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Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

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Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#391

Post by WalterBright »

AlbertCory wrote: post #327
steveBK123 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, once you are past the free tier.. GSuite is close to the monthly cost of Office365, and Google sheets is not even close to Excel. You can basically program mini applications in Excel vs a basic spreadsheet app for medium sized spreadsheets that multiple people can edit in their browser with version tracking.

I have Excel, and of course Sheets. I actually find Excel to be too full of features (same with Word). It's just too hard to figure out a simple thing like having the top row be column headings (yes, I do know how to do it, but it was not immediately apparent). "Someone, somewhere, might want to do this, so let's put it in" is obviously what's happened with Office for 30 years now.

Excel is the #1 programming language by a wide margin, and it evolved rather than was designed.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#392

Post by WalterBright »

petre wrote: post #326
steveBK123 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GSuite is either underpriced or underfeatured. Most real enterprise still happens on Office, and lots of consumers happy give Apple $100/year for iCloud. Cloud services - aren't they basically 3rd behind AMZN/MSFT now, by A LOT? They are basically competing for 3rd against IBM/Oracle/etc, and some quarters they are #4.

iCloud is funny because it's just storage and an e-mail address compared to GSuite which can be actually used to do a bunch of hobby level stuff. ChatGPT AI is overhyped, just like full self driving was five years ago. Yes, it can do stuff, write articles, code etc. until people realize that what it spits out is useful stuff mixed with made up gibberish and has to be checked by a human. It's going to be just great fo…

ChatGPT generated code has the interesting property of looking like it should work, but is subtly completely wrong.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#393

Post by graycat »

AlbertCory wrote: post #327
steveBK123 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, once you are past the free tier.. GSuite is close to the monthly cost of Office365, and Google sheets is not even close to Excel. You can basically program mini applications in Excel vs a basic spreadsheet app for medium sized spreadsheets that multiple people can edit in their browser with version tracking.

I have Excel, and of course Sheets. I actually find Excel to be too full of features (same with Word). It's just too hard to figure out a simple thing like having the top row be column headings (yes, I do know how to do it, but it was not immediately apparent). "Someone, somewhere, might want to do this, so let's put it in" is obviously what's happened with Office for 30 years now.

My summary view of much of Microsoft, and more of tech, is that, while a lot of the software is really good, too often the corresponging explanations and documentation are not.

There seems to be a theme that the user should learn to use the software via experimentation. To me, that too often results in too much clicking, and when finally I do see I take notes, i.e., document some of the software.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#394

Post by kmeisthax »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #226
pm90 wrote: post #118

Seems like Google leadership is freaking out. Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company. I don’t know how Google could be saved but perhaps having grateful and happy employees that would just build things in their 20% time might have been a better strategy. A truly revolutionary step would have been to buck the layoffs trend. But of course…

I think this goes back to Google’s decision to be evil. Being evil has a lot of overhead where you have to invest significant time into researching grey areas to exploit and then crafting your product or service not step over the line. Then it falls apart when you get to Europe and they are happy to call you on being evil and fine you billions of euros for doing evil things. Google should go back to not being evil, t…

Google was always "evil"[0]. They've never done support; the entire business model was "automate everything at scale". The "don't be evil" thing, aside from being a jab at Microsoft, was backed up mostly with talk about short-term vs long-term profits, rather than not taking all the cake on the table for themselves.

[0] Assuming your definition of "evil" includes "don't answer support calls to save a buck".

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#395

Post by csomar »

steveBK123 wrote: post #155
trentnix wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should be freaking out. Google is overwhelmingly dependent on a single revenue stream and AI like ChatGPT is a serious threat to their dominant position. Not to mention, Google has spent a decade using their defacto monopoly as leverage and optimizing for ads and clicks, often exploiting their own users in the process. The bar for better was lower than it should have been, and the market is hungry for an alterna…

Yes this is the most insane thing about GOOG to me. Yes, search is basically monopoly moat of recurring growing revenue. On the other hand, they've spent not a decade, but about 25 years betting this would remain the case! I've met a lot of people who work at GOOG, and yet none of them could explain to me how the thing they work on makes any money for GOOG. In fact, most went out of their way to volunteer to me that…

I don’t know but Google is very bad at releasing and maintaining products they already have a horrible reputation. They could have done better but I guess no one gives a flying f when the money is still coming.

Google did more than search: gmail, youtube, docs, cloud and that’s just stuff on top of my mind.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#396

Post by graycat »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #348
dekhn wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right- Larry wanted a question-answering machine. Larry and Sergey "got bored of search" (I heard this from the engs who were going to weekly presentations to show new search features) when they felt it was just chasing a larger index and showing people what they wanted to click on.

Meanwhile I long for the days where this was Google's focus. I want a better index of the web and I want the search engine to give me the tools to filter out the garbage I don't want. The fact that this isn't a feature tells you everything you need to know about Google's real priority: it's not us, it's the advertisers.

> I want the search engine to give me the tools to filter out the garbage I don't want.

Thought some people might want that.

Have the user interface and pure/applied math worked out and documented and code designed, written, and running.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#397

Post by lumost »

pm90 wrote: post #118

Seems like Google leadership is freaking out. Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company. I don’t know how Google could be saved but perhaps having grateful and happy employees that would just build things in their 20% time might have been a better strategy. A truly revolutionary step would have been to buck the layoffs trend. But of course…

It’s easy to lead in good times. Your main goal is simply not to rock the boat. Maybe every now and then you do something flashy to avoid complacency. Google’s had enough capital to more or less do anything and everything the team wanted to do for the last 15 years.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#398

Post by neilv »

steveBK123 wrote: post #260
eastbound wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the people, it’s the management that decided which traits they would reward, both at hiring and during the career.

Thankfully when I was graduating they had some strict school & GPA filters that someone as lowly as me wasn't even dignified a response. Wall Street tech DGAF about that though.

It seemed like Google's hiring filters were about what a Stanford student might think is important (that socioeconomic class, had learned what Stanford students do, thinks whatever they don't know is less important or follows naturally from what they know, preferably recent grad (again, student thinking), with affluent lifestyle expectations, etc.).

Wall Street, OTOH, is about making money. They might also not fully know how to hire the people they want, but it seemed they valued scrappy more, especially when it leads to real results (which are maybe easier for them to see, when it can be pretty directly quantified in dollars).

(Though the Wall Street recruiter I talked with, back 2 decades ago, when I first wanted to work for Google, did ask about my GPA. So I told them I had a perfect GPA, like most of the other students in that grad program, and that that wouldn't tell them much about someone's potential. Then I told them I didn't really want to work on Wall Street, which had a bad reputation from the preceding decade, though the $400K to start was maybe 10x what I was making at the time. Then Google gave me some asinine brogrammer student nonsense in the interview, before that was a thing, and before wannabe companies mimicked it. So I ended up going to neither company.)

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#399

Post by twoodfin »

ghusbands wrote: post #322
irq-1 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like experts criticizing Wikipedia, before it dominated. Mostly true and mostly accurate information is useful beyond what we normally think. Remember how people use to criticize the newspapers? They'd say they read an article on a subject they new something about and were shocked at how bad it was. Then they'd conclude that the rest of the news was just as bad. What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of…

While I use ChatGPT myself, its ability to invent true-seeming information is insidious. One of the early popular examples was asking ChatGPT what the downsides are of generics in TypeScript, and it cited that they're not compatible with some browsers/runtimes. It's entirely believable, but entirely wrong, and actually quite hard to confirm either way with internet searches. It's the sort of thing people would readil…

I like to describe ChatGPT as a highly weaponized form of Gell-Mann Amnesia.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#400

Post by easton »

Adverblessly wrote: post #46
rightbyte wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dark design I wonder how much of Google's revenue is from Foobarbazz Corp buying ads for Foobarbazz searches. The conversion rate for those searches is probably really high since the consumer was going there anyway. It is like a silent agreement between marketing folks and Google to pretend it is value for money.

> I wonder how much of Google's revenue is from Foobarbazz Corp buying ads for Foobarbazz searches. I don't know if it is a common practice or just an excpetion, but not that long ago we had this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218340 where two competitors of (the FOSS) Kdenlive tried to advertise on "Kdenlive" on various search engines and it seems like "They had them on Google too, but we complained and they…

Freakonomics Radio had a really good (two-parter?) episode about whether ads really work, and one of the people they had on was someone who cut eBay's ad spend a ton, and they said the one of the biggest wastes was advertising on the word "eBay". They removed those buys and sure enough people just scrolled down to click on the actual link to eBay.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

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