Google and Ambient Computing
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
I'll take 80s dystopian cyberpunk over this crap any time of the day.
But if people choose these products because the convenience is worth it in their estimation, revealed preferences and all that.
Maybe this suggests a counter-product? An offline, all data is local, product opportunity. Who will build it?
"is worth it" requires people to be fully aware of what's going on.
I've described what some of these devices are doing based on product announcements, patents, investigative news stories, and that sort of thing. I've had numerous people tell me that I'm wrong. That they don't believe companies are doing this.
This has caused me to come to the conclusion that people aren't aware of the trade-offs or what is going on.
That lack of understanding concerns me.
But what exactly is going on? It's not like google going to blackmail you for 10K USD in cash, single payment please, once it will learn that you are going to the same pub and spend 2 hours there daily, "or we will let your boss know".
It will show you more relevant ads, right. But do you really expect an average person to be scared by this?
I’d love to see a counter product but more than that I’d like to see more standardized and short/brief lay person understandable policies. Maybe like a nutrition label but for consumer data.
Google can't change that.
At least the money from those adware products goes toward deep tech r&d. It could be worse.
For ambient computing, my favorite things are my Apple Watch and iPods. True enough, using Siri and these devices is using black box devices, but for now I am OK with them. I trust Apple, for now.
It would be even cooler if a certain percentage of the rate was a "designate your target" that allowed you to directly fund things like google reader etc.
It's also kind of crazy they dont have some kind of pricing sheet that shows me all the subscriptions available to me, along with some bundle options. I have to search out each product to see its price. It's like they dont want me to look for ways to give them money.
I'm not saying it cannot be done well, but there's certainly an overhead if you have to be explicit about what costs how much to whom.
It sounds like walking through a forest of ferns.
Since then, I've seen more of this trend. It's hard to find information about how anything works now because most the results are commercial - SEOed to be high in the rankings.
I'd like an option to screen out commercial results in favor of more informational ones. They're supposed to be helping me find information right? But in reality they've shifted to feeding me marketing information.
That isn't the first time this happens either. It's extremely frustrating to not be able to locate a page that you know is out there.
That kind of thing hasn't worked in... god, at least a decade, at this point. Not just because the Web is larger, but because search doesn't seem to work like that anymore and also everything got way spammier. "Clever" searching is a skill I was once (judging by people's reactions) notably good at but that is entirely obsolete, but not because the function it served was replaced by something better—it's just gone now.
If you can't find a library (or engine) in your domain that has the operation, then you're kind of S.O.L., and have to start from first principles.
I don't blame commercial results and SEO for this. It's not like you used to be able to see a menu of rich choices for this, and now they're lost in the noise of companies with a mission.
It's actually not "insanely complicated", and there are resources around, like https://pages.mtu.edu/~shene/COURSES/cs3621/NOTES/spline/NUR... and https://www.amazon.com/NURBS-Book-Monographs-Visual-Communic...
> It's not like you used to be able to see a menu of rich choices for this, and now they're lost in the noise of companies with a mission.
I mentioned just yesterday that DDG results are better for me, and this case is an example. "NURBs splitting algorithm" turns up a bunch of results.
Hi, your first link talks about NURBS curves, not NURBS surfaces. Cutting a surface in half is significantly more complicated than cutting a curve in half.
And your second link is to a commercial result, an entire book. Presumably because the topic is complicated enough that people are willing to pay $69 to $78 to understand the challenge well enough.
If your DDG search for "splitting a NURBS surface in half" are successful, I'd love to see the results.
No, it's actually the Exact same thing. Just applied independently to each of the curves in one direction.
But none of that is really important. 15 years ago it would be trivial to learn how to do it with a Google search. Today not so.
Also, a book result is still better for me than the commercial tool links which contain no math or theory what so ever.
I can easily imagine situations where I would not be happy with that result.
If that works for you, that's great.
> Also, a book result is still better for me than the commercial tool links which contain no math or theory what so ever.
Searching Google for "NURBS Book", "NURBS Course", "NURBS filetype:pdf" all work great for me.
At a guess, most of the people who use Google are using tools, not making them. Yes, Google favors results that make the majority happy. I see that as a feature. If I'm in the minority, yes, I do need to become a more sophisticated searcher.
https://computergraphics.stackexchange.com/questions/340/spl...
I am rather curious about Stradia's longevity.
I know this is a caricature but it's how I get my kicks.
To wit, the conditions that the engineers inhabit in their lives has basically zero resemblance with the technology experience of the vast majority of people. Designing websites for 4K screens only, expecting <20ms latency over home lines when everyone else in the house is streaming video to their own personal devices, etc. One thing we can do collectively as an industry is put in place guidelines which steer development to minimalism and attention to the resources available to the median user.
If you're more of a hardcore player, you may feel the extra latency as all your reflexes being off. It's harder to make jumps, perform combos, line up shots, etc.
In my case, I absolutely can't stand network streaming latency. Even 50ms is completely unacceptable to me outside of turn-based games, and I go out of my way to look into the input lag for any new monitor or TV I buy. BUT you might be different, you should give it a shot.
Ha-ha, I wish I could switch over from Comcast.
In many places in the US people already have the best internet that can be provided to their home, and it's not good enough.
I would switch my internet provider for literally anything.
The problem is I live in the country's main technological hub (the bay area), and I fucking can't. It's infuriating.
The world would have a lot less great products if this is how it was always done.
This is why startups continue to be the primary innovation source. They are willing to go through the hard grind to find product/market fit over multiple years.
Most of the products purchased by the big guys are at least 5-7yrs old (WhatsApp, YouTube, Waze, Looker, etc). There are some rare exceptions like Instagram and Android which were both 2yrs old at acquisition.
They just aren't staying around to collect the (relative to Google) meager profits. I wish more companies knew when to call it quits.
Maximizing profits (and innovation) over time may mean closing something profitable now, and focusing on new potential profits. Thats great.
That isn't a Google problem. That's our opportunity. I can't think of a single company known for riding Google's coat tails. Why aren't people responding to the enormous wealth of Google by emulating them? We don't have to be beholden to a few huge tech companies there is space for so many more players.
I try to see things I can do when other people tell me a story about who is to blame for something. It's all a matter of framing.
Why didn't something pop up and eat up the success left in the wake of a market Google left, like reader or inbox or wave?
I'm more than happy to wait for years if I have to in case something develops accidental mass market traction in which case Google will likely support it long term.
I wonder if Google realizes how much this works against them, without 'early adopters' you don't have much chance of success, even at Google's scale. Burn your early adopters often enough and you'll end up with unused new services.
I agree it sucks when support ends but I enjoy it checking it out while it exists.
There are alternatives, of course, but the burden is on me to migrate. When I'm forced to keep migrating away from Google products, I find it less and less appealing to continue using more of their products.
This may be an unpopular sentiment, but at least for me, I find a certain indefinable pleasure in manual tasks, to a certain extent. Slipping a CD into a player or a cassette into a deck or having to browse through a shelf to find the book I want. I don't think people will realise the "ambience" of these minor things we do hundreds of times a day almost unconsciously until practically everything becomes voice/thought activated and almost anything you want is delivered right to where you are. I believe that there is a certain happy medium between entirely manual and being too automated. Obviously this will be different for different tasks but we must keep in mind that the aim of corporations will always be to make them fully automated because that way they and their services become indispensable for the world. Our aim should be to try to tread the happy medium where automation makes significant difference but does not turn us into instantly-gratified, grown-up children.
Edit: Not sure how this is even debatable down-voters?
- companies used to respect us.
- computers used to belong to us.
The equation changed when companies found a way to charge advertisers big money by inverting these equations.
Google is just the poster child for all this, but there are lots of other players that have cashed in.
It feels the same with Duck Duck Go vs. Google since at least 5 years now? I don't really care how it is financed in the background, i care about how much hassle it is to find something, or even being able to find it at all. Google fails there massively for me, and i wonder why that is? Maybe because it is Anglocentric? Or even US-centric? But then the same should apply to Duck Duck Go, which isn't the case, because it works fine for me. I know it's using inferior indices, but it doesn't matter when the better ones are so overblown that i fail to find the needle in the impossibly large haystack. I'm even using other search engines before i fall back to Google, in case of not finding something. Google has gone from something good to last ditch only for me.
That was for general search. Now to the maps. With the exception of satellite/air-imagery it leaves much to be desired, and that is the labeling of places. Which fails worldwide. That algorithm is just crap on higer zoom levels. At first i thought it would be because of my location, some country far away over the Atlantic in old Europe, but it's not. I recognized that while reading something about the history of building railroads trough the Rocky Mountains, and the Googlemaps made no sense at all, because it either omits small places altogether, or puts the labels where they absolutely don't belong. Bingmaps meanwhile were a joy to use, everything was there, at the right places, and it ran even faster! LOL?
Then there is this thing with business listings and reviews in the map which is useless in my locations. I don't read them anymore, because any i have read were wrong, or did otherwise not meaningfully apply. I don't know why that is, is it just vandalism from random people, coercion of services like Yelp, or whatver? I don't care anymore, because USELESS!
Then general accuracy about what is where, and how to get there in my favored modes of transport. In my locations Open Streetmaps wins. EVERY TIME! (I know that is not applicable in general, because coverage/accuracy thereof varies regionally)
What else? Hm. Youtube. What can i say? Expect to get dirty if walking into a market for stupid pigs. Though it has not only some rare, but many pearls. Just difficult to find them in all that stinking shit. Apart from that, what are they thinking if i'm listening to some ambient psychill/progressive psytrance mix which goes about 1 to 2 hours and they are interupting that with at least 4 adverts per hour for stuff which is totally unrelated and i have no interest in? Who thinks of something like that? Are they on crack?
Is there anything i like about Google? Yeah, i like EARTH. Glorious! My digital globe. Great. But i don't need that, it's more of a toy for me.
So, emperors new clothes for all the gaslighted androids, anyone? :-)
The goal derives from the mission statement; it's an implementation strategy for "universally accessible and useful."
The vision is correct but the naming is off. Something like “embodied computing” would convey the key difference better than “ambient”, namely that the user is at the center. And yes this is a fancypants way of saying wearables.
But this is a nice attempt from google to paint the future as an extension of something it is good at (managing lots of ambient cloud-like things) while downplaying that what we’re really talking about is wearables (not really a strong suit for Big G).
Literally everything there ships in a month, dude.
i remarked to my wife last night that the biggest difference in the ux between the two was that my android was always a phone, and this iphone has become a platform/ux that's larger than a single device, a whole set of humanistic little devices -- airpods and the home ipad in my case. i'd always thought i couldn't switch because i use google services, but those are largely commodities now -- i've got a wide range of good enough options for photos/music/email/cal/etc. -- the google android apps are a little better, but not enough so to make a difference. even siri has been good enough so far, though my queries aren't especially complicated.
The first thing I do with a new phone is turn Siri off because I don’t want to use my phone that way. So it doesn’t matter to me which is better or which is worse.
However privacy is important to me so I use that as a driver of purchases.
When it comes to voice recognition and language modeling we are still rubbing sticks together to make fire. But Google and Amazon are marketing their voice products like it's a zippo lighter.
They really have a chicken and the egg problem. They need more data input to train their AI and make the service better, but they need the service to be better before more people will adopt it and feed data to train the AI.