago."
One of my least favorite trends about how HN comments go these days is that nearly all of them are reflexively supporting the company over the employees in any sort of story involving conflict between employer/employee. It's like, goddamn, y'all can stop bootlicking for companies already, as I know most of you are employee class rather than owner class.
I've had the same feeling. I've also noticed what feels like an increase in shallow, emotionally driven "gotcha" replies that are almost always from post-2020 accounts.
But I have to wonder if it's because as I have tried to quit Reddit and other mass market social media, I'm browsing this site a lot more. So I'm seeing more comment sections in general and clicking more threads than I would otherwise.
It's even in the community guidelines.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
And that links to comments all the way back in 07!
I used to like it when I didn't live in the Bay and avoided all the "local news" threads because it was not interesting to me. I kinda left after I moved because I don't wanna be in a site where the consensus solution to poop on the street on some neighborhoods is basically concentration camps.
I'm not an Apple follower, what innovation have they produced in the last 5+ years that the sibling comments deride Google for? I would argue the TPU is far more interesting than the M1, other than that, is it not just marginal improvements on existing products?
I personally would argue the M1 is more interesting than the TPU, but I think the general answer to your question is “nothing”. Apple and google both churn out research, google maybe a bit more. Beyond that though, both of their product lines reach such a scale that requires the tech to be mature (aka no longer an innovation).
Apple has really strong chip prowess, eg the M1 or the battery efficiency vs size of AirPods and AirTags. But a lot of that is resting on TSMC which anyone can contract. Google has some impressive research into things like AI, database, K8, etc - but today others seem to be catching up.
I am consistently surprised by the battery life and quality of noise cancellation given their size. Although none of that is revolutionary and just improving on existing tech, I think the complete package (hardware+software integration) was leaps better than what came before.
Yep, neither one is really innovating, except for the examples you named. I don't know the history of TPUs vs similar ML accelerators; did Google blaze the trail on this?
There's one thing that made Google great and it was search. It's no longer great and hasn't been for some time. I don't even think it's entirely their fault, but their brand and sentiment has taken a hit from that.
Also, the data harvesting is much more common knowledge.
Apple has been increasing their own data harvesting and advertising, so same shoe different foot.
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.
I would characterise the "losing their minds all day about Final Cut Pro on iPad" that went on as... moaning about subscription pricing. So not positive either.
The Hacker News community are mainly "doers" - action-oriented individuals who prefer a hands-on approach. I think we yearn for opportunities to experiment with new technologies, not simply hear about their potentials.
This year's Google I/O appears to be heavy on talk about new technologies, but light on tangible releases for us to explore.
In order words, the true value lies not in the promise of a product, but in its practical application. So, I urge Google to present us with tools, APIs, products, we can actively engage with, rather than just talk about and endless "waiting lists".
>> Yesterday we had an Apple post where everyone was losing their minds all day about Final Cut Pro on iPad
Were we reading the same thread? My take away was mostly complaints about subscriptions and people asking why you would use it on an iPad instead of a laptop.
I think the problem here is that this was posted hours before the keynote - meaning there is actually nothing of value to discuss yet. Now the thread that should be about todays even is full of “back in my day” comments.
I’ll be more interested in Google’s ML when they use it as a competent spam filter for Gmail. As it stands the false positives and false negatives are baffling. Maybe it’s unfair but to me that directly reflects their ML abilities
I'm not denying your experience, but I have almost zero problems with the Gmail spam filter. Never false negatives and almost never false positives. I wonder why different users have different experiences with this?
5-10 years ago I’d agree they were very good. My suspicion is that the base spam filter is not very good but it trains on your email history and becomes better. So my “newer” gmail accounts have very poor filtering.
Like I get all caps subject lines with spammy content that my grandmother would recognize as spam, but it blocks some personally written emails from other gmail accounts.
HN crowd and devs should know better than most that you can’t depend on anything from Google. Kind of surprised this conference is still being held given where they are at right now.
And Google’s disregard of Android devs outside the America/Europe. I have been doing Android development since 2011 and still impossible to get my hands on a Pixel or Chromebook directly from Google. On the other hand, I could get the latest iPhone shipped in a month.
Google just doesn't have the volumes to provide products in all countries. Providing sales integrations and support is costly and if you don't have volumes, your amortized cost over a device is high.
March 13, 2013, a decade ago and RSS effectively died along with it. Being upset at this for 10 years is right up there with being upset that Gopher protocol never took off.
I've been deep in the Google ecosystem for 10+ years and my sentiment has changed simply because their products suck now. Every offering they have is worse today than it was a year ago. Google assistant is borderline unusable in it's current state, and I used to sing it's praises from the mountain tops.
Bc none of the features are actually live yet. We keep hearing about what will be released and demos - but HN is mainly do-ers. Their launches would have 100x the impact if people could see and play with it in real time right after the announcement.
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.
What's even more surprising is that Google has spent almost 2 decades collecting text, image, geospatial and video data. You'd think they would be ahead of everyone in this space. With all they've spent on research - they've got nothing meaningful to show for it.
They never figured out how to diversify away from targeted ads. All that AI prowess was mainly to figure out how to manipulate people to click on the steadily increasing number of ads.
Meanwhile they gamified display ads to the point that the web slowly turned into pure clickbait so there’s nothing even left to search for - 99% of content from the last decade is dogshit.
With ChatGPT my web searches are down by at least 50% and more than 80% of the ones I still do are on DuckDuckGo.
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.
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 are really wonky arguments here trying to justify rent seeking in the App Store, walled gardens, and completely closed ecosystems. And I'm not sure why anyone would be supportive of any of those things outside of being pro-Apple. No other company seems to get that type of pass.
There was a thread the other day where some people seemed pretty miffed that Google requires a Pixel to connect to the internet before you can unlock it's bootloader.
Then you go into a thread about third party app stores on iPhones and you see people saying that being blocked from installing software that Apple hasn't blessed is actually a feature.
Different people and all that. But the general sentiment on HN is definitely more forgiving of Apple than others.
My Sennheiser HD8s and their propietary cable begs to differ. And also keep in mind you are favoring Bose, the multi-million dollar company that didn't bat an eye when they decided to introduce spyware on their app.
Apple has done the wrong thing many times, but audio is not one of them. They offered a legitimate better product, to the point the only headphones I would rather use are IEMs that cost 8 times as much.
I think it depends on how you define Hacker. This site is very business leaning to begin with in a lot of ways which doesn’t always draw the “hacker” crowd. I will forever think of hackers ideally not being so concerned with operating businesses but being obsessed with technology sometimes at the expense of business concerns.
For YCombinator and the like, “hacker” is actually just code for “disruptor”. It is a subtle but powerful conflation designed to retroactively strengthen the historical positioning of e.g. Jobs, Woz, Zuckerberg while simultaneously praising disruptive technologies that will “eat the world”.
Of course, none of those people ever fit the more common definition of hacker for more than a few years, if ever, even if you assume hacker means “good coder” or similar. And they certainly never fit the information security definition.
Hacker crowds like to see underdogs win. Apple was the ultimate underdog for most of its existence, and was "doomed" every year up until around 2013.
There's no mental gymnastics involved, no upstanding hacker respects "standards" unless they're better for the user (often they're not). It is a matter of taste and preference. Remember, Microsoft also was for a LONG time an attractor of hackers, until the early-mid 90s when Windows 3.1 became the focus (and it sucked for hackers, who fled to OS/2 briefly, then Linux, then Apple when they got tired of tweaking Linux, now some flowing back to Microsoft or Linux).
Maybe for people of a certain age. But there is a whole generation of people (some of whom are on HN) who have only ever known a world where everyone wanted the latest iThing. It's been probably 15 years since you could seriously consider Apple an underdog in the tech space.
The iPhone hasn’t even been out for 15 years. People were calling Apple dead not even 6 or 7 years ago, the Apple Watch not being enough to satiate the demand for new toys.
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.
This is probably the most absurd comment that I've read so far in 2023.
Apple is a 2.73 trillion dollar company, and single-handedly makes up 13.3% of the entire S&P 500 index. The iPod was launched 22 years ago. Apple hasn't been remotely an "underdog" for over a generation now.
A generation ago, Apple was a penny stock and the iMac was released. The iPod was a success but a small fraction of the story. They were “only” a $75 billion company by the year the iPhone came out.
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.
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)
Oh no, I didn't mean moderators are biased. I don't think that is the case at all.
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.
I mostly understood that you were talking about the community, not the mods, but now that you mention it, I confused the two in my reply. The first two paragraphs were about the community but then the bit about refs was about the mods. Interesting—thanks for pointing that out!
> 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!
This is why I stopped calling HN, HN. It's YCombinator news. It's not news for hackers - maybe at one point, but not anymore and not for awhile. It may even be seen as looked down on because you're posting on a site run by venture capitalists.
I think it's a lot less confusing when you understand that "hacker" doesn't describe a kind of politics, but rather connotes an interest in technology.
Depending on who you talk to, hacking doesn't even mean technology. It's more of an artful blend of craftsmanship and trickery in whatever problem domain you face.
But I think the confusing aspect of HN and the VC influence is the number of folks here who happily conflate technology, business, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. If you see these as separable topics, you find that a lot of the confused threads here are different cohorts in the audience who focus on one of these topics and treat the others as ancillary.
> Depending on who you talk to, hacking doesn't even mean technology. It's more of an artful blend of craftsmanship and trickery in whatever problem domain you face.
Exactly this. I use the term hacker in its original form.
Not really. Every entrepreneur has to worship the Steve Jobs handbook if they want jaded middle-aged Disney investors to open their wallets for $TECH_PRODUCT. It's not uncommon or surprising to see people in the startup sphere who are unnaturally defensive of Apple/iOS/MacOS.
Woz and Jobs started out building Blue Boxes (https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/blue-box-designed-an...) They then created Apple as a hobbyist outfit in a garage, soldering chips together so they could demo a DIY computer programmed in Assembler at a computer club. As opposed to what, a company that exists to sell the equivalent of billboard ads on the Internet? Out of Big Tech, Apple has the strongest claim to any kind of hacker culture.
And when Jobs got the contract from Atari, he lied to Woz about how much it paid so he could take the lion's share. Fraud culture is unfortunately part of their blood too, something we ought to excise if we want the tech industry to be taken seriously in the long-run.
the fallacy you have is that all hackers are socialists or folks that dislike venture capital or capitalism.
I can assure you many hackers are libertarian or anarchists of some flavour (from mutualists to anarcho-capitalists). Many celebrate Apple because they want to build the next Apple some day.
HN has always slanted for the latter crowd, though certainly open to everyone.
yes, most HNers are affected by it. That's why you see a massive anti-corp, anti-tech, anti-capitalist despite data screaming at them the massive benefits of tech, capitalism and corporation.
yes, that's why I'm the one who is pointing the following trait to the HN crowd who are blissfully unaware of it -- "Irrationally Hating things / people that have provided net benefit to the society (utility, pension plans, 401(k)s, employee salary, productivity, standard-of-living)"
Worked at Google, pro Elon, anti Zuck but mainly for his failures (Metaverse), not from the far left and still think it's clear Google's last major product (major meaning category defining, like Search or Maps or Android) was 15 years ago.
Metaverse is DoA. Public perception is that it is either too complicated/expensive to use or that it is essentially a worse VRChat. More technically inclined circles see it as a data harvester and crypto-scam breeding ground. Facebook itself does not use it for its supposed intended purpose of virtual conferencing, instead mandating that all employees return to the physical office to work. It has next to no adoption and is the butt of many jokes. Romero abandoned the project with a public statement saying how out of touch and inefficient the workforce behind it is.
Your outlandish sweeping claims about the users of this site aside, sticking your neck out for the Metaverse is just not the hill to die on.
The Public's lack of imagination / vision is the worst indicator of anything. There is a reason there are only a handful of Jobs, Zuck, Elon, Bezos, Gates, Buffett in the world but 15 Million people on Wallstreetbets.
They fired entire orgs that were working on metaverse at facebook. Spoke about it with a sad friend yesterday. At least the facebook metaverse has been cut down.
> The Public's lack of imagination / vision is the worst indicator of anything
So? Most great ideas end up as objective failures. Also great visionaries generally actually have some at least somewhat specific vision of what are they trying to achieve, neither Zuckerberg nor anyone else were yet able to coherently explain WTH is the Metaverse supposed to be.
IMHO whatever Meta is doing seems much more likely to end up as the Apple Newton than the iPad/iPhone... (which to be fair is not a bad thing).
And they would've been right in 2019. The hype was not matching the technology. The fact that gpt got so good is pure coincidence and not a result of the chat agent folks being some kind of visionairies.
Maybe some technological breakthrough comes along that makes the metaverse not suck. But if you're gonna build your company around such hopes and it works, then you're not smart, but just lucky. Or you need to build the breakthroughs yourself, but it doesn't look like that's what zuck is doing.
1. Wow you think transformers are a product like Search and Maps and Android are. That's great.
2. I think most people consider both Metaverse and chat agents as failures. ChatGPT isn't a 'chat agent' and most chat agents still don't work.
Watching the keynote and Google are expecting developers to cut and paste code into Bard rather than releasing a Bard plugin for code editors and taking on Microsoft directly. Weak.
Most people lack the vision beyond 15 minutes. Of course Metaverse is a failure for them, just like how Internet was just a glorified fax machine for luddites. So, popular opinion is the worst indicator of anything. Happy to make a public bet that Metaverse will consume 25% of a person's day for at least 4 billion people by 2035
If transformer doesn't excite you (mostly due to anti-Google bias), Google has a dozen products that has over a 500 Million users. It takes an unprecedented amount of anti-corp brainwash to say Google isn't successful or innovative.
> Google has a dozen products that has over a 500 Million users.
So did Microsoft in 2005. That doesn't mean the Ballmer era was innovative. If you need other examples of companies with hundreds of millions of users that aren't relevant, there's also Oracle.
It seems quite the opposite: HN biases towards anti-Apple, often for bizarre reasons that require lots of mental gymnastics to justify.
You don’t really have to buy AirPods, there are lots of products out in the market that compete in that space. Just because Apple provides a certain product doesn’t mean you are being forced to buy it.
The AirPods are capitalizing on lock-in. iPhones have always had Bluetooth, but almost nobody used BT headphones cause they suck. Then Apple released AirPods with first-party integrations to make it usable, and to make sure people would buy them, they also took out the jack.
I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options compared to before. The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.
> I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options compared to before.
How did AirPods existing ruin your options? You can choose to not buy them, I don't, I like conductive head phones better anyways (non-Apple, before the AirPods came out, and they don't suck, so I don't get what you mean by apple producing the only BT headphones that don't suck?). Or do you mean you want to buy AirPods but you don't want to use an iPhone, or you want to use wired headphones only and don't care for dongles?
> The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.
Seriously, this is the mental gymnastics I'm talking about. None of this is really stopping you from listening to music on your phone.
So my chosen option before was to just plug my earbuds or car aux into my phone.
Now my choices are:
- AirPods, which I don't want to shell out more money for and deal with charging/caring for them, but otherwise they'd be the best option.
- Non-AirPod BT headphones. I have nice Bose ones from work. These lack Apple's extensions to improve pairing and headset (mic) mode. In headset mode, the earphone quality drops to like worse than early 2000s cellphone. Standard pairing is annoying. It's a bit annoying having to charge them. I also don't want to shell out more money for earbuds (the headphones aren't so portable).
- Dongles, which I tried. Turns out they don't work with inlined mics, don't work with older iPhones (so I can't leave them on a shared car aux), are fragile, and are really easy to lose. Can't charge while using one either, but that's nbd. My car seats ate two and the last one broke. It also just feels stupid having to use these.
- Old iPhone. I kept my 6 until it broke. I still have a spare 5, no longer usable with AT&T, which I use to play music in the car.
Yeah I want to listen to music on my phone, but they've made it sufficiently annoying that I don't anymore. It's a clear regression.
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.
I wouldn't have any beef with AirPods if Apple didn't remove the jack to sell them. Maybe if Apple somehow couldn't make their own BT extensions, they'd improve the BT standard instead, which would benefit those buying non-Apple wireless headphones (like you). That matters less to me, though.
> You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone
No, by mic I mean taking calls and meetings on my earbuds/phones, which is a common requirement. Most earbuds have inlined mics sharing the same jack.
Car aux issue is separate. One of my cars does have BT, but that's even worse because the phones fight over it or the pairing sometimes doesn't happen. Maybe "pass the aux" is not a thing anymore and I'm the only one who wants passengers to play their own music sometimes, but this wasn't a problem before.
I’m with you on the dongle issues, it’s a tremendous pain to find consistently working equipment that allows charging, in-line mic, and durability.
That said, I hate BT more and have been using the same Bose QC20 wired earbuds and Belkin adapters for 4+ years. There are semi-decent options out there.
Weird, I think you left out the part where they did include the dongle for the 3.5mm jack for at least 2 generations after they removed it and still offer one. But to each his/her own.
This is always brought up by people who don't actually use the dongle. Anyone who's tried it doesn't consider it a solution, and I described in a sibling thread why.
If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)
Can confirm, dongle's not an actual usable alternative for most situations. IRL you'll lose the little fuckers, they'll be in the way for any devices without missing hardware (and get lost when you remove them for that device), they're fragile, and you'll never have them when you need them anyway. They're theoretically a replacement for the removed headphone jack, but in actual fact they're worthless.
I just use my phone for fewer music-playing situations than I otherwise would, and when I do use it for playing music, it's a mixed bag. Controls on the car console are nice (aside from that the UI sucks and exhibits all kinds of glitches, but that's not Apple's fault), but BT is BT, so, more annoying and less reliable than a cable. My $120 BT headphones are... fine, but I'd rather have better wired headphones for the same price and not have to charge them. Being able to connect to a bluetooth-enabled receiver across the room is handy, but also janky, because of course it is, because it's bluetooth.
If they'd just kept the jack, everyone could be happy. Except Apple, from the somewhat-lower sales of wireless audio devices and especially AirPods.
> IRL you'll lose the little fuckers, they'll be in the way for any devices without missing hardware (and get lost when you remove them for that device)
1. I plug dongle into car aux for my iPhone 12 mini to use.
2. Next day, girlfriend wants to play her own music from her iPhone 6, I say to plug the Lightning in.
3. Dongle doesn't work with iPhone 6 despite being same connector -_- She takes it off to plug into the 3.5mm.
4. Dongle falls beneath car seat and is never seen again. Presumably it's next to the other one that got lost the same way.
Went from "it just works" to screwing up the most basic functionality ever, plugging in the damn aux. And it's while you're driving.
Yeah, I lost my first one like a week in when it fell into the (automatic—I'm not cool, I don't drive a manual) shifter. It was so small it managed to fit into the little gap in the rubber guard around it. Lost forever, or at least until someone tears apart the center console of that car for some reason. Only time I've managed to lose something that particular way.
> Anyone who's tried it doesn't consider it a solution, and I described in a sibling thread why.
Universals are always wrong of course: we actually used a dongle for the kid's wired iPad headphones. It doesn't suck for us using a dongle, so I'm guessing our experience was really different from yours.
> If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)
Nope, our 6 year old is not getting AirPods anytime soon.
Let me hit you with some anecdotes. I regularly disparage both Apple and Google in my comments, typically Apple for being user-hostile and lying in marketing and Google for being incompetent and user-hostile. My Apple comments get downvoted more than my Google comments (I'd guess due to fanaticism that I see with no other company), although the gap has been steadily closing.
Well, today I learned that it was possible to go to -4. But I'm not sure we can tell anything from that really, just that there are a lot people who (a) don't like apple, and (b) are sure they are in the minority rather than the majority. Which is a bit contradictory.
No one is forced to buy Airpods, but the first class integration that the product gets which others can't gives it a competitive advantage. This is besides the power to push the product through different channels to customers of iPhones, iPads etc.
Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS device or Mac. In fact, even when I keep removing the application from the Mac, on a version update it comes back again. It has integrations into the system and other core system apps that other products can't get and defaults matter. On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive.
> Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS device or Mac.
I never noticed, having never bought Apple Music before and just using spotify instead. I guess if I wanted it to run on a HomePod, I would need it?
> On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive.
Spotify doesn't get to offer you that when you are setting up your new phone. You have to know about the company and go and install it.
It is good that you are using Spotify and supporting an independent company, but as I was saying defaults and ease of access matters. Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.
There are plenty of non-apple speakers that come with Spotify trials. I get that trials are hard to back out of, and I've never activated my Apple Music trial.
> Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.
Spotify is still dominating music streaming, more so than Apple Music or Amazon Prime Music (which we used to use since it came free with prime).
> There are plenty of non-apple speakers that come with Spotify trials.
Spotify has to pay for these and has to compete for this with other music streaming companies.
Also, comparison with smart speakers is disingenuous. There are a billion iPhone users itself. No non big tech company smart speaker comes even close.
> Spotify is still dominating music streaming
Because of nailing the product early on and being world class in playlists and music recommendations. Even if Apple music comes 80% close, just by holding distribution advantage, they will capture that market.
My god the increasing services push is awful; I used to be an Apple Music subscriber but left eventually because at launch it was a clusterfuck with personal libraries, just destroying metadata and deleting 'duplicates'. And I now have to use a 3rd party music app to listen to my local library on my phone because the system one likes to pop up a fullscreen ad for Apple Music what feels like every time I open it.
I like my Apple products but this services thing is truly destroying a lot of the good experiences they can provide.
I'm pretty sure everyone feels that their opinion is the underdog opposed to the other sheeple side.
It is like people who think they are being hip for either hating or loving X, when lots of people love or hate X already, so it isn't really weird either way.
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.
I’m comparing sentiment, hype, upvoting, etc on a particular topic. I think HN isn’t what it used to be but maybe that’s me having old man syndrome. People on HN are happy discussing boring apps on iPad and crapping on all things Google instead of the gold rush of new functionality driven by AI. I’ll just say I’m not the only one that thinks this judging by the response and upvotes on my observation
Around 2013 is when I/Os became less about showing technological progress and more about corporate talk.
Examples of I/O topics before 2013: Android, Maps API, App Engine (cloud), Chrome, AJAX for their APIs, real-time collaboration/Wave, Google TV (early predecessor to Android TV), Chromebooks, Chrome Web Store, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Glass, Gmail updates, Google+, YouTube updates.
Most I/O topics after 2013 revolved around marginal improvements on a lot of things, like individual Android features and apps. And naturally, when there is so little to talk about, corporate speak fills the void.
There were still some interesting topics after 2013, especially if you follow some specific developments in the Android ecosystem. But there were very few groundbreaking topics. Google will probably talk about Bard this year, which has not been a huge success, but at least it's something bigger that harkens back to pre-2013 days.
Almost all of the topics you listed have sessions in this year's Google I/O. There are 35 different sessions tagged "Android" alone: https://io.google/2023/program/?q=android
There might be no sessions for stuff like how to use web APIs because these are already mature and well-documented technologies. I/O is about showcasing new stuff after all.
I don't know, it seems to me that recently in I/O, discussions have primarily focused on mature core products, indicating a shift towards iteration rather than invention. I would say the conference definitely showcases less "new stuff" or "new stuff" of smaller scope. Both I/O and Google now seem to prioritize safe, low-risk technologies from a business standpoint. And that just doesn't fill up an entire conference without some business speak padding.
To my mind, the turning point towards this new, less fun and more corporate Google and I/O was around 2013. I think that's when they started thinking about shaping the company into Alphabet with Google as a subsidiary as well. Famously they removed "don't be evil" as the motto and expanded into hardware a lot soon after 2013, too. It was a time of wholistic change at Google.
It was kept alive internally by Apache for a while later — https://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html. Very interesting why it failed as a project in two separate companies. There was an explosion of team collaboration software in the 2010s and yet these companies couldn't make their product compete.
> Most I/O topics after 2013 revolved around marginal improvements on a lot of things, like individual Android features and apps. And naturally, when there is so little to talk about, corporate speak fills the void.
I don't understand how a corporate culture that's so focused on shipping new projects at the expense of maintenance, manages to ship so few new projects.
There is Vertex AI, which some people are getting early access to (what i hope is) PaLM2 | ULM. The GCP offering only contains tools for your own models, what everyone wants is an alternative to ChatGPT, a pre-trained LLM from Google accessible via API and fine tune-able in Vertex.
They are providing API access to at least some models in the same family underlying Bard, but explicitly (while its in preview) prohibiting production/commercial use — not disclaiming liability and advising against it as is common for pre-release products, but actually prohibiting in the ToS.
Google is taking an hypercautious approach around “AI safety” issues that amounts to “we should not release products and if we do they are just demos that no one should be permitted to use for any serious purpose” which is going to hurt them in the marketplace but also does nothing meaningful to deal with either the real and immediate issues with AI or the mixture of other (some real but less immediate but largely science fantasy) issues that typically are referred to under the “AI safety” umbrella (and that’s even more true if you consider from the pov of assuming that the more science-fantasy-ish of those risks are real and serious.)
Maybe "A journey to protect the Great Barrier Reef using ML"?
The video is five minutes long, is basically a nature advert complete with stirring music, has a bizarre cartoon in the middle of it and is all about an attempt to control the reef's population of starfish. We're told that the starfish are doing great thanks to there being fewer predators and more nutrients in the water, but that this is bad because "it's quite a nasty animal" and it eats coral. The goal is to find starfish "outbreaks" using ML and enable teams of divers to kill the starfish as quickly as possible.
They appear to think this is a stirring example of protecting nature. There's even a diver at the end who breaks down in tears at the way the reef has degraded over his lifespan. Fortunately since the video was made it was discovered that the reefs are now at record-breaking coverage levels despite the starfish, so apparently they didn't need AI driven death-from-above. Also it's not really clear why Google wants to help implement mass animal culls in a place where people don't even go. Why are corals better than starfish? This seems like a very arbitrary judgement. Corals and crown-of-thorns starfish have been co-existing in nature for far longer than people have.
So:
1. Not for developers. They use batching and quantization, that's as deep as it goes technically.
2. Essentially a long ad for their cloud ML services.
3. Consists mostly of people talking about how meaningful, awesome and filled with hope they feel.
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.)
Agreed. That seems like the short high-level feel-good talk aimed at corporate folks, whereas the remaining 17 talks are technical and aimed at actual developers.
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:
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.
I understand him. Maybe Im cynical but everything I see on your link looks like something a technical sales person would come up with… How easy is it to onboard people? Easy! Are we helping save the world? Yes! Can we build it ethically? Yes!
Are those questions really what’s on the mind of the developer? Where is the: we have a way to revolutionize the debugging experience when doing ML(for people with PhDs) talks?
I know it wouldn’t sell to the masses but that was kind of the point if you want jaded devs on your side.
I think you are quick to judge the talks by their title. They are all technical from what I can tell, and many cover topics that are of interest to PhD researchers. For example, the distributed large model paper covers several papers' worth of research done at Google and how to utilize their implementation in JAX.
ML debugging is just one topic among many. I wouldn't dismiss the entire lineup because Google didn't have any big announcements in that space for that year.
I remember going back in 2015. Biggest thing I remember were the "Smart" fabrics that would be integrated into your clothing for interacting with your devices. It was a cool demo but felt very silly and impractical.
I enjoyed the silent disco and free concerts, but it felt very over the top and expensive, basically just a big ego display for Google.
I can understand now why my company is less eager to send developers to events like these every year.
> I remember going back in 2015. Biggest thing I remember were the "Smart" fabrics that would be integrated into your clothing for interacting with your devices. It was a cool demo but felt very silly and impractical.
I almost forgot about that! I think I pushed this into the back of my mind along with google glass.
To add one more data point to the general sentiment in the comments: in 2011 I was so bummed that I couldn’t get a ticket to I/O that year, I wanted to start an alternate conference called I/O Error “for the rest of us” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2192827 !
Ahh, the 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.
It also has a headphone jack, which is getting harder and harder to find these days.
Even if you usually use bluetooth headphones... it's still nice to have a backup. There's lots of situations where headphone jack input is simpler, easier, faster, and more reliable than messing with bluetooth.
I've had a 4a since launch but I was planning to wait out for the 9a. (The cheap OnePlus I had before survived 5 years so I'd hope for at least the same.)
Battery degradation hasn't been an issue for me at all, but maybe I'm using my phone less than average. Still goes from morning to bedtime without me thinking about or looking at the charge.
I had a OnePlus 1 and later a 3t for an impressively long time. I wish they would go back to the flagship specs / mid-range price model with the build quality they used to have.
I'm not sure if it'll ever come back. I loved my Pixel 3 at 5.5" but nothing else for the past 5 years has come close. I eventually relented and got a Pixel 6a at 6.1"
It's relevant enough if you're concerned about RSI or CTS and such
In that case display size is a measure of how much strain you're putting on your hands to navigate the huge screen. A smaller screen means less reaching.
Also smaller display size means less content, less instagram posts, less twitter feed, less interest on your phone in general in my perspective
Every 2-3 years I am severely tempted by The Other Side, especially as a very happy Macbook user. But every time, there's a new phone that's just nice enough to keep me around.
Same, I'm a Pixel user and happy Macbook user, but every time I use an iOS device I have such a terrible experience. I purchased a 10th generation iPad for my daughter. The parental controls are simply broken. When installing apps, the child has to click "Ask" and the notification never appears on my wife's iPhone. And only one parent can be the account "manager". Because I'm pretty good with Google, I was able to find some random Reddit post which has a workaround (the solutions in the Apple forum never worked). You can go into the iPhone's settings and rename the phone, e.g. from "iPhone" to "iPhone 2" then the iPhone starts receiving the notifications from the iPad.
Well, I purchased a second iPad 10th gen for my younger daughter and the same exact problem. Out of the box this basic feature just doesn't work reliably. We're at the point we're renaming my wife's iPhone once a month.
That's just one specific problem we've had, but really it's been a disaster. The setup for both iPads was full of bugs and random issues. Both iPads randomly fail to install updates overnight. I don't recall the last time my Android has ever failed to do a system update. It's just really surprising for me because I assumed a device in it's 10th generation with such a good reputation would be rock solid.
In 2018 an obnoxious researcher working at a company known at the time as DeepMind told me (who was working in healthtech) that "AI in healthcare is a solved problem".
It's 2023 now. AI in healthcare is a rounding error and will likely stay that way for a decade or longer. Google blew a 7 year lead of being an AI-first company to a non-profit. DeepMind is now a team within Google, similar to Ads, Drive, and Shopping Express.
IMO Google flunked it on the public side, I think the reason most of it was very hush-hush for years is because it was used for private, government purposes. Now, maybe they can't release most of their prior work without permission, so they're regrettably starting over with a blank slate in various departments.
Agreed. It seems like they have the capabilities, but failed on the product side of things, as it seems they do often these days.
I disagree with the GP that they "blew a 7 year lead". They still have a lot of the top industry minds in this area, and it's still early days; ChatGPT was launched less than 6 months ago (which seems crazy). I'm thankful OpenAI is forcing them to stop resting on their laurels. How they will deliver on all of this remains to be seen, but this Google I/O has at least made me hopeful.
It's really nice to have a keynote that isn't KUBERNETES ISTIO BLOCKCHAIN. Lots of interesting AI integrations with existing products. The search and maps improvements are really exciting.
That surprised me too - I read that they are restructuring their assistant team to focus more on Bard, so I don't know if that means they are less focused on the core assistant or not. I don't use Google Assistant, but seems like a clear integration point for these new tools. Will be interesting to see what shape that takes.
All I have to say is I'm annoyed the domain is io.google instead of google.io. I mean I get they gotta flex the notion that they have TLD us peasants don't get to use, but the conf's name is Google IO not IO Google.
There's some political baggage associated with the .io TLD since it's for the British Indian Ocean Territory, an area whose inhabitants were forcibly removed to build a military base.
It's a faux pas to flex your own massive amounts of power in places where it doesn't really matter all that much. Then again, Google has pretty much embraced their role as a comic book villain these days.
I'm betting they'll be integrating Bard into smartphones and Chrome ASAP. The way Bing got added into SwiftKey is pretty awesome, but being able to interact with Bard the same way phones currently interact with the gAssistant would be a huge boon for usability and increasing interaction with it, assuming that's something Google wants to increase.
I'm still of the opinion that just swapping current phone assistants with LLMs is naive and bad. For one thing, they need to make sure they don't break current functionality, like for setting timers and reminders, and and doing math calculations (which LLMs are not good at unless you get it to pass the query off to a dedicated calculator like Wolfram Alpha), etc. But more importantly, when you use something like ChatGPT through the web interface there's a bunch of warning labels all over to remind you "this thing will make up information."
For something with such an easily-accessible interface that's baked-in at an OS level, I think a fail state of "sorry, I don't know how to help with that" is better than stating a bunch of false information as fact.
They could potentially handle that by evaluating the request and determining whether gAssistant can answer is without Bard's involvement, since that would save them bandwidth and time.
I agree that the is massive potential for errors, but I'm certain those will get fleshed out soon, and Google is pretty well known for throwing shit and the fan and looking for the cleanest patch of carpet after the fact.
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 :-)
Google now has a separate conference for Cloud ("Next") and even for Android there are separate conferences (like "Dev Summit" or "Bootcamp"). These dilute the I/O's excitement.
But this phenomenon exemplifies the incoherent nature of Google's dev story.
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.
This I/O is pretty important, IMO, as Google's reputation for being the best cloud for data science is on the line with ChatGPT eating their AI position and BigQuery's waning developer pull. Data is a large driver for companies to use Google Cloud, and without that they're in big trouble, IMO.
Hopefully this I/O gives folks more compelling reasons to use Google Cloud.
Some good stuff here. I like the Pixel 7A. I like that we've got another competitor in the LLM API market.
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.
The people who made those "world shifting" products at Google back in the day are long gone.
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).
I have no idea how much effort Google spent preparing these demos, but I personally find it so much less impressive than the livestream OpenAI did where they actually used their tech following suggestions from discord.
I think OpenAI is probably held to different standards than Google. ChatGPT hallucinates incorrect information, and it's kind of adorable - the tech is early, they'll improve over time, etc. Google Bard hallucinates incorrect information, and it _looks_ like a step backwards in their core product.
I went to Google IO in 2014 and it was very exciting as a young engineer.
Google Glass, Google Cardboard, Modular Smartphone, 3D space scanning tablet, Android Wear, and Android Auto were all announced there.
Now it seems Android Wear never really took off and Android Auto is the only product that made it to somewhat mainstream.
I'm not seeing much exciting experimental projects from Google anymore but maybe I'm just older and not easily excited.
Hard to be enthusiastic about announcements from Google when there's a substantial chance of that product hitting https://killedbygoogle.com/ in 2 years.
<to Google Bard>: create a Google I/O keynote on this and that project. Mention AI at every turn.
All subtly cringe, unexciting. Presenting million ways AI takes a whole lot of the real creation & soul out of every human-technology interaction. Plus feeling society not ready to handle this.
I'm beginning to wonder if soulless, boring, corpspeak AI-generated text is going to turn out to be a huge competitive disadvantage for those who become reliant on it.
If someone sends me an email or a message that sounds AI-generated, it's easy to tell that it's not meaningful. So I end up ignoring it entirely.
I'm also concerned about folks who actually try to use "AI" like Bard to assist with life decisions like they showed in the college-search presentation. Maybe that works OK right now -- though I suspect AI has serious blind spots. But what happens when Google wants to milk advertisers a bit more, and starts pushing more Wendy's (TM) and for-profit universities and whatever else into your chats?
The "what bike should I buy for a 5 mile hilly commute" query had hilarious results, too -- literally all sponsored content from no-name (but expensive) bike brands. No real understanding of what makes a decent, maintainable commuter bike. Just Bard spitting out whichever bike manufacturers pay Google the most.
Anyone who actually relies on this garbage for decisionmaking is going to wind up making some very poor decisions once Google allows advertisers to hook into these AI features... which is already happening in Search.
Goodle dev conferences used to be exciting, but now, unfortunately, all I care about is an update on what else did they break in new version of Android (that was working fine previously, like call recording).
There are certainly similarities. Google has built quite a moat in most of their businesses that operate like monopolies. They don't seem to be able to make a cohesive strategy for devices or services that connect these devices, but they still have massive market share.
Indeed they do have lots of users, hence mentioning 'Microsoft in the Ballmer era' in the comment you are replying to. Lots of existing users doesn't mean a company is relevant.
> "We made next-gen state of the art transparent video translation/dubbing" and "we will let to use this tool only to our hand picked partners". What the fuck ?
Its a bigger WTF because “realtime audio translation with live transcripts is a problem we’ve solved completely and the key unique selling point of our earbuds with our phones” was a Google thing in... 2017.
> "We made next-gen state of the art transparent video translation/dubbing" and "we will let to use this tool only to our hand picked partners". What the fuck ?
Because otherwise developers will write bots that generate and upload fake videos, then download the generated captions, in order to use YouTube as a free deep-translation API. (People already proved willing to generate and upload videos in order to use YouTube as a bulk data storage API.)
No, you wrong. It is about keeping language barriers, and about preventing people to understand each other more easily. Google could released features like this years ago with TTS from Google Translate, instead they have been doing absolutely nothing for last 10 years.
Wow based on the comments Google IO is already dead on arrival. Maybe the hate will put some fire under google to come out with something meaningful in the years to come.
Oh, my god. Google is SO lost that the guy is demonstrating a "Project Tailwind". TAILWIND.
When you google for project tailwind you obviously get results for Tailwind (the css framework).
Did just GOOGLE FORGOT HOW TO DO SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?!?
(sorry for the capslock, but I'm lost)
I feel that this comment might bother some people. But the idea that the company will demonstrate on stage a project and fail at choosing a proper googable name, when this company is google itself it's just mindboggling.
