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Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice

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Re: Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice

#491

Post by Dylan16807 »

ambrose2 wrote: post #410
Dylan16807 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was fake about unlimited google drive? There were some people using petabytes. The eventual removal of that tier and anything even close speaks to Google's general issues with cancelling services, but that doesn't mean it was less real while it existed.

What about when gmail was released and the storage was advertised as increasing forever, but at first they just increased it infinitesimally slower and then stopped increasing it all.

Oh, long before google drive existed?

I don't remember the "increasing forever" ever being particularly fast. I found some results from 2007 and 2012 both saying it was 4 bytes per second, So it's true that the number hasn't increased in ten years, but that last increase was +5GB all by itself. They've done a reasonable job of keeping up.

Arguably they should have kept adding a gigabyte each year, based on the intermittent boosts they were giving, but by that metric they're only about 5GB behind.

Re: Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice

#492

Post by throw__away7391 »

nyxtom wrote: post #488

Silicon Valley is plagued by over promising far too early and fooling everyone we are years ahead of where we actually are. Estimates are always way off, and claims and even fake demos are almost always oversold to get investors.

Which means anyone who isn’t engaged in the hype cycle looks bad by comparison.

Still I would distinguish between genuine optimism and cynical exaggeration. If you go back and read what was being said in and around the 70s about technology and watch the demos they gave…it always makes me feel a little sad for them. People really thought so many things were right around the corner, e.g. if a computer can beat a human star chess player, surely understanding natural language or driving a car will be easy. There were so many things being made like primitive robots that could follow a line painted on the floor, that in a controlled environment seemed so promising but the realization of the vision would take decades longer than predicted. Without their efforts we would not be where we are today.

Re: Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice

#493

Post by magicalhippo »

im3w1l wrote: post #484
10u152 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related, I work with industrial control systems. We’d call this “smoke and mirrors”. Sometimes the client would insist on seeing a small portion of a large project working well before it was ready. They’d misunderstand that 90% of the bulk of the work is not visible to the user but they’d want to see a finished state. We’d set up a dummy HMI and have someone pressing buttons on it for the demo, and someone in the nex…

To me it sounds like a useful thing, for communicating your vision and getting early feedback on whether you are building the right thing. Like uh, a live action blueprint. Let's say the client is like "Email???? That's no good. It needs to be a text message". Now you have saved yourself the trouble of implementing email.

I've done similar things by manually inserting and updating rows in the database etc to "demo" some process.

Like you say it can be useful as a way to uncover overall process or UX issues before all the internals are coded.

I'm quite open about what I'm doing though, as most of our clients are reasonable.

Re: Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice

#494

Post by qingcharles »

DonnyV wrote: post #259

This is so crazy. Google invented transformers which is the bases for all these models. How do they keep fumbling like this over and over. Google Docs created in 2006! Microsoft is eating their lunch. Google creates the ability to change VM's in place and makes a fully automated datacenter. Amazon and Microsoft are killing them in the cloud. Google has been working on self driving longer than anyone. Tesla is catchin…

I demo'd a full browser office suite in 1998 called Office Wherever (o-w.com). It used Java applets to do a lot of the more tricky functions.

Shopped it around VCs. Got laughed out of all the meetings. "Companies storing their documents on the Internet?! You're out of your mind!"

Re: Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice

#495

Post by chasd00 »

WWLink wrote: post #438
10u152 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related, I work with industrial control systems. We’d call this “smoke and mirrors”. Sometimes the client would insist on seeing a small portion of a large project working well before it was ready. They’d misunderstand that 90% of the bulk of the work is not visible to the user but they’d want to see a finished state. We’d set up a dummy HMI and have someone pressing buttons on it for the demo, and someone in the nex…

the phrase I've heard is "dog and pony show" lol

The industry term is “art of the possible”.

Re: Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice

#496

Post by corndoge »

benbristow wrote: post #409
vitorgrs wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft demoed Office Web Apps in 2008 L.A PDC it seems: https://www.wired.com/2008/10/pdc-2008-look-out-google-docs-...

Funny, I asked Google Bard to guess what the actual product name was from the comment. "It was probably Office Web Apps. It was a web-based office suite that was introduced in 2008. It included Word Web App, Excel Web App, Powerpoint Web App, and OneNote Web App. It was not SharePoint, but it was based on SharePoint technology."

Does bard browse the web yet? Is it possible it read the parent comment?

Wild that we have to ask these questions.

Re: Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice

#497

Post by godelski »

im3w1l wrote: post #484
10u152 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related, I work with industrial control systems. We’d call this “smoke and mirrors”. Sometimes the client would insist on seeing a small portion of a large project working well before it was ready. They’d misunderstand that 90% of the bulk of the work is not visible to the user but they’d want to see a finished state. We’d set up a dummy HMI and have someone pressing buttons on it for the demo, and someone in the nex…

To me it sounds like a useful thing, for communicating your vision and getting early feedback on whether you are building the right thing. Like uh, a live action blueprint. Let's say the client is like "Email???? That's no good. It needs to be a text message". Now you have saved yourself the trouble of implementing email.

> To me it sounds like a useful thing

To me it sounds like lying...

Context matters a ton though. Are you presenting the demo as if the events are being automatically triggered (as in the OP) or are you presenting as this is your plan? Explicitly. If it is implicit, it's deceptive. If you explicitly do not say what parts are faked, it is lying. Of course in a magic show this is totally okay because you're going to the show with the explicit intention to be lied to, but I'm not convinced the same is true for business but I'm sure someone could make a compelling argument.

Re: Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice

#498

Post by godelski »

lizard wrote: post #452
gardenhedge wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this cheating? It sounds like cheating and reflects quite poorly on you.

This can depend a lot on the context, which we don't have a lot of. Looking at this a different way, they gave first-year students, likely with no established pre-requistites, an open-ended project with fixed hardware but no expectation to submit the final project for review. If they wanted to verify the students actually developed a working program, they could have easily asked for the Pi's to be returned along with…

> If they wanted to verify the students actually developed a working program, they could have easily asked for the Pi's to be returned along with the source code.

Wait, is your argument honestly "it's not cheating because they just trusted the students"?

There's a huge difference between demoing something as "this is what we did" vs "we didn't quite get there, but this is what we're envisioning."

Edit: You all are responding very weirdly. The cheating is because you're presenting "something" that is not that thing. Put a dog in a dress and call it a pretty woman and I'll call you a conman.

Re: Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice

#499

Post by godelski »

gardenhedge wrote: post #439
hot_gril wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of top-down direction is what allowed that situation. Microsoft is MBA-driven and usually has a coherent product lineup, including messaging. Also, "had." Google cleaned things up. They still sometimes do stuff just cause, but it's a lot less now. I still feel like Meet using laggy VP9 (vs H.264 like everyone else) is entirely due to engineer stubbornness.

The same Microsoft that squandered MSN messenger and Skype and then brought us the abomination that is MS teams?

The same Microsoft that recently brought us "New Teams" and "New Outlook" and gave us a reskinned version of the same programs but now we have it installed twice?
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