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Google I/O 2023

io.google

321–330 of 443 posts

Re: Google I/O 2023

#321
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 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.

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.

Re: Google I/O 2023

#322
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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 :)

Re: Google I/O 2023

#323
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They’re playing catch-up, it’s boring. 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 wor…

And yet the only people laughing are Altman and Nadella.

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.

Re: Google I/O 2023

#324
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI must be sweating profusely after viewing that I/O presentation. Not only do they not have the integration, scale and user base of Google, but the migration of Bard to PaLM 2 it will exceed whatever OpenAI currently has. Also, it's only a matter of time before their top employee's are poached by Apple and Google.

Well I guess that internal memo was true, there is no moat in AI, for Google, OpenAI, or any other, as long as AI continues to improve.

What does it mean to have no moat?

Re: Google I/O 2023

#325

Maybe going against the grain here, but this was the best Google I/O I've seen in a long time. In the past, they seemed liked incremental updates on their hardware (which I don't care too much about) or some new products like the pixel watch / glasses (which I probably won't use). I knew there would be a huge focus on AI this year, but I was pleasantly surprised by many of the new features and how quickly these integ…

I have a hard time getting excited about anything AI with a company whose main profit center is in harvesting your data. Incentives are just not aligned. In this case AI is simply a gimmick to get us to give them more data to serve their real customers.

Re: Google I/O 2023

#327

To all the people who have been espousing how they appreciate cover letters, good luck - you'll be swimming in them, all AI generated. There will be a sea of all good, all positive fake text and text will lose its meaning. We used to appreciate a nicely written mail - now AI will be writing perfectly composed letters. We will learn to appreciate a badly written mail.

If AI can generate them trivially, maybe that suggests cover letters should not have been that important to begin with. To me, the main benefit of a cover letter is that it shows the applicant is engaged enough to actually make an application that is specific to a job posting. That is still the case with AI, it just saves everyone creating them a huge amount of work - most of which is completely wasted when the major…

The ability to write a polite and on-topic email used to be a valuable skill to demonstrate. Not so much anymore.

Re: Google I/O 2023

#328
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…

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.

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).

Re: Google I/O 2023

#329

To all the people who have been espousing how they appreciate cover letters, good luck - you'll be swimming in them, all AI generated. There will be a sea of all good, all positive fake text and text will lose its meaning. We used to appreciate a nicely written mail - now AI will be writing perfectly composed letters. We will learn to appreciate a badly written mail.

Texters and readers of Homestuck have been practicing for decades at appreciating badly written mail. I believe human-to-human knowledge transfers will still be fine :). I'm fucking scared of the incoming spam tsunami though!

Re: Google I/O 2023

#330
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 don't understand the point of your comment.

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.

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