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Google I/O 2023

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Re: Google I/O 2023

#131

Post by pjmlp »

danwee wrote: post #2

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).

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.

Re: Google I/O 2023

#132

Post by bdcravens »

latchkey wrote: post #105
bdcravens wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is due to Google's track record on killing products.

Plenty of products are still alive and kicking. AppEngine is a great example of that. Initial release date: April 7, 2008.

No one wants to play the guessing game of which products will live and die (well, maybe those who are compulsive gambler do)

https://gcemetery.co/

Re: Google I/O 2023

#133

Post by neodymiumphish »

hbn wrote: post #83
neodymiumphish wrote: post #65

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 Chat…

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.

Re: Google I/O 2023

#134

Post by flippy_flops »

jebarker wrote: post #88
flippy_flops wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Google I/O 2023

#135

Post by r0m4n0 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #104
actuator wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN tends to bias towards pro Apple. 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.

People are anti everything on HN… the question is how much on what.

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

Re: Google I/O 2023

#136

Post by lawgimenez »

bdcravens wrote: post #94
r0m4n0 wrote: post #64

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…

This is due to Google's track record on killing products.

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.

Re: Google I/O 2023

#137

Post by skrowl »

r0m4n0 wrote: post #64

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…

[dead]

Re: Google I/O 2023

#139

Post by revelio »

lordswork wrote: post #114
revelio wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Guess it depends what you mean by technical.

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.

Re: Google I/O 2023

#140

Post by frou_dh »

r0m4n0 wrote: post #64

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…

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.
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