My computer literate but non-technical wife just noticed yesterday that google searches are a waste of time compared to ChatGPT. Over the course of about six hours it went from this thing is amazing to this stupid thing knows I'm on a Mac but still refers to F11 keys.
She even got ChatGPT to re-enforce she was on Mac and didn't have an F11 key but never got a substitute key to use for Mac users. (F11 is volume down on my Mac keyboard.)
Like I say it's volume down on the Mac keyboard. Why she was interrogating ChatGPT I don't know. I know she started using it to get multi-state reading correlations... then she was talking about get it to excel work.
After that I imagine ChatGPT told her to use the F11 for something and she noticed she didn't have one. I believe at that point she started to try to get ChatGPT to tell her which key was the F11 on a Mac. She told it she was on Mac and didn't have an F11 key. ChatGPT agreed she was on a Mac and didn't have one.
I believe that is far as the conversation went. It was interesting to me becuase it is commonly available information but the answer just couldn't happen.
How is that different from everything after Google Search. Alphabet is even structured around the idea of not being able to pick winners. I can discern some long term strategy in Android Automotive and Waymo, but nothing is sacred when it comes to cutting off products that are not growing.
It's one thing to say that Sundar hasn't led Google to innovate much in his tenure (I agree there), but to say Google hasn't picked any winners since Google Search?
- Gmail (largest email service at 1.5B users)
- YouTube (by far the biggest video sharing platform)
- Android (most used operating system in the world by number of devices)
- Google Maps (maps service with the largest userbase)
- YouTube TV
- The whole Google Drive Suite
- Chromecast/Android TV
- Chromebooks (made huge inroads in the k-12 education space)
What I mean by "not picking winners" is that Google admits they can't foresee, for example, the acquisition of YouTube turning into a first-tier social network. Just like they could not foresee Orkut and G+ not becoming successful social networks.
> Just like they could not foresee Orkut and G+ not becoming successful social networks.
They put minimal effort into their products and prematurely sunset them if they don't perform well enough. Their organization is either so fragmented or toxic that they launch products that are competing against eachother.
It really does seem like there are only morons at the helm. A company with as much resources as Google should not continue to fail so badly. My suspicion is as Jobs said of Apple during his time away, the company is being totally run by the product guys not the engineers.
That's exactly what I think. I personally also find him very uninspiring, it looks like he's basically just 'maintaining' the company on auto-pilot mode. No out of the world new ideas, and now the company is losing on the very field they were seemingly far-far ahead than the rest of the world.
10 years ago, Google was one of the most exciting companies in the world to me, culminating in that amazing Google Chrome comic https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/
Their products and software seemed genuinely inspiring. Now, it seems to just be maintenance or death. Seemingly happens with all once-loved tech companies to some degree. It's quite sad but I guess time moves on. Totally self-inflicted for them though, they decided to stop moving forward
Alphafold is open and seems fundamentally transformative in the science space. GPT is nice but it’s a smart meme-generator at the moment. I don’t disagree with the impact on G’s bottom line, though.
Sure, I agree they are useful. My objection is it’s more in the tool category than science, while Alphafold is both. There isn’t convincing evidence that GPTs are pushing what we know; rather, they make it easier to process/search what we already know. You could hire an ML expert to be your tutor without GPTs and you’d get equal or better tutoring, though at a higher price. You can’t hire people to predict protein folding better than Alphafold. It’s very convenient that GPTs exist and they can provide tons of value, but they’re essentially the next version of mechanical turk or a domain expert you’d hire for contract work except more scalable. The net impact of GPTs may also be higher due to how often we use text, but I’d rather see a society curing disease, etc. than one generating fake books, etc.
I see what you're saying. However, I'd argue that the zero-shot learning capabilities of the latest GPTs, if continually improved upon, could potentially offer a path towards a generalist "scientist" agent, one that could perform its own research and take over R&D for humanity (aka, the singularity). But yes, I absolutely agree that the current gen capabilities of GPTs are nowhere close to this hypothetical situation.
Of course, the models from Alphabet don't really fit this bill either. I do wonder how many "protein folding" style problems there are out there, for these narrow superintelligent AIs to solve.
The very nature of how people search is changing. Personally, I'm LOVING phind.com, it hits all my buttons of what a modern AI inspired SE should be. IMHO someday soon, Google will just be the Youtube company. That will be their primary thing, and maybe that's good so they can make that better so it doesn't fail too.
- regurgitates stuff it hits on a shallow search as authoritative response (communicating uncertainty would be a great improvement for GPT models but I'm guessing that's not going to happen because of shallow RHLF preferences)
- search index is worse than google (eg. I've tried a search where google lands on a good solution, phind hits official docs and offers suboptimal solution)
- produces results slower than I can read source
- I still need to go to the source for full reference or do follow-up (but again it's slow)
Not seeing the value tbh. If it was gpt 3.5 fast with 4 quality now we might be on to something.
I agree, and on top of that Google products used to be, in my experience of top notch quality.
But over the past couple of years I'm seeing more and more bugs in Google maps, chrome, and android. I think they've really let the quality bar slip.
They were/are in such a dominant position it's taking a long time to crumble, but crumbling they seem to be, slowly but surely.
If gods of chaos decide give a future where google completely gets broken up a chance, I'd be massively pissed if someone doesn't detach google reader and bring it online just to make a point.
There are plenty of good RSS services now. In fact I’d argue there is more choice and higher quality now than when Reader was around. I use Newsblur as my aggregator and either net news wire on my Mac and Unread on my iPhone and ipad. I’m glad Google got out of the RSS business.
Sundar is a McKinsey consultant who is very pleasant and agreeable and can keep a boat steady while maximizing shareholder return. Unfortunately there isn’t much innovation happening .
Google needs a Larry Page or Musk like character back at the helm.
> Sundar is a McKinsey consultant who is very pleasant and agreeable and can keep a boat steady
Yep. In fact, he was specifically chose to step in as CEO for his meekness : voted most likely to preserve brand value by best distracting folks from the evil turn the company had taken.
> while maximizing shareholder return.
Nope. He's a 100% static CEO, and he's therefore squandering huge amounts of capital and human resources.
That's not what I'd call "maximizing shareholder return".
Sundar is a caretaker who got credited for simple inertia: The momentum in place before he took the reigns were predestined to grow earnings for years, but suddenly Pichai gets to pretend it's all him.
Especially compared to Nadella, who shows that someone not from the the founders’ circle, a corporate ladder climber, can lead an IT company with great vision too.
Microsoft dealt with with the too-rich-to-work problem and the founders-and-earlies-lost-interest problems in the 80s and 90s. "FYIFV" (despite being a bit of a tech urban legend) and "Quietly Vesting Disease" (QVD) and all that. They're an actual grown up company that knows how to build and vet leaders.
Google is not a grown up company - it runs the way a 2nd generation dynastic family runs their businesses - haphazard and sloppy and entirely surviving because of a cash cow and nothing else. Plus, they have a fairly substantial crew with "rest and vest" as a mantra at least for the folks I knew there prior to 2008..
It's werid to me that no one has made the self-evident comparison: Sundar is like Steve Ballmer was for Microsoft.
Coming in right after the founders and trying to raise the moats of the exisiting products instead of creating new moats. Google Stadia is a similar failure to Ballmer's late Windows Live initiatives.
Bad comparison. Ballmer launched Azure, Surface, Bing, Xbox and Office on iOS and Office365. He was also the one go all-in on the cloud and to start the shift towards embracing Open Source. Pretty much everything that people attribute to Nadella either launched or started under Ballmer.
Maybe finally the board will wake up and find a replacement for Sundar this year. I thought Googlers were internally very unhappy about Sundar for a long time now.
Not sure. The real question is what the Google founders and board want and expect. Sundar is just looking after things for them. The reason he got the job is that he was never going to do more than that. But you might legitimately ask at this point if that's enough. And he's been there long enough that he could be replaced without anyone losing too much face. Surround it with some corporate euphemisms and get some fresh blood in and move on. I would not be surprised if they are already looking around.
It worked for Microsoft obviously. This is quite a coup for Satya Nadella. And he got that one on merit. MS has no stake in Android (they declined to get into that after killing Windows Phone). Also, he hit the ground running after Steve Ballmer was retired. Not that hard of course after Ballmer but he did a few decisive things early on that all seem to have mostly worked out. The Linkedin acquisition; fixing .Net, re-establishing MS as a bonafide OSS player with the Github acquisition and VS-Code. And then making a smart investment in OpenAI which they are now riding to success. All great moves.
I'd say, Google is in the same boat right now. Lots of obvious potential, an extended period of a bit rudderless performance, missed boats, and no clear direction or vision. Fix that and it could go somewhere else again. Doing more of the same isn't going to be anywhere near good enough. They seem to be stuck playing a game of whack-a-mole in terms of strategy and ever responding to what others are doing and never quite catching up with that instead of initiating things themselves and leading.
The same job as every public company CEO: Keep their job by prioritizing the stock price, board happiness and keeping activist shareholders from causing problems
Samsung has done this before, and Google has multiple times made various offers and incentives intended to "encourage" Samsung not to. Because a huge portion of the Android monopoly will leave Google Search when this happens. Stuff like OEMs getting a cut of Play Store revenue are mechanics done to avoid this.
There's a pretty good chance Samsung is just negotiating for better terms, kinda like carriage disputes for TV networks.
Indeed. Though for Android OEMs, "paying" for Google's app suite is considered part of the equation. It's less of an incentive for Samsung though since they have their own replacements for most Google apps ready to go.
1) "It will reportedly be known as Project ‘Magi’ and is said to provide a far more personalized experience than the company’s current service."
That is super creepy. Google knows a lot about you, and now it is using that knowledge to really put you in a filter bubble. Imagine this plus engagement metrics.
2) So much for that monopoly a lot of people thought Google had. Turns out they're still as exposed to market pressure as they ever were.
I would love for that ability to be easily determined visually, and easily toggled on/off. A big "personalized" and "generic" toggle switch at the top would be useful.
I don't think the ability to serve up specialized content is the concern here. It is the fragmentation that results when we no longer have a shared reality or a consistent set of results in the population. Results specific to any one person is terrifying in some of its implications.
Not all bubbles are harmful. I’m in a regional bubble when I search for “restaurant”. I’m in a programming language bubble when I search for coding issues.
Tune it to be less bubbly with controversial topics, perhaps.
part of the issue with 'bubbles', as I see it, is that you don't know you're in a bubble. a big huge honking option of "keep me in the bubble" and "show results outside my bubble" would make it a lot more obvious (and manageable) to many people who are oblivious to the notion that they live in an information bubble. won't stop people who only use one source of news, but in a search aspect, it would be useful.
Interestingly, Google themselves seem to be at least somewhat aware of this - though it may just be an accidental side effect of trying to drive user engagement on YouTube.
I’ve been noticing an occasional “Show me something new to me” prompt showing up in my YT feed. It has literally never provided anything I was interested in watching, but I appreciate that they’re trying to burst bubbles.
I'm actually not entirely sure about that. For example, if I know a lot about a particular topic and the search engine knows that I know a lot about that particular topic, then when I search for something, it should give me a condensed result and not introductory-level material. Or if I have certain preferences for the format of material I'm given. For example, if I prefer college-level outline material versus eighth-grade reading level text, for example.
So it seems entirely reasonable to me that you would get different results.
If I had a personal assistant that was performing the search for me, I would expect customized results from them. I don't know why I should not expect the same from a machine.
Yes. I like that Google seems to surface programming results in the language I use. In the case of “boobies”, if I’m a bird expert it might give me info on blue footed boobies first.
Or if you're a programmer and are looking for that paper written by Professor Firstname Lastname, you might prefer results about the CS professor, not about the eponymous person who undresses for a living. Or plays baseball for a living.
I like arthouse films. ∀ arthouse ∃ approximately eponymous porn film. I can't say I dislike porn, but if the search engines were to treat me like my neighbour I'd never get any arthouse results. Too niche.
Query results are more diverse than you might expect. I once worked in a startup whose name we thought was unique, but in actual fact there were nine other similarly-named companies in the same city, not to mention names of non-local companies, organisations, products, objects…
That’s not true. If I, a software developer, search for “pandas,” Google should probably show me the Python data library near or at the top. If my friend who’s not an engineer searches for “pandas,” they’re probably looking for the bear.
That might be true in concept, but I don't think it's true in reality. When people search for something online, they want the first result to be whatever they had in mind. If I search for Python, I want the homepage for the programming language. When somebody else searches for Python, they might be looking to learn about the animal.
You could argue that we should just ask for exactly what we want, but that puts more work on the user and reduces the effectiveness of the tool. I don't want to type more than "python", I just want the link!
Search engines provide very little personalization even today. I'm almost surprised a competitor hasn't popped up with a product that tries to fill that niche.
> Search engines provide very little personalization even today. I'm almost surprised a competitor hasn't popped up with a product that tries to fill that niche.
What about a child who used to be interested in reptiles but is now interested in programming? I get frustrated when Google starts acting "smart" and changing queries or hiding results. I've started to use Bing image search because I'd like more than 20 results, the way Google used to be. If they start acting like that even more, I'll use them even less!
Google's model is the only viable one long term. With growing amount of information, the only way to find you something useful without making you enter a growing amount of terms is to maintain a context of what you are interested in.
No child will be confused if they look up a programming language that they already know have the exact same name as reptile and get reptile first.
People are different, I get it, but I don't want a search engine that tries to second guess me all the time. If I'm a programmer and I'm interested in the actual animal, I don't want to have to fight against the product. I'd much rather use my knowledge to craft my queries intelligently so that I get exactly what I want.
But then when it comes to technology, I'm a bit of a control freak.
What you mean is that you don't want a search engine that guesses wrong.
If you happen to get a search engine that is correctly giving you the right result every time because it happens to know what you want, I am guessing you will not have a problem with that.
I would have a problem with that, because for a search engine to know me well enough to know what I actually want despite what I typed in it would have to know a lot of information about me I wouldn't trust the company behind it with.
I spend most of my browsing time in a browser configured to clear cookies, cache, and history on exit.
I'm not sure why most people are okay with companies gathering tons of data about them and trying to use it to manipulate them into buying products they don't actually want or need (among other uses), but I'm not one of them.
Now if I could only get a search engine to not ignore query terms because it thinks it knows what I want better than I do, I'd be even happier.
"I'm not sure why most people are okay with companies gathering tons of data about them and trying to use it to manipulate them into buying products they don't actually want or need (among other uses), but I'm not one of them."
It takes a ton of work to prevent it and it's more or less futile anyways. It's not so much that people are okay with this, rather it's a part of modern life and it's exhausting trying to mitigate it. And impulsively buying products due to ads is a personal failing.
Results are already different based on your location, so unless you're very near each other, you already don't have that. You mightn't notice it too much because it's only noticeable on queries where it might matter. Could be similar for personalization.
Here's another example taken from my experience a few years ago. I once googled "pro tour results" and was, as expected, presented with an info box about the results of the recent Pro Tour in Magic: The Gathering.
Some months later I was visiting family for a few weeks and wrote the same query on a family-member's PC. It gave me something about golf which I couldn't care less about. But I got the right results on my phone. I'm sure if I added "golf" to my query on the phone it would have given me info about that tournament instead. While it disturbs me how much I'm being tracked, I'm still happy with the practicality of the implied context being aligned with my interests.
I can type at 100 words per minute. Typing "programming language" after every search will cost me maybe two seconds per search. The savings are trivial. The costs, however, are not trivial. I have on several occasions spent half an hour trying to make a search engine handle a query that I know worked in the past. And that's when I find what I'm looking for at all. They have optimized the happy path but made failures worse and more frequent.
What really bothers me is that no one asked what I want. These companies replaced my tools behind my back. I have seen literal fistfights between machinists over people messing with their tools. This is at least that bad and probably worse. Software is central to how I make sense of the world. Software is not just part of my livelihood; it is how I make sense of the world. Changing my software behind my back is like "upgrading" my eyes while I sleep. Why do we accept that such a central part of our world is completely out of our control?
Totally agree. I want to be surprised by a new UX in a software tool about as much as I want to be surprised by a new UX on my chainsaw. Nobody would put up with this in the physical world, I hate that it has become accepted in the software world.
A lot of major UX changes have resulted in immense outrage, so it's not like everyone is fine with the churn. My best guesses on why it's accepted are:
1. Most big tech companies have monopoly power and get away with not caring much about their users. Maintenence work is famously under-rewarded at many companies, incentivizing changes even if they are net negative for users.
2. People get browbeaten about security concerns. Actually useful security updates often get bundled with UX changes.
Not "anyone": only mature searchers that worry about privacy, filter bubbles and artificially buried/censored good results.
Advertisement buyers, on the other hand, benefit greatly from carefully controlling who sees their ads. For example, child care related products for female teenagers that are one year too old for their school class, or lawyers for young adult males from bad neighborhoods; I'm sure everyone can think of something more creepy and offensive.
For the unsuspecting computer nerd, a search for latex back at the dawn of search technology was briefly something that could truly open the unprepared mind to unsuspected vistas.
Boy did that one get fixed fast.
But let us spare a moment of thought for the subsequent searchers for interesting items of latex clothing, and how they felt about being exposed to interminable details about an obscure word processing system.
It really depends. If I want to search coding related stuff, I want this to be personalized as much as possible, with always having the option to extend the search for non-traditional topics.
Or when searching for places to go, it would be nice to get recommendations which consider that I love to ride bicycle.
Then there's DuckDuckGo on Firefox for legacy search if you're paranoid.
What do you think an American tourist overseas wants when they ask for [football scores]?
Do you think an ergonomics engineer logged in from the office and a musician in their studio might want different things when they search for [keyboard reviews]?
How about a 16-year-old male native Texan versus a 62-year-old female immigrant with a degree in fine arts who search for [nearby movies]?
Opening the widget is useless because it shows the result in the Google app (a 350MB monster) and when you click to open a result it opens in app.
You can't have your browser's features, You can't open multiple results in multiple tabs you need to go back each time.
A better option is to add the browser's search widget on the home screen, it takes you straight to the address bar where you can enter your query. All modern browsers support searching from the address bar, no need to go to google.com
Edit: looks like I'm wrong, see IceWreck's reply below.
Original comment: my understanding is that this means Google will deny their customers access to Google Play, Photos and other first party Google apps. Samsung has replacements for some of these but not all of them.
Nope, to access play services you have to add the powered by android logo and preinstall a minimum set of required apps (including the google search app), but afaik nothing saying google has to be the default search engine.
Seems unlikely. Samsung would justifiably paint that as anti-competitive / monopolistic and the last thing Google wants is more scrutiny from various government regulators right now.
Android's early commercialization actively encouraged OEMs to "customize" Android for at least two reasons: Android product maturity was questionable, and what else are phone OEM product managers going to do?
Now that "Google experience" is generally cleaner and better than OEMs' customizations, Google is struggling to put the toothpaste back in the tube. It is very damaging to Android as a product because OEMs are slow to issue updates and won't continue updates beyond three years, in most cases.
I doubt Google will strong-arm Samsung over this. They need Samsung more than Samsung needs the Play Store and other "Google experience" apps.
That's one reason I like Pixels. The camera software is better than other phones, too. Unfucking a Samsung phone's default set of apps is annoying, though I admit I have not had to do that in a while.
I've been using Bing for a few weeks now it is not all the way there yet but so far the experience is more gratifying than Google. The results seem to be better and there is less ads on top the search results. Their AI integration is also well accomplished. No complains there...
Anecdotally, their actual search results have sucked for me. For example, I searched for “narrowest cars with 6 or more seats”, and Bing’s results were terrible and irrelevant. The AI version gave me some acceptable results but very few. Google returned pages of relevant results from different years.
Also, even if it were just a Dr front for Bing, it doesn't change that I got perfectly reasonable results for the search string said to return unusable results from Bing, so
I'd use Bing's chat feature if it wasn't only available on Edge... I can't seem to get any Chromium browsers working well on my Fedora install. I already want to use Microsoft's search engine, why do they need me to use their browser too?
Didn't realized that. My currently employer is MS-stack based so I have been working with Edge and to be fair, this was also surprising. I would probably rather work with Firefox but the browser is not that intrusive and provide the same level of support and tooling I get with FF. I think one the reasons I decided to stick with Edge these last few weeks is the extremely poor support I get when working with the SharePoint implementations that are for internal use, seems to be a issue with the way FF interacts with Windows Authentication.
Blind advice: it may be related to kerberos authentication. Firefox needs to whitelist the domains against which kerberos authentication can be performed.
You may try configure network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris and network.negotiate-auth.delegation-uris
I use bing via duck duck go and it's total dog shit but I don't want to use Google so I just suffer through it. And even Google's 1st page results are pretty useless nowadays
I've been using it for about 4 years now. Occasionally, I'll try Google when I'm having difficulty finding something with Bing. It's usually something where I have only a vague recollection of what I'm looking for and I'm starting by using search to find other keywords to eventually get to my true search terms. But it has yet to work out that Google has provided better results in those cases. Indeed, the results are often worse and I doubt I'd be able to make any progress with Google anymore.
And now, with ChatGPT integrated with Bing, I have found it makes very, very short work of those sorts of vague, barely remembered searches.
Some interesting dynamics at play here if true. Google basically maintains Android to get people to use Google services on it, so Samsung switching to Bing would eliminate Google's incentive to develop Android. Samsung is also by FAR the largest Android OEM and holds almost as much power over the platform as Google just from the sheer amount of Android devices that they ship.
This sounds similar to Walmart saying they'll stop taking Visa. Samsung would be dumb not to at least threaten moving away from Google, even if they had no intention to change. It's a negotiating tactic, one that has more teeth in recent months because Google's competitors are finally showing a real challenge.
They'd only be moving away from Google search not GMS. In my recent experience, Google Search is mediocre at best and perhaps worse than Bing most of the time. So it's not a massive gamble.
I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively. They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or something) and then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce.
This is precisely what Microsoft did to Google. They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money. Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply.
One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop. Now, with deals such as this, Microsoft will have more data to tune their engine while Google is left on the sidelines.
Let's just hope that the AI driven search revolution does not produce a monopoly.
Canonical doesn't really make any things that are considered part of a desktop OS. Ubuntu is just a package (and some argue a bad one) of things made by other people.
There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon. You're probably best re-inventing the wheel if you want a Windows competitor, like Google did with ChromeOS.
They're using a package manager that a lot of people are comfortable with, they give away their packages without subscriptions and they work with some OEMs.
But in reality, the hardware support is in the kernel, so any distro with a more up2date kernel would fare at least as good. As for the software Canonical produces, I'm not great friends with anything. Snap is crap, Netplan is just a renderer to systemd-networkd or networkmanager, MAAS is a pile of garbage, Juju never caught on, upstart failed, Unity failed etc...
We're running a lot of Canonical at work and I'm not particularly impressed.
A canonical engineer did fix a kernel bug that prevented my laptop from booting on newer kernel versions. And they do develop their own software, too. Saying that they are "just a package" is not giving them enough credit.
To you and me, sure, there is value in a linux desktop.
To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop. Where it works, it is the exception, not the norm.
Taking linux and turning it into a business model can be done - see valve and the steam deck. Granted, that is gaming-only but it can be done. The #1 problem with the linux desktop is that there is no single linux desktop and things break far too often.
> To you and me, sure, there is value in a linux desktop.
"You and me" is actually not a small or meaningless demographic. It includes my thousands of colleagues at Mercedes-Benz who use Linux desktops to do engineering work, and millions of other developers. It means a lot of scientists, for example at NASA and CERN. It means a lot of school students and government employees in educational and other municipal deployments.
A lot of the places where Linux is used is for roles that act as multiplicators, e.g. in the development and production of end-user products, or research/science/RD that will lead to new ones, or in educating the people who will one day make new ones.
All of this is a lot of value if you sum it up. There may be no single shining CEO and his shareholders getting rich off of the Linux desktop in the way we're used to fawning over in the tech hustle news cycle. But the world at large almost certainly is. I submit that's a fine success metric.
> To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop.
For many users it's today more reliable than contemporary Windows. Ten years ago, the Linux desktop experience for a non-technical user was death by a thousand papercuts. Today there are still some gaps in HW support that can create unsolvables, but if your machine is well-supported, things work just fine.
What's mainly keeping it back is many other factors, from channel availability to software availability.
> see valve and the steam deck
:-) I worked on the Steam Deck as CTO of one of Valve's contractors on the project. Glad you like it.
You may be snarky, but it is actually meaningful progress.
My first attempt on Linux was 20 years ago, before I was a technical user. It was a nightmare. Getting my mouse to work was impossible. Even figuring out how to turn the computer off so I could reinstall Windows was a pain.
I came back to Linux some 8 years ago, already as a Developer. Installed Ubuntu. Everything hardware worked well, no need to tinker around. Usability was good and somewhat intuitive, but it took me some time to adjust. I enjoyed it for programming, but not being able to play most games I care about limited my use, and I kept Windows in dual boot.
Nowadays I use Linux Mint as my only OS. It's objectively better than Windows in every way. For regular usage I don't even need to tinker with anything. Although I like the terminal and prefer using it, I can totally see how an average user can get by without touching it at all. I need only to tinker a little to get certain games running, and that's all.
> To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop.
I've switched about a dozen average users to Linux from Windows, and they have all been happy with the change and have not switched back.
Based on that, I say that Linux absolutely is usable as a daily driver desktop. The only place I can see where Linux might not be the right choice is with a certain class of gamer -- but those gamers are not "average users".
> The #1 problem with the linux desktop is that there is no single linux desktop
That's a strength, not a weakness. For the user want a windows-like desktop? Done. Does the user want something more to their style of working? Done. Not being locked into the desktop means that if your objection to desktop linux is the UX, there's probably a different desktop that will make you happier.
If it takes someone to show you how, it is not there yet. I know many technical people who can't be bothered to deal with Linux on the desktop due to driver issues et al
For it to be ready to be a mainstream desktop, it needs to just work.
> If it takes someone to show you how, it is not there yet.
How many average users install Windows by themselves? Most people just take their Windows laptop to a store/service provider for maintenance, buy a new PC because "the old one is slow now" or have their nerdy fam member once a year remove mal/spy/adware and run a reg cleaner. And yes, show them things.
Like OP, I've converted many family members over the years to Linux desktops, and as the resident nerdy family member, the amount of maintenance and assistance I need to provide has gone down very decently vs. supporting family Windows sytems.
My 70+ mother in law has no problems using a Linux desktop to run her book club and other things she needs to do, but is far less likely to accidentally install malware. I used to come back to these systems a year later and find a system tray full of 20 new icons, a stack of 5 new browser toolbars, ad popups and "install new version" popups galore and other horrific stuff that needed hours to clean up or required a wipe and reinstall.
There's a lot of Windows users on the fence about Linux that absolutely underestimate how technical they are and how much active and passive maintenance they do on their Windows systems. Are you a tech user who reads The Verge or Ars Technica and knows in advance about that bad new option in the new Win11 update that you will switch of day 0? Do you have your mental laundry list of five settings you change in every new Windows system you acquire? Most Windows users are and do not.
The truth is, a lot of people have a working body of knowledge about how to admin and keep alive a Windows system, and a Linux switch requires re-learning and re-acquiring similar knowledge at times. And it's absolutely fine if you don't have the time to do that. There's value to that existing body of knowledge, and there is a switching cost. Some people have better things to do than installing Linux. But Windows is not magically maintenance/upkeep/difficulty-free.
> If it takes someone to show you how, it is not there yet
Installing Windows is a more complicated and confusing job than installing Linux. The people who have to be shown how to install Linux also have to be shown how to install Windows.
The fact is that I don't really show them how to install and configure this stuff -- it's really very easy. What I do is hold their hand to get them past the fear of the unknown.
Valve turned it into a business model just fine. Their long-term goal is to not be dependent on proprietary OSes and this is why Linux is installed on Steam Deck by default.
> There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon
Only because no-one has disrupted the market. Typical case of “Who would pay for a Mantis open-source bugtracker”, then Jira appear and companies purchase it.
What you mean is, who would pay for Ubuntu. But I’d pay for an open-source macOS, with online backups, video editing and SSO for my IT fleet, anything that doesn’t look like Ubuntu.
It wouldn't be an OS, it would be a casino full of flashy ads. The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never. They get away with Android because it's mostly a consumer market.
Was about to post the same thing. Windows is infuriating for me not because I dislike ads per se, but it triggers all sorts of ADD behavior in my brain -- try to open an application, and "ohh, what's Tom Cruise up to today?!".
Having deployed Chromebooks into corporate and education, there's less ad content there than on a Windows machine... by oodles. In fact, the only place a stock Chromebook has ads is on websites, in the browser and I believe on a personal install it tries to sell you a subscription to Google's cloud service for extra storage. Once you start installing apps, well, your mileage will vary.
Having used Android as my daily driver since Android 1.3, again, the default experience is pretty much ad-free. I've even used Android in "desktop mode" where you connect a display, keyboard and mouse and used windowed Android apps. When you start installing apps, or if you buy a device with non-default apps installed (i.e. the mobile carrier install as infested crap). In that case you can disable or uninstall that app and move on.
> The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never.
While Google does have a history of cancelling some well-loved products (like Reader), Google Apps (Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentations, etc...) has been solid for a decade. The live, multiuser, real-time editing and versioning is a wonderful feature for collaboration. Also, Google has been very reasonable on pricing, and after six years of running three companies on Google Worplace/Apps, I'm very impressed with the reliability of Google Workplace (what they are now calling Apps).
ChromeOS is only in the market because they have cheap laptops that schools bought up. And not a single student I know would ever use one outside of school.
Which is kind of depressing. I get public schools have budgetary needs and I suppose Chromebooks are perfectly appropriate for Elementary and (maybe) Middle Schoolers (my kid has one, he's in 2nd grade and its fine) but they should really consider supplying real laptops to the High Schoolers so they learn on hardware and software used in the real world.
Ask me how many times I've effed up the battery and sleep configuration upgrading Linux on a desktop vs a laptop.
Relative to desktops, laptops tend to be quirky little things because the heavy constraints of form factor, power, and weight result in engineering trade-offs and outright hacks that aren't necessary in the desktop ecosystem.
By desktop app they don't mean an app that runs on desktop computers only. They mean an app that runs locally and not web-based. Office 365 desktop vs Office 365 web portal. Google doesn't offer anything but web based.
I'm not sure that would have changed anything, though. Their main loss is that ChromeOS isn't marketed as 'business-oriented' but that's probably because you can't market it to businesses when tons of legacy software doesn't run, and accountants still tend to prefer Excel over sheets (in my experience). But when businesses do use GWorkspace products, it's not an issue that it all happens within the browser.
You haven't been in a business environment then. Almost all of the users whine about having to use Google's Web Apps and prefer the desktop version of 365. Microsoft absolutely dominates in the enterprise environment. We have both, just because department will not use the Google Apps. They'll accept Gmail but that's it.
You are misattributing the cause. It’s not because they’re web-based, it’s because they aren’t *really^ Word, Excel, etc. I’ve shot myself in the foot one too many times with the web-based Office suite. There’s a reason there’s a nice big button to bounce you to the desktop applications - for when you need to do something they didn’t bother putting in the web version.
Eh... I think it's both. A lot of end-users don't understand understand what a web browser is. The older crowd is completely weirded out about running an app in their browser.
It could just be my circle of influence which is mostly SWEs, but nobody complains about Google and most prefer it. Maybe it's because doing anything on the web version of M365 is hell on earth if you have the audacity to be signed into more than one account at once.
And as an an Admin, GMail is awful. Microsoft knows what admins need and give them to tools to do it. There is so much that can't be configured with GMail, and they don't even provide a proper cmd tool like Microsoft does with their powershell modules. The only option is "GAM", a third party not supported by Google project [0].
Another example, the default routing rules page in the admin console defaults to only showing 10 rules. Every time you add a rule, the pagination is reset, so you get lost where you are and can't even see the rule you literally just added.
And as an identity platform, Google is nothing compared to Okta or AAD. Whilst it's wonderful that Google login is everywhere now, I can't for example, request the user do 2FA for particular apps.
Even the admin console only requires 2FA once a month, it's ridiculous.
And don't get me started on "groups" still being attached to distribution lists out of the 60s [1]. Or the inability to have shared mailboxes.
No one should ever choose Google Workspace over Office 365.
Yeah I agree. You shouldn't have to use 3rd party tools to administer Google Workspaces. I find myself using Advanced-GAM and BetterCloud far too often.
I'm trying to talk my boss into dumping Gmail and switching to Outlook. It's such a waste running 365 and Google.
I've specifically been using Azure as my "source of truth" because I think it's more likely we'll dump Google than we'll ever dump things like on-prem AD or Azure.
>and accountants still tend to prefer Excel over sheets (in my experience).
And it isn't because they didn't try Sheets. Lol. Nobody I know likes Google Sheets.
They basically copied the UX of Office 2003 and did nothing to improve upon it since it's initial release over a decade ago.
It's awful.
Shit, it still doesn't have the concept of tables like Excel does and you need to manually paint rows, manually find the hidden filter creation option for cells and manually refresh the table because the fitlers are kludged such that they don't automatically re-filter when you edit a row.
> They basically copied the UX of Office 2003 and did nothing to improve upon it since it's initial release over a decade ago.
> It's awful.
On the contrary, sounds marvellous.
> Shit, it still doesn't have the concept of tables like Excel does
Sounds utterly weird. Spreadsheets already are tables, so WTF is the use of a “separate concept of tables” within your tables? Seems to be geared towards creating confusion.
(Or are you just taking about some newfangled moniker for named ranges?)
For me, one of the things that has stopped me from even trying ChromeOS is that is/meant to be 100% cloud which means no local storage and since I code for a living having things locally is a must for me.
It makes 100% sense in Schools and other places where you want to be able to reset the OS constantly and stop people from breaking it. I think for facebook machine's it would do well too but again I think alot of people will want to have local storage.
> For me, one of the things that has stopped me from even trying ChromeOS is that is/meant to be 100% cloud which means no local storage
I've had a Pixelbook for 4.5 years -- a Google product, so arguably as it's "meant to be" -- and it has 128GB of local storage, and I believe you can get them with up to 512GB. Coding locally using Linux VMs/containers is actually pretty pleasant IME (albeit I don't do frontend work).
Chrome OS deals decently with local file. This is the same way Chrome deals with local stuff anywhere else.
I think people underestimate what ChromeOS can do by a lot. There's the android subsytem coming with it, along with an optional linux subsystem, so all in all it covers a lot of ground.
That said, it's still limited a lot by Google not going the full length and having half baked support for a lot of things. Access to the bluetooth stack is pretty random for android apps for instance. Then Chromebooks are mostly low power machines, so the linux substack only helps that much.
Tablet mode support is too weak to take full advantage of the different form factors. ChromeOS isn't configurable enough to alternative keyboard configs, system wide shortcuts etc.
All in all, it has so much promises, only half delivered. But the half we have now is still pretty decent IMHO.
>I think people underestimate what ChromeOS can do by a lot. There's the android subsytem coming with it, along with an optional linux subsystem, so all in all it covers a lot of ground.
First impressions are everything.
ChromeOS's first impression was that it's Chrome in OS form with no local compute whatsoever; everything is done via the internet, aka the cloud.
That is not strictly the case anymore, but changing first impressions simply is not trivial.
Higher end Chromebooks also rival low- to middle-tier Windows laptops in price, and if you're paying top dollar why not buy the latter and have access to the much more capable Windows ecosystem instead?
That's not accurate, my device a Lenovo Chromebook S345 supports linux containers & android apps and is absolutely not a flagship. You'd struggle to run windows on a similarly priced laptop (cost me £150 a year ago).
On the SSD size, it's often the RAM that's really limiting for the linux subsystem. It's the same issue as on cheap windows laptops, only a tad better as ChromeOS is more frugal and orchestrates resources more aggressively.
Chrome OS devices have local storage. Premium ones (which are not even that expensive, in the $500+ price tier) have a 256GB SSD for local storage. This at least has not been my issue with Chrome OS.
Google docs/etc are totally eating into Microsoft Office's market share. I can't remember the last company I was at where they expected us to use Microsoft office products. But we used Google docs,sheets,etc constantly.
For big corporates, it is still 100% Microsoft Office and 0% Google Workspace. Email is still 100% Microsoft Outlook/Exchange. That said, for small to medium, Google must be eating into MSFT, but I don't have any visibility.
As someone that works at an IT company, not a software company, Almost every customer that started with google is switching to o365. Nearly 99% of our clients are on o365 or are switching from on-prem exchange to o365. I can see maybe the bubble of silicon valley might be more oriented toward google, but the vast majority of businesses continue to migrate to o365.
M365 the far superior solution to many business problems. As a long-time paying gmail customer I'm also moving away. It looks like Google didn't improve UI in their admin menus for at least a decade.
Some people would pay extra to not have the UI change every couple of years. As someone who no longer regularly uses Windows it drives me nuts to try to find anything in their web apps or settings interfaces.
O365 has the same real time collaboration and document sharing. I worked at one company they were originally on Google had to share the enterprise plan by the parent company for “money reasons”. People just kept using Google until the account was closed 12 months after migrating. When I left they were going back to Google.
My current employer is pushing us to Office 365. We have a lot of meetings that center around a shared document. The syncing in Word is extremely slow and in Excel we gave up on it entirely because we got constant merge conflicts with no clear way off fixing them. Outlook web is very slow and sometimes stopped fetching new emails till you reload. Meanwhile outlook for Mac silently doesn't show more than ten all-day events which lead to massive confusion during the holidays with our shared OoO calendar.
I understand that some might see offline storage and editing as advantages, but I've only seen it create chaos. It makes the file save dialog much more complex and I constantly have non-technical users mail files around like it's the 90s because they don't understand how to share it properly.
> Google grew its share of the productivity software market to 10.3% in 2020, according to research from Gartner, taking about 2% from Microsoft. Microsoft is still the clear leader however, with 89.2%. Overall, the productivity software suite market grew 18.2% during 2020.
My point wasn’t about the market share, it was that you decided to be condescending about not having relevant data, and then you also failed to provide any :)
This is the only part they aren't on caliber in most cases. I rarely hear Slides or Docs isn't as good as PowerPoint or Word (even though, at least on paper, Word and Powerpoint have more features).
It seems that the sticky moat is Excel (and to a lesser extent but gaining somewhat rapidly, the Teams integration into 365. Google has blown it on being the enterprise chat solution).
Seems Google could chase this to close this, but Microsoft Excel is just absolutely sticky
Word is too, at least for lawyers. A whole generation of lawyers has spent 20 years learning the intricacies of cross-references, page/section numbering, styles and formatting. While some of that is possible in Google Docs, it's clumsy and uses much different conventions.
Just to clarify, I do know that Word fills some niches better (through both feature set and inertia). I know there are universities that still send their post doc writing standards out as word templates and they don't always translate well to Google Docs either.
That said, I think Excel is the exponentially higher case and hardest to replace. The niches filled by Word that Google Docs can't fill readily are pretty small comparatively. Excel has grown to mean so much more than just spreadsheets. Its pretty much a first line database to a huge amount of the business community, and still relied on across entire industries to do work, from wealth management to accounting to payroll to inventory etc.
I have, upon thinking about it as well, to hear any raised point about PowerPoint vs Google Slides where PowerPoint does something so niche that Slides doesn't and its a deal breaker, actually.
Or <null> to Visio. Visio is huge where I work. Being able to cut and paste technical diagrams into complex Word documents is a really important for our uses.
That's a stripped down OS running only a web browser and a bunch of webapps, not a real OS. Another one of those Google fantasies that failed to understand normal people.
What do you think Joe Sixpack runs on his computer these days? There are tons of people out there who do nothing but browse websites and use the "apps" as provided on those sites. They have no use for native Windows apps nor all the extra baggage that comes with it.
That's a stupid over-generalization. There's always one shitty app you need for some weird use case which is not in the official stores. And to rule that out 100% by purchasing a chromebook is a hassle people don't want to worry about.
Yeah, most people shouldn't need more, but you're right. For example, to update the maps in our minivan's navigation system, I need to install some (crappy) Windows-only desktop application, "Garmin Express."
Besides gaming people, I know very few people who need more. And gaming with webgl goes pretty far too. I think it works quite well; I don’t like it, or rather, actually hate it; I like optimal software against the hardware, but that is such a niche now. So just running everything in a browser is simply realistic and enough for most of the population. I think it sells quite well as well. I have a Chromebook which was cheap but it works very well. With GitHub spaces I am not sure if I will go back for many of the stuff I do; if I drop a pot of tea on it, it’s a short trip to the shop to get a new one and I will be back to work 30 min later.
Android and iOS work like that too of course. So maybe they should just switch to something like Dex instead as now you can run android apps in chromeos, so what’s the difference?
Even gen-z still build their own PCs. It isn't as niche as often said. They would laugh in your face with the worst insults a 16 year old teenager can come up with if you offer them a chromebook. They would sell it to their wine-aunt (who happens to not run non-emulator windows emulators on Linux).
Sure, they also play Pokemon Go... although partially because they are not sitting in front of their PCs. Large market by volume, but more so for alternative situations.
This is interesting insight. So Chromebooks aren't cool? I guess I can see that when every school is issuing Chromebooks to the kids these days. I remember Mac computers being uncool when I was a kid because that's what we had in the school computer lab in the 1990s, and they were locked down enough that it wasn't easy to do fun things on them.
"Wine-aunt" is new to me too, and funny (after looking up what it means).
Tell that to the scores of kids that have come up not understanding a filesystem because they just…haven’t needed to, in large part because they grew up using Chromebooks, happily.
Stop conflating yourself with a “normal person”. It’s quite clear from your comment that you’re anything but.
That might have been true years ago. It's currently leagues ahead of any other OS outside of Windows and Mac. It's still limited and quirky, but pretty much covers the basic needs of "normal" people.
It heavily depends on what you do on linux, if you completely customized it to perfecfly fit your needs and only work with a stable set of programs, ChromeOS doesn't stand a chance.
For more "standard" users though, ChromeOS is very simple, has excelent touch support, battery management, a half baked but functional tablet mode, covers a lot of its ecosystem issues with the android subsytem, is fast to learn yet gives access to more power user features (including linux VMs). And it's of course very forgiving, as every regular apps are sandboxed. In that respect I see it succeeding where linux has been struggling for so long. TBH I was hoping Google made a decent iPad pro competitor based on ChromeOS, but I'm not holding my breath.
It's of course not perfect, far from it, but it's a pretty good computer experience IMHO. Linux has progressed a lot, but I still don't see the simplicity, versatility and forgiveness trio in a linux machine anytime soon.
On the other OSes, I didn't see it as desktop only, and iOS could have been a nice alternative, if Apple could have bothered (same for android and DEX). I actually think ChromeOS is a better choice than windows for light computer users, assuming Google doesn't throw the towel..
ChromeOS has for years supported a full linux shell in a chroot, with full X support. And even before that, it supported quite a bit through android apps. Your information is about ten years out of date.
>Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce.
Microsoft Office has a lot of network effect surrounding it. Organizations use MS Office because the people who pay them (e.g., government or large corporations) use MS Office. I've tried switching away to LibreOffice or Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, and those are very likely to mangle layout and formatting when saving to DOCX/XLSX/PPTX. Not worth the hassle trying to troubleshoot why my government program managers aren't seeing what I'm seeing on the document I sent them.
Yeah, Bing has been consistently profitable for a long time.
People mock it because its not bringing in obscene amounts that google search does, but it's revenues have consistently been growing for years:
https://fourweekmba.com/bing-revenue/
$11.59B is pretty damn good revenue for a 'laughing stock'.
Especially Consider that gaming 'only' was $16.23B.
They kinda did that with ChromeOS + Google Docs with offline mode. The problem for Google is that while it was a solid investment for MS to persue cloud services to compete with Google, I don't think it would have been a good investment the other way around. Chrome is really the only desktop product that makes sense for Google because it pushes people into their ecosystem online. Creating something like a standalone OS or a standalone office software would have gone in the "wrong direction" for Google, taking people off their site rather than taking people there.
Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.
> Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.
If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed. That's how much impact the ChatGPT integration had for Bing -- overnight.
The thing is: Google is threatened for the first time in its decades of history. It might not be better, yet, but it definitely is a real and existential threat to Google.
Google is threatened by MS and OA, OA is threatened by Stable Diffusion and MiniGPT-4. We are wondering if there will still be developer work in 10 years. Everyone is threatened.
I was not at all surprised, to be honest. ChatGPT took over about 90-95% of my what I would previously resort to Google. Since Microsoft was dealing cards at OpenAI, it was just a matter of time...
We can downvote human comments and proposed solution (on stack overflow, hn, etc...) and also I don't expect colleagues to lied to me when I ask them about a feature or how to do xyz in a language or library or framework.
Bing, IIRC, has a way to provide feedback, not sure how useful it is for today's users and if it will be able to solve hallucinations one day.
I try to always give Bing+ChatGPT chat or search results a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I am using the service for free, so it seems fair for me to take a moment to provide feedback.
Humans are actually quite reliable. Wikipedia is that trust manifested. Also a human liar knows they are lying, AI doesn't know it's saying something wrong.
The average human is going to give me the wrong answer to a question I ask him.
But I'm generally not interested in asking an average human. I'm interested in asking someone who knows their butt from a hole in the ground in whichever topic I'm asking them about.
When google sends me to a website, I can at least judge the credibility of a website.
When ChatGPT tells me something, I have no idea if it's paraphrasing information gathered from Encyclopedia Britannica, or from a hollow-earther forum.
This is a real question, so I apologize if it comes off as sophistry:
Is the work of judging the accuracy of a summary not just the work of comprehending the non-summarized field?
For example, a summary could be completely correct and cite its facts exhaustively. Say you're asking about available operating systems: it tells you a bunch of true info about Windows and OSX, but doesn't mention the existence of Linux. Without familiarity with the territory, wouldn't verifying the factuality of each reference still leave you with an incomplete picture?
At a slightly more practical level, do you actually save any time if you've gotta fully verify the sources? I assume you're doing more than just making sure the link doesn't 404, as citing a link that doesn't say what it is made out to be isn't exactly a new problem, but at that point we're mighty close to the traditional experience of running through a SERP.
Finally, even if you're reading all the links in detail, isn't that still a situation prone to automation bias? There's a lot of examples of cases where humans are supposed to check machine output, but if it's usually good enough the checkers fall into a pattern of trusting it too much and skipping work. Maybe I'm just lazy, but I think I'd eventually get less gung-ho about verifying sources and eventually do myself a mischief.
I'm asking because I've been underwhelmed by my own attempts at using LMs for search tasks, so maybe I'm doing it wrong.
> When ChatGPT tells me something, I have no idea if it's paraphrasing information gathered from Encyclopedia Britannica, or from a hollow-earther forum.
Or it's something it just hallucinated out of thin air.
Citations! I never trust Bing Chat's answer. The links usually quickly tell you if the answer is hallucinated. Basically: treat it as a search engine, not an answer engine. Follow the links like you would on any other search engine. Those links will still be more relevant.
It happily made up citations for me. In a follow up, I asked it not too, and to please use only real papers. It apologized, said it would not do it again, then in the same reply made up another non-existent but plausible citation.
Checking the links is a good practice.
I feel like we just created an interesting novel problem in the world. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out.
Are you talking about Bing Chat, which cites actual web pages it used to make the summary, or ChatGPT, which is a very different beast and relies on built-in knowledge rather than searches?
It totally would, if Bing doesn't return relevant results.
I've asked BingGPT about myself and it gave me three answers. One was more or less on-point (it found my linkedin profile), and the other two were hallucinations. What happened was Bing found two unrelated pages and GPT has tried and failed to make sense of them.
Either that, or I am a prince whose name means "goose" in Polish.
All the time, but only when prompted. You have to have a conversation with it and provide more detail which exposes the flaws in its previous answers, then it will happily apologize for its mistakes. (For me, this usually looks like me pasting an error message that its code caused.)
I really hope they find a way to have it apply context from future conversations such that when it learns the error of its ways it emails you a retraction, but that's probably a ways out because humans can't be trusted to not weaponize such a feature into sending spam.
But it doesn't learn its error, that's the whole problem.
It only responds to 'accusations' from user in the most common way, which is 'apologies-like'.
The weight of phrases like "you are wrong" is in fact so strong, that it fools the chatGPT to apologize for its 'mistakes' even in the scenarios where its text was obviously correct - like telling it 2+2 doesn't equal 4
Well yeah, it's an imperfect tool, and you have to treat it as such. Probably there's a lot to be discovered about how to use it most effectively. I just don't find that it's more problematic than the other tools in my box.
Sure, grep has never flat out lied to me the way chatGPT does, but it's a statistical model, not a co-worker, so I don't feel betrayed, I just feel... cautioned. It keeps you on your toes, which isn't such a bad state to be in.
Problematically, they're much better bullshitters than ChatGPT. And if you used Google to find them, they're probably either selling you something, or you had to navigate a minefield of people who are in order to find them.
What I've found is that until you see it really hallucinate like mad on a subject you know well you don't realize how crazy it can be.
Especially when I talk to it about fiction and ask questions about - for example - a specific story and you see it invent whole quotes and characters and so on...it is a masterful bullshitter.
Hallucination problem is easily solved by using it as a code/config template or starter, and actually vetting its output. It's still a huge time-saver, even with the vetting time involved.
That was a problem for ChatGPT3. Not so much for ChatGPT4. I also switched to ChatGPT4 for most of my searches. I only use Google now as a shortcut for navigating to specific website.
GPT4 is much better at it. So far, I haven't seen it hallucinate. GPT3 hallucinates terribly, but not that often, and it's fairly predictable in what kinds of questions it's more inclined to hallucinate.
in my exp. bing even hallucinates the sources. I use chatgpt and bing side by side instead of the average google, then resort to google with those both fail.
i find chatgpt 3.5 answers better than bing. Also ive had bing end conversion with me on more than one occasion without saying anything offensive
No. In few cases where there is time sensitivity, it's not an issue.
I'm using it to help me with a library integration, for example. I noticed it was recommending deprecated methods. So I copy/pasted the latest source code, asked it to update itself, and voilá.
It's super smart and learns literally in a second. Just drop recent information at it and ask what you need.
Can you give examples of the average pre-ChatGPT Google queries you were doing, that ChatGPT can fully handle?
Personally — and having not tried ChatGPT for this — I don't think ChatGPT would do well with resolving the kinds of queries I consider Google "good at."
To me, the place where Google wins over Bing, DDG, etc. is when I know there must exist some page that uniquely talks about some extremely niche overlap of concepts; but I don't know any specific "natural key" keywords to refer to the that overlapped-set-of-concepts, and instead only have a "cloud of highly-correlated keywords for the individual concepts involved" to throw into the search box.
For example, if I'm trying to conjure from the aether a discussion people are having about an issue I'm facing with some buggy behavior in an API — where that buggy behavior doesn't spit out any distinctive error message to use in the search.
I could see ChatGPT being good at a limited version of this problem, where I could give it e.g. several definitions of a word (= correlated keywords), and it could tell me the word that fits those definitions.
But the full version of the problem — pointing you at (or regurgitating) the one unique conversation that most highly correlates with your keyword cloud — essentially implies an Internet-scale "language model": one where there are unique vertices for every unique URL. Which, if you think about it, is what a traditional search engine's index is: a very dumb, but very large correlational language model, where that "dumbness" is a valuable constraint meaning that queries are able to be run map-reduced across many nodes.
Is there something I'm missing here, that makes Bing+ChatGPT better at these types of queries than Google is?
Or are the advantages ChatGPT is bringing to the table here, in areas that have nothing to do with making search engines better at the things they're already "the best tool for the job" at, and instead are in solving problems that could be solved any number of other ways (e.g. querying a search assistant such as Siri/Alexa; or pulling up an encyclopedia article or textbook relevant to the subject and just reading it) such that a search engine wouldn't necessarily be the first tool you'd search for?
There are several engineering tasks that I've just found explained better by ChatGPT than scouring Google for out of date documentation or abandoned forum posts. For example a while back I needed to encode some AAC audio frames into the ADTS format. In the work I've been doing recently, this isn't a hard task given you have the spec. The problem was I couldn't find the spec on Google - arguably it's not well supported either.
No problem for ChatGPT however which was not only able to write the code, but write it in Rust - the target language Iw as going to. Now I've just found it easier to ask ChatGPT first then go go google.
I had an example recently: I wanted to learn more about how certificate-based WiFi authentication worked. In the past, I would have used Google to find some resources on it, probably find that the relevant standard is called 802.1x, used Google to find the relevant Wikipedia article, skimmed that, etc. But instead of doing that, I just asked ChatGPT the specific questions I needed the answer to.
When you're asking generally about a pretty basic topic which you just happen to not be very familiar with, ChatGPT is not too dissimilar from having an expert in the field you can chat with and ask questions to. I find it to be a very effective way of querying the huge database of information that is its training dataset.
Surprisingly, the one thing it's really terrible at but which I would've expected it to be okay at, is writing config files. I sometimes ask it how to write, say, a systemd service file which does a particular thing, and it usually shows me something which looks roughly sensible but doesn't actually do what I wanted. Its nature of fancy autocomplete with no understanding really shines through in those cases. Its biggest downfall is that it has no way to recognize when it doesn't have an answer and is making stuff up.
> In the past, I would have used Google to find some resources on it, probably find that the relevant standard is called 802.1x, used Google to find the relevant Wikipedia article, skimmed that, etc.
And apparently you didn't quite notice the particular inefficiency there...
> But instead of doing that, I just asked ChatGPT the specific questions I needed the answer to.
Yeah, sure, if you want to vet hallucinations in stead of just getting the facts.
But that's the thing. I can't ask Wikipedia targeted questions. I have to read through the whole article or try to skim to the right points, if the article even covers the exact question I have.
Over the weekend I wanted a recipe for a dish I wanted to make and the first recipe I found required an important ingredient I didn't have. I thought I'd give ChatGPT a shot and asked it for the same recipe but not including that ingredient to see if it could come up with an alternative formulation.
I'm sure that recipe exists somewhere on the internet but ChatGPT gave something to me in a very succinct format with none of the usual bullshit you deal with when looking through search results. ChatGPT also thankfully did not include the usual recipe backstory.
I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I had been asking this question for a while but now I’m a convert. Here are some of my most recent uses:
how to create a multi line string in a bash script. I needed to encode a human-readable JSON string in a curl call and didn’t know how. Google game me crummy tutorial sites, GPT gave me instructions, and when provided with the target, did all the formatting too.
I found it also understands git well. I use git at work, but I almost never use anything beyond push/pull/commit so crazy rebases or merges and stuff I still have to search for instructions to remember them. Now GPT can just explain to me the steps for my particular case. When I googled things, I’d search for keywords and stuff based on my knowledge and piece together the steps myself.
On a counter example, I recently had an intern who botched their config on VsCode and didn’t know what settings to fix. I found it was easier to google search how to reset things than use GPT. Ymmv.
I was a skeptic, but it's very useful and not hallucinatory for small and specific coding questions.
For example, today I asked ChatGPT how to write a class method in Ruby and to explain the class << self idiom. Super simple stuff, but it gives accurate answers and it's way more convenient than Google.
For this class of simple queries there's a lot of overhead to do a Google search and then try to filter out bullshit and padded results vs a super simple prompt to ChatGPT.
Virtually anything else. I'm studying architecture and read about associations of feelings that cardinal points transmit in a house (north, south, east, west). Like, east is associated with youth because of sunrise. At first it wasn't obvious why, so I asked ChatGPT and it explained everything brilliantly to me.
It takes me an order of magnitude less time to educate myself on ChatGPT comparing to Google.
I'm sure they'll use ChatGPT to come up with solutions.
Spammers will, too, and since OpenAI has access to what they're asking and can easily flag their questions, they can feed misleading guidance to spammers.
Google has spent the last 10 years ago making Google worse. They achieved this in large part by making the whole Internet worse [0], but a search engine with results of the quality of Google 10 years ago would be a serious competitor.
[0] For example, Google used to have a fairly strictly enforced rule that indexable content had to actually be visible to an unauthenticated user. The current crop of sites that have apparently useful content in snippets but that hide it when loaded would have been penalized, possibly severely.
They really have a flywheel of internet destruction. The fact that they own the entire display advertising business + search and ping pong people from a 50% paid search listing to a CPM arbitrage SEO website and back is just gross.
I've been using DDG and Brave for a few years now, and I went back to Google yesterday because its the default for Chrome on my phone. I was startled at the difference in quality, especially with Brave vs Google. Brave typically prefers long-form writing and the quality of the articles is typically a lot higher than what I found using Google.
After 2016, Google went on a crusade to save the universe by stamping out all misinformation and seems to have highly deranked all forums and blogs in favor of mainstream sites. This has made Google unusable for any political or controversial subject matter. This has also made their LLM efforts too cautious as they can't handle the political controversy of an LLM and can't verify that it will never return anything that offends anyone.
It does seem like Larry and Sergei are finally back trying to fix the excessively politically sensitive and overly cautious culture. Larry, having disappeared to Fiji for several years, must have been pretty bored or annoyed with running it.
Yesterday night I was trying to recall the name of a particular SCOTUS case that I had (semi-incorrectly) thought was connected to the 14th Amendment.
Bombed out on the SERPs two or three times, so I started looking for an very old article by Thomas Sowell that randomly introduced me to the case a few years back. I knew it was something regarding the unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Act.
Neither Google nor DDG gave me ANY useful results for 3-5 variations on “scholarly critique of the Civil Rights Act”. I eventually remembered the Sowell connection and even adding his name in quotes only got me to a page deboonking the article I was searching for!
I’m very far from being a right winger or whatever so I’ve never really experienced this sort of thing before, but my god is the “no no, you don’t REALLY want to search for THAT” silent censorship out of control. Millions to billions of people use these search engines daily and assume they’re mildly biased but otherwise shining portals to the sum total of human knowledge.
In hindsight, I suspect I would have immediately found the SCOTUS case with my initial search on 2010 era Google. Very much seems like my starter queries were triggering the Bad Think Detected algorithm.
While I have many reasons that Google made the Internet worse (AMP, censoring search, forcing localized search results, privacy, etc.) I don't think the hidden content is their fault but rather that of publishers.
Publishers blamed Google for declining revenue since they had to make their content openly accessible and therefore free in order to be visible to users on search. The EU tried to make Facebook and Google pay publishers to account for this. I think allowing paywalled content was a compromise to prevent this legislation from passing.
That being said, I agree with the publishers especially since hypocritically Google and Facebook strictly don't allow scraping of their services and litigate those who do.
Google could easily fix this by putting a symbol or label on paywall-related content so you know not to click it.
People are acting like Bing has created some big market success and Samsung is running to them because the tech is better. But the alternative explanation is simple: vendors are always looking for reasons to (threaten to) put mediocre non-Google search as default on their products, so they can extract more money from search engine providers. Samsung sees the current hype around Bing/Google/AI as a convenient negotiating point, since the media will portray this as “Samsung switches to awesome AI search” rather than “Samsung forces its users to use crummy Bing.”
I think the problem is Google is also pretty crummy. Ai is in a golden age without poisoned data right now. But wait until Bing gets popular and blackhat seo types start poisoning chatgpt. It will stop being useful, and I suspect in a way that will be unfixable since these language models are so hard to wrangle.
There's another side to that medal: At the moment nobody takes any issue with OpenAI doing filtering and curation in deciding what is part of their training data set, aside from perhaps the anti-bias crowd. "AI neutrality" is not yet a topic. Yet.
I've already seen that several times with image generation. Most recently was an article commenting on how the American smile was polluting generated photos. People can't decide what they want. Do they want licensed, curated commercial photos in the database or do they want search engine style neutrality? You really can't have both.
The users who pay attention to search quality aren't impacted by the default search option. They will just go back to Google or whatever alternative they wish.
The users who the default engine really locks in are the ones who just mostly click ads and have no idea they are ads. When they use Google they are mostly clicking ads anyways, so the search result quality will appear about the same with Bing. Maybe even better if there are fewer ads.
For Microsoft, getting more users on board means higher ad volume which brings more advertisers who are going to spend the time to manage Bing ad campaigns. You can bet they've done the calculations for how much money they can spend at what price. Ultimately that leads to higher monetization and then Microsoft can pay other companies (like Apple) to switch the default engine.
Google is a multi-trillion dollar attention tax that just sucks money from the global economy. They've been wildly mismanaged since Eric Schmidt's CEO tenure ended. It's been a long time coming, but the timer is running out of sand for Google fast. The revenue may take a long time to peak and decline but when they start missing their quarterly earnings it will be a bloodbath for Google's employees.
Your tone subs like you're contradicting a point, but your actual comment is completely in like with the idea that Google has been caught by surprise that Bing is good enough (as measured by market sentiment) to be a credible threat.
>If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed.
Every day I enter a few difficult queries on both Google and Bing to see if Bing gives me something better. I'm still laughing that people think Bing is a serious threat.
The Bing chatbot searches the web for you, it doesn't just spit out answers like ChatGPT. There's no clear distinction between the Chatbot and a search engine.
I just asked it about something in today's news and it answered it and provided links to 6 news articles on that topic.
Truman Capote and Gore Vidal were two American writers who had a long-standing feud with each other. The feud began when Capote wrote an article for Esquire magazine in which he claimed that Vidal had been thrown out of the White House after making a pass at a member of President Kennedy's family². Vidal took Capote to court for libel, where the two traded insults². After the pair settled out of court, their feud continued – even outliving Capote².
Not a very satisfying answer because it doesn't answer why Capote would slander Vidal in the first place. Indeed the feud existed before the Esquire slander took place so it's incorrect/hallucinatory for Bing Chat to say "The feud began when...".
Oh, and references (2) and (3) seem to be hallucinated and are unrelated to the question and response despite being cited inline. The other ref links are valuable but well then it's just a search engine with more noise.
Maybe I'm using a different Bing because I access it through Duck Duck Go, but it doesn't seem better than Google. I often have to add a !g to technical searches because DDD doesn't return the right results. Google has them in the very first links. I'll try to use Bing directly.
I have a friend who started saying "let me just bing that" to get people to laugh. Now I've started saying it at work... originally for a laugh, but I find I'm using DDG and Bing more often than Google now. (Alas how I miss AltaVista) So it may be sooner than you think. I mean... my data set is only two people, so maybe it will only be 2 hours sooner than you think.
Even though I have invested heavily in Apple's sandbox world, I am very impressed by ChromeOS and inexpensive Chromebooks by 3rd parties. I have close to the cost of a car invested in Apple gear, yet, if I had to I could do all of my writing and coding on the very inexpensive Lenovo Duet Chromebook I bought a year ago. The Linux container support is OK, and I usually use remote servers anyway.
For search, Bing + ChatGPT is now my driver for search. I still use Google and Duck Duck Go occasionally, but usually I am OK with waiting a short while for Bing + ChatGPT results.
Sorry for the OT question - do you use slime-tramp? And if so, do you have a way to use M-. (slime-edit-definition) without having to re-compile files using the remote paths?
I usually use Mosh (instead of SSH) and have a nice Emacs setup on remote servers. If I am using an iPad Pro instead of a laptop, I have Emacs on remote servers configured with Mosh to accept virtual mouse clicks (by tapping the iPad screen) to jump around source files and scrolling with screen gestures. This might seem awkward, but it is not.
For Common Lisp, running Emacs on a remote server instead of slime-tramp has always been good enough. Would you suggest I try slime-tramp?
I don't know yet, I've just started trying it out.
What made me want to try it was that I could use GUI Emacs to connect to emacs running on a different machine and still have full access to all the emacs keybindings.
So far, the downsides that I have encountered are that M-. and C-c C-k (slime-compile-and-load-file) don't quite work. The work-around would be to visit each file using the remote path and re-compile them so that the running Lisp image can map what's in the image to a path tramp recognizes. Then M-. and C-c C-k should work.
To recompile, select all then compile (X-c X-p C-c C-c) works, or I think C-c M-k also works. Not a great solution if there are a lot of files, though.
IIUC the problem boils down to M-. eventually calling (xref-find-definitions) which is an emacs built-in, and I think that's why the tramp paths aren't translating until a re-compile is done.
>One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop
???
PageRank. It was PageRank, and the fact that they didn't rely on the lies put into <meta> tags. There was no feedback loop at that point.
I created AISearch.vip but honestly I am now going to open source it and make it a locally run stand-alone AI search engine because it's absurd having to call OpenAI APIs in the backend when I can let the user run it with their own API keys
There's no moat in anything AI, but MS gets OpenAI access at a discount and therefore will win
> Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply.
It's more like Google has to change from optimizing for next week's revenue numbers to optimizing for user experience. People have been saying for years that their search results are trash. That we haven't seen a response from Google may be an indicator that they aren't able to return useful search results.
'People have been saying for years that their search results are trash'.
Have they? I hear people say this on Hacker news but i've never heard it anywhere else, people seem to be using the internet just fine with Google as there main search engine, what is the alternative? Bing? It's still trash and Bing Chat is like a worse version of ChatGPT, I don't see it replacing Google currently.
How naïve of Microsoft! They clearly didn't have enough experience to know that they have to remove the good parts and make it bland in order to make the product viable.
FWIW, many of the non-tech people I know gripe about the same user facing issues that come up on HN, including poor Google search results. They just don't post about it on the internet and might not even know that there are alternatives.
I would bet that a good chunk of users don't know that you can change the default browser or search engine, or at least don't think to do so. They might not like the UX, but they have other things occupying their focus and muddle through a bad experience with their phone or PC, just like they do with many other mediocre interfaces throughout the week.
They've been pretty good about making some results on the first page be better than competition still, and with niche search features IME.
If I want to find artists, lyrics, locations, results of sporting events, other special events... I'm not sure all the things, but DDG doesn't even compare.
> They should have tried to make a better desktop OS
Desktop OS's are not the long term future of computing, is it? But they were astute in acquiring Android. Meanwhile, Microsoft thought that a mobile OS is just a desktop OS squished onto a smaller screen.
> I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively.
I've always been shocked that Google didn't face antitrust action over using their internet video monopoly to kill Windows Phone. They wouldn't create a Youtube app for Windows Phone, nor would they allow Microsoft to create one themselves.
I had a Windows phone and android simultaneously - I actually liked the UI on the windows phone but I think I may have been the only person on earth that did because I virtually never saw another one. From that perspective, I can understand choosing not to build for the platform.
I can understand not wanting to build an app yourself, but when you hold a monopoly on internet video and you won't allow your platform competitors to build an app on their own dime, that really should have triggered antitrust action.
I can remember Google taking similar actions to lock out Amazon's Echo Show.
Is this really about AI and ChatGPT? Google search just sucks now. I actually get better results from Bing and Duck Duck Go.
> then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop
With their inferior products? Not a chance. Google's apps are so far away from even competing with Microsoft's it's not even funny. Google Sheets doesn't even have proper tables. I wouldn't even be surprised if they cancelled it.
The fact that big corps have moved to Gsuite always surprises me and credit to Google salespeople. But they will never meaningfully breach Office, people at Microsoft fight tooth and nail when renewals are up and Google is in the picture
As someone who's worked at both gsuite and office shops, I would pick gsuite every time. After the first place where I used gsuite I used to try to figure out which I'd have to use before applying somewhere new.
A Google desktop OS wasn't going to win against Windows in PC gaming compatibility. Nor was it going to displace MS Office + Active Directory at the enterprise level.
With ChromeOS, they took the route available to them, which was to enter the school market and try to build something from there.
Google's whole raison d'être was internet computing - computing at scales never before seen. Think "BigFiles" and the original Google search. They were able to leverage that technology in creating AdSense, which is their huge money-maker. Google's challenge has been finding ways to monetize their internet compute technologies. But now that it's 25 years later and more and more people have internet-scale computing available to them it appears Google is losing their edge. What used to be their "special sauce" has now become a commodity. It's a story as old as business.
Increasingly people don't need this kind of special sauce to run a big Internet service. Everything that's challenging has been outsourced to public clouds. Just pay more and those special sauce comes to you.
Admittedly Google still has some special sauce left, but in my opinion those special sauce only improves efficiency; it doesn't enable one to do something that's impossible otherwise. (I've been reading about some public research reports about Google's special sauce: they range from special user space networking to new congestion control to custom TPUs etc.)
I'd say it another way - everything that's challenging has been commoditized and is available from your choice of public cloud providers. You've identified new special sauce opportunities for Google, the question is can these new opportunities generate as much revenue as they'd been enjoying?
> They should have tried to make a better desktop OS
Wouldn't office suite be a better target? Everyone uses it. Lots of low hanging fruits. Easy to win the heart of geeks. Ample opportunities to integrate with other enterprise services.
If Microsoft's 48-year history has shown anything, it is that they can produce subpar products, experience numerous failures, make poor investments and acquisitions, and even ruin products (e.g., Skype), yet they remain resilient and successful!
As for Google, I am uncertain whether they were prepared for this competition because, firstly, the business terms offered by Microsoft might have been quite strategic, and secondly, the Google search engine has not experienced significant innovation or improvement since PageRank, at least from a user experience perspective rather than complexity. I will regale my descendants with stories of a time when I searched for something and found at least one relevant result among the top 20.
That to me is the big difference between Google and Microsoft. Microsoft is willing to slowly build on something for years before it goes anywhere. They maintain their products for incredible amounts of time, such as how IE11 was only killed off like a decade after its release.
Google on the other hand is always chasing the next big thing. It just doesn’t have the institutional attention span to do anything really big. If a project isn’t an explosive hit right away, Google moves on to the next big idea.
What would a Google office for desktop do that the current Google docs doesn't?
Even MS is moving office to being cloud based, so it's not clear business users value local document availability that much - rather the opposite, I've worked in places that like cloud services because locking out their data from a disgruntled or departed employee is one button away.
There are worlds of difference between MS Office and Google Docs in terms of features and abilities. There’s actually a risk for MS to lose their edge by moving to the cloud with a reduced feature set.
Google did encroach. Google office/docs is much better than Microsoft. Chrome OS is a better OS for most non-tech jobs. The browser is the operating system for most people, and Chrome is leading in that. They won on mobile as well with Android. Google Workspace, in my opinion, is much better than Microsoft.
It's their outdated search bringing everything else down it seems.
Google Docs is not anywhere close to as powerful or as performant as Microsoft Office. I don’t really see how someone familiar with both forward suites could think that is the case.
Pretty much the only notable advantage MSO for my use is excel, which is better for "advanced" spreadsheet workloads. For collaborative work and 99% of documents and spreadsheets, Google docs is the superior option.
I haven't opened a MS product in years and my life is better for it. Their Mac product lineup is particularly lackluster.
This is hardly surprising. I never normally use Google, but was asked to check some SEO using Google search the other day. The results were a dumpster fire of sponsored content, “other people also search for” and stuff that was largely irrelevant. I had to go onto the second and third pages to find anything even remotely close to what I wanted.
It must depend heavily on what you are searching for. There are a lot of things I dislike about Google, but their search results are consistently better than Bing in my experience.
> When people search, we believe they’re really looking for answers, as opposed to just links
I believe this as well for most people and most searches. I, however, am not most people. The vast majority of the time I want a link to sites that have what I am looking for. This is my biggest gripe with search engines and has been for a very long time. I used to be really good at finding pages I wanted by punching in the right words in the search. At some point in the mid 00's Google changed everything and I have failed to adapt fully.
This is basically Samsung asking Google to pay up. Google needs to pay Apple / iOS for Default Search Engine, and paying Samsung for staying on Android with Google Search.
Basically Google is being squeezed left and right. So the only way to increase revenue or profits to satisfy the money they spend on Apple and Samsung? More Ads on Youtube and Google Search. The more Ads they serve, the worse UX they have. All while completely fail to compete against AWS or Azure.
> as well as sweeping out crappy "customizations."
huh? Samsung OneUI features have been making their way into mainstream AOSP...particularly the tablet-focused stuff
there is no way Google will ever try to "strong arm" Samsung...Samsung is the Android market, the Pixel line is a rounding error and in no way a competitive threat
Only ~56% of Google's revenue is from Search ads - <50% of that comes from Android - and <35% of that comes from Samsung.
<10% of Google's total revenue comes from Samsung devices >40% of Samsung's NET REVENUE comes from selling Android devices.
It's almost as if Samsung is a lot more dependent on Google than the other way around.
At the end of the day - the majority of people you default to Bing search are going to switch back to Google. Samsung will be lucky to get a meaningful amount of money.
MSFT can't outbid Google because they can't make as much money from the searches as Google.
> It's almost as if Samsung is a lot more dependent on Google than the other way around.
in a pinch, Samsung could just fork the AOSP project and continue forward without Google, it would be trivial for app makers to re-publish their apps in a Samsung app store (and many already do)
> there is no way Google will ever try to "strong arm" Samsung...Samsung is the Android market, the Pixel line is a rounding error and in no way a competitive threat
They've been strong-arming every Android OEM since the start (Google Mobile Services agreement). ("Strong arming" being closer to Apple exerting control vs. the wild west of pre-2007 cellphones.)
It's finally starting to bear fruit with things like Project Mainline and Project Treble, but the political winds have changed and I expect various Gov'ts to claw back the control Google has on OEMs over the next decade. Whether Google can continue their efforts to ensure a stable Android platform is an open question after that.
I can't point to anything specific since I'm rushing this comment, but it should be fairly obvious that Google lets OEMs do things their own way until the dust settles and Google synthesizes the different approaches into the "official" AOSP way.
I'm not sure any actual code from OneUI has made it into Android, that would surprise me. Google really likes doing things "their way" in Android. The Android team takes UI inspiration from everyone, but most of their eyeball time is on Apple.
An extremely second rate phone platform compared to iOS where the customers don’t spend nearly as much money and they have minimal control over their hardware partners.
Then linux should be a second rate platform since no one spend enough money and there is zero control over what it runs on.
Android is also technically more advanced than anything Apple in pure versatility and user control. Apple execs might get nightmares if someone suggested giving more control to their user. I can stay in the walled garden or play outside with naughty apps and emulators. Android's safety model is not based on restricting what the user can do. Security by obscurity is the least one can do.
I understand everyone has a phone choice and some people prefer their phone less sophisticated or less feature rich or more basic.
But just because you prefer something so reduced in functionality that it's a waste of the incredible silicon powering it does not mean you can belittle something far more capable. Especially in a developer oriented website.
Most of Android is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. So while the word "owns" is true in a technical legal sense, there is nothing to prevent anyone from forking it and doing their own thing. Unlike with GPL code, they don't even need to license their changes under the same license as long as they abide the terms with respects to the original.
Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google" without switching to the Apple ecosystem. No Google Play (you can install it but I choose not to), FOSS apps only. I don't recommend it for everyone but it made me not hate owning a smart phone for the first time since the "mobile revolution" passed my old grumpy self by.
They did and I bought a used pixel6 just to switch to graphene. The problem is that the next pixel will likely be much more difficult to do this with because google is going to not not be evil.
Yes that is ironic. As someone else said, Google made the best de-Google-able phone. But from what I gather they chose it because of the specific hardware features and they need to restrict what they support to keep the project manageable and maintainable.
I bought mine outright and wiped the Pixel version of Android and am pretty happy. To be clear, I wasn't trying to avoid giving Google money ... I just wanted a phone and operating system that I felt like I had control of, without having a ton of bloatware and spyware pre-installed by the vendor etc.
That's correct. It's my understanding that this is for two reasons:
1) google opened api/support for verified boot on the pixels (so you can tell if a border agent hacked your grapheneos phone, for example)
2) it's easier to support fewer phone models (given they are not a large team)
I bought a refurbished pixel 3a last year for a little over $100 and have been thrilled with my grapheneos experience. I don't run google play, but it is my understanding this can be done in a sandbox (allowing for more privacy than usual).
Really?! You mean that my offering additional information and context didn't magically alter the very nature of time itself, thus causing the characters that they typed to change representation in Hacker News' database? You don't say! (do I need a /s indicator?)
And what value, exactly, does your comment add to the conversation?
> paying Samsung for staying on Android with Google Search
> google still owns android
> Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google"
It doesn't matter that Google owns Android if Samsung can make their own fork of Android that doesn't use Google stuff by default. Is there something that would prevent Samsung from creating their own app store?
Samsung already has their own app store (Galaxy Store) alongside the Play Store. Have only used it personally to download/update Samsung specific apps however.
Look how well Huawei smartphones are selling in the west (not well at all). And that's not because of lack of trying, I've been on a team where everybody agreed that supporting their phones had zero upside outside of the cash Huawei offered for a port of our apps. And we did it, only because they paid so much. And those were laughably unattractive apps (think yellow pages), I can't even start to imagine what they must have spent in other directions.
Because they used to have Google's play store and other services. Parent commenter's point is that a manufacturer having the open source parts of Android isn't necessarily worth much on its own.
> Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google" without switching to the Apple ecosystem. No Google Play (you can install it but I choose not to), FOSS apps only.
This is only valid for power users. Normal users would probably never accept a phone without Google Play Services running on it, with Amazon's devices being the exception (and don't ask me why, because I don't get it.)
Of course this is true, that is why it's a real threat when a company like Samsung, with the resources and money to make these things convenient/unnoticeable to normal users is a real problem to Google
Google have done a great job over the last ten years of making Android pretty unusable without Google's proprietary software on it.
Don't have Google Play Services (Proprietary) then no access to push notifications, maps APIs etc etc.
Yes, Vanilla Android works, but it's rough as guts. And who'd want to buy a phone where push messages for Facebook/Instagram etc don't work? Very few people.
That’s more because it was a bet on the wrong horse. If you know how to install Firefox you probably know what search engine you are using and how to switch the default search engine.
It's not the default browser on most devices. I think the parent comment is stating that if you're technical enough to install a 3rd party browser, you're technical enough to pick your own search engine. So people chose Firefox and chose away from Yahoo
I think Firefox users have now reduced to geeks and some 'real FOSS' enthusiasts etc. I still use Firefox as my primary browser, but I haven't seen any non-tech person installing it for a long time now. They all just search for Chrome and download, install that. So in today's times if someone's installing Firefox I'd say they'd mostly know their way around.
If Samsung is smart, then they ensure that their users gets access to new Bing as default, which means that even if people switch back (read get their nerdy friends to switch them back) they will find that Google is missing quite a lot.
As far as investor buzz is concerned, Microsoft has a lot of positive sentiment compared to Google.
Perhaps ironically it’s because Google’s search tailors it’s results to show me those results that paint MSFT in a positive light.
I can also see Generative AI providing some real amazing features with near OS level integration. Imagine being able to quickly draft business emails from your mobile device?
I don’t think Apple will have anything that amazing anytime soon so us iOS users will be stuck with using 3rd party apps, but I could see Samsung trying to distinguish their handsets with additional software capabilities not found in Android.
Google makes a shit ton of money from Search, Microsoft doesn't.
If Bing had more users the Microsoft would make more money from it, and vice verse for Google. Their respective sizes are a reason for Microsoft to grow Bing, not a reason to turn Samsung away.
Microsoft are investing $10b in OpenAI partly to make Bing better. That is not a sign they're happy with Bing's market share. They're coming for Google, albeit with an oblique strategy rather than competing directly.
how much can they afford to throw into this pit before investors start being worried
A lot, for a really long time. Microsoft have plenty of money and a history of playing a long game successfully. Have a look at Xbox if you want an example of Microsoft spending a lot of money for a very long time and coming out ahead in the end.
Google's offers to Android OEMs often mix search revenue, app store revenue, and ad revenue... a tying nightmare. Google is now under significantly increased scrutiny for how they manage these deals, they've gotten in trouble for destroying evidence and will now have even more incriminating evidence for future arrangements... it's a great time to press Google for a better deal because their hands are tied.
Is GCP really a failure? I think the product is OK and they seem to have some big customers. They're maybe #3 in the space, but you can make a lot of money without being #1.
Yes, we all hate their support structure (it goes through SADA), but the price is right. At my last company with 4 engineers we were paying AWS ~$1000/month for support. At my current company back when we had a cloud service on GCP, we got weekly calls with support for $0/month. Folks at Google also seemed to approve my weird resource requests (tons of GPUs in the midst of a GPU shortage, etc.) without me going through any back channels. I didn't find it terrible to work with at all, and it was much cheaper than AWS.
I'd call being half of Azure's market share today a failure. Hell, they were better-positioned than Amazon to offer an AWS-like product when AWS itself came out.
Honestly, with any vendor not named AWS, it's incredibly difficult to parse their actual "cloud" revenue. I believe Microsoft bundles in their Office 365 revenue just as Google does Docs. IBM stuffs in all sorts of seemingly unrelated stuff to make their numbers sound bigger. It's actually difficult to compare apples-to-apples because of all the gamesmanship.
Companies think they are simplifying things by using Azure since they already rely so heavily on MS software. That's pretty much the only reason Azure is more popular. GCP is a far better platform.
Apparently not. According to Steve Yegge's letter about Google+ (copy at https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611), one of the mandates Jeff have asked is to ensure that "All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.", while on the same letter his impression of Google is basically on the other side of Amazon's spectrum, even describing how bad Google's documentation at the time compared to Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.
Its way easier to define exactly what kind of instances you need in GCP in my experience. Need more RAM? Just add a bit more RAM, don't need to completely double it along with double the CPU and double the networking and what not. Just need one more CPU core? Done.
Then the reliability of GCP is a good bit higher. gp3 has 99.8% durability. I've seen several EBS volumes just disappear. Not deleted, just become permanently gone due to hardware failures. Compare that to 99.999% durability on GCP. You're spending several times for extra redundancy and complexity per gig on AWS just to come close to the durability to GCP.
If I have a choice between AWS and GCP, and unless I've got some specific product need for AWS, I'd probably go with GCP every time. It's such a better product IMO.
> Yes, we all hate their support structure (it goes through SADA)
SADA (and their competitor DoIT) are just resellers. Support doesn't inherently go through them. That's a decision your company makes. It's generally not a great decision either, in my opinion, as those resellers add a lot of opacity between you and your cloud provider. Google recommends them because it's easier for them.
The frenemy status of Google-Samsung is once again on display. Samsung probably hasn't been happy with the Google's continued Pixel phone push :p
But why is Google paying Apple to be the default search engine on iOS devices?
It seems a waste of money as Apple would be stupid to default to any other search engine given the lower search quality results. End users would notice if there was a result degradation and likely switch their default. Google seems to be playing the "Intel Inside" part without reaping the marketing benefits and only paying the traffic acquisition costs.
Apple may not consider any other default search engine only in the absence of a search engine other than google offering a pot of money to be the default search engine.
If Samsung really wasn't happy, they wouldn't be manufacturing Google's phones and providing custom silicon. I think the Pixel phones are a blip on Samsung's radar in terms of competition.
Samsung also tried to push their own mobile OS for a long while after android become dominant. Samsung is large enough that it's hard to tell overarching strategy though.
Why can't they do it? A tiny boot strapped company like Kagi has already made a much better search engine than Google. Are no good engineers working at Apple, or what is missing in the equation?
> but what would be gained?
People needing to buy an Apple device to reap the benefits of the internet, as Google continues to sink into their SEO-optimized malware swamp.
When I saw the title it reminded me of the 20+ years we'd see almost bi-annual news articles about how Dell was considering adding AMD chips to their line-up.
They'd do that, Intel would offer them a discount, and that'd be the last we'd hear of it for a year or so, until that discount would be expiring.
IIRC someone at Intel once said that Dell is the “best friend money can buy” in an internal email that came out when Intel was being investigated for anti-competitive practices.
Google is losing its competitive advantage in the search space. DDG and Bing are very strong competitors for the typical web search usecase.
External forces of economic and technical nature are not in their favor. Internal forces from politics, leadership and management issues are surfacing.
This does not sound good for Google. Almost like it will implode.
> This is basically Samsung asking Google to pay up
True, but Samsung isn't known for user-friendly phones, and they often come with a lot of bloat. At some point, it drives more and more users to Pixel.
There's a separate Samsung version of every core Google Android app, a separate Samsung account system to sync everything, and a Samsung launcher. Mind you, I personally use none of it (except launcher), but that's basically the definition of Android bloat.
I'd expect bloatware to be unnecessary software. To a user who is not familiar with google's offering, the bloat doesn't exist, they don't see two different softwares. Samsung phones don't have two messaging apps, gallery, or phone app
Not including google's version doesn't equate to bloat. In fact, the opposite is true.
I guess one man's trash is another man's treasure. I like Samsung Health application and use it daily. I even had purchased something called RunKepper but stopped using it in favour of Samsung app.
That hasn't been my experience at all. If anything, they are more userfriendly than other phones I have used. One thing in particular that is very nice is that everything is accessible on the larger screen sizes, action centers, call logs, messages, everything is designed to be accessible when holding your phone with one hand without having to awkwardly reach the top.
Except Samsung sells orders of magnitude more phones than Google does.
I don’t like the Samsung inference either, but millions and millions of people don’t just like it, they prefer it. They buy the phones specifically because they know how to use it. They aren’t loyal to Android, they are loyal to the Galaxy line.
Try a Pixel. None of the Samsung bloat and most importantly, no Bixby constantly getting in the way of the vastly superior Google Assistant already baked into android.
I have a recent Samsung Galaxy and haven't once accidentally triggered Bixby. Long press on home button is google assistant. I'm sure I disabled some Bixby settings when I set up the phone but at this point I don't know how to open it even if I tried.
Must have changed in the years since I had one. They had a dedicated Bixby button that you couldn't assign to anything else and updates to Bixby would constantly mess with settings related to activating Google Assistant. Good to know things have gotten better.
Pixel is known for amount of bugs and issues after the release. Also they release them in a handful of countries. It's not realistically viable alternative to Samsung when most of the world can't get it officially...
I was recently in the market for a basic VPS, and Azure is absolutely awful for this use. The most bloated complicated signup and setup process I have experienced in a long time. Google was tolerable. Of the three amazon lightsail was the best, but even that loses to something like digital ocean
I often see products optimise for the "get-started-quick" part, which is often 0.1% of the total experience. For example, reviews of operating systems often focus more than 50% of the content on the upgrade or installation process, even though that's actually a rare operation.
Azure focuses on Microsoft's large enterprise customers. They want guard rails, separation of responsibilities, policy, compliance controls, etc...
Nothing to do with the process required to get 1 VM up and running from scratch, including signing up. Their bread & butter customers have enterprise agreements in place already for Office and Windows licensing!
From my use of Bard, I think it’s main issue is poor alignment due to lack of RLHF dataset. Open AI has been curating its data set for years as it aggressively pushed to productization. Google never cared about getting its models into the hands of the public so is having to scramble. I think Google will catch up eventually, but not before doing major damage to its market share and partnerships.
I think the smarter move would be to integrate GPT-4 into Bixby. That's what finally got me to use Bing... it could probably get people to use Bixby too.
It's probably the only source at all, as every number in the sammobile article is also in the NYT, like the 160+ people working on Magi.
As the sammobile article doesn't appear to do anything but regurgitate what is in the NYT article without any apparent validation on their side, the link should be changed to the NYT IMO, whose article seems at least based on actual internal messages from Google. I understand that the title isn't as attention grabbing though ("Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals").
Soon we have a Microsoft more power full then ever but less controlled and constrained by anti monopoly regulation then ever.
- after google search degraded for a while bing is competive
- MS has much influence and stack in (not really open) OpenAI
- MS has with LinkedLn a relevant social network, sure it's work focused but increasingly used for non work usecases
- MS controls 2 of the 6 relevant gaming platforms (XBox, PC -- the others are Switch, Playstation, iOS and Android), they happen to also be 2 of the 3 AAA gaming platforms (XBox, PC -- the other is Playstation)
- MS owns a lot of game production
- MS has the go to email solution for companies Outlook as part of Office365
- MS has what some call the best Calendar/schedule Meeting app, also part of Office365
- MS has the go to online meeting platform for companies (teams as part of Office365, through it succks)
- MS has a competitive company chatting platform
- MS competes with Google and Apple in the Cloud
- MS has a not so competitive ad platform
- MS has a semi competitive voice assistant which if integrated with ChatGPT tech could very well become very competitive very fast
- MS doesn't have a phone OS, but a lot control over phone through MDM features integrated into teams/outlook etc.
- MS has one of the main browsers (edge) with a lot of people happily explicitly opting for it or being coerced or tricked into using it (they lost that in the past but regained it). While it pains me its likely more relevant then Firefox by now.
- MS sells PC/Laptop like hardware successfully, but not that competitive
- one of the best standard consumer ergonomic keyboards is from MS
- they still have one of the most widely used presentation and note taking applications
- their database system is still around and sells, not sure why
- they control both of the some of the most widely used IDEs (VS and VSCode)
- they have some experience with AR/VR through I'm not sure about the competitiveness of current products from them
- they made some of the main reasons why people tried out Linux go away by having WSL
- .... I most likely forgot a lot
I.e. all in all: MS is EVERYWHERE with constant faster growing power and control all through the tech space. If it keeps up that way MS will soon be both more powerful then Google and then it ever have been. If they had managed to properly land their phone OS things would be really scary now.
Microsoft's effort to corner the developer productivity software market has surprised me with how successful it's been. Github has solid vscode integration, WSL works well enough, copilot is seeing use. They've really solidified themselves as the enterprise productivity software company for all stacks other than creative which adobe still dominates. Wonder if they plan to expand there next?
- MS complies with Chinese laws so they operate in China. That's a huge population Google is missing out on. If other countries start to enact similar laws, MS would eagerly comply to get into that market.
Some would consider the fact that Microsoft "competes with Google and Apple in the Cloud" and "has a not so competitive ad platform" and "has a semi competitive voice assistant" and so on is evidence they don't have a monopoly, rather than evidence they do.
they don't have a monopoloy but they are not far away from having more power then when they had a quasi monopoly
the mono in monopoly is in the end irrelevant, what matters is the power and ways you can abuse it. In the past you mainly got that with being a monopoly or duopoly but by now you can archive it by being "just" competitive with the best in a sector, and doing so in docent of areas and slowly integrating all of that into each other
With the aim of making premium margins from hw/sw products better than Apple without Microsoft, the partnership of Google, Mercedes-Benz, Sony could go far with top cover and Nintendo's superpower patience and as a key point of difference promise to re-supply parts without short fast fashion half lives. I fail to understand how Microsoft gets away with huge market monopoly without correction from parliamentarians confining them to one third or two of industry dominance.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 368 ms ] threadShe even got ChatGPT to re-enforce she was on Mac and didn't have an F11 key but never got a substitute key to use for Mac users. (F11 is volume down on my Mac keyboard.)
After that I imagine ChatGPT told her to use the F11 for something and she noticed she didn't have one. I believe at that point she started to try to get ChatGPT to tell her which key was the F11 on a Mac. She told it she was on Mac and didn't have an F11 key. ChatGPT agreed she was on a Mac and didn't have one.
I believe that is far as the conversation went. It was interesting to me becuase it is commonly available information but the answer just couldn't happen.
- Gmail (largest email service at 1.5B users)
- YouTube (by far the biggest video sharing platform)
- Android (most used operating system in the world by number of devices)
- Google Maps (maps service with the largest userbase)
- YouTube TV
- The whole Google Drive Suite
- Chromecast/Android TV
- Chromebooks (made huge inroads in the k-12 education space)
They put minimal effort into their products and prematurely sunset them if they don't perform well enough. Their organization is either so fragmented or toxic that they launch products that are competing against eachother.
It really does seem like there are only morons at the helm. A company with as much resources as Google should not continue to fail so badly. My suspicion is as Jobs said of Apple during his time away, the company is being totally run by the product guys not the engineers.
I would argue for 95% of Google's existence they have been pretty much aimless.
I like it, personally speaking. Google has a lot of power, and it's an approach that minimise the use of that power to push people around.
Samsung and other OEMs get a lot of crap for how they handle android. But they are really the ones driving innovation here.
Their products and software seemed genuinely inspiring. Now, it seems to just be maintenance or death. Seemingly happens with all once-loved tech companies to some degree. It's quite sad but I guess time moves on. Totally self-inflicted for them though, they decided to stop moving forward
2) how is it helping Alphabet’s bottom line? I haven’t seen it helping here either.
Of course, the models from Alphabet don't really fit this bill either. I do wonder how many "protein folding" style problems there are out there, for these narrow superintelligent AIs to solve.
If you are using OpenAI stuff you are using it.
> how is it helping Alphabet’s bottom line? I haven’t seen it helping here either.
I guess I wasn't talking about "bottom line" impressive. Oracle might make a lot by squeezing current licensees in an unimpressive way, for example.
That's not maximizing shareholder return.
That's locally maximizing shareholder return.
As shareholders jump from ship to ship, there is nothing beyond short term shareholder return.
Apple smoked all of them.
Apple long term investors are a string of short term investors.
Of course there are people with a long term view or institutional investors who buy and keep their stock for years.
But most investors, if Apple stock drops enough will sell, and new investors will buy at the new level.
Yep. In fact, he was specifically chose to step in as CEO for his meekness : voted most likely to preserve brand value by best distracting folks from the evil turn the company had taken.
> while maximizing shareholder return.
Nope. He's a 100% static CEO, and he's therefore squandering huge amounts of capital and human resources.
That's not what I'd call "maximizing shareholder return".
These are not the same kind of character.
Google is not a grown up company - it runs the way a 2nd generation dynastic family runs their businesses - haphazard and sloppy and entirely surviving because of a cash cow and nothing else. Plus, they have a fairly substantial crew with "rest and vest" as a mantra at least for the folks I knew there prior to 2008..
Coming in right after the founders and trying to raise the moats of the exisiting products instead of creating new moats. Google Stadia is a similar failure to Ballmer's late Windows Live initiatives.
It worked for Microsoft obviously. This is quite a coup for Satya Nadella. And he got that one on merit. MS has no stake in Android (they declined to get into that after killing Windows Phone). Also, he hit the ground running after Steve Ballmer was retired. Not that hard of course after Ballmer but he did a few decisive things early on that all seem to have mostly worked out. The Linkedin acquisition; fixing .Net, re-establishing MS as a bonafide OSS player with the Github acquisition and VS-Code. And then making a smart investment in OpenAI which they are now riding to success. All great moves.
I'd say, Google is in the same boat right now. Lots of obvious potential, an extended period of a bit rudderless performance, missed boats, and no clear direction or vision. Fix that and it could go somewhere else again. Doing more of the same isn't going to be anywhere near good enough. They seem to be stuck playing a game of whack-a-mole in terms of strategy and ever responding to what others are doing and never quite catching up with that instead of initiating things themselves and leading.
There's a pretty good chance Samsung is just negotiating for better terms, kinda like carriage disputes for TV networks.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...
That is super creepy. Google knows a lot about you, and now it is using that knowledge to really put you in a filter bubble. Imagine this plus engagement metrics.
2) So much for that monopoly a lot of people thought Google had. Turns out they're still as exposed to market pressure as they ever were.
Tune it to be less bubbly with controversial topics, perhaps.
I’ve been noticing an occasional “Show me something new to me” prompt showing up in my YT feed. It has literally never provided anything I was interested in watching, but I appreciate that they’re trying to burst bubbles.
So it seems entirely reasonable to me that you would get different results.
If I had a personal assistant that was performing the search for me, I would expect customized results from them. I don't know why I should not expect the same from a machine.
Is the last thing I'd want really results different from my neighbour?
If I'm searching for Python, I'd expect to see more about the programming language than the animal.
Which is different from what most people would expect. You see the problem.
I like arthouse films. ∀ arthouse ∃ approximately eponymous porn film. I can't say I dislike porn, but if the search engines were to treat me like my neighbour I'd never get any arthouse results. Too niche.
You could argue that we should just ask for exactly what we want, but that puts more work on the user and reduces the effectiveness of the tool. I don't want to type more than "python", I just want the link!
Search engines provide very little personalization even today. I'm almost surprised a competitor hasn't popped up with a product that tries to fill that niche.
Kagi seems to be that.
https://kagi.com
No child will be confused if they look up a programming language that they already know have the exact same name as reptile and get reptile first.
But then when it comes to technology, I'm a bit of a control freak.
If you happen to get a search engine that is correctly giving you the right result every time because it happens to know what you want, I am guessing you will not have a problem with that.
I spend most of my browsing time in a browser configured to clear cookies, cache, and history on exit.
I'm not sure why most people are okay with companies gathering tons of data about them and trying to use it to manipulate them into buying products they don't actually want or need (among other uses), but I'm not one of them.
Now if I could only get a search engine to not ignore query terms because it thinks it knows what I want better than I do, I'd be even happier.
It takes a ton of work to prevent it and it's more or less futile anyways. It's not so much that people are okay with this, rather it's a part of modern life and it's exhausting trying to mitigate it. And impulsively buying products due to ads is a personal failing.
Some months later I was visiting family for a few weeks and wrote the same query on a family-member's PC. It gave me something about golf which I couldn't care less about. But I got the right results on my phone. I'm sure if I added "golf" to my query on the phone it would have given me info about that tournament instead. While it disturbs me how much I'm being tracked, I'm still happy with the practicality of the implied context being aligned with my interests.
What really bothers me is that no one asked what I want. These companies replaced my tools behind my back. I have seen literal fistfights between machinists over people messing with their tools. This is at least that bad and probably worse. Software is central to how I make sense of the world. Software is not just part of my livelihood; it is how I make sense of the world. Changing my software behind my back is like "upgrading" my eyes while I sleep. Why do we accept that such a central part of our world is completely out of our control?
A lot of major UX changes have resulted in immense outrage, so it's not like everyone is fine with the churn. My best guesses on why it's accepted are:
1. Most big tech companies have monopoly power and get away with not caring much about their users. Maintenence work is famously under-rewarded at many companies, incentivizing changes even if they are net negative for users.
2. People get browbeaten about security concerns. Actually useful security updates often get bundled with UX changes.
Advertisement buyers, on the other hand, benefit greatly from carefully controlling who sees their ads. For example, child care related products for female teenagers that are one year too old for their school class, or lawyers for young adult males from bad neighborhoods; I'm sure everyone can think of something more creepy and offensive.
Boy did that one get fixed fast.
But let us spare a moment of thought for the subsequent searchers for interesting items of latex clothing, and how they felt about being exposed to interminable details about an obscure word processing system.
Or when searching for places to go, it would be nice to get recommendations which consider that I love to ride bicycle.
Then there's DuckDuckGo on Firefox for legacy search if you're paranoid.
Do you think an ergonomics engineer logged in from the office and a musician in their studio might want different things when they search for [keyboard reviews]?
How about a 16-year-old male native Texan versus a 62-year-old female immigrant with a degree in fine arts who search for [nearby movies]?
It's usually the first thing I remove
My default search engine on Vivaldi is DDG, it issues a query to DDG.
Do you actually use the default google shit widget to do web searches?
You can't have your browser's features, You can't open multiple results in multiple tabs you need to go back each time.
A better option is to add the browser's search widget on the home screen, it takes you straight to the address bar where you can enter your query. All modern browsers support searching from the address bar, no need to go to google.com
Original comment: my understanding is that this means Google will deny their customers access to Google Play, Photos and other first party Google apps. Samsung has replacements for some of these but not all of them.
The question is: why isn't it anticompetitive to have Bing as the default?
Now that "Google experience" is generally cleaner and better than OEMs' customizations, Google is struggling to put the toothpaste back in the tube. It is very damaging to Android as a product because OEMs are slow to issue updates and won't continue updates beyond three years, in most cases.
I doubt Google will strong-arm Samsung over this. They need Samsung more than Samsung needs the Play Store and other "Google experience" apps.
Also, even if it were just a Dr front for Bing, it doesn't change that I got perfectly reasonable results for the search string said to return unusable results from Bing, so
https://imgur.com/a/xekxNAh
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bing-chat-for...
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bing-chat-for-all-...
https://github.com/anaclumos/bing-chat-for-all-browsers/blob...
You may try configure network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris and network.negotiate-auth.delegation-uris
They both work for me at least on MacOS and Windows; haven't tried any linux distos yet, but worth a look.
And now, with ChatGPT integrated with Bing, I have found it makes very, very short work of those sorts of vague, barely remembered searches.
They still have quite some apps on Android that they can use to extract data from users and send ads, e.g. youtube, gmail, maps, etc.
This is precisely what Microsoft did to Google. They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money. Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply.
One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop. Now, with deals such as this, Microsoft will have more data to tune their engine while Google is left on the sidelines.
Let's just hope that the AI driven search revolution does not produce a monopoly.
Canonical doesn't really make any things that are considered part of a desktop OS. Ubuntu is just a package (and some argue a bad one) of things made by other people.
There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon. You're probably best re-inventing the wheel if you want a Windows competitor, like Google did with ChromeOS.
But in reality, the hardware support is in the kernel, so any distro with a more up2date kernel would fare at least as good. As for the software Canonical produces, I'm not great friends with anything. Snap is crap, Netplan is just a renderer to systemd-networkd or networkmanager, MAAS is a pile of garbage, Juju never caught on, upstart failed, Unity failed etc...
We're running a lot of Canonical at work and I'm not particularly impressed.
There is a reason why Canonical was the first option when Microsoft introduced WSL.
There's a tremendous amount of value in the Linux desktop. It's used to do amazing things every day.
What you mean is that it's very hard to turn it into a business model, which I'd agree with. But these are not the same in the world.
To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop. Where it works, it is the exception, not the norm.
Taking linux and turning it into a business model can be done - see valve and the steam deck. Granted, that is gaming-only but it can be done. The #1 problem with the linux desktop is that there is no single linux desktop and things break far too often.
"You and me" is actually not a small or meaningless demographic. It includes my thousands of colleagues at Mercedes-Benz who use Linux desktops to do engineering work, and millions of other developers. It means a lot of scientists, for example at NASA and CERN. It means a lot of school students and government employees in educational and other municipal deployments.
A lot of the places where Linux is used is for roles that act as multiplicators, e.g. in the development and production of end-user products, or research/science/RD that will lead to new ones, or in educating the people who will one day make new ones.
All of this is a lot of value if you sum it up. There may be no single shining CEO and his shareholders getting rich off of the Linux desktop in the way we're used to fawning over in the tech hustle news cycle. But the world at large almost certainly is. I submit that's a fine success metric.
> To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop.
For many users it's today more reliable than contemporary Windows. Ten years ago, the Linux desktop experience for a non-technical user was death by a thousand papercuts. Today there are still some gaps in HW support that can create unsolvables, but if your machine is well-supported, things work just fine.
What's mainly keeping it back is many other factors, from channel availability to software availability.
> see valve and the steam deck
:-) I worked on the Steam Deck as CTO of one of Valve's contractors on the project. Glad you like it.
My first attempt on Linux was 20 years ago, before I was a technical user. It was a nightmare. Getting my mouse to work was impossible. Even figuring out how to turn the computer off so I could reinstall Windows was a pain.
I came back to Linux some 8 years ago, already as a Developer. Installed Ubuntu. Everything hardware worked well, no need to tinker around. Usability was good and somewhat intuitive, but it took me some time to adjust. I enjoyed it for programming, but not being able to play most games I care about limited my use, and I kept Windows in dual boot.
Nowadays I use Linux Mint as my only OS. It's objectively better than Windows in every way. For regular usage I don't even need to tinker with anything. Although I like the terminal and prefer using it, I can totally see how an average user can get by without touching it at all. I need only to tinker a little to get certain games running, and that's all.
Not who you're responding to, but I am extremely grateful for the work that was put to make gaming on Linux possible.
I may not own a Steam Deck, but it's development allowed me to switch entirely to Linux without looking back.
I've switched about a dozen average users to Linux from Windows, and they have all been happy with the change and have not switched back.
Based on that, I say that Linux absolutely is usable as a daily driver desktop. The only place I can see where Linux might not be the right choice is with a certain class of gamer -- but those gamers are not "average users".
> The #1 problem with the linux desktop is that there is no single linux desktop
That's a strength, not a weakness. For the user want a windows-like desktop? Done. Does the user want something more to their style of working? Done. Not being locked into the desktop means that if your objection to desktop linux is the UX, there's probably a different desktop that will make you happier.
For it to be ready to be a mainstream desktop, it needs to just work.
How many average users install Windows by themselves? Most people just take their Windows laptop to a store/service provider for maintenance, buy a new PC because "the old one is slow now" or have their nerdy fam member once a year remove mal/spy/adware and run a reg cleaner. And yes, show them things.
Like OP, I've converted many family members over the years to Linux desktops, and as the resident nerdy family member, the amount of maintenance and assistance I need to provide has gone down very decently vs. supporting family Windows sytems.
My 70+ mother in law has no problems using a Linux desktop to run her book club and other things she needs to do, but is far less likely to accidentally install malware. I used to come back to these systems a year later and find a system tray full of 20 new icons, a stack of 5 new browser toolbars, ad popups and "install new version" popups galore and other horrific stuff that needed hours to clean up or required a wipe and reinstall.
There's a lot of Windows users on the fence about Linux that absolutely underestimate how technical they are and how much active and passive maintenance they do on their Windows systems. Are you a tech user who reads The Verge or Ars Technica and knows in advance about that bad new option in the new Win11 update that you will switch of day 0? Do you have your mental laundry list of five settings you change in every new Windows system you acquire? Most Windows users are and do not.
The truth is, a lot of people have a working body of knowledge about how to admin and keep alive a Windows system, and a Linux switch requires re-learning and re-acquiring similar knowledge at times. And it's absolutely fine if you don't have the time to do that. There's value to that existing body of knowledge, and there is a switching cost. Some people have better things to do than installing Linux. But Windows is not magically maintenance/upkeep/difficulty-free.
Installing Windows is a more complicated and confusing job than installing Linux. The people who have to be shown how to install Linux also have to be shown how to install Windows.
The fact is that I don't really show them how to install and configure this stuff -- it's really very easy. What I do is hold their hand to get them past the fear of the unknown.
Only because no-one has disrupted the market. Typical case of “Who would pay for a Mantis open-source bugtracker”, then Jira appear and companies purchase it.
What you mean is, who would pay for Ubuntu. But I’d pay for an open-source macOS, with online backups, video editing and SSO for my IT fleet, anything that doesn’t look like Ubuntu.
> Google
It wouldn't be an OS, it would be a casino full of flashy ads. The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never. They get away with Android because it's mostly a consumer market.
Having used Android as my daily driver since Android 1.3, again, the default experience is pretty much ad-free. I've even used Android in "desktop mode" where you connect a display, keyboard and mouse and used windowed Android apps. When you start installing apps, or if you buy a device with non-default apps installed (i.e. the mobile carrier install as infested crap). In that case you can disable or uninstall that app and move on.
> The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never.
While Google does have a history of cancelling some well-loved products (like Reader), Google Apps (Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentations, etc...) has been solid for a decade. The live, multiuser, real-time editing and versioning is a wonderful feature for collaboration. Also, Google has been very reasonable on pricing, and after six years of running three companies on Google Worplace/Apps, I'm very impressed with the reliability of Google Workplace (what they are now calling Apps).
Ironically Windows is the OS that is full of shit ads these days, not Google's OS.
Ask me how many times I've effed up the battery and sleep configuration upgrading Linux on a desktop vs a laptop.
Relative to desktops, laptops tend to be quirky little things because the heavy constraints of form factor, power, and weight result in engineering trade-offs and outright hacks that aren't necessary in the desktop ecosystem.
Another example, the default routing rules page in the admin console defaults to only showing 10 rules. Every time you add a rule, the pagination is reset, so you get lost where you are and can't even see the rule you literally just added.
And as an identity platform, Google is nothing compared to Okta or AAD. Whilst it's wonderful that Google login is everywhere now, I can't for example, request the user do 2FA for particular apps.
Even the admin console only requires 2FA once a month, it's ridiculous.
And don't get me started on "groups" still being attached to distribution lists out of the 60s [1]. Or the inability to have shared mailboxes.
No one should ever choose Google Workspace over Office 365.
[0] https://support.google.com/a/answer/10014088?hl=en
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35070618
I'm trying to talk my boss into dumping Gmail and switching to Outlook. It's such a waste running 365 and Google.
I've specifically been using Azure as my "source of truth" because I think it's more likely we'll dump Google than we'll ever dump things like on-prem AD or Azure.
And it isn't because they didn't try Sheets. Lol. Nobody I know likes Google Sheets.
They basically copied the UX of Office 2003 and did nothing to improve upon it since it's initial release over a decade ago.
It's awful.
Shit, it still doesn't have the concept of tables like Excel does and you need to manually paint rows, manually find the hidden filter creation option for cells and manually refresh the table because the fitlers are kludged such that they don't automatically re-filter when you edit a row.
Even Mail Merging is awful. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/samples/automation...
Like, you don't need a programming degree to mail merge in Office but you do for Google Sheets because it's a script instead of built-in feature.
> It's awful.
On the contrary, sounds marvellous.
> Shit, it still doesn't have the concept of tables like Excel does
Sounds utterly weird. Spreadsheets already are tables, so WTF is the use of a “separate concept of tables” within your tables? Seems to be geared towards creating confusion.
(Or are you just taking about some newfangled moniker for named ranges?)
In regards to ChromeOS, it hardly matters outside the US school system and Googleplex.
It makes 100% sense in Schools and other places where you want to be able to reset the OS constantly and stop people from breaking it. I think for facebook machine's it would do well too but again I think alot of people will want to have local storage.
I've had a Pixelbook for 4.5 years -- a Google product, so arguably as it's "meant to be" -- and it has 128GB of local storage, and I believe you can get them with up to 512GB. Coding locally using Linux VMs/containers is actually pretty pleasant IME (albeit I don't do frontend work).
I think people underestimate what ChromeOS can do by a lot. There's the android subsytem coming with it, along with an optional linux subsystem, so all in all it covers a lot of ground.
That said, it's still limited a lot by Google not going the full length and having half baked support for a lot of things. Access to the bluetooth stack is pretty random for android apps for instance. Then Chromebooks are mostly low power machines, so the linux substack only helps that much.
Tablet mode support is too weak to take full advantage of the different form factors. ChromeOS isn't configurable enough to alternative keyboard configs, system wide shortcuts etc.
All in all, it has so much promises, only half delivered. But the half we have now is still pretty decent IMHO.
First impressions are everything.
ChromeOS's first impression was that it's Chrome in OS form with no local compute whatsoever; everything is done via the internet, aka the cloud.
That is not strictly the case anymore, but changing first impressions simply is not trivial.
Higher end Chromebooks also rival low- to middle-tier Windows laptops in price, and if you're paying top dollar why not buy the latter and have access to the much more capable Windows ecosystem instead?
And even in those, the lilliput SSD sizes make them hardly workable versus w regular laptop for the same price range.
Most of the time it is not possible to enable it.
Chrome being frugal, that is interesting. Maybe Electron devs could take some tips from ChromeOS.
The only benefit, and it may be a big one, is real time collaboration and document sharing.
I understand that some might see offline storage and editing as advantages, but I've only seen it create chaos. It makes the file save dialog much more complex and I constantly have non-technical users mail files around like it's the 90s because they don't understand how to share it properly.
https://www.saasgenius.com/blog/why-office-365-is-overtaking...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...
> Google grew its share of the productivity software market to 10.3% in 2020, according to research from Gartner, taking about 2% from Microsoft. Microsoft is still the clear leader however, with 89.2%. Overall, the productivity software suite market grew 18.2% during 2020.
The features and functionally of Google office are very limited, especially when you compare Sheets to Excel
It seems that the sticky moat is Excel (and to a lesser extent but gaining somewhat rapidly, the Teams integration into 365. Google has blown it on being the enterprise chat solution).
Seems Google could chase this to close this, but Microsoft Excel is just absolutely sticky
That said, I think Excel is the exponentially higher case and hardest to replace. The niches filled by Word that Google Docs can't fill readily are pretty small comparatively. Excel has grown to mean so much more than just spreadsheets. Its pretty much a first line database to a huge amount of the business community, and still relied on across entire industries to do work, from wealth management to accounting to payroll to inventory etc.
I have, upon thinking about it as well, to hear any raised point about PowerPoint vs Google Slides where PowerPoint does something so niche that Slides doesn't and its a deal breaker, actually.
Android and iOS work like that too of course. So maybe they should just switch to something like Dex instead as now you can run android apps in chromeos, so what’s the difference?
Windows is hopelessly overkill for most people.
Sure, they also play Pokemon Go... although partially because they are not sitting in front of their PCs. Large market by volume, but more so for alternative situations.
"Wine-aunt" is new to me too, and funny (after looking up what it means).
Stop conflating yourself with a “normal person”. It’s quite clear from your comment that you’re anything but.
Is ChromeOS really leagues ahead of Linux on the desktop? And other than Linux, how many other desktop OSes are there?
For more "standard" users though, ChromeOS is very simple, has excelent touch support, battery management, a half baked but functional tablet mode, covers a lot of its ecosystem issues with the android subsytem, is fast to learn yet gives access to more power user features (including linux VMs). And it's of course very forgiving, as every regular apps are sandboxed. In that respect I see it succeeding where linux has been struggling for so long. TBH I was hoping Google made a decent iPad pro competitor based on ChromeOS, but I'm not holding my breath.
It's of course not perfect, far from it, but it's a pretty good computer experience IMHO. Linux has progressed a lot, but I still don't see the simplicity, versatility and forgiveness trio in a linux machine anytime soon.
On the other OSes, I didn't see it as desktop only, and iOS could have been a nice alternative, if Apple could have bothered (same for android and DEX). I actually think ChromeOS is a better choice than windows for light computer users, assuming Google doesn't throw the towel..
>making any product that lasts
that's a tough chance for OS.
it wouldn't hit growth targets after n-th year and would be remotely disabled by google worldwide.
Microsoft Office has a lot of network effect surrounding it. Organizations use MS Office because the people who pay them (e.g., government or large corporations) use MS Office. I've tried switching away to LibreOffice or Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, and those are very likely to mangle layout and formatting when saving to DOCX/XLSX/PPTX. Not worth the hassle trying to troubleshoot why my government program managers aren't seeing what I'm seeing on the document I sent them.
Maybe a nitpick, but I think Bing has been profitable on its own for a while now.
(2015) https://time.com/4084975/microsoft-bing-search-engine-profit...
People mock it because its not bringing in obscene amounts that google search does, but it's revenues have consistently been growing for years: https://fourweekmba.com/bing-revenue/
$11.59B is pretty damn good revenue for a 'laughing stock'. Especially Consider that gaming 'only' was $16.23B.
Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.
If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed. That's how much impact the ChatGPT integration had for Bing -- overnight.
For instance: That Microsoft Rewards counter? Ugh.
I’m blown away by the competence of the language model but its willingness to make up facts makes me leary.
I see you haven't met humans
Bing, IIRC, has a way to provide feedback, not sure how useful it is for today's users and if it will be able to solve hallucinations one day.
But I'm generally not interested in asking an average human. I'm interested in asking someone who knows their butt from a hole in the ground in whichever topic I'm asking them about.
When ChatGPT tells me something, I have no idea if it's paraphrasing information gathered from Encyclopedia Britannica, or from a hollow-earther forum.
phind.com has been incredibly good for me.
Is the work of judging the accuracy of a summary not just the work of comprehending the non-summarized field?
For example, a summary could be completely correct and cite its facts exhaustively. Say you're asking about available operating systems: it tells you a bunch of true info about Windows and OSX, but doesn't mention the existence of Linux. Without familiarity with the territory, wouldn't verifying the factuality of each reference still leave you with an incomplete picture?
At a slightly more practical level, do you actually save any time if you've gotta fully verify the sources? I assume you're doing more than just making sure the link doesn't 404, as citing a link that doesn't say what it is made out to be isn't exactly a new problem, but at that point we're mighty close to the traditional experience of running through a SERP.
Finally, even if you're reading all the links in detail, isn't that still a situation prone to automation bias? There's a lot of examples of cases where humans are supposed to check machine output, but if it's usually good enough the checkers fall into a pattern of trusting it too much and skipping work. Maybe I'm just lazy, but I think I'd eventually get less gung-ho about verifying sources and eventually do myself a mischief.
I'm asking because I've been underwhelmed by my own attempts at using LMs for search tasks, so maybe I'm doing it wrong.
Or it's something it just hallucinated out of thin air.
Checking the links is a good practice.
I feel like we just created an interesting novel problem in the world. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out.
https://www.phind.com/
“everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge”.
Humans are pretty good bullshitters too!
I've asked BingGPT about myself and it gave me three answers. One was more or less on-point (it found my linkedin profile), and the other two were hallucinations. What happened was Bing found two unrelated pages and GPT has tried and failed to make sense of them.
Either that, or I am a prince whose name means "goose" in Polish.
I really hope they find a way to have it apply context from future conversations such that when it learns the error of its ways it emails you a retraction, but that's probably a ways out because humans can't be trusted to not weaponize such a feature into sending spam.
The weight of phrases like "you are wrong" is in fact so strong, that it fools the chatGPT to apologize for its 'mistakes' even in the scenarios where its text was obviously correct - like telling it 2+2 doesn't equal 4
Sure, grep has never flat out lied to me the way chatGPT does, but it's a statistical model, not a co-worker, so I don't feel betrayed, I just feel... cautioned. It keeps you on your toes, which isn't such a bad state to be in.
Especially when I talk to it about fiction and ask questions about - for example - a specific story and you see it invent whole quotes and characters and so on...it is a masterful bullshitter.
Cold War strategy. Trust but Verify.
Leary is a rare variant spelling of leery.
I mention this, because you seem to care about correctness.
What could be more 2020s than a post-truth search engine?
it solves a lot for hallicination and current event problems you have in chatgpt
i find chatgpt 3.5 answers better than bing. Also ive had bing end conversion with me on more than one occasion without saying anything offensive
That said, I'm not a fan of using these tools for search. For me, anyway, they don't even come close to doing what I want when I'm searching the web.
I'm using it to help me with a library integration, for example. I noticed it was recommending deprecated methods. So I copy/pasted the latest source code, asked it to update itself, and voilá.
It's super smart and learns literally in a second. Just drop recent information at it and ask what you need.
Personally — and having not tried ChatGPT for this — I don't think ChatGPT would do well with resolving the kinds of queries I consider Google "good at."
To me, the place where Google wins over Bing, DDG, etc. is when I know there must exist some page that uniquely talks about some extremely niche overlap of concepts; but I don't know any specific "natural key" keywords to refer to the that overlapped-set-of-concepts, and instead only have a "cloud of highly-correlated keywords for the individual concepts involved" to throw into the search box.
For example, if I'm trying to conjure from the aether a discussion people are having about an issue I'm facing with some buggy behavior in an API — where that buggy behavior doesn't spit out any distinctive error message to use in the search.
I could see ChatGPT being good at a limited version of this problem, where I could give it e.g. several definitions of a word (= correlated keywords), and it could tell me the word that fits those definitions.
But the full version of the problem — pointing you at (or regurgitating) the one unique conversation that most highly correlates with your keyword cloud — essentially implies an Internet-scale "language model": one where there are unique vertices for every unique URL. Which, if you think about it, is what a traditional search engine's index is: a very dumb, but very large correlational language model, where that "dumbness" is a valuable constraint meaning that queries are able to be run map-reduced across many nodes.
Is there something I'm missing here, that makes Bing+ChatGPT better at these types of queries than Google is?
Or are the advantages ChatGPT is bringing to the table here, in areas that have nothing to do with making search engines better at the things they're already "the best tool for the job" at, and instead are in solving problems that could be solved any number of other ways (e.g. querying a search assistant such as Siri/Alexa; or pulling up an encyclopedia article or textbook relevant to the subject and just reading it) such that a search engine wouldn't necessarily be the first tool you'd search for?
No problem for ChatGPT however which was not only able to write the code, but write it in Rust - the target language Iw as going to. Now I've just found it easier to ask ChatGPT first then go go google.
When you're asking generally about a pretty basic topic which you just happen to not be very familiar with, ChatGPT is not too dissimilar from having an expert in the field you can chat with and ask questions to. I find it to be a very effective way of querying the huge database of information that is its training dataset.
Surprisingly, the one thing it's really terrible at but which I would've expected it to be okay at, is writing config files. I sometimes ask it how to write, say, a systemd service file which does a particular thing, and it usually shows me something which looks roughly sensible but doesn't actually do what I wanted. Its nature of fancy autocomplete with no understanding really shines through in those cases. Its biggest downfall is that it has no way to recognize when it doesn't have an answer and is making stuff up.
And apparently you didn't quite notice the particular inefficiency there...
> But instead of doing that, I just asked ChatGPT the specific questions I needed the answer to.
Yeah, sure, if you want to vet hallucinations in stead of just getting the facts.
Just go directly to Wikipedia instead.
B) Your browser (most probably) has a search function.
I'm sure that recipe exists somewhere on the internet but ChatGPT gave something to me in a very succinct format with none of the usual bullshit you deal with when looking through search results. ChatGPT also thankfully did not include the usual recipe backstory.
how to create a multi line string in a bash script. I needed to encode a human-readable JSON string in a curl call and didn’t know how. Google game me crummy tutorial sites, GPT gave me instructions, and when provided with the target, did all the formatting too.
I found it also understands git well. I use git at work, but I almost never use anything beyond push/pull/commit so crazy rebases or merges and stuff I still have to search for instructions to remember them. Now GPT can just explain to me the steps for my particular case. When I googled things, I’d search for keywords and stuff based on my knowledge and piece together the steps myself.
On a counter example, I recently had an intern who botched their config on VsCode and didn’t know what settings to fix. I found it was easier to google search how to reset things than use GPT. Ymmv.
For example, today I asked ChatGPT how to write a class method in Ruby and to explain the class << self idiom. Super simple stuff, but it gives accurate answers and it's way more convenient than Google.
For this class of simple queries there's a lot of overhead to do a Google search and then try to filter out bullshit and padded results vs a super simple prompt to ChatGPT.
Geographical information about a region.
What is the name of a song I have in my mind.
Virtually anything else. I'm studying architecture and read about associations of feelings that cardinal points transmit in a house (north, south, east, west). Like, east is associated with youth because of sunrise. At first it wasn't obvious why, so I asked ChatGPT and it explained everything brilliantly to me.
It takes me an order of magnitude less time to educate myself on ChatGPT comparing to Google.
Spammers will, too, and since OpenAI has access to what they're asking and can easily flag their questions, they can feed misleading guidance to spammers.
[0] For example, Google used to have a fairly strictly enforced rule that indexable content had to actually be visible to an unauthenticated user. The current crop of sites that have apparently useful content in snippets but that hide it when loaded would have been penalized, possibly severely.
It does seem like Larry and Sergei are finally back trying to fix the excessively politically sensitive and overly cautious culture. Larry, having disappeared to Fiji for several years, must have been pretty bored or annoyed with running it.
Yesterday night I was trying to recall the name of a particular SCOTUS case that I had (semi-incorrectly) thought was connected to the 14th Amendment.
Bombed out on the SERPs two or three times, so I started looking for an very old article by Thomas Sowell that randomly introduced me to the case a few years back. I knew it was something regarding the unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Act.
Neither Google nor DDG gave me ANY useful results for 3-5 variations on “scholarly critique of the Civil Rights Act”. I eventually remembered the Sowell connection and even adding his name in quotes only got me to a page deboonking the article I was searching for!
I’m very far from being a right winger or whatever so I’ve never really experienced this sort of thing before, but my god is the “no no, you don’t REALLY want to search for THAT” silent censorship out of control. Millions to billions of people use these search engines daily and assume they’re mildly biased but otherwise shining portals to the sum total of human knowledge.
In hindsight, I suspect I would have immediately found the SCOTUS case with my initial search on 2010 era Google. Very much seems like my starter queries were triggering the Bad Think Detected algorithm.
*debunking
https://yandex.com/search/touch/?text=scholarly+critique+of+...
Publishers blamed Google for declining revenue since they had to make their content openly accessible and therefore free in order to be visible to users on search. The EU tried to make Facebook and Google pay publishers to account for this. I think allowing paywalled content was a compromise to prevent this legislation from passing.
That being said, I agree with the publishers especially since hypocritically Google and Facebook strictly don't allow scraping of their services and litigate those who do.
Google could easily fix this by putting a symbol or label on paywall-related content so you know not to click it.
You mean, so that you can satisfy everybody at the same time?
No, sorry, the world doesn't work this way.
Being the richest gives someone a lot of power to make others look foolish
It already seems poisoned to me. It's popularity over correctness, because LLMs don't know semantics.
The users who the default engine really locks in are the ones who just mostly click ads and have no idea they are ads. When they use Google they are mostly clicking ads anyways, so the search result quality will appear about the same with Bing. Maybe even better if there are fewer ads.
For Microsoft, getting more users on board means higher ad volume which brings more advertisers who are going to spend the time to manage Bing ad campaigns. You can bet they've done the calculations for how much money they can spend at what price. Ultimately that leads to higher monetization and then Microsoft can pay other companies (like Apple) to switch the default engine.
Google is a multi-trillion dollar attention tax that just sucks money from the global economy. They've been wildly mismanaged since Eric Schmidt's CEO tenure ended. It's been a long time coming, but the timer is running out of sand for Google fast. The revenue may take a long time to peak and decline but when they start missing their quarterly earnings it will be a bloodbath for Google's employees.
Every day I enter a few difficult queries on both Google and Bing to see if Bing gives me something better. I'm still laughing that people think Bing is a serious threat.
I just asked it about something in today's news and it answered it and provided links to 6 news articles on that topic.
Truman Capote and Gore Vidal were two American writers who had a long-standing feud with each other. The feud began when Capote wrote an article for Esquire magazine in which he claimed that Vidal had been thrown out of the White House after making a pass at a member of President Kennedy's family². Vidal took Capote to court for libel, where the two traded insults². After the pair settled out of court, their feud continued – even outliving Capote².
I hope that helps!
Source: Conversation with Bing, 4/17/2023(1) The A-Z of Gore Vidal | Gore Vidal | The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/01/the-a-z-gore-v... Accessed 4/17/2023. (2) Why Did Gore Vidal and William Buckley Hate Each Other? - Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-did-gore-vidal-and-william... Accessed 4/17/2023. (3) Feud sensation! Why Vargas Llosa thumped Márquez. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/mar/13/feud... Accessed 4/17/2023. (4) A life in feuds: how Gore Vidal gripped a nation - The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/14/gore-vidal-gri... Accessed 4/17/2023. (5) ‘Just a couple of fags’: Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and celebrity feud. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19392397.2015.1... Accessed 4/17/2023. (6) Truman Capote’s unhappy ending | PBS NewsHour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/truman-capotes-unhappy-e... Accessed 4/17/2023.
Oh, and references (2) and (3) seem to be hallucinated and are unrelated to the question and response despite being cited inline. The other ref links are valuable but well then it's just a search engine with more noise.
Bing has only 10m+ downloads on Android. Not even a top 200 app.
Samsung switch too Bing will hurt Samsung more than Google.
For search, Bing + ChatGPT is now my driver for search. I still use Google and Duck Duck Go occasionally, but usually I am OK with waiting a short while for Bing + ChatGPT results.
Sorry for the OT question - do you use slime-tramp? And if so, do you have a way to use M-. (slime-edit-definition) without having to re-compile files using the remote paths?
For Common Lisp, running Emacs on a remote server instead of slime-tramp has always been good enough. Would you suggest I try slime-tramp?
Mosh as in "mobile shell"? https://mosh.org/
> Would you suggest I try slime-tramp?
I don't know yet, I've just started trying it out.
What made me want to try it was that I could use GUI Emacs to connect to emacs running on a different machine and still have full access to all the emacs keybindings.
So far, the downsides that I have encountered are that M-. and C-c C-k (slime-compile-and-load-file) don't quite work. The work-around would be to visit each file using the remote path and re-compile them so that the running Lisp image can map what's in the image to a path tramp recognizes. Then M-. and C-c C-k should work.
To recompile, select all then compile (X-c X-p C-c C-c) works, or I think C-c M-k also works. Not a great solution if there are a lot of files, though.
IIUC the problem boils down to M-. eventually calling (xref-find-definitions) which is an emacs built-in, and I think that's why the tramp paths aren't translating until a re-compile is done.
Edit: I'm wrong!
???
PageRank. It was PageRank, and the fact that they didn't rely on the lies put into <meta> tags. There was no feedback loop at that point.
There's no moat in anything AI, but MS gets OpenAI access at a discount and therefore will win
It's more like Google has to change from optimizing for next week's revenue numbers to optimizing for user experience. People have been saying for years that their search results are trash. That we haven't seen a response from Google may be an indicator that they aren't able to return useful search results.
Have they? I hear people say this on Hacker news but i've never heard it anywhere else, people seem to be using the internet just fine with Google as there main search engine, what is the alternative? Bing? It's still trash and Bing Chat is like a worse version of ChatGPT, I don't see it replacing Google currently.
I would bet that a good chunk of users don't know that you can change the default browser or search engine, or at least don't think to do so. They might not like the UX, but they have other things occupying their focus and muddle through a bad experience with their phone or PC, just like they do with many other mediocre interfaces throughout the week.
If I want to find artists, lyrics, locations, results of sporting events, other special events... I'm not sure all the things, but DDG doesn't even compare.
Ah yes, Canonical, land of people attempting to fork the Linux ecosystem and getting shot down by everyone and doubling down.
Would be a perfect fit for Google.
Desktop OS's are not the long term future of computing, is it? But they were astute in acquiring Android. Meanwhile, Microsoft thought that a mobile OS is just a desktop OS squished onto a smaller screen.
I've always been shocked that Google didn't face antitrust action over using their internet video monopoly to kill Windows Phone. They wouldn't create a Youtube app for Windows Phone, nor would they allow Microsoft to create one themselves.
I can remember Google taking similar actions to lock out Amazon's Echo Show.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google-youtube-a...
If anything, Google has been too aggressive.
> then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop
With their inferior products? Not a chance. Google's apps are so far away from even competing with Microsoft's it's not even funny. Google Sheets doesn't even have proper tables. I wouldn't even be surprised if they cancelled it.
With ChromeOS, they took the route available to them, which was to enter the school market and try to build something from there.
Admittedly Google still has some special sauce left, but in my opinion those special sauce only improves efficiency; it doesn't enable one to do something that's impossible otherwise. (I've been reading about some public research reports about Google's special sauce: they range from special user space networking to new congestion control to custom TPUs etc.)
Wouldn't office suite be a better target? Everyone uses it. Lots of low hanging fruits. Easy to win the heart of geeks. Ample opportunities to integrate with other enterprise services.
As for Google, I am uncertain whether they were prepared for this competition because, firstly, the business terms offered by Microsoft might have been quite strategic, and secondly, the Google search engine has not experienced significant innovation or improvement since PageRank, at least from a user experience perspective rather than complexity. I will regale my descendants with stories of a time when I searched for something and found at least one relevant result among the top 20.
Google on the other hand is always chasing the next big thing. It just doesn’t have the institutional attention span to do anything really big. If a project isn’t an explosive hit right away, Google moves on to the next big idea.
They did one better and made Chrome so good that its the OS for most, for all intents and purposes, now.
Even MS is moving office to being cloud based, so it's not clear business users value local document availability that much - rather the opposite, I've worked in places that like cloud services because locking out their data from a disgruntled or departed employee is one button away.
Google search has just gotten worse and is more ad prone. It's still better, but not golden age google - not even close.
It's their outdated search bringing everything else down it seems.
I haven't opened a MS product in years and my life is better for it. Their Mac product lineup is particularly lackluster.
Bing is just one of many sources DuckDuckGo utilizes
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
I believe this as well for most people and most searches. I, however, am not most people. The vast majority of the time I want a link to sites that have what I am looking for. This is my biggest gripe with search engines and has been for a very long time. I used to be really good at finding pages I wanted by punching in the right words in the search. At some point in the mid 00's Google changed everything and I have failed to adapt fully.
Basically Google is being squeezed left and right. So the only way to increase revenue or profits to satisfy the money they spend on Apple and Samsung? More Ads on Youtube and Google Search. The more Ads they serve, the worse UX they have. All while completely fail to compete against AWS or Azure.
Two things are not likely to happen:
1. Samsung will not give up on licensing Google proprietary package of apps.
2. Google will not yank Samsung's license.
Google will absolutely tighten the screws on their future contracts to discourage these deals, as well as sweeping out crappy "customizations."
huh? Samsung OneUI features have been making their way into mainstream AOSP...particularly the tablet-focused stuff
there is no way Google will ever try to "strong arm" Samsung...Samsung is the Android market, the Pixel line is a rounding error and in no way a competitive threat
>40% of Samsung's net revenue is mobile devices.
Only ~56% of Google's revenue is from Search ads - <50% of that comes from Android - and <35% of that comes from Samsung.
<10% of Google's total revenue comes from Samsung devices >40% of Samsung's NET REVENUE comes from selling Android devices.
It's almost as if Samsung is a lot more dependent on Google than the other way around.
At the end of the day - the majority of people you default to Bing search are going to switch back to Google. Samsung will be lucky to get a meaningful amount of money.
MSFT can't outbid Google because they can't make as much money from the searches as Google.
in a pinch, Samsung could just fork the AOSP project and continue forward without Google, it would be trivial for app makers to re-publish their apps in a Samsung app store (and many already do)
They've been strong-arming every Android OEM since the start (Google Mobile Services agreement). ("Strong arming" being closer to Apple exerting control vs. the wild west of pre-2007 cellphones.)
It's finally starting to bear fruit with things like Project Mainline and Project Treble, but the political winds have changed and I expect various Gov'ts to claw back the control Google has on OEMs over the next decade. Whether Google can continue their efforts to ensure a stable Android platform is an open question after that.
I can't point to anything specific since I'm rushing this comment, but it should be fairly obvious that Google lets OEMs do things their own way until the dust settles and Google synthesizes the different approaches into the "official" AOSP way.
I'm not sure any actual code from OneUI has made it into Android, that would surprise me. Google really likes doing things "their way" in Android. The Android team takes UI inspiration from everyone, but most of their eyeball time is on Apple.
Android is also technically more advanced than anything Apple in pure versatility and user control. Apple execs might get nightmares if someone suggested giving more control to their user. I can stay in the walled garden or play outside with naughty apps and emulators. Android's safety model is not based on restricting what the user can do. Security by obscurity is the least one can do.
I understand everyone has a phone choice and some people prefer their phone less sophisticated or less feature rich or more basic.
But just because you prefer something so reduced in functionality that it's a waste of the incredible silicon powering it does not mean you can belittle something far more capable. Especially in a developer oriented website.
Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google" without switching to the Apple ecosystem. No Google Play (you can install it but I choose not to), FOSS apps only. I don't recommend it for everyone but it made me not hate owning a smart phone for the first time since the "mobile revolution" passed my old grumpy self by.
I bought mine outright and wiped the Pixel version of Android and am pretty happy. To be clear, I wasn't trying to avoid giving Google money ... I just wanted a phone and operating system that I felt like I had control of, without having a ton of bloatware and spyware pre-installed by the vendor etc.
That's correct. It's my understanding that this is for two reasons:
1) google opened api/support for verified boot on the pixels (so you can tell if a border agent hacked your grapheneos phone, for example)
2) it's easier to support fewer phone models (given they are not a large team)
I bought a refurbished pixel 3a last year for a little over $100 and have been thrilled with my grapheneos experience. I don't run google play, but it is my understanding this can be done in a sandbox (allowing for more privacy than usual).
And what value, exactly, does your comment add to the conversation?
> paying Samsung for staying on Android with Google Search
> google still owns android
> Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google"
It doesn't matter that Google owns Android if Samsung can make their own fork of Android that doesn't use Google stuff by default. Is there something that would prevent Samsung from creating their own app store?
https://www.economist.com/business/2022/10/25/ren-zhengfei-h...
This is only valid for power users. Normal users would probably never accept a phone without Google Play Services running on it, with Amazon's devices being the exception (and don't ask me why, because I don't get it.)
IMO, narrow use cases and cheapness.
My impression is people buy a Fire Tablet because:
* They want to read/browse the web/use a few basic social media apps
* They want something for their kid
Fire Tablets are never a primary device, so it's okay to have trade-offs.
GrapheneOS only supports Google devices like the Pixel though. It's the only reason I'm considering buying one.
The whole Bing AI stuff is already a huge money sink for them, how much can they afford to throw into this pit before investors start being worried?
Perhaps ironically it’s because Google’s search tailors it’s results to show me those results that paint MSFT in a positive light.
I can also see Generative AI providing some real amazing features with near OS level integration. Imagine being able to quickly draft business emails from your mobile device?
I don’t think Apple will have anything that amazing anytime soon so us iOS users will be stuck with using 3rd party apps, but I could see Samsung trying to distinguish their handsets with additional software capabilities not found in Android.
If Bing had more users the Microsoft would make more money from it, and vice verse for Google. Their respective sizes are a reason for Microsoft to grow Bing, not a reason to turn Samsung away.
Microsoft are investing $10b in OpenAI partly to make Bing better. That is not a sign they're happy with Bing's market share. They're coming for Google, albeit with an oblique strategy rather than competing directly.
how much can they afford to throw into this pit before investors start being worried
A lot, for a really long time. Microsoft have plenty of money and a history of playing a long game successfully. Have a look at Xbox if you want an example of Microsoft spending a lot of money for a very long time and coming out ahead in the end.
In the past Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, etc. have frequently gotten outbidded by Google for similar deals.
Pure speculation—MSFT probably nailed the demo and impressed Samsung execs.
Yes, we all hate their support structure (it goes through SADA), but the price is right. At my last company with 4 engineers we were paying AWS ~$1000/month for support. At my current company back when we had a cloud service on GCP, we got weekly calls with support for $0/month. Folks at Google also seemed to approve my weird resource requests (tons of GPUs in the midst of a GPU shortage, etc.) without me going through any back channels. I didn't find it terrible to work with at all, and it was much cheaper than AWS.
Did Amazon have the same constraints?
In my experience, GCP and AWS are within a tiny % of each other.
Then the reliability of GCP is a good bit higher. gp3 has 99.8% durability. I've seen several EBS volumes just disappear. Not deleted, just become permanently gone due to hardware failures. Compare that to 99.999% durability on GCP. You're spending several times for extra redundancy and complexity per gig on AWS just to come close to the durability to GCP.
If I have a choice between AWS and GCP, and unless I've got some specific product need for AWS, I'd probably go with GCP every time. It's such a better product IMO.
SADA (and their competitor DoIT) are just resellers. Support doesn't inherently go through them. That's a decision your company makes. It's generally not a great decision either, in my opinion, as those resellers add a lot of opacity between you and your cloud provider. Google recommends them because it's easier for them.
But why is Google paying Apple to be the default search engine on iOS devices?
It seems a waste of money as Apple would be stupid to default to any other search engine given the lower search quality results. End users would notice if there was a result degradation and likely switch their default. Google seems to be playing the "Intel Inside" part without reaping the marketing benefits and only paying the traffic acquisition costs.
What does this even mean?
They can absolutely build a solid search engine with enough money and time, but what would be gained? It's better to just collect Google's checks.
> but what would be gained?
People needing to buy an Apple device to reap the benefits of the internet, as Google continues to sink into their SEO-optimized malware swamp.
They'd do that, Intel would offer them a discount, and that'd be the last we'd hear of it for a year or so, until that discount would be expiring.
External forces of economic and technical nature are not in their favor. Internal forces from politics, leadership and management issues are surfacing.
This does not sound good for Google. Almost like it will implode.
True, but Samsung isn't known for user-friendly phones, and they often come with a lot of bloat. At some point, it drives more and more users to Pixel.
Not including google's version doesn't equate to bloat. In fact, the opposite is true.
I'm still using Samsung hardware and I like it, but it's got a little bloat goin on
(Personally, I disagree, but this seems to be almost unanimous. Even for people that don't buy their phones.)
I don’t like the Samsung inference either, but millions and millions of people don’t just like it, they prefer it. They buy the phones specifically because they know how to use it. They aren’t loyal to Android, they are loyal to the Galaxy line.
I was recently in the market for a basic VPS, and Azure is absolutely awful for this use. The most bloated complicated signup and setup process I have experienced in a long time. Google was tolerable. Of the three amazon lightsail was the best, but even that loses to something like digital ocean
Azure focuses on Microsoft's large enterprise customers. They want guard rails, separation of responsibilities, policy, compliance controls, etc...
Nothing to do with the process required to get 1 VM up and running from scratch, including signing up. Their bread & butter customers have enterprise agreements in place already for Office and Windows licensing!
I cannot imagine every wanting to talk to any computing device.
The only source linked in the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/technology/google-search-...
It's probably the only source at all, as every number in the sammobile article is also in the NYT, like the 160+ people working on Magi.
As the sammobile article doesn't appear to do anything but regurgitate what is in the NYT article without any apparent validation on their side, the link should be changed to the NYT IMO, whose article seems at least based on actual internal messages from Google. I understand that the title isn't as attention grabbing though ("Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals").
- after google search degraded for a while bing is competive
- MS has much influence and stack in (not really open) OpenAI
- MS has with LinkedLn a relevant social network, sure it's work focused but increasingly used for non work usecases
- MS controls 2 of the 6 relevant gaming platforms (XBox, PC -- the others are Switch, Playstation, iOS and Android), they happen to also be 2 of the 3 AAA gaming platforms (XBox, PC -- the other is Playstation)
- MS owns a lot of game production
- MS has the go to email solution for companies Outlook as part of Office365
- MS has what some call the best Calendar/schedule Meeting app, also part of Office365
- MS has the go to online meeting platform for companies (teams as part of Office365, through it succks)
- MS has a competitive company chatting platform
- MS competes with Google and Apple in the Cloud
- MS has a not so competitive ad platform
- MS has a semi competitive voice assistant which if integrated with ChatGPT tech could very well become very competitive very fast
- MS doesn't have a phone OS, but a lot control over phone through MDM features integrated into teams/outlook etc.
- MS has one of the main browsers (edge) with a lot of people happily explicitly opting for it or being coerced or tricked into using it (they lost that in the past but regained it). While it pains me its likely more relevant then Firefox by now.
- MS sells PC/Laptop like hardware successfully, but not that competitive
- one of the best standard consumer ergonomic keyboards is from MS
- they still have one of the most widely used presentation and note taking applications
- their database system is still around and sells, not sure why
- they control both of the some of the most widely used IDEs (VS and VSCode)
- they have some experience with AR/VR through I'm not sure about the competitiveness of current products from them
- they made some of the main reasons why people tried out Linux go away by having WSL
- .... I most likely forgot a lot
I.e. all in all: MS is EVERYWHERE with constant faster growing power and control all through the tech space. If it keeps up that way MS will soon be both more powerful then Google and then it ever have been. If they had managed to properly land their phone OS things would be really scary now.
- Github with its new Copilot API to multiple IDE's (incl. third party)
- Typescript and standards management
- NPM, locking into the entire web2 ecosystem
lol. MS owns my ass and I can't even do shit about it
the mono in monopoly is in the end irrelevant, what matters is the power and ways you can abuse it. In the past you mainly got that with being a monopoly or duopoly but by now you can archive it by being "just" competitive with the best in a sector, and doing so in docent of areas and slowly integrating all of that into each other