Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mourning Google

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 485 posts

Re: Mourning Google

#121

Post by picadores »

vanderZwan wrote: post #22

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the…

Turpor after great feasts and the ability to either winter and scurry under the snow - or move migrate away to greener pastures is what saved the day.

Re: Mourning Google

#122

Post by dleeftink »

rezonant wrote: post #24
cousin_it wrote: post #16

I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to…

Your theory doesn't match the timeline. Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search. Unfortunately, the approach doesn't work for all product categories. Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old. As a result they saw themselves fall behind Facebook in social, faile…

> ceded heavy ground

Calling attention to this specifically, because do we want a single 'Google' to have foothold on every ground? Innovation needs a healthy dose of competition, after all.

Re: Mourning Google

#123

Post by acdha »

DeathArrow wrote: post #92
cousin_it wrote: post #16

I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to…

>I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. What decline are you talking about? They have hundreds of billions revenue and climbing.

What successful product have they launched since 2008, when they embraced DoubleClick’s management culture? Ads bring in a lot of revenue, scaling with the general internet-using population growth, but they also seem to have made Google’s management incapable of thinking about products which are not immediately, wildly successful at selling tons of ads or harvesting data for ad targeting.

It’s fortunate that they’ve been able to sustain the ad business but the billions they’ve spent developing new products nobody wanted to use had given them the air of decline, our age’s IBM where they have a lot of existing users but few people expect a new success even if the finance guys reliably get fabulous bonuses.

Re: Mourning Google

#124

Post by Chathamization »

cousin_it wrote: post #16

I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to…

That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not it seems people have forgotten about it in general, and the exciting stuff is likely to come from other companies.

I don't see people commenting on this a lot when they lament the former Google. There seems to be a lot of personal reasons why people prefer how the company used to be run - it was fun, we spent lots of time on side projects, the company had free stuff all over the place, it felt like a fun college and not a job, etc. But little reflection on how productive the company was being.

I do wonder sometimes if a Jobs (or maybe an Altman or Musk) is more valuable than people realize. People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/technology/they-promised-...

Re: Mourning Google

#125

Post by bluetomcat »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #117
bluetomcat wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. Nothing apart from search, ads, maps, Gmail, Chrome and Android was a huge success. They essentially created their own monocultural ecosystem. Most of everything else was a short-lived fad. Plus, Wave, Reader, Chat and Glass, to mention a few.

"Apart from all the many succesful products, everything they did was a failure" is an empty statement which can be applied to any company. So yes, you can say that about Alphabet. You can also mention that they have a market cap of $1.8 trillion and are the fourth most valuable company in the world.

Their successful products are vertically-integrated to provide a walled "convenient" experience to users. You use an Android smartphone to open their browser, searching for stuff and viewing ads, using Maps to find the location of businesses appearing in the ads. The rest of their contributions are welcome side-effects that have enabled running that software and hardware infrastructure.

Re: Mourning Google

#126

Post by _heimdall »

AYBABTME wrote: post #103
_heimdall wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

edit: I totally misread the parent comment, move along I really wouldn't recommend looking to LLMs to evaluate truthfulness, they aren't built for that and have no way of knowing what true is. They're much better as a tool for summarizing information, with the usual caveat that any summary is incomplete and can only be as truthful as the original source(s) used.

Can't they technically be supplemented to report their confidence level along with their output? Afaict there's ways to do it.

But what does a confidence level even mean for an LLM? "Truthfulness" would be limited by the original training set, compounded by the fact that the LLM loses context when effectively compressing the original dataset down to the LLM's final model.

A confidence level could be helpful to know how much competing data was considered by the LLM when predicting each word, but it would say nothing of truthfulness or even accuracy relative to the original training data.

Re: Mourning Google

#127

Post by tuukkah »

ulfw wrote: post #82
rezonant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your theory doesn't match the timeline. Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search. Unfortunately, the approach doesn't work for all product categories. Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old. As a result they saw themselves fall behind Facebook in social, faile…

"However, you can feel it in the experience as a user when the product team is given the keys to the kingdom and left unchallenged. The product becomes soulless and vapid" Wow. Incredibly that there are people who think this. So only an engineer with no product team input can build products with a soul? Really?

A middle way exists between "keys to the kingdom" and "no input".

Re: Mourning Google

#128

Post by ynniv »

nostrademons wrote: post #68
vanderZwan wrote: post #22

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the…

This description actually makes me feel like the metaphor is more apt. The dinosaurs went down because they were large, complex lifeforms that required a vibrant, complex ecosystem to support them. Amidst a fundamental shift to that ecosystem, large complex organisms were the first to go down. This is a general pattern - complex systems are always the first to collapse when there's a shift in the ecosystem, because t…

I think you're mistaking popularity with power. Big Tech is less cool, but 7/8ths of humanity are under their umbrella.

Re: Mourning Google

#129

Post by zozbot234 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #22

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the…

> Mammals being already small and nocturnal is what gave them an edge during this evolutionary "funnel" (and presumably the ancestors of modern birds had similar features).

Conspiracy theory: Birds are not real, they're actually dinosaurs.

Re: Mourning Google

#130

Post by DanielHB »

cousin_it wrote: post #16

I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to…

I think the main problem is because the reward from your innovative ideas being successful was not tied to the team members own rewards. Startup founders get crazy rich or get nothing so they will do their damnest to get their ideas to deliver value and capitalize their value.

All the researchers at Google still keep their jobs and salaries if their ideas/projects fail. And if they succeed they might get a promotion and a bonus, maybe, and probably only the top people behind the idea/project.

Post reply on HN