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Loon’s final flight

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Re: Loon’s final flight

#181

Post by pas »

pnw_hazor wrote: post #96
ehsankia wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have at least a dozen services that have over a billion users. Others not mentioned in your list: Youtube, Photos, Drive, Maps, Gmail, Docs. And probably slightly more trivial ones like translate, calendar, flights, news, finance, and other stuff that are kinda part of search. Their hardware/home line isn't doing that bad either.

Are any of those innovations? It seems to me they are all boring, obvious, copied, or purchased products that complement their ad selling business.

Maybe the innovation is that Google bought some interesting new translation/mapping/phoneOS thing and made it robust enough to power half the world?

Sure, they bought it because they saw that it will go nicely with their adtech thing.

Or who knows. Really. Google is very big. They always has been quirky and enormously successful and profitable. It's very hard to attribute causality to its actions retroactively, especially because even the small numbers are in the billions range, but they are always dwarfed by the adtech blob.

But there's room for nuance. 74% of their revenue was from adtech in 2019 (11 months, 162B USD)

But that means they made 40+ billion from other "stuff" ( https://d3jlwjv6gmyigl.cloudfront.net/images/2020/04/Google-... ).

One of the big problems of Google is that anything that does not integrate with adtech just doesn't really makes sense for them. They have no real model of what to do with things that are not adtech. Chat apps? Whatever the current flavor is. Social network? Yeah, we tried to copy FB, made everyone put +1 buttons everywhere, but ... did not really matter, as it was an insecure hack and it did not really give that oompfh to adtech that they expected.

But they could have kept G+. There's a constant need for a FB alternative. Every time FB fucks up a bunch of people would have tried G+. I'm not saying G+ was good, but shutting it did not make much sense. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Loon’s final flight

#182

Post by DEADBEEFC0FFEE »

ForHackernews wrote: post #167
Dylan16807 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surviving on the way to Mars isn't a huge leap in difficulty over a space station, and we have those on lock.

There's much greater radiation exposure away from Earth's magnetic field. I believe this is still an unsolved problem. Proposed solutions for shielding are heavy and expensive.

I though shielding with water was the way forward there.

Re: Loon’s final flight

#183

Post by sixti60 »

knorker wrote: post #175
sixti60 wrote: post #129

Sorry to be this guy, but I am quite happy this will not happen. The sky - our sky - is not a playground for tech companies. Imposing a mesh-grid of thousands of balloons in the sky is an incredible intrusion for people around the world who have not asked for anything. It's the same for mega constellations of satellites (Starlink). Would you be willing to have a company come and put unsolicited electronic equipment i…

> Or maybe ask "the owner" before you start, i.e. the citizens of the world. Are you under the impression that the sky and satellite space is unregulated, by the people's representatives? Huh.

Do you find the questions about sky and sattelite space are often addressed by people's representatives?

I don't think I heard it addressed even once on public media during major elections.

You'll probably say: "then change your representatives or do some lobying or choose representatives who care about this".

This is a little more complicated than this: people are busy with hundreds of other things when they vote, and the fact these questions are never addressed in public debates should not give an 'implicit consent' about "Ok, tech companies, you can do whatever you want with our sky. Dozens of thousands of new satelites? Ok, no problem, please do!"

Re: Loon’s final flight

#184

Post by ZephyrBlu »

rorykoehler wrote: post #86
refulgentis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_The_ moonshot, Waymo. People are sleeping on that you can hop in a perfectly safe robotaxi today, the ride along videos are stunning.

I don’t understand people saying full self driving is decades away. We have it always albeit in a very restricted geo fence.

I would apply the 90/90 rule here [0]. It looks ready, but I don't think their safety is up to scratch yet and I'm almost certain the cars aren't safe in adverse conditions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule

Re: Loon’s final flight

#185

Post by DEADBEEFC0FFEE »

runawaybottle wrote: post #67
Mistri wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo seems like it's nearing its final stages. I have high hopes!

Google has absolutely no choice but to make Waymo succeed with Apple and Tesla taking the space seriously. It’s not a moonshot, it’s an absolute necessity.

Only if that the market you want to win in. Where's the synergy between Waymo and online ads?

Re: Loon’s final flight

#186

Post by Dylan16807 »

Judgmentality wrote: post #180
Dylan16807 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should keep data in case of a crash but that's a minuscule amount. I don't see any need to keep a record of everything else for a full month.

They can be accused of a crash even if there isn't a crash though. And if they have no data to back up their side of the story, why would any court believe them? In other words - people can just randomly accuse them of hit-and-runs and they'd have nothing to say otherwise.

I don't see how it's any different from accusing random people of a hit and run.

Though enough data to disprove a hit and run wouldn't actually take up very much space. Medium-resolution camera views and some acceleration data? Sure, pop a single SSD in there and it'll hold more than a month's logs.

Re: Loon’s final flight

#187

Post by iainmerrick »

One thing that irks me a bit about Google X as a “moonshot factory” is that they seem to be claiming that they’re good at moonshots but I’m not sure that’s true. (I’m not saying they’re bad at it, just questioning that they have a special edge.)

I get the basic idea, that you try lots of big ambitious projects, and most of them will fail but some will hopefully stick; but how do you distinguish between a 5% success rate and a 1% rate, say?

Deep pockets and the willingness to place big long-term and medium-term bets is crucial, but it’s not everything you need. Does Google X have processes, people, notable successes they can point to to show that they really are good at moonshots?

Re: Loon’s final flight

#188

Post by shpx »

Tepix wrote: post #162
shpx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You connect to Loon balloons with your regular cellphone whereas StarLink requires a "pizza-box-sized" antenna. They solve slightly different problems.

"Pizza-box-sized" was a placeholder. The Starlink antenna ("Dishy") has a diameter of 59cm https://i.imgur.com/ULwOGxs.jpg

That's a 12 inch medium pizza, without the box. An antenna of that size can't be carried by normal people going about their daily lives.

More people are willing to buy a phone and a phone plan (Facebook was even willing to subsidize the plan in India with Internet.org) than buying a phone, a phone plan, an antenna and a StarLink plan. That's even more true for people who aren't internet users yet.

Re: Loon’s final flight

#189

Post by fakedang »

WanderPanda wrote: post #168
ogre_codes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the days of Google Moonshots are coming to a close. In general Google hasn't been very good at shooting for the moon. They've lost their leadership and vision and all that's left is a giant advertising behemoth. Did any of their moonshots really hit the mark or even come close?

Android was probably a moonshot at some point?!

Android was an acquisition

Re: Loon’s final flight

#190

Post by querez »

ForHackernews wrote: post #163
antupis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brain is doing great and Waymo probably at least hits close.

Is Brain doing great? From a few things people have said, it sounded like Brain was struggling so Google bought Deep Mind instead. All of the really cutting edge AI stuff has come out of Deep Mind, not Brain.

I strongly disagree. Without a shadow of a doubt, the most successful/important AI model of recent times is the Transformer (from Brain). As another example, the fastest accelerators, TPUs, are from Brain. If you only look at "amount of output" and use # publications at e.g. NeurIPS as proxy, Brain vastly outperforms Deepmind. Deepmind really exceeds at flashy and showy PR releases like AlphaStar, not so much at laying the groundwork for AI breakthroughs. (Though of course AlphaFold or AlphaGo were great).
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