I was very enthusiastic about Google I/O in the past (around the year 2010). Full of nice tech talks; I learned a lot. These years, I couldn't care less. It's all business talk. I guess developers are not the target audience anymore (and for newcomers, perhaps the "I/O" may be misleading).
Google is a factory and software is manufacturing. They want to sell their goods to managers not engineers. Makes sense if you think about it. Most of what google does is yesterday’s tech, the web isn’t new and they aren’t making bank by selling stuff to software devs. We want free stuff, preferably open source. There’s so much of it anyway that it has zero value. They might babble a bit about how ai can replace workers and further reduce wages.
All of that makes sense for Google in general, but Google I/O used to be explicitly a developer conference, with everything targeting developers, which no longer seems true.
That was when Google thought they needed the support of the "developer" community that they don't write the paychecks for. Now they make nothing new or interesting, or on the off chance they do, they kill it after it proves not to be a cash cow.
The getting away from the day job and serendipitous discovery are benefits in addition to meeting with people and socializing. But I think a lot of conference goers approach it as a sprint to maximize sessions and if that’s your goal online is probably more efficient.
Same. Google invited me to participate and have a booth - in 2010 or 2011 - because we were an early business adopter of their APIs. It was a cool event. I think the hot new tech that year was NaCl. I don't think startups get invited now just for using new Google tech. And is a reminder that this year's hot new tech will be forgotten in a few years.
I looked at the schedule for the web section, and some of the talks look useful. Much has been done in the browser space: new CSS capabilities and webgpu among them.
If you pick 10 random sessions from the program[0], I'd think the odds are that you'll end up with like 8-9 technical sessions or workshops. The keynotes of course target a more general audience, but that's always been the case. (E.g. haven't they been announcing consumer hardware during the keynotes basically from the start?). It seems in line with something like the WWDC, which is a developer conference but with a general audience keynote.
Yeah, and I realize my point of view is unpopular here. Integrating across all their services is just doubling down on what they already took from GPT. I didn’t see anything that wowed me. Cool, so I can LLM in Gmail and workspaces. Cool, so I can build a job description based on what others are hiring for instead of my company’s needs. I’m not saying that any of this is easy, just that it’s simply novelty. PaLM 2, we’ll have to see how it performs but it looks promising but it’s just another GPT-4 competitor. Where’s the “while the world was ogling over GPT-4, we built this”? PaLM 2 isn’t distinctive enough for me to say they are paving the way. They totally get it, but they aren’t paving the road forward. Maybe next year.
Yeah, but it seems their real "big new model" is Gemini, not PaLM 2:
> We recently brought these two teams together into a single unit, Google DeepMind. Using the computational resources of Google, they’re focused on building more capable systems, safely and responsibly.
> This includes our next-generation foundation model, Gemini, which is still in training. Gemini was created from the ground up to be multimodal, highly efficient at tool and API integrations and built to enable future innovations, like memory and planning. While still early, we’re already seeing impressive multimodal capabilities not seen in prior models.
> Once fine-tuned and rigorously tested for safety, Gemini will be available at various sizes and capabilities, just like PaLM 2.
It sounds like this is the first "joint project" of the old DeepMind/Brain groups since the merger.
Heh, yours and other comments here disparaging I/O as "business" or "corporate" talk these days come across as quite ignorant - and I don't mean this in a nasty way, more in a literal way. It seems perhaps you're missing the fact there are many different styles of talks for many audiences.
At every I/O there is a "keynote" and a "developer keynote", and similarly there are business / product talks and developer-focused talks. In fact, they even create entirely separate playlists on YouTube for the dev/non-dev talks.
As a Staff Eng who leads and mentors engineers who live in a world where they have no choice but to use Google SDKs and services, I find many of the developer-focused talks invaluable for getting others in my team up to speed on what's new and what's coming soon. Most of these talks are given by engineers and involve concise code examples which quickly convey the gist of new functionality.
Google can pretend they're not IBM, but that doesn't make it true.
Google no longer innovates or launches products of note. They throw ideas at the wall, like spaghetti, and hope things stick.
Perverse incentives create competing products, dead end projects, and invariably everything created winds up getting cancelled.
Google got drunk off of easy search ad revenue. Their founding leadership went off to do zeppelins and politicking. Now that golden goose looks like it may be cooked.
Google had the Bell Labs of AI research, but their ability to build product around it looks a lot more like IBM Watson.
Over the next half decade, their top tier talent will leave and get venture funding to do their own things with their own equity.
> As a Staff Eng who leads and mentors engineers who live in a world where they have no choice but to use Google SDKs and services, I find many of the developer-focused talks invaluable for getting others in my team up to speed on what's new and what's coming soon.
This sounds identical to IBM developer outreach. Or Ballmer-era Microsoft. Similar straightjackets, captive audience.
We'll see if Google can excite people about AI here, but I'm doubtful.
> They throw ideas at the wall, like spaghetti, and hope things stick.
Yes, and whether they stick or not, they tear down the wall after 2-3 years because they seemingly still haven’t figured out how to internally incentivize KTLO/running stable products (other than a few flagship ones) rather than building shiny new things.
No problem! My team is a small subset of engineers in a 10yo+ startup, and the organisation chose to go all in on many Google services long before any of us joined the company. I have my issues with Google and some of their services but the GP stands out as an odd comment to me because it's at odds with my own experience of keeping up with I/O talks.
Related: It drives me bananas when a mega-corp makes a small R&D team and the job req says “we are a small startup in a big company.” The benefits, bureaucracy, speed of innovation, and equity all fit the usual mega corporate shoes, so it’s probably still a traditional role.
It does actually work out sometimes. I had the luck to be on one such team at Microsoft in the past, and we absolutely did have the benefit of cutting through much of the usual red tape etc, while still having access to megacorp resources.
But the only reason why it worked out the way it did is because the "owner" of the team in question 1) sincerely believed in this approach, 2) had enough clout with the top management to make it stick.
I was in one of these. We got equity and benefits, but we were explicitly exempted from normal bureaucracy. Our exec sponsor (and nominal manager) asked that we tell him before we launched or signed a big customer, and that was about it. Otherwise, we could do whatever we wanted with basically no oversight.
I'm pretty sure we could have gotten away with spending most of our time playing video games on the company's dime, if we had wanted. We probably would have been fired once someone found out, but that's pretty universal.
does not imply that ¬A => B. In other words, the logical structure can be correct, but that does not mean the premises are themselves true. This is the difference between validity and soundness in formal logic [0].
That's because most people do startups that are destined to fail. I've done plenty of those myself! The problem is that we think we can get away with building solutions looking for products. While a few of those do well, in general, that is a recipe for failure.
In other words, our success was because we identified a critical missing piece in a profitable industry and built exactly what people were asking for, and more importantly, willing to pay for.
After that success (and a couple more after it), I refuse to ever build something without finding customers first. You have to build products people want, not try to convince people into believing they want your product.
Startup is just another buzzword for a business. It's never been anything different than that. I wouldn't make any assumption about it based on the term, not the age, size, market, etc
I'm too lazy to go through the previous agendas of I/O, but it would be interesting to see the burnt out remnants of google's various abandoned projects.
I saw this headline and eyerolled. In 2010, I read the schedule/agenda and hype about what might be given to attendees. ALMOST signed up for the lottery.
As I addended to google's IoT with respect to other IoT vendors:
"It's just that Google adds completely rudderless leadership, its world famous utter disregard for customer support, and complete lack of commitment to the recipe."
Google I/O was cool when you could get early access to google glasses.
What do you get these days? Anything interesting? Or the latest Pixel (god, don't get me started, I am NEVER EVER EVER dropping more than $300 on an android phone again).
Anyway, back to the eyeroll. Wow, 10 years. Android is buggier and its app store laden with malware, copycats, predatory addictware, and bureaucracy. Android hardware is arguably even buggier than it was. Search is FAR FAR worse. Their self-driving is still a non-starter. The internet has turned into a dystopian wasteland and they are a not-insignificant party to it. No longer open, no longer even trying to not be evil.
Everything about google is worse today than it was 10 years ago. Does anybody actually want to work there for any reason besides money and resume eyecandy? Google the search is far worse than it was 10 years ago with maximum monetization policies. Advertising / information hoovering is a threat to democracy and perhaps human existence. The fourth estate / newspapers / journalism has been utterly hollowed out. It has directly enabled cartel and monopoly market consolidation. It is the shining example of locking out someone from the internet and providing no human contact for resolution. If it fails to dominate something with its horrid customer service and big brother creepy dominance, it strands people with little warning.
It wasn't always tech talks. I remember going to Google I/O in 2008 and sitting in a bean bag chair about 30 feet from "Flight of The Conchords", who were performing live. Fun times.
Same here, it used to be quite cool, but with the multiple reboots on Android frameworks, lack of updstes enforcement for OEMs, how the Kotlin advocates talk about Java, and the sorry state of NDK tooling, I lost interest.
Only the Web talks are relevant, as the Web is now basically ChromeOS.
tbh, I kinda blame the media for this. At some point the media decided that I/O was Google's competitor to Apple's consumer keynotes, and so it was forced to become that in order to avoid weeks of "Google disappoints at I/O" headlines.
Around 2013 is when I/Os became less about showing technological progress and more about corporate talk.
Examples of I/O topics before 2013: Android, Maps API, App Engine (cloud), Chrome, AJAX for their APIs, real-time collaboration/Wave, Google TV (early predecessor to Android TV), Chromebooks, Chrome Web Store, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Glass, Gmail updates, Google+, YouTube updates.
Most I/O topics after 2013 revolved around marginal improvements on a lot of things, like individual Android features and apps. And naturally, when there is so little to talk about, corporate speak fills the void.
There were still some interesting topics after 2013, especially if you follow some specific developments in the Android ecosystem. But there were very few groundbreaking topics. Google will probably talk about Bard this year, which has not been a huge success, but at least it's something bigger that harkens back to pre-2013 days.
There is Vertex AI, which some people are getting early access to (what i hope is) PaLM2 | ULM. The GCP offering only contains tools for your own models, what everyone wants is an alternative to ChatGPT, a pre-trained LLM from Google accessible via API and fine tune-able in Vertex.
They are providing API access to at least some models in the same family underlying Bard, but explicitly (while its in preview) prohibiting production/commercial use — not disclaiming liability and advising against it as is common for pre-release products, but actually prohibiting in the ToS.
Google is taking an hypercautious approach around “AI safety” issues that amounts to “we should not release products and if we do they are just demos that no one should be permitted to use for any serious purpose” which is going to hurt them in the marketplace but also does nothing meaningful to deal with either the real and immediate issues with AI or the mixture of other (some real but less immediate but largely science fantasy) issues that typically are referred to under the “AI safety” umbrella (and that’s even more true if you consider from the pov of assuming that the more science-fantasy-ish of those risks are real and serious.)
Almost all of the topics you listed have sessions in this year's Google I/O. There are 35 different sessions tagged "Android" alone: https://io.google/2023/program/?q=android
There might be no sessions for stuff like how to use web APIs because these are already mature and well-documented technologies. I/O is about showcasing new stuff after all.
I don't know, it seems to me that recently in I/O, discussions have primarily focused on mature core products, indicating a shift towards iteration rather than invention. I would say the conference definitely showcases less "new stuff" or "new stuff" of smaller scope. Both I/O and Google now seem to prioritize safe, low-risk technologies from a business standpoint. And that just doesn't fill up an entire conference without some business speak padding.
To my mind, the turning point towards this new, less fun and more corporate Google and I/O was around 2013. I think that's when they started thinking about shaping the company into Alphabet with Google as a subsidiary as well. Famously they removed "don't be evil" as the motto and expanded into hardware a lot soon after 2013, too. It was a time of wholistic change at Google.
It was kept alive internally by Apache for a while later — https://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html. Very interesting why it failed as a project in two separate companies. There was an explosion of team collaboration software in the 2010s and yet these companies couldn't make their product compete.
> Most I/O topics after 2013 revolved around marginal improvements on a lot of things, like individual Android features and apps. And naturally, when there is so little to talk about, corporate speak fills the void.
I don't understand how a corporate culture that's so focused on shipping new projects at the expense of maintenance, manages to ship so few new projects.
I understand him. Maybe Im cynical but everything I see on your link looks like something a technical sales person would come up with… How easy is it to onboard people? Easy! Are we helping save the world? Yes! Can we build it ethically? Yes!
Are those questions really what’s on the mind of the developer? Where is the: we have a way to revolutionize the debugging experience when doing ML(for people with PhDs) talks?
I know it wouldn’t sell to the masses but that was kind of the point if you want jaded devs on your side.
I think you are quick to judge the talks by their title. They are all technical from what I can tell, and many cover topics that are of interest to PhD researchers. For example, the distributed large model paper covers several papers' worth of research done at Google and how to utilize their implementation in JAX.
ML debugging is just one topic among many. I wouldn't dismiss the entire lineup because Google didn't have any big announcements in that space for that year.
Maybe "A journey to protect the Great Barrier Reef using ML"?
The video is five minutes long, is basically a nature advert complete with stirring music, has a bizarre cartoon in the middle of it and is all about an attempt to control the reef's population of starfish. We're told that the starfish are doing great thanks to there being fewer predators and more nutrients in the water, but that this is bad because "it's quite a nasty animal" and it eats coral. The goal is to find starfish "outbreaks" using ML and enable teams of divers to kill the starfish as quickly as possible.
They appear to think this is a stirring example of protecting nature. There's even a diver at the end who breaks down in tears at the way the reef has degraded over his lifespan. Fortunately since the video was made it was discovered that the reefs are now at record-breaking coverage levels despite the starfish, so apparently they didn't need AI driven death-from-above. Also it's not really clear why Google wants to help implement mass animal culls in a place where people don't even go. Why are corals better than starfish? This seems like a very arbitrary judgement. Corals and crown-of-thorns starfish have been co-existing in nature for far longer than people have.
So:
1. Not for developers. They use batching and quantization, that's as deep as it goes technically.
2. Essentially a long ad for their cloud ML services.
3. Consists mostly of people talking about how meaningful, awesome and filled with hope they feel.
Agreed. That seems like the short high-level feel-good talk aimed at corporate folks, whereas the remaining 17 talks are technical and aimed at actual developers.
I randomly picked another, "Product fairness testing for developers". It seems to consist of two Googlers reading a codelab out loud. And I mean that literally:
She literally reads out the title, pauses, reads out the subtitle, pauses again, reads out the rest of the document word for word. WTF? Is this person a text-to-speech AI? Why did Google make a video that consists of Googlers doing a TTS-quality video of their own documentation website? I'm a developer, watched many dev oriented tech talks and I've never seen that before.
The bulk of the talk is about how important it is to be ethical and stuff. First time we see code that isn't just a snippet in some docs is at the 22 minute mark in a 34 minute talk. It appears to be little more than running some regexs over some rather incoherent LLM output. The code isn't even explained anywhere, just what it's doing. No dev is going to learn anything from this even if they're at bootcamp level.
The video has got only around 4000 views, which seems about right. I can't imagine anyone watching this and thinking, yes, awesome, let's share it around. BTW the bootcamp level of the code might be because neither of the speakers are developers. One is a product manager, the other is an analyst. Really don't think this is targeted at developers dude despite the title. It definitely wasn't written by one. So that's twice now.
Corals as a habitat host a lot of species, creating biodiversity. People don't really seem to care about corals by themselves; rather, they care about a few hundred species of pretty-looking tropical fish that exist nowhere other than within coral reefs. Anything that kills enough of the coral, is likely to make all of those very pretty fish go extinct.
(I've never heard about starfish as a threat to corals; the wellbeing of coral reefs is usually brought up mostly in relation to the impacts of ocean acidification and seafloor trawling.)
This I/O is pretty important, IMO, as Google's reputation for being the best cloud for data science is on the line with ChatGPT eating their AI position and BigQuery's waning developer pull. Data is a large driver for companies to use Google Cloud, and without that they're in big trouble, IMO.
Hopefully this I/O gives folks more compelling reasons to use Google Cloud.
Thrilled. Of course, I want to see Bard for myself. I pay for OpenAI to use unlimited GPT4 right now. Maybe I end up not having to do that, we'll see, it depends on how it performs. I wasn't impressed previously but with each update I'll give it another try.
I just need to somehow convince my large organization's IT team to enable the Workspace updates in Workspace Labs, which is likely to take some time. That's likely a few months, at least, but not the fault of google!
Me too, plus what's coming with their new phones and most importantly, how they are adding more and more AI into their cameras. I'm exclusively a Pixel user, so it's super important to me.
My family member works for this team. Could you share what makes you a Pixel fan? Some like customizability, open platform . Some avoid Apple lock in. What draws you to Pixel?
Pixel's are just the best "stock Android" phone there is. So many other Android device makers just slap a crappy UI on top of stock Android that offers no real value. In addition, Pixels always get the latest os updates, and Google recently improved support timeframes so they'll get support for years, on par with iPhones - that was a huge sticking point for years.
There are some other specific features of Pixels that are great:
1. Excellent camera
2. The phone features are really fantastic, like auto "call screening" and "hold for me".
I for one benefited so much from Google Developer Groups while at University. Google made sure we learned how to build Android Apps, and consume API's and services like Maps, Firebase, etc. Overall, I gained a good understanding of how systems work, Thanks Google!
Google did not do this out of the goodness of their heart. They did it to lock you in with Firebase, Maps, etc. And believe me, the moment they start charging you for it, you quickly realize why Google is not a company to give an ounce of trust to.
Eh, I think you’re underselling the value of “free” stuff. Even if it has an ulterior motive, giving free access to computing resources allows someone to learn concepts and even ship things that would otherwise be impossible.
None of these companies are altruistic and everyone knows it, but by not charging upfront it gives possibilities for millions of developers who don’t have US$ 50/month to spend on something (students, emerging economies, career changers, etc).
I wouldn't as knowledgeable and successful in tech without free computing resources from various companies. My parents didn't have any money and I certainly didn't either.
There's a lot of transferable skills gained in these products. You're not just operating a Maytag.
That's fantastic to hear. The guy who leads GDG for North America and Canada grew up in Nigeria and got his education there. He's the most enthusiastic and passionate developer I've ever met. I love the reach google has in inspiring new engineers. Thanks for sharing your story.
There are certainly similarities. Google has built quite a moat in most of their businesses that operate like monopolies. They don't seem to be able to make a cohesive strategy for devices or services that connect these devices, but they still have massive market share.
Indeed they do have lots of users, hence mentioning 'Microsoft in the Ballmer era' in the comment you are replying to. Lots of existing users doesn't mean a company is relevant.
Every 2-3 years I am severely tempted by The Other Side, especially as a very happy Macbook user. But every time, there's a new phone that's just nice enough to keep me around.
Same, I'm a Pixel user and happy Macbook user, but every time I use an iOS device I have such a terrible experience. I purchased a 10th generation iPad for my daughter. The parental controls are simply broken. When installing apps, the child has to click "Ask" and the notification never appears on my wife's iPhone. And only one parent can be the account "manager". Because I'm pretty good with Google, I was able to find some random Reddit post which has a workaround (the solutions in the Apple forum never worked). You can go into the iPhone's settings and rename the phone, e.g. from "iPhone" to "iPhone 2" then the iPhone starts receiving the notifications from the iPad.
Well, I purchased a second iPad 10th gen for my younger daughter and the same exact problem. Out of the box this basic feature just doesn't work reliably. We're at the point we're renaming my wife's iPhone once a month.
That's just one specific problem we've had, but really it's been a disaster. The setup for both iPads was full of bugs and random issues. Both iPads randomly fail to install updates overnight. I don't recall the last time my Android has ever failed to do a system update. It's just really surprising for me because I assumed a device in it's 10th generation with such a good reputation would be rock solid.
I'm not sure if it'll ever come back. I loved my Pixel 3 at 5.5" but nothing else for the past 5 years has come close. I eventually relented and got a Pixel 6a at 6.1"
It's relevant enough if you're concerned about RSI or CTS and such
In that case display size is a measure of how much strain you're putting on your hands to navigate the huge screen. A smaller screen means less reaching.
Also smaller display size means less content, less instagram posts, less twitter feed, less interest on your phone in general in my perspective
I've had a 4a since launch but I was planning to wait out for the 9a. (The cheap OnePlus I had before survived 5 years so I'd hope for at least the same.)
Battery degradation hasn't been an issue for me at all, but maybe I'm using my phone less than average. Still goes from morning to bedtime without me thinking about or looking at the charge.
I had a OnePlus 1 and later a 3t for an impressively long time. I wish they would go back to the flagship specs / mid-range price model with the build quality they used to have.
It also has a headphone jack, which is getting harder and harder to find these days.
Even if you usually use bluetooth headphones... it's still nice to have a backup. There's lots of situations where headphone jack input is simpler, easier, faster, and more reliable than messing with bluetooth.
I remember going back in 2015. Biggest thing I remember were the "Smart" fabrics that would be integrated into your clothing for interacting with your devices. It was a cool demo but felt very silly and impractical.
I enjoyed the silent disco and free concerts, but it felt very over the top and expensive, basically just a big ego display for Google.
I can understand now why my company is less eager to send developers to events like these every year.
> I remember going back in 2015. Biggest thing I remember were the "Smart" fabrics that would be integrated into your clothing for interacting with your devices. It was a cool demo but felt very silly and impractical.
I almost forgot about that! I think I pushed this into the back of my mind along with google glass.
Goodle dev conferences used to be exciting, but now, unfortunately, all I care about is an update on what else did they break in new version of Android (that was working fine previously, like call recording).
I remember Sergey skydiving onto the roof of Moscone in 2012, and everyone getting one of those cool
Nexus Q media players which they never actually released so they all ended up as landfill.
I was on stage at that Google IO (I press the button that "launches" 700,000 servers during the launch of GCE). My practice session was bumped into 2:30AM because both Sergey with Glass and Vic with some Google Plus feature were "more important presentations and needed the stage practice time more".
Of the three products, Glass is gone, Vic and Google Plus are gone, and GCE is now making money for Google.
As for Nexus Q- I met a guy on the team. They not only never released it, they never INTENDED to release it! It was just a marketing thing for that Google IO.
At least the 2012 live demo went better than the 2010 keynote live demo when they unveiled Google TV... and the lead presenter was stuck on stage for 10 or 15 minutes because no one could figure out how to pair the wireless keyboard. Apparently having 5,000 people in the audience all with Bluetooth and WiFi-enabled devices was not accounted for when preparing for the live demo...
Google now has a separate conference for Cloud ("Next") and even for Android there are separate conferences (like "Dev Summit" or "Bootcamp"). These dilute the I/O's excitement.
But this phenomenon exemplifies the incoherent nature of Google's dev story.
Factoring in all the discounts and incentives that Samsung tends to do, the Pixel may be more expensive in practice. That's bold considering it has pretty middle-of-the-road specs, it's using the Tensor G2 SOC that launched last year and wasn't the best Android SOC even then, nevermind now that it's up against the Snapdragon 8 gen 2.
Wow based on the comments Google IO is already dead on arrival. Maybe the hate will put some fire under google to come out with something meaningful in the years to come.
To add one more data point to the general sentiment in the comments: in 2011 I was so bummed that I couldn’t get a ticket to I/O that year, I wanted to start an alternate conference called I/O Error “for the rest of us” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2192827 !
Ahh, the naïveté of the young age (I was in my early forties at that time, mind you). I was in technology development then, now moved to PdM side. Google products no longer interest me from either the tech or biz side.
I find it interesting the sentiment in the comments... Yesterday we had an Apple post where everyone was losing their minds all day about Final Cut Pro on iPad (which in my opinion as a Software Engineer is the most boring thing I’ve had to read all week). Today we have probably a massive lineup of a bunch of new AI features to be announced for products most of us use on the regular, or could use as devs, and 90% of the comments are about how boring it will be.
Not sure what to make of it but you would think the HN crowd would be slightly more interested.
I'm not an Apple follower, what innovation have they produced in the last 5+ years that the sibling comments deride Google for? I would argue the TPU is far more interesting than the M1, other than that, is it not just marginal improvements on existing products?
I personally would argue the M1 is more interesting than the TPU, but I think the general answer to your question is “nothing”. Apple and google both churn out research, google maybe a bit more. Beyond that though, both of their product lines reach such a scale that requires the tech to be mature (aka no longer an innovation).
Apple has really strong chip prowess, eg the M1 or the battery efficiency vs size of AirPods and AirTags. But a lot of that is resting on TSMC which anyone can contract. Google has some impressive research into things like AI, database, K8, etc - but today others seem to be catching up.
Yep, neither one is really innovating, except for the examples you named. I don't know the history of TPUs vs similar ML accelerators; did Google blaze the trail on this?
I am consistently surprised by the battery life and quality of noise cancellation given their size. Although none of that is revolutionary and just improving on existing tech, I think the complete package (hardware+software integration) was leaps better than what came before.
There's one thing that made Google great and it was search. It's no longer great and hasn't been for some time. I don't even think it's entirely their fault, but their brand and sentiment has taken a hit from that.
Also, the data harvesting is much more common knowledge.
Apple has been increasing their own data harvesting and advertising, so same shoe different foot.
Google Cloud is fantastic compared to the others. I don't know why people still go to AWS, nothing interesting has happened, it seems like very little has changed. My biggest gripes are the cookie cutter EC2 vs the flexibility of GCP VMs and the account/project switching in AWS vs GCP.
Google is also one of the few companies at the forefront of AI. There is definite innovation there.
I’ll be more interested in Google’s ML when they use it as a competent spam filter for Gmail. As it stands the false positives and false negatives are baffling. Maybe it’s unfair but to me that directly reflects their ML abilities
I'm not denying your experience, but I have almost zero problems with the Gmail spam filter. Never false negatives and almost never false positives. I wonder why different users have different experiences with this?
5-10 years ago I’d agree they were very good. My suspicion is that the base spam filter is not very good but it trains on your email history and becomes better. So my “newer” gmail accounts have very poor filtering.
Like I get all caps subject lines with spammy content that my grandmother would recognize as spam, but it blocks some personally written emails from other gmail accounts.
I've noticed that the sentiment on HN tends to skew heavily against Google and more towards Apple. When I go to in-person tech meetups it's usually not at all like that. Not sure why.
It's an expectations mismatch. Google used to be the most loved company by developers. It was confident, strong, did wonders for dev comp and gave away lots of cool stuff for free. The only way from there was down, really. Then they did a bunch of things that upset people like getting buy-in into platforms and products only to then constantly kill them off, refuse to release their AI models as APIs on the grounds that devs weren't ethically pure enough to use them, as well as doing stuff that shows a lack of confidence, mostly me-too products like GCP or Bard.
Apple was never particularly loved by developers. Respected yes, tolerated yes. But they were always a bit aloof, separate, never bought into the 2010s era of free love and open source. And that's exactly the way they still are today. Apple has been remarkably stable over time, culturally speaking. It consistently meets people expectations for how it behaves, both good and bad. So there's nothing really to be disappointed about there. It is what it is.
Even outside technology, Google went from that cool "don't be evil" company, to suppressing search results so that people would vote the way Google wanted.
Add a few cases of Glassholes[1], killing products people loved, and it eventually piles up.
I will add though, that just because the company has lost its lustre, doesn't mean the people working there are any less talented. I just think that on a long enough timeline, Google becomes IBM[2].
I think the sentiment is more complex than that. In general, I think the sentiment is against large corporate interests, and in favor of small, focused technical improvements. And improvement here is not the same as change. Often, sentiment is pretty negative towards changes made by large corporations which could be interpreted as strategic decisions made to control an ecosystem.
In this specific case, things are high level and generic, so at this point the framing is closer to big corporation than it is to anything specific or technical.
March 13, 2013, a decade ago and RSS effectively died along with it. Being upset at this for 10 years is right up there with being upset that Gopher protocol never took off.
And Google’s disregard of Android devs outside the America/Europe. I have been doing Android development since 2011 and still impossible to get my hands on a Pixel or Chromebook directly from Google. On the other hand, I could get the latest iPhone shipped in a month.
Google just doesn't have the volumes to provide products in all countries. Providing sales integrations and support is costly and if you don't have volumes, your amortized cost over a device is high.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe. The features are exciting. Google I/O, the conference with talks, is seen as less so. Notice how all the comments are about the talks. Yesterday's Apple announcement was _not_ a conference, and the comment thread was about the new app. It's not the same thing at all.
Here are some snippets from top-level comments in this discussion thread.
> It's all business talk
> I for one benefited so much from Google Developer Groups
> looking forward to the event and plan to watch it
> just corporate talk
> alternate conference
> separate conference
> I can understand now why my company is less eager to send developers to events
You see it, right? They're all about the talks at the conference and not the features. This HN post is specifically about the conference, that's why the title is "Google I/O 2023".
I just meant that the conference is not the features. The conference is about the features, but they're different things. Much like the Magritte painting is not a pipe, it's a painting of a pipe. The analogy was not very good.
You would see people doing mental gymnastics trying to defend their closed anti competitive practices, disregard for standards. I would cheer a Sennheiser/Bose more than any version of Airpods, I would rather not have a multi trillion dollar company gobble up other industries through unfair advantages.
Seeing a hacker crowd do this is just beyond bizzare.
It seems quite the opposite: HN biases towards anti-Apple, often for bizarre reasons that require lots of mental gymnastics to justify.
You don’t really have to buy AirPods, there are lots of products out in the market that compete in that space. Just because Apple provides a certain product doesn’t mean you are being forced to buy it.
No one is forced to buy Airpods, but the first class integration that the product gets which others can't gives it a competitive advantage. This is besides the power to push the product through different channels to customers of iPhones, iPads etc.
Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS device or Mac. In fact, even when I keep removing the application from the Mac, on a version update it comes back again. It has integrations into the system and other core system apps that other products can't get and defaults matter. On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive.
> Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS device or Mac.
I never noticed, having never bought Apple Music before and just using spotify instead. I guess if I wanted it to run on a HomePod, I would need it?
> On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive.
Spotify doesn't get to offer you that when you are setting up your new phone. You have to know about the company and go and install it.
It is good that you are using Spotify and supporting an independent company, but as I was saying defaults and ease of access matters. Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.
There are plenty of non-apple speakers that come with Spotify trials. I get that trials are hard to back out of, and I've never activated my Apple Music trial.
> Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.
Spotify is still dominating music streaming, more so than Apple Music or Amazon Prime Music (which we used to use since it came free with prime).
> There are plenty of non-apple speakers that come with Spotify trials.
Spotify has to pay for these and has to compete for this with other music streaming companies.
Also, comparison with smart speakers is disingenuous. There are a billion iPhone users itself. No non big tech company smart speaker comes even close.
> Spotify is still dominating music streaming
Because of nailing the product early on and being world class in playlists and music recommendations. Even if Apple music comes 80% close, just by holding distribution advantage, they will capture that market.
My god the increasing services push is awful; I used to be an Apple Music subscriber but left eventually because at launch it was a clusterfuck with personal libraries, just destroying metadata and deleting 'duplicates'. And I now have to use a 3rd party music app to listen to my local library on my phone because the system one likes to pop up a fullscreen ad for Apple Music what feels like every time I open it.
I like my Apple products but this services thing is truly destroying a lot of the good experiences they can provide.
Let me hit you with some anecdotes. I regularly disparage both Apple and Google in my comments, typically Apple for being user-hostile and lying in marketing and Google for being incompetent and user-hostile. My Apple comments get downvoted more than my Google comments (I'd guess due to fanaticism that I see with no other company), although the gap has been steadily closing.
Well, today I learned that it was possible to go to -4. But I'm not sure we can tell anything from that really, just that there are a lot people who (a) don't like apple, and (b) are sure they are in the minority rather than the majority. Which is a bit contradictory.
I'm pretty sure everyone feels that their opinion is the underdog opposed to the other sheeple side.
It is like people who think they are being hip for either hating or loving X, when lots of people love or hate X already, so it isn't really weird either way.
The AirPods are capitalizing on lock-in. iPhones have always had Bluetooth, but almost nobody used BT headphones cause they suck. Then Apple released AirPods with first-party integrations to make it usable, and to make sure people would buy them, they also took out the jack.
I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options compared to before. The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.
> I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options compared to before.
How did AirPods existing ruin your options? You can choose to not buy them, I don't, I like conductive head phones better anyways (non-Apple, before the AirPods came out, and they don't suck, so I don't get what you mean by apple producing the only BT headphones that don't suck?). Or do you mean you want to buy AirPods but you don't want to use an iPhone, or you want to use wired headphones only and don't care for dongles?
> The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.
Seriously, this is the mental gymnastics I'm talking about. None of this is really stopping you from listening to music on your phone.
So my chosen option before was to just plug my earbuds or car aux into my phone.
Now my choices are:
- AirPods, which I don't want to shell out more money for and deal with charging/caring for them, but otherwise they'd be the best option.
- Non-AirPod BT headphones. I have nice Bose ones from work. These lack Apple's extensions to improve pairing and headset (mic) mode. In headset mode, the earphone quality drops to like worse than early 2000s cellphone. Standard pairing is annoying. It's a bit annoying having to charge them. I also don't want to shell out more money for earbuds (the headphones aren't so portable).
- Dongles, which I tried. Turns out they don't work with inlined mics, don't work with older iPhones (so I can't leave them on a shared car aux), are fragile, and are really easy to lose. Can't charge while using one either, but that's nbd. My car seats ate two and the last one broke. It also just feels stupid having to use these.
- Old iPhone. I kept my 6 until it broke. I still have a spare 5, no longer usable with AT&T, which I use to play music in the car.
Yeah I want to listen to music on my phone, but they've made it sufficiently annoying that I don't anymore. It's a clear regression.
You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone, which I've never seen before but lets go with it. There are dongles that have microphone inputs (Cubilux Lightning to 3.5mm TRS Microphone Adapter with Headphone Jack), but I'm assuming you can't use those because the microphone and headset are sharing the same jack somehow?
Your car doesn't support bluetooth, and you use multiple generations of iPhones so you can't just leave the dongle in the car. This is unrelated to airpods since you can't use those while driving anyways.
AirPods are expensive, I get that, and you aren't satisfied with cheaper non-Apple options on amazon. I'm happy not using airpods, since I hate earbuds anyways, but I guess not everyone is like that. Would the non-existence of AirPods make things better? I haven't had trouble pairing my conductive headphones, I guess I don't notice any distortion because it is going through my bones anyways, and I'm not using mic.
I wouldn't have any beef with AirPods if Apple didn't remove the jack to sell them. Maybe if Apple somehow couldn't make their own BT extensions, they'd improve the BT standard instead, which would benefit those buying non-Apple wireless headphones (like you). That matters less to me, though.
> You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone
No, by mic I mean taking calls and meetings on my earbuds/phones, which is a common requirement. Most earbuds have inlined mics sharing the same jack.
Car aux issue is separate. One of my cars does have BT, but that's even worse because the phones fight over it or the pairing sometimes doesn't happen. Maybe "pass the aux" is not a thing anymore and I'm the only one who wants passengers to play their own music sometimes, but this wasn't a problem before.
I’m with you on the dongle issues, it’s a tremendous pain to find consistently working equipment that allows charging, in-line mic, and durability.
That said, I hate BT more and have been using the same Bose QC20 wired earbuds and Belkin adapters for 4+ years. There are semi-decent options out there.
Weird, I think you left out the part where they did include the dongle for the 3.5mm jack for at least 2 generations after they removed it and still offer one. But to each his/her own.
This is always brought up by people who don't actually use the dongle. Anyone who's tried it doesn't consider it a solution, and I described in a sibling thread why.
If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)
Can confirm, dongle's not an actual usable alternative for most situations. IRL you'll lose the little fuckers, they'll be in the way for any devices without missing hardware (and get lost when you remove them for that device), they're fragile, and you'll never have them when you need them anyway. They're theoretically a replacement for the removed headphone jack, but in actual fact they're worthless.
I just use my phone for fewer music-playing situations than I otherwise would, and when I do use it for playing music, it's a mixed bag. Controls on the car console are nice (aside from that the UI sucks and exhibits all kinds of glitches, but that's not Apple's fault), but BT is BT, so, more annoying and less reliable than a cable. My $120 BT headphones are... fine, but I'd rather have better wired headphones for the same price and not have to charge them. Being able to connect to a bluetooth-enabled receiver across the room is handy, but also janky, because of course it is, because it's bluetooth.
If they'd just kept the jack, everyone could be happy. Except Apple, from the somewhat-lower sales of wireless audio devices and especially AirPods.
> IRL you'll lose the little fuckers, they'll be in the way for any devices without missing hardware (and get lost when you remove them for that device)
1. I plug dongle into car aux for my iPhone 12 mini to use.
2. Next day, girlfriend wants to play her own music from her iPhone 6, I say to plug the Lightning in.
3. Dongle doesn't work with iPhone 6 despite being same connector -_- She takes it off to plug into the 3.5mm.
4. Dongle falls beneath car seat and is never seen again. Presumably it's next to the other one that got lost the same way.
Went from "it just works" to screwing up the most basic functionality ever, plugging in the damn aux. And it's while you're driving.
Yeah, I lost my first one like a week in when it fell into the (automatic—I'm not cool, I don't drive a manual) shifter. It was so small it managed to fit into the little gap in the rubber guard around it. Lost forever, or at least until someone tears apart the center console of that car for some reason. Only time I've managed to lose something that particular way.
> Anyone who's tried it doesn't consider it a solution, and I described in a sibling thread why.
Universals are always wrong of course: we actually used a dongle for the kid's wired iPad headphones. It doesn't suck for us using a dongle, so I'm guessing our experience was really different from yours.
> If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)
Nope, our 6 year old is not getting AirPods anytime soon.
Worked at Google, pro Elon, anti Zuck but mainly for his failures (Metaverse), not from the far left and still think it's clear Google's last major product (major meaning category defining, like Search or Maps or Android) was 15 years ago.
1. Wow you think transformers are a product like Search and Maps and Android are. That's great.
2. I think most people consider both Metaverse and chat agents as failures. ChatGPT isn't a 'chat agent' and most chat agents still don't work.
Watching the keynote and Google are expecting developers to cut and paste code into Bard rather than releasing a Bard plugin for code editors and taking on Microsoft directly. Weak.
Most people lack the vision beyond 15 minutes. Of course Metaverse is a failure for them, just like how Internet was just a glorified fax machine for luddites. So, popular opinion is the worst indicator of anything. Happy to make a public bet that Metaverse will consume 25% of a person's day for at least 4 billion people by 2035
If transformer doesn't excite you (mostly due to anti-Google bias), Google has a dozen products that has over a 500 Million users. It takes an unprecedented amount of anti-corp brainwash to say Google isn't successful or innovative.
> Google has a dozen products that has over a 500 Million users.
So did Microsoft in 2005. That doesn't mean the Ballmer era was innovative. If you need other examples of companies with hundreds of millions of users that aren't relevant, there's also Oracle.
Metaverse is DoA. Public perception is that it is either too complicated/expensive to use or that it is essentially a worse VRChat. More technically inclined circles see it as a data harvester and crypto-scam breeding ground. Facebook itself does not use it for its supposed intended purpose of virtual conferencing, instead mandating that all employees return to the physical office to work. It has next to no adoption and is the butt of many jokes. Romero abandoned the project with a public statement saying how out of touch and inefficient the workforce behind it is.
Your outlandish sweeping claims about the users of this site aside, sticking your neck out for the Metaverse is just not the hill to die on.
The Public's lack of imagination / vision is the worst indicator of anything. There is a reason there are only a handful of Jobs, Zuck, Elon, Bezos, Gates, Buffett in the world but 15 Million people on Wallstreetbets.
They fired entire orgs that were working on metaverse at facebook. Spoke about it with a sad friend yesterday. At least the facebook metaverse has been cut down.
> The Public's lack of imagination / vision is the worst indicator of anything
So? Most great ideas end up as objective failures. Also great visionaries generally actually have some at least somewhat specific vision of what are they trying to achieve, neither Zuckerberg nor anyone else were yet able to coherently explain WTH is the Metaverse supposed to be.
IMHO whatever Meta is doing seems much more likely to end up as the Apple Newton than the iPad/iPhone... (which to be fair is not a bad thing).
And they would've been right in 2019. The hype was not matching the technology. The fact that gpt got so good is pure coincidence and not a result of the chat agent folks being some kind of visionairies.
Maybe some technological breakthrough comes along that makes the metaverse not suck. But if you're gonna build your company around such hopes and it works, then you're not smart, but just lucky. Or you need to build the breakthroughs yourself, but it doesn't look like that's what zuck is doing.
yes, most HNers are affected by it. That's why you see a massive anti-corp, anti-tech, anti-capitalist despite data screaming at them the massive benefits of tech, capitalism and corporation.
yes, that's why I'm the one who is pointing the following trait to the HN crowd who are blissfully unaware of it -- "Irrationally Hating things / people that have provided net benefit to the society (utility, pension plans, 401(k)s, employee salary, productivity, standard-of-living)"
I think it depends on how you define Hacker. This site is very business leaning to begin with in a lot of ways which doesn’t always draw the “hacker” crowd. I will forever think of hackers ideally not being so concerned with operating businesses but being obsessed with technology sometimes at the expense of business concerns.
For YCombinator and the like, “hacker” is actually just code for “disruptor”. It is a subtle but powerful conflation designed to retroactively strengthen the historical positioning of e.g. Jobs, Woz, Zuckerberg while simultaneously praising disruptive technologies that will “eat the world”.
Of course, none of those people ever fit the more common definition of hacker for more than a few years, if ever, even if you assume hacker means “good coder” or similar. And they certainly never fit the information security definition.
This is why I stopped calling HN, HN. It's YCombinator news. It's not news for hackers - maybe at one point, but not anymore and not for awhile. It may even be seen as looked down on because you're posting on a site run by venture capitalists.
I think it's a lot less confusing when you understand that "hacker" doesn't describe a kind of politics, but rather connotes an interest in technology.
Depending on who you talk to, hacking doesn't even mean technology. It's more of an artful blend of craftsmanship and trickery in whatever problem domain you face.
But I think the confusing aspect of HN and the VC influence is the number of folks here who happily conflate technology, business, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. If you see these as separable topics, you find that a lot of the confused threads here are different cohorts in the audience who focus on one of these topics and treat the others as ancillary.
> Depending on who you talk to, hacking doesn't even mean technology. It's more of an artful blend of craftsmanship and trickery in whatever problem domain you face.
Exactly this. I use the term hacker in its original form.
Not really. Every entrepreneur has to worship the Steve Jobs handbook if they want jaded middle-aged Disney investors to open their wallets for $TECH_PRODUCT. It's not uncommon or surprising to see people in the startup sphere who are unnaturally defensive of Apple/iOS/MacOS.
Woz and Jobs started out building Blue Boxes (https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/blue-box-designed-an...) They then created Apple as a hobbyist outfit in a garage, soldering chips together so they could demo a DIY computer programmed in Assembler at a computer club. As opposed to what, a company that exists to sell the equivalent of billboard ads on the Internet? Out of Big Tech, Apple has the strongest claim to any kind of hacker culture.
And when Jobs got the contract from Atari, he lied to Woz about how much it paid so he could take the lion's share. Fraud culture is unfortunately part of their blood too, something we ought to excise if we want the tech industry to be taken seriously in the long-run.
the fallacy you have is that all hackers are socialists or folks that dislike venture capital or capitalism.
I can assure you many hackers are libertarian or anarchists of some flavour (from mutualists to anarcho-capitalists). Many celebrate Apple because they want to build the next Apple some day.
HN has always slanted for the latter crowd, though certainly open to everyone.
I'm not sure if I agree with that. I think being anti-Google and FB would be more accurate than being pro-Apple.
Also, during the years I've observed the "pro-Apple" gauge changes as the time zones change, ie. it tends to be all-time high when it's noon in California - which is understandable.
There are really wonky arguments here trying to justify rent seeking in the App Store, walled gardens, and completely closed ecosystems. And I'm not sure why anyone would be supportive of any of those things outside of being pro-Apple. No other company seems to get that type of pass.
There was a thread the other day where some people seemed pretty miffed that Google requires a Pixel to connect to the internet before you can unlock it's bootloader.
Then you go into a thread about third party app stores on iPhones and you see people saying that being blocked from installing software that Apple hasn't blessed is actually a feature.
Different people and all that. But the general sentiment on HN is definitely more forgiving of Apple than others.
Hacker crowds like to see underdogs win. Apple was the ultimate underdog for most of its existence, and was "doomed" every year up until around 2013.
There's no mental gymnastics involved, no upstanding hacker respects "standards" unless they're better for the user (often they're not). It is a matter of taste and preference. Remember, Microsoft also was for a LONG time an attractor of hackers, until the early-mid 90s when Windows 3.1 became the focus (and it sucked for hackers, who fled to OS/2 briefly, then Linux, then Apple when they got tired of tweaking Linux, now some flowing back to Microsoft or Linux).
Maybe for people of a certain age. But there is a whole generation of people (some of whom are on HN) who have only ever known a world where everyone wanted the latest iThing. It's been probably 15 years since you could seriously consider Apple an underdog in the tech space.
The iPhone hasn’t even been out for 15 years. People were calling Apple dead not even 6 or 7 years ago, the Apple Watch not being enough to satiate the demand for new toys.
The days of Apple basing their business on shiny new iThings are mostly past it, Airpods notwithstanding. Now they’re in pure optimization mode, and going deep into content and services.
This is probably the most absurd comment that I've read so far in 2023.
Apple is a 2.73 trillion dollar company, and single-handedly makes up 13.3% of the entire S&P 500 index. The iPod was launched 22 years ago. Apple hasn't been remotely an "underdog" for over a generation now.
A generation ago, Apple was a penny stock and the iMac was released. The iPod was a success but a small fraction of the story. They were “only” a $75 billion company by the year the iPhone came out.
Apple’s valuation and PE ratio only became in line with its peers around 5-6 years ago. It was priced as if it were about to go bankrupt for much of its history , even after the iPhone was released, convinced that Apple just HAD to go out of business, or hit a ceiling, or whatever.
History is also littered with quotes from competition that didn’t take them seriously: Dell, HPE, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Facebook.
The absurdity isn’t that Apple was thought to be an underdog, it’s that so many never took them seriously. Perhaps the main reason Apple is as big as it is now is because wall street and the competition refused to take them seriously? If they did, we’d have a more balanced industry.
My Sennheiser HD8s and their propietary cable begs to differ. And also keep in mind you are favoring Bose, the multi-million dollar company that didn't bat an eye when they decided to introduce spyware on their app.
Apple has done the wrong thing many times, but audio is not one of them. They offered a legitimate better product, to the point the only headphones I would rather use are IEMs that cost 8 times as much.
But it works the same way with other things, like $BigCos. Each $BigCo has a fanbase and a foebase. Each fanbase feels like HN is biased against "their" $BigCo and in favor of some other $BigCo.
No doubt the same mechanism makes sports fans feel like the refs are biased against their team. The feelings of a sports fan determine not only the direction of perceived bias (no fan ever thought "the refs are consistently biased in our favor") but also its intensity (the more passionately a fan is devoted to $team, the more strongly they are persuaded about the refs' "bias").
Readers with no particular passion on a topic are less likely to perceive bias or feel much about it either way.
I believe that the way this works is that if we feel strongly about $foo, we're much more likely than the median reader to notice posts about $foo, especially ones we dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and to weight them much more heavily. What starts as a feeling in us thereby turns into a perception about the world, often one that is very intensely held and impossible to dissuade.
This is not to say that the community, the refs, the mods, or what have you, aren't biased! Just that the existence or quantity of possible bias can't be decided by this mechanism, which is the mechanism that drives online discussion. In fact, the primary concern of any serious attempt to decide or quantify bias would have to be making sure that it wasn't distorted by this psychological mechanism, which is so powerful.
(This is a bit more than I set out to write about this! it's a hobbyhorse of mine, as it makes moderation moderately more complicated...where by moderately I mean extremely)
Oh no, I didn't mean moderators are biased. I don't think that is the case at all.
I was making the point of the HN users. Specially the characteristic of downvoting and negating criticism in this case.
You are right though, because I strongly feel about the anti competitive issues Apple indulges in, maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them.
Although, I think there is a positive bias as well, which I care less about. Like one of the commenter mentioned that Final Cut Pro being launched on iPad was the top post through large parts of the day.
I mostly understood that you were talking about the community, not the mods, but now that you mention it, I confused the two in my reply. The first two paragraphs were about the community but then the bit about refs was about the mods. Interesting—thanks for pointing that out!
> maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them
You may be the first person who has ever indicated that they've gotten that point!
I would characterise the "losing their minds all day about Final Cut Pro on iPad" that went on as... moaning about subscription pricing. So not positive either.
I've been deep in the Google ecosystem for 10+ years and my sentiment has changed simply because their products suck now. Every offering they have is worse today than it was a year ago. Google assistant is borderline unusable in it's current state, and I used to sing it's praises from the mountain tops.
>> Yesterday we had an Apple post where everyone was losing their minds all day about Final Cut Pro on iPad
Were we reading the same thread? My take away was mostly complaints about subscriptions and people asking why you would use it on an iPad instead of a laptop.
I think the problem here is that this was posted hours before the keynote - meaning there is actually nothing of value to discuss yet. Now the thread that should be about todays even is full of “back in my day” comments.
I am slowly feeling like I should move on from HN. I used to find comments much more mature in the past and learned a lot. Lately I predict the general trend I'll see in the comments before even opening the page.
Somehow that has been my experience as well. I used to love HN for the rational and mature comments. Now, I find more of the comments to be idealistic and biased. More of the comments are from people who don't seem to have read the linked post.
I feel the same. Comments used to be more thoughtful and nuanced, and I often found comments that changed my perspective on things. Now so many comments are massively negative and sweepingly generalize in uninteresting ways, eg just to pick a random example from replies to this current post:
"Every offering they have is worse today than it was a year ago."
One of my least favorite trends about how HN comments go these days is that nearly all of them are reflexively supporting the company over the employees in any sort of story involving conflict between employer/employee. It's like, goddamn, y'all can stop bootlicking for companies already, as I know most of you are employee class rather than owner class.
I used to like it when I didn't live in the Bay and avoided all the "local news" threads because it was not interesting to me. I kinda left after I moved because I don't wanna be in a site where the consensus solution to poop on the street on some neighborhoods is basically concentration camps.
I've had the same feeling. I've also noticed what feels like an increase in shallow, emotionally driven "gotcha" replies that are almost always from post-2020 accounts.
But I have to wonder if it's because as I have tried to quit Reddit and other mass market social media, I'm browsing this site a lot more. So I'm seeing more comment sections in general and clicking more threads than I would otherwise.
It's even in the community guidelines.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
And that links to comments all the way back in 07!
Final Cut Pro is a thing people already use in their workflow, becoming more convenient for them. People have depended on this as part of their production-ready workflow for over 20+ years now, and FCP-folks seem to have a lot of trust in the application and related tooling, that Apple isn't going to leave or abandon Final Cut anytime soon.
Google's AI features are not something most of us use in our workflow, and are (arguably/debatably) not making anything more convenient for us. That's all in addition to it being Google, so there's a built-in assumption that no one can depend on any of this, because it might be discontinued at any point with little notice.
(I say this as someone who does not own an iPhone or Mac, and has been on Android for over a decade) -- I can see why Mac folks would be excited by the Mac announcement, and why some aren't that excited by Google right now.
Final Cut is definitely not the industry standard - most pros abandoned it after they completely rebuilt it from the ground up years ago and it sucked hard
FCP 7 was dominant but the disaster of early versions of FCP X forced a bunch of shops to switch to Premiere.
There are still things that make Premiere better. Recently I couldn't get an mp4 from a Sony cam to play at the right speed in FCP no matter what I tried, and it just worked in Premiere. I'm more fluid in FCP but I will probably switch too as Premiere just "feels more pro" now to me.
I've heard some great reports about Davinci, especially for post.
Most big-budget feature films are cut on Avid and that's been the case for a while now; for indies my impression is that it's 50/50 Premiere and Resolve, yup.
> Final Cut Pro is a thing people already use in their workflow, becoming more convenient for them. People have depended on this as part of their production-ready workflow for over 20+ years now, and FCP-folks seem to have a lot of trust in the application and related tooling, that Apple isn't going to leave or abandon Final Cut anytime soon.
All of that may be well and good, and yet I can't remotely get excited by an announcement that it's being ported from PC/laptop to iPad. Are professionals really going to be using iPads for this use case en masse? Was there a lot of people upset that they had to use a PC/laptop for this, and a lot of pent-up demand for an even more portable version?
It's hard to think of any platform port that would be amazing exciting news, let alone this one!
My theory is there are a lot of folks that needlessly bought expensive ipads that sit around and collect dust when their kids aren't doodling on them. Finding out that Apple is bringing an app that could bring potential productivity to a bad investment got a lot of people excited. People will soon learn that another app was not the reason why they aren't using them.
yeah, doing pretty bad at that. I just tried out Bard by asking it a question on an almost 10 year old .net library for interacting with a popular CRM platform's API. It came back with:
"I can't assist you with that, as I'm only a language model and don't have the capacity to understand and respond."
Went over to ChatGPT and asked it the same question in the prompt word for word. It came back with a concise explanation on how to use the library. Specifically one specific set of API calls. Bard is a joke.
What's even more surprising is that Google has spent almost 2 decades collecting text, image, geospatial and video data. You'd think they would be ahead of everyone in this space. With all they've spent on research - they've got nothing meaningful to show for it.
They never figured out how to diversify away from targeted ads. All that AI prowess was mainly to figure out how to manipulate people to click on the steadily increasing number of ads.
Meanwhile they gamified display ads to the point that the web slowly turned into pure clickbait so there’s nothing even left to search for - 99% of content from the last decade is dogshit.
With ChatGPT my web searches are down by at least 50% and more than 80% of the ones I still do are on DuckDuckGo.
HN crowd and devs should know better than most that you can’t depend on anything from Google. Kind of surprised this conference is still being held given where they are at right now.
Are you comparing discussion of a (relatively legacy) software application to an entire developer conference with a mostly singular focus on a newer, evolving technology?
I'm not trying to be an Apple apologist here but maybe this discussion would be better discussed in roughly a month when WWDC happens.
I’m comparing sentiment, hype, upvoting, etc on a particular topic. I think HN isn’t what it used to be but maybe that’s me having old man syndrome. People on HN are happy discussing boring apps on iPad and crapping on all things Google instead of the gold rush of new functionality driven by AI. I’ll just say I’m not the only one that thinks this judging by the response and upvotes on my observation
The Hacker News community are mainly "doers" - action-oriented individuals who prefer a hands-on approach. I think we yearn for opportunities to experiment with new technologies, not simply hear about their potentials.
This year's Google I/O appears to be heavy on talk about new technologies, but light on tangible releases for us to explore.
In order words, the true value lies not in the promise of a product, but in its practical application. So, I urge Google to present us with tools, APIs, products, we can actively engage with, rather than just talk about and endless "waiting lists".
Bc none of the features are actually live yet. We keep hearing about what will be released and demos - but HN is mainly do-ers. Their launches would have 100x the impact if people could see and play with it in real time right after the announcement.
I'm betting they'll be integrating Bard into smartphones and Chrome ASAP. The way Bing got added into SwiftKey is pretty awesome, but being able to interact with Bard the same way phones currently interact with the gAssistant would be a huge boon for usability and increasing interaction with it, assuming that's something Google wants to increase.
I'm still of the opinion that just swapping current phone assistants with LLMs is naive and bad. For one thing, they need to make sure they don't break current functionality, like for setting timers and reminders, and and doing math calculations (which LLMs are not good at unless you get it to pass the query off to a dedicated calculator like Wolfram Alpha), etc. But more importantly, when you use something like ChatGPT through the web interface there's a bunch of warning labels all over to remind you "this thing will make up information."
For something with such an easily-accessible interface that's baked-in at an OS level, I think a fail state of "sorry, I don't know how to help with that" is better than stating a bunch of false information as fact.
They could potentially handle that by evaluating the request and determining whether gAssistant can answer is without Bard's involvement, since that would save them bandwidth and time.
I agree that the is massive potential for errors, but I'm certain those will get fleshed out soon, and Google is pretty well known for throwing shit and the fan and looking for the cleanest patch of carpet after the fact.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threadI once worked somewhere where the only people who actually went to WWDC where the IT admins and Apple fans,rather than developers.
From a developer perspective - online if so good now, why do you need to travel? ( unless you really want 1:1 with Apple/Google Devs ).
So the only people who travel end up being the people their for the 'event' and the 'one more thing' excitement.
You're right about I/O. The once-fat "invite adopters to conference" coffers seem to have been transferred to their Cloud Next conferences instead.
[0] https://io.google/2023/program/
https://bard.google.com/ https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/01/tech/geoffrey-hinton-leaves-g... https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/13/google_lamda_sentient... https://www.wired.com/story/google-timnit-gebru-ai-what-real...
> We recently brought these two teams together into a single unit, Google DeepMind. Using the computational resources of Google, they’re focused on building more capable systems, safely and responsibly.
> This includes our next-generation foundation model, Gemini, which is still in training. Gemini was created from the ground up to be multimodal, highly efficient at tool and API integrations and built to enable future innovations, like memory and planning. While still early, we’re already seeing impressive multimodal capabilities not seen in prior models.
> Once fine-tuned and rigorously tested for safety, Gemini will be available at various sizes and capabilities, just like PaLM 2.
It sounds like this is the first "joint project" of the old DeepMind/Brain groups since the merger.
lmfao google can't host a fucking static page
At every I/O there is a "keynote" and a "developer keynote", and similarly there are business / product talks and developer-focused talks. In fact, they even create entirely separate playlists on YouTube for the dev/non-dev talks.
As a Staff Eng who leads and mentors engineers who live in a world where they have no choice but to use Google SDKs and services, I find many of the developer-focused talks invaluable for getting others in my team up to speed on what's new and what's coming soon. Most of these talks are given by engineers and involve concise code examples which quickly convey the gist of new functionality.
Google no longer innovates or launches products of note. They throw ideas at the wall, like spaghetti, and hope things stick.
Perverse incentives create competing products, dead end projects, and invariably everything created winds up getting cancelled.
Google got drunk off of easy search ad revenue. Their founding leadership went off to do zeppelins and politicking. Now that golden goose looks like it may be cooked.
Google had the Bell Labs of AI research, but their ability to build product around it looks a lot more like IBM Watson.
Over the next half decade, their top tier talent will leave and get venture funding to do their own things with their own equity.
> As a Staff Eng who leads and mentors engineers who live in a world where they have no choice but to use Google SDKs and services, I find many of the developer-focused talks invaluable for getting others in my team up to speed on what's new and what's coming soon.
This sounds identical to IBM developer outreach. Or Ballmer-era Microsoft. Similar straightjackets, captive audience.
We'll see if Google can excite people about AI here, but I'm doubtful.
Yes, and whether they stick or not, they tear down the wall after 2-3 years because they seemingly still haven’t figured out how to internally incentivize KTLO/running stable products (other than a few flagship ones) rather than building shiny new things.
Which world is this? I’m genuinely interested not trying to be rude.
But the only reason why it worked out the way it did is because the "owner" of the team in question 1) sincerely believed in this approach, 2) had enough clout with the top management to make it stick.
I'm pretty sure we could have gotten away with spending most of our time playing video games on the company's dime, if we had wanted. We probably would have been fired once someone found out, but that's pretty universal.
does not imply
A (profitable) => ¬B (not a startup).
> ¬A (not profitable) => B (startup)
> does not imply
> A (profitable) => ¬B (not a startup)
does not imply that ¬A => B. In other words, the logical structure can be correct, but that does not mean the premises are themselves true. This is the difference between validity and soundness in formal logic [0].
[0] https://iep.utm.edu/val-snd/
In other words, our success was because we identified a critical missing piece in a profitable industry and built exactly what people were asking for, and more importantly, willing to pay for.
After that success (and a couple more after it), I refuse to ever build something without finding customers first. You have to build products people want, not try to convince people into believing they want your product.
I saw this headline and eyerolled. In 2010, I read the schedule/agenda and hype about what might be given to attendees. ALMOST signed up for the lottery.
As I addended to google's IoT with respect to other IoT vendors:
"It's just that Google adds completely rudderless leadership, its world famous utter disregard for customer support, and complete lack of commitment to the recipe."
Google I/O was cool when you could get early access to google glasses.
What do you get these days? Anything interesting? Or the latest Pixel (god, don't get me started, I am NEVER EVER EVER dropping more than $300 on an android phone again).
Anyway, back to the eyeroll. Wow, 10 years. Android is buggier and its app store laden with malware, copycats, predatory addictware, and bureaucracy. Android hardware is arguably even buggier than it was. Search is FAR FAR worse. Their self-driving is still a non-starter. The internet has turned into a dystopian wasteland and they are a not-insignificant party to it. No longer open, no longer even trying to not be evil.
Everything about google is worse today than it was 10 years ago. Does anybody actually want to work there for any reason besides money and resume eyecandy? Google the search is far worse than it was 10 years ago with maximum monetization policies. Advertising / information hoovering is a threat to democracy and perhaps human existence. The fourth estate / newspapers / journalism has been utterly hollowed out. It has directly enabled cartel and monopoly market consolidation. It is the shining example of locking out someone from the internet and providing no human contact for resolution. If it fails to dominate something with its horrid customer service and big brother creepy dominance, it strands people with little warning.
Anyway, have fun at Google I/O 2023 everyone!
Ah, look, I blogged about it: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/475
But back then Google was at the forefront of open standards and pushing the web forward. It was an exciting time for sure.
Far from the Google of today who can’t seem to run a project for more than a couple years.
Only the Web talks are relevant, as the Web is now basically ChromeOS.
(I expect whatever year you give other people will say it was already just corporate talk before then)
I remember this complaint from the IO 2013, when I was there representing mod_pagespeed.
Examples of I/O topics before 2013: Android, Maps API, App Engine (cloud), Chrome, AJAX for their APIs, real-time collaboration/Wave, Google TV (early predecessor to Android TV), Chromebooks, Chrome Web Store, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Glass, Gmail updates, Google+, YouTube updates.
Most I/O topics after 2013 revolved around marginal improvements on a lot of things, like individual Android features and apps. And naturally, when there is so little to talk about, corporate speak fills the void.
There were still some interesting topics after 2013, especially if you follow some specific developments in the Android ecosystem. But there were very few groundbreaking topics. Google will probably talk about Bard this year, which has not been a huge success, but at least it's something bigger that harkens back to pre-2013 days.
There is this in the meantime: https://github.com/acheong08/Bard
APIs are available since the middle of the presentation!
Google is taking an hypercautious approach around “AI safety” issues that amounts to “we should not release products and if we do they are just demos that no one should be permitted to use for any serious purpose” which is going to hurt them in the marketplace but also does nothing meaningful to deal with either the real and immediate issues with AI or the mixture of other (some real but less immediate but largely science fantasy) issues that typically are referred to under the “AI safety” umbrella (and that’s even more true if you consider from the pov of assuming that the more science-fantasy-ish of those risks are real and serious.)
There might be no sessions for stuff like how to use web APIs because these are already mature and well-documented technologies. I/O is about showcasing new stuff after all.
To my mind, the turning point towards this new, less fun and more corporate Google and I/O was around 2013. I think that's when they started thinking about shaping the company into Alphabet with Google as a subsidiary as well. Famously they removed "don't be evil" as the motto and expanded into hardware a lot soon after 2013, too. It was a time of wholistic change at Google.
I don't understand how a corporate culture that's so focused on shipping new projects at the expense of maintenance, manages to ship so few new projects.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQY2H8rRoyvyY0AsvPIkb...
Are those questions really what’s on the mind of the developer? Where is the: we have a way to revolutionize the debugging experience when doing ML(for people with PhDs) talks?
I know it wouldn’t sell to the masses but that was kind of the point if you want jaded devs on your side.
ML debugging is just one topic among many. I wouldn't dismiss the entire lineup because Google didn't have any big announcements in that space for that year.
The video is five minutes long, is basically a nature advert complete with stirring music, has a bizarre cartoon in the middle of it and is all about an attempt to control the reef's population of starfish. We're told that the starfish are doing great thanks to there being fewer predators and more nutrients in the water, but that this is bad because "it's quite a nasty animal" and it eats coral. The goal is to find starfish "outbreaks" using ML and enable teams of divers to kill the starfish as quickly as possible.
They appear to think this is a stirring example of protecting nature. There's even a diver at the end who breaks down in tears at the way the reef has degraded over his lifespan. Fortunately since the video was made it was discovered that the reefs are now at record-breaking coverage levels despite the starfish, so apparently they didn't need AI driven death-from-above. Also it's not really clear why Google wants to help implement mass animal culls in a place where people don't even go. Why are corals better than starfish? This seems like a very arbitrary judgement. Corals and crown-of-thorns starfish have been co-existing in nature for far longer than people have.
So:
1. Not for developers. They use batching and quantization, that's as deep as it goes technically.
2. Essentially a long ad for their cloud ML services.
3. Consists mostly of people talking about how meaningful, awesome and filled with hope they feel.
I randomly picked another, "Product fairness testing for developers". It seems to consist of two Googlers reading a codelab out loud. And I mean that literally:
https://youtu.be/RcgBNkX0RjE?t=904
She literally reads out the title, pauses, reads out the subtitle, pauses again, reads out the rest of the document word for word. WTF? Is this person a text-to-speech AI? Why did Google make a video that consists of Googlers doing a TTS-quality video of their own documentation website? I'm a developer, watched many dev oriented tech talks and I've never seen that before.
The bulk of the talk is about how important it is to be ethical and stuff. First time we see code that isn't just a snippet in some docs is at the 22 minute mark in a 34 minute talk. It appears to be little more than running some regexs over some rather incoherent LLM output. The code isn't even explained anywhere, just what it's doing. No dev is going to learn anything from this even if they're at bootcamp level.
The video has got only around 4000 views, which seems about right. I can't imagine anyone watching this and thinking, yes, awesome, let's share it around. BTW the bootcamp level of the code might be because neither of the speakers are developers. One is a product manager, the other is an analyst. Really don't think this is targeted at developers dude despite the title. It definitely wasn't written by one. So that's twice now.
Corals as a habitat host a lot of species, creating biodiversity. People don't really seem to care about corals by themselves; rather, they care about a few hundred species of pretty-looking tropical fish that exist nowhere other than within coral reefs. Anything that kills enough of the coral, is likely to make all of those very pretty fish go extinct.
(I've never heard about starfish as a threat to corals; the wellbeing of coral reefs is usually brought up mostly in relation to the impacts of ocean acidification and seafloor trawling.)
it's a well-known thing.
2023: https://www.scubadivermag.com/9-8-million-program-to-protect...
2020: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2258714-coral-eating-st...
2018: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/world/australia/starfish-...
Hopefully this I/O gives folks more compelling reasons to use Google Cloud.
I just need to somehow convince my large organization's IT team to enable the Workspace updates in Workspace Labs, which is likely to take some time. That's likely a few months, at least, but not the fault of google!
Pixel's are just the best "stock Android" phone there is. So many other Android device makers just slap a crappy UI on top of stock Android that offers no real value. In addition, Pixels always get the latest os updates, and Google recently improved support timeframes so they'll get support for years, on par with iPhones - that was a huge sticking point for years.
There are some other specific features of Pixels that are great:
1. Excellent camera
2. The phone features are really fantastic, like auto "call screening" and "hold for me".
--From Uganda
None of these companies are altruistic and everyone knows it, but by not charging upfront it gives possibilities for millions of developers who don’t have US$ 50/month to spend on something (students, emerging economies, career changers, etc).
There's a lot of transferable skills gained in these products. You're not just operating a Maytag.
After all, why care? It's not like those people were gonna buy it anyway, and they're still using windows, aren't they?
either Google comes up with something nice or I'm getting a used iPhone SE
Well, I purchased a second iPad 10th gen for my younger daughter and the same exact problem. Out of the box this basic feature just doesn't work reliably. We're at the point we're renaming my wife's iPhone once a month.
That's just one specific problem we've had, but really it's been a disaster. The setup for both iPads was full of bugs and random issues. Both iPads randomly fail to install updates overnight. I don't recall the last time my Android has ever failed to do a system update. It's just really surprising for me because I assumed a device in it's 10th generation with such a good reputation would be rock solid.
My S21 (6.2") is within a mm of my Pixel 3a (5.6") due to the reduction in bezel.
In that case display size is a measure of how much strain you're putting on your hands to navigate the huge screen. A smaller screen means less reaching.
Also smaller display size means less content, less instagram posts, less twitter feed, less interest on your phone in general in my perspective
Battery degradation hasn't been an issue for me at all, but maybe I'm using my phone less than average. Still goes from morning to bedtime without me thinking about or looking at the charge.
I’m holding on to my Pixel 4a until they make one that’s smaller & lighter. Not liking the trend of bigger and bigger phones.
Even if you usually use bluetooth headphones... it's still nice to have a backup. There's lots of situations where headphone jack input is simpler, easier, faster, and more reliable than messing with bluetooth.
I enjoyed the silent disco and free concerts, but it felt very over the top and expensive, basically just a big ego display for Google.
I can understand now why my company is less eager to send developers to events like these every year.
I almost forgot about that! I think I pushed this into the back of my mind along with google glass.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_Q
Of the three products, Glass is gone, Vic and Google Plus are gone, and GCE is now making money for Google.
As for Nexus Q- I met a guy on the team. They not only never released it, they never INTENDED to release it! It was just a marketing thing for that Google IO.
But this phenomenon exemplifies the incoherent nature of Google's dev story.
I for one am super excited about this years chat app fail!
Bring on Allo Meets with Messages! The worlds most force installed Chat app with as many users as its development team!
Factoring in all the discounts and incentives that Samsung tends to do, the Pixel may be more expensive in practice. That's bold considering it has pretty middle-of-the-road specs, it's using the Tensor G2 SOC that launched last year and wasn't the best Android SOC even then, nevermind now that it's up against the Snapdragon 8 gen 2.
Pixels normally are very generously priced, especially outside the US compared to Apple.
Ahh, the naïveté of the young age (I was in my early forties at that time, mind you). I was in technology development then, now moved to PdM side. Google products no longer interest me from either the tech or biz side.
Not sure what to make of it but you would think the HN crowd would be slightly more interested.
Apple has really strong chip prowess, eg the M1 or the battery efficiency vs size of AirPods and AirTags. But a lot of that is resting on TSMC which anyone can contract. Google has some impressive research into things like AI, database, K8, etc - but today others seem to be catching up.
Also, the data harvesting is much more common knowledge.
Google Cloud is fantastic compared to the others. I don't know why people still go to AWS, nothing interesting has happened, it seems like very little has changed. My biggest gripes are the cookie cutter EC2 vs the flexibility of GCP VMs and the account/project switching in AWS vs GCP.
Google is also one of the few companies at the forefront of AI. There is definite innovation there.
Like I get all caps subject lines with spammy content that my grandmother would recognize as spam, but it blocks some personally written emails from other gmail accounts.
Apple was never particularly loved by developers. Respected yes, tolerated yes. But they were always a bit aloof, separate, never bought into the 2010s era of free love and open source. And that's exactly the way they still are today. Apple has been remarkably stable over time, culturally speaking. It consistently meets people expectations for how it behaves, both good and bad. So there's nothing really to be disappointed about there. It is what it is.
Add a few cases of Glassholes[1], killing products people loved, and it eventually piles up.
I will add though, that just because the company has lost its lustre, doesn't mean the people working there are any less talented. I just think that on a long enough timeline, Google becomes IBM[2].
---
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glasshole
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...
In this specific case, things are high level and generic, so at this point the framing is closer to big corporation than it is to anything specific or technical.
https://gcemetery.co/
https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation
At the end of the day, I'm super glad they have experimented with things and it seems weird to hold that against them.
I don't feel like the parent comment was asking for first-class support, just access to the device.
Here are some snippets from top-level comments in this discussion thread.
> It's all business talk
> I for one benefited so much from Google Developer Groups
> looking forward to the event and plan to watch it
> just corporate talk
> alternate conference
> separate conference
> I can understand now why my company is less eager to send developers to events
You see it, right? They're all about the talks at the conference and not the features. This HN post is specifically about the conference, that's why the title is "Google I/O 2023".
But, I agree, it's not an exact match context wise.
The reality is what people can really use and what really does hit the road.
Right now, everything google presented in the keynote is vapourware for anyone that doesn't have access to it.
You would see people doing mental gymnastics trying to defend their closed anti competitive practices, disregard for standards. I would cheer a Sennheiser/Bose more than any version of Airpods, I would rather not have a multi trillion dollar company gobble up other industries through unfair advantages.
Seeing a hacker crowd do this is just beyond bizzare.
You don’t really have to buy AirPods, there are lots of products out in the market that compete in that space. Just because Apple provides a certain product doesn’t mean you are being forced to buy it.
Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS device or Mac. In fact, even when I keep removing the application from the Mac, on a version update it comes back again. It has integrations into the system and other core system apps that other products can't get and defaults matter. On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive.
I don't even want to get started on iCloud etc.
I never noticed, having never bought Apple Music before and just using spotify instead. I guess if I wanted it to run on a HomePod, I would need it?
> On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive.
Doesn't Spotify do the same thing?
It is good that you are using Spotify and supporting an independent company, but as I was saying defaults and ease of access matters. Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.
> Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.
Spotify is still dominating music streaming, more so than Apple Music or Amazon Prime Music (which we used to use since it came free with prime).
Spotify has to pay for these and has to compete for this with other music streaming companies.
Also, comparison with smart speakers is disingenuous. There are a billion iPhone users itself. No non big tech company smart speaker comes even close.
> Spotify is still dominating music streaming
Because of nailing the product early on and being world class in playlists and music recommendations. Even if Apple music comes 80% close, just by holding distribution advantage, they will capture that market.
I like my Apple products but this services thing is truly destroying a lot of the good experiences they can provide.
There are a lot of people that defend the far and few apple negative comments.
The only way to prove this would be by doing some data analysis. Maybe worth it’s own post
It is like people who think they are being hip for either hating or loving X, when lots of people love or hate X already, so it isn't really weird either way.
I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options compared to before. The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.
How did AirPods existing ruin your options? You can choose to not buy them, I don't, I like conductive head phones better anyways (non-Apple, before the AirPods came out, and they don't suck, so I don't get what you mean by apple producing the only BT headphones that don't suck?). Or do you mean you want to buy AirPods but you don't want to use an iPhone, or you want to use wired headphones only and don't care for dongles?
> The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.
Seriously, this is the mental gymnastics I'm talking about. None of this is really stopping you from listening to music on your phone.
Now my choices are:
- AirPods, which I don't want to shell out more money for and deal with charging/caring for them, but otherwise they'd be the best option.
- Non-AirPod BT headphones. I have nice Bose ones from work. These lack Apple's extensions to improve pairing and headset (mic) mode. In headset mode, the earphone quality drops to like worse than early 2000s cellphone. Standard pairing is annoying. It's a bit annoying having to charge them. I also don't want to shell out more money for earbuds (the headphones aren't so portable).
- Dongles, which I tried. Turns out they don't work with inlined mics, don't work with older iPhones (so I can't leave them on a shared car aux), are fragile, and are really easy to lose. Can't charge while using one either, but that's nbd. My car seats ate two and the last one broke. It also just feels stupid having to use these.
- Old iPhone. I kept my 6 until it broke. I still have a spare 5, no longer usable with AT&T, which I use to play music in the car.
Yeah I want to listen to music on my phone, but they've made it sufficiently annoying that I don't anymore. It's a clear regression.
You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone, which I've never seen before but lets go with it. There are dongles that have microphone inputs (Cubilux Lightning to 3.5mm TRS Microphone Adapter with Headphone Jack), but I'm assuming you can't use those because the microphone and headset are sharing the same jack somehow?
Your car doesn't support bluetooth, and you use multiple generations of iPhones so you can't just leave the dongle in the car. This is unrelated to airpods since you can't use those while driving anyways.
AirPods are expensive, I get that, and you aren't satisfied with cheaper non-Apple options on amazon. I'm happy not using airpods, since I hate earbuds anyways, but I guess not everyone is like that. Would the non-existence of AirPods make things better? I haven't had trouble pairing my conductive headphones, I guess I don't notice any distortion because it is going through my bones anyways, and I'm not using mic.
> You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone
No, by mic I mean taking calls and meetings on my earbuds/phones, which is a common requirement. Most earbuds have inlined mics sharing the same jack.
Car aux issue is separate. One of my cars does have BT, but that's even worse because the phones fight over it or the pairing sometimes doesn't happen. Maybe "pass the aux" is not a thing anymore and I'm the only one who wants passengers to play their own music sometimes, but this wasn't a problem before.
That said, I hate BT more and have been using the same Bose QC20 wired earbuds and Belkin adapters for 4+ years. There are semi-decent options out there.
If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)
I just use my phone for fewer music-playing situations than I otherwise would, and when I do use it for playing music, it's a mixed bag. Controls on the car console are nice (aside from that the UI sucks and exhibits all kinds of glitches, but that's not Apple's fault), but BT is BT, so, more annoying and less reliable than a cable. My $120 BT headphones are... fine, but I'd rather have better wired headphones for the same price and not have to charge them. Being able to connect to a bluetooth-enabled receiver across the room is handy, but also janky, because of course it is, because it's bluetooth.
If they'd just kept the jack, everyone could be happy. Except Apple, from the somewhat-lower sales of wireless audio devices and especially AirPods.
1. I plug dongle into car aux for my iPhone 12 mini to use.
2. Next day, girlfriend wants to play her own music from her iPhone 6, I say to plug the Lightning in.
3. Dongle doesn't work with iPhone 6 despite being same connector -_- She takes it off to plug into the 3.5mm.
4. Dongle falls beneath car seat and is never seen again. Presumably it's next to the other one that got lost the same way.
Went from "it just works" to screwing up the most basic functionality ever, plugging in the damn aux. And it's while you're driving.
Universals are always wrong of course: we actually used a dongle for the kid's wired iPad headphones. It doesn't suck for us using a dongle, so I'm guessing our experience was really different from yours.
> If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)
Nope, our 6 year old is not getting AirPods anytime soon.
1) If you think Transformers weren't category defining, I don't know what to say.
2) Metaverse isn't a failure. That's like saying in 2019, "Chat Agents are a failure"
2. I think most people consider both Metaverse and chat agents as failures. ChatGPT isn't a 'chat agent' and most chat agents still don't work.
Watching the keynote and Google are expecting developers to cut and paste code into Bard rather than releasing a Bard plugin for code editors and taking on Microsoft directly. Weak.
If transformer doesn't excite you (mostly due to anti-Google bias), Google has a dozen products that has over a 500 Million users. It takes an unprecedented amount of anti-corp brainwash to say Google isn't successful or innovative.
So did Microsoft in 2005. That doesn't mean the Ballmer era was innovative. If you need other examples of companies with hundreds of millions of users that aren't relevant, there's also Oracle.
Ballmer set the foundations for many of Microsoft's success today, including Azure
Your outlandish sweeping claims about the users of this site aside, sticking your neck out for the Metaverse is just not the hill to die on.
So? Most great ideas end up as objective failures. Also great visionaries generally actually have some at least somewhat specific vision of what are they trying to achieve, neither Zuckerberg nor anyone else were yet able to coherently explain WTH is the Metaverse supposed to be.
IMHO whatever Meta is doing seems much more likely to end up as the Apple Newton than the iPad/iPhone... (which to be fair is not a bad thing).
Maybe some technological breakthrough comes along that makes the metaverse not suck. But if you're gonna build your company around such hopes and it works, then you're not smart, but just lucky. Or you need to build the breakthroughs yourself, but it doesn't look like that's what zuck is doing.
Next question
Of course, none of those people ever fit the more common definition of hacker for more than a few years, if ever, even if you assume hacker means “good coder” or similar. And they certainly never fit the information security definition.
But I think the confusing aspect of HN and the VC influence is the number of folks here who happily conflate technology, business, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. If you see these as separable topics, you find that a lot of the confused threads here are different cohorts in the audience who focus on one of these topics and treat the others as ancillary.
Exactly this. I use the term hacker in its original form.
How should one test for ethics? A reference check comes to mind, but it is not a test that you can apply fairly.
You ask if that's how you'd like to be treated.
I can assure you many hackers are libertarian or anarchists of some flavour (from mutualists to anarcho-capitalists). Many celebrate Apple because they want to build the next Apple some day.
HN has always slanted for the latter crowd, though certainly open to everyone.
I'm not sure if I agree with that. I think being anti-Google and FB would be more accurate than being pro-Apple.
Also, during the years I've observed the "pro-Apple" gauge changes as the time zones change, ie. it tends to be all-time high when it's noon in California - which is understandable.
There was a thread the other day where some people seemed pretty miffed that Google requires a Pixel to connect to the internet before you can unlock it's bootloader.
Then you go into a thread about third party app stores on iPhones and you see people saying that being blocked from installing software that Apple hasn't blessed is actually a feature.
Different people and all that. But the general sentiment on HN is definitely more forgiving of Apple than others.
There's no mental gymnastics involved, no upstanding hacker respects "standards" unless they're better for the user (often they're not). It is a matter of taste and preference. Remember, Microsoft also was for a LONG time an attractor of hackers, until the early-mid 90s when Windows 3.1 became the focus (and it sucked for hackers, who fled to OS/2 briefly, then Linux, then Apple when they got tired of tweaking Linux, now some flowing back to Microsoft or Linux).
The days of Apple basing their business on shiny new iThings are mostly past it, Airpods notwithstanding. Now they’re in pure optimization mode, and going deep into content and services.
Apple is a 2.73 trillion dollar company, and single-handedly makes up 13.3% of the entire S&P 500 index. The iPod was launched 22 years ago. Apple hasn't been remotely an "underdog" for over a generation now.
Apple’s valuation and PE ratio only became in line with its peers around 5-6 years ago. It was priced as if it were about to go bankrupt for much of its history , even after the iPhone was released, convinced that Apple just HAD to go out of business, or hit a ceiling, or whatever.
History is also littered with quotes from competition that didn’t take them seriously: Dell, HPE, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Facebook.
The absurdity isn’t that Apple was thought to be an underdog, it’s that so many never took them seriously. Perhaps the main reason Apple is as big as it is now is because wall street and the competition refused to take them seriously? If they did, we’d have a more balanced industry.
Apple has done the wrong thing many times, but audio is not one of them. They offered a legitimate better product, to the point the only headphones I would rather use are IEMs that cost 8 times as much.
Possibly the most reliable phenomenon I've observed as a mod is that people believe HN is biased against what they like and in favor of what they dislike. This shows up most often with politics - for a recent example see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734307 ("HN leans left") followed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734354 ("HN leans left?") and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734392 ("You're completely delusional if you consider HN to be left leaning"). For an amusing (to me anyway!) set of examples see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
But it works the same way with other things, like $BigCos. Each $BigCo has a fanbase and a foebase. Each fanbase feels like HN is biased against "their" $BigCo and in favor of some other $BigCo.
No doubt the same mechanism makes sports fans feel like the refs are biased against their team. The feelings of a sports fan determine not only the direction of perceived bias (no fan ever thought "the refs are consistently biased in our favor") but also its intensity (the more passionately a fan is devoted to $team, the more strongly they are persuaded about the refs' "bias").
Readers with no particular passion on a topic are less likely to perceive bias or feel much about it either way.
I believe that the way this works is that if we feel strongly about $foo, we're much more likely than the median reader to notice posts about $foo, especially ones we dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and to weight them much more heavily. What starts as a feeling in us thereby turns into a perception about the world, often one that is very intensely held and impossible to dissuade.
This is not to say that the community, the refs, the mods, or what have you, aren't biased! Just that the existence or quantity of possible bias can't be decided by this mechanism, which is the mechanism that drives online discussion. In fact, the primary concern of any serious attempt to decide or quantify bias would have to be making sure that it wasn't distorted by this psychological mechanism, which is so powerful.
(This is a bit more than I set out to write about this! it's a hobbyhorse of mine, as it makes moderation moderately more complicated...where by moderately I mean extremely)
I was making the point of the HN users. Specially the characteristic of downvoting and negating criticism in this case.
You are right though, because I strongly feel about the anti competitive issues Apple indulges in, maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them.
Although, I think there is a positive bias as well, which I care less about. Like one of the commenter mentioned that Final Cut Pro being launched on iPad was the top post through large parts of the day.
> maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them
You may be the first person who has ever indicated that they've gotten that point!
man I don't know about everybody else but I'm pretty burned out on the never-ending deluge of AI-related chatter at this point.
Were we reading the same thread? My take away was mostly complaints about subscriptions and people asking why you would use it on an iPad instead of a laptop.
I think the problem here is that this was posted hours before the keynote - meaning there is actually nothing of value to discuss yet. Now the thread that should be about todays even is full of “back in my day” comments.
"Every offering they have is worse today than it was a year ago."
HN should be better than this.
But I have to wonder if it's because as I have tried to quit Reddit and other mass market social media, I'm browsing this site a lot more. So I'm seeing more comment sections in general and clicking more threads than I would otherwise.
It's even in the community guidelines.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
And that links to comments all the way back in 07!
Google's AI features are not something most of us use in our workflow, and are (arguably/debatably) not making anything more convenient for us. That's all in addition to it being Google, so there's a built-in assumption that no one can depend on any of this, because it might be discontinued at any point with little notice.
(I say this as someone who does not own an iPhone or Mac, and has been on Android for over a decade) -- I can see why Mac folks would be excited by the Mac announcement, and why some aren't that excited by Google right now.
SCNR...
There are still things that make Premiere better. Recently I couldn't get an mp4 from a Sony cam to play at the right speed in FCP no matter what I tried, and it just worked in Premiere. I'm more fluid in FCP but I will probably switch too as Premiere just "feels more pro" now to me.
I've heard some great reports about Davinci, especially for post.
All of that may be well and good, and yet I can't remotely get excited by an announcement that it's being ported from PC/laptop to iPad. Are professionals really going to be using iPads for this use case en masse? Was there a lot of people upset that they had to use a PC/laptop for this, and a lot of pent-up demand for an even more portable version?
It's hard to think of any platform port that would be amazing exciting news, let alone this one!
yeah, doing pretty bad at that. I just tried out Bard by asking it a question on an almost 10 year old .net library for interacting with a popular CRM platform's API. It came back with:
"I can't assist you with that, as I'm only a language model and don't have the capacity to understand and respond."
Went over to ChatGPT and asked it the same question in the prompt word for word. It came back with a concise explanation on how to use the library. Specifically one specific set of API calls. Bard is a joke.
Meanwhile they gamified display ads to the point that the web slowly turned into pure clickbait so there’s nothing even left to search for - 99% of content from the last decade is dogshit.
With ChatGPT my web searches are down by at least 50% and more than 80% of the ones I still do are on DuckDuckGo.
Are you comparing discussion of a (relatively legacy) software application to an entire developer conference with a mostly singular focus on a newer, evolving technology?
I'm not trying to be an Apple apologist here but maybe this discussion would be better discussed in roughly a month when WWDC happens.
This year's Google I/O appears to be heavy on talk about new technologies, but light on tangible releases for us to explore.
In order words, the true value lies not in the promise of a product, but in its practical application. So, I urge Google to present us with tools, APIs, products, we can actively engage with, rather than just talk about and endless "waiting lists".
For something with such an easily-accessible interface that's baked-in at an OS level, I think a fail state of "sorry, I don't know how to help with that" is better than stating a bunch of false information as fact.
I agree that the is massive potential for errors, but I'm certain those will get fleshed out soon, and Google is pretty well known for throwing shit and the fan and looking for the cleanest patch of carpet after the fact.