141–150 of 518 posts
Last time this happened people thought social was the future. Facebook was considered a threat to everything since they had the social-graph, so everything had to become social. Google+, Google Buzz, Orkut.
"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete." Transcribing this profound insight of Buckminster Fuller to the current debate: You cannot out-do google by inventing "smarter" search. You need to create a new business model that makes the old one obsolete. Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic…
Google beat their original competitors — Altavista, Excite, Yahoo!, and so on — with an incremental improvement, not a new model. At the time (2000-2003), their search was better and faster, certainly, but not several orders of magnitude better. In fact, Google was something of a reactionary model at the time, by rejecting the push for bloated, captive "web portals" and going back to the simpler, stripped-down user e…
Before ChatGPT, I would spend a lot of time searching on Google for the right API call and the response structure:
Problem: I need a simple Python script that list roles in an AWS account that has at least one of a list of command line specified policies.
Before ChatGPT: I would look up the api call to list the roles (the API service area of AWS is huge), then look up the API call to list the policies for the role and then look up the API call for the “paginator” that pages through all of the results since the API call only returns 50 results at a time.
After ChatGPT:
“Write a Python script that allows me to specify a list of AWS IAM roles that contain at least one of a given list of policies”.
I get “working” code and then I start polishing it.
“Use argparse with required parameters and use a paginator to iterate through the roles”
Again expected results.
“I need the list of ARNs printed out as a comma separated list”.
I copy the code into VSCode, test it, and I’m done.
Later on for another project, the customer prefers JavaScript. I copy the code into ChatGPT, and tell it to convert it into JavaScript. It works perfectly and is idiomatic JS along with proper async/await handling
Last time this happened people thought social was the future. Facebook was considered a threat to everything since they had the social-graph, so everything had to become social. Google+, Google Buzz, Orkut.
It was to me the social network for grownups without the Facebook clickbait - I liked the circles model too (I did one for professional stuff one for personal) and great photos support.
But then someone was put in charge who lost their mind and just started wrecking products (YouTube etc) with plus and it was chaos.
I actually laughed out loud at that one.
What's the general opinion on Sundar Pichai as CEO? I haven't been excited about Google since Eric Schmidt, but I don't know how much of that is down to the CEO, and how much is just down to a different world and larger company. In contrast I think most people would agree that Microsoft is a much more interesting and maybe better company with Satya Nadella as boss.
My impression is that he's not a leader but a care taker. This article kind of shows the two founders swooping in for some emergency leadership. That's not a good look. I think they've been coasting on their past glory for a decade now. Yes they make money but otherwise they are just doing more of the same and just building out the stuff they've had for more than a decade (Search, Ads, Youtube, Maps, Android, etc.).…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Search ads are pretty much the perfect internet business model - if my biz is having a sale on lawnmowers, who better to target than people googling for "buy lawnmower"? If this is done right, everyone walks away happy and google makes a killing. ChatGPT is great, but it's pretty far from providing good answers to "where can I get a good deal on a lawnmower right now?" They might take over a decent share of…
Ads work because they're embedded in interesting or useful things. No one would use a search engine composed of 100% ads. Chat-GPT can be used for this: returing interesting results. The ads don't have to be served through chat-GPT, but could be given as a side result.
Isn’t that pretty much what the Yellow Pages used to be? As long as you know what you’re getting…
> Google announced it’s laying off more than 12,000 employees and focusing on AI as a domain of primary importance. I have had an Android phone since Froyo. I liked it when the functionality was simple and didn't try to inject too much suggestions / AI. Now, Google Photos app is trying to suggest things to print, the Settings app is trying to predict when and how to charge my battery (I just want it 80%, all the time…
The one that bothers me most is that background services are now management by some AI thingy, in order to 'optimize battery usage'. Ergo, background services are now unreliable.
I'm not 100% convinced that this is by accident.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google beat their original competitors — Altavista, Excite, Yahoo!, and so on — with an incremental improvement, not a new model. At the time (2000-2003), their search was better and faster, certainly, but not several orders of magnitude better. In fact, Google was something of a reactionary model at the time, by rejecting the push for bloated, captive "web portals" and going back to the simpler, stripped-down user e…
Pagerank (TM) was a Google innovation and the reason Google had much better results than the others and it took many years for the SEO spammers to catch up. That revolution, combined with the philosophy of the speedy, focused homepage and the elimination of irrelevant results by always using the ‘AND’ operator was why their popularity exploded.
Despite this objective comparison, in users' view Google's results were much much better.
I remember a German CS professor telling me eyes in eyes with obviously a lot of schadenfreud "Google will kill you".
And I answered "No they will become as us, big, fat and ugly".
And an ad based revenue model does not work based on SEO. As as soon as the revenue (which is coupled with traffic) goes down you are inclined to just ad more ads or make ads more agressive, which counteracts good UX which will lead to further traffic loss, which leads to more ads...
Google is not dependend on SEO, but as a defacto monopolist in search in the western world on user traffic.
User traffic to search will go down from now on. Thx to AI assistants. Ads will go up, in aggressiveness and quantity, so their mai product will get worse and worse, fast.
So, Google is toast.
If they go down this road.
Or, they go the opposite way. Less ads, more focus on UX including AI Assistants. Revenue comes later.
But as we all know, Google will not go down that way. They are an ad business with a halfway decent search engine attached.