Google I/O 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Google I/O 2021

events.google.com

96 pointsmfrw64 comments

I am really intrigued to see how this will work. https://health.google/health-research/imaging-and-diagnostic...

For me at least, minor dermatological issues have been something that I feel lazy enough(also a bit conscious) to not go to a dermatologist about. If there is something that can quickly help me figure out any OTC solution to it or some home remedy, I would love that.

From their Keynote today I definitely saw the renewed focus on their mission: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The new features introduced in Translation, Search, Photos and Health diagnosis along with that cool feature to search/find a specific clip within a video etc. by utilizing AI and ML at scale is pretty good.

Project Starline looks incredible. Wonder if it'll be affordable/viable for consumers.

Video of Project Starline: https://youtu.be/Q13CishCKXY

Interesting thing is that they don't show the participants touching the glass pane 'separating' them, whereas for that kind of situation it would be very very natural thing to do.

I guess the imagery would distort/degrade real fast when you start reaching out towards the glass pane (you would be out of camera's FoV), and that would break the magic.

I agree with everything you've said except for "and that would break the magic". We've already seen proofs of concept of "how natural does this kind of thing seem", in Star Trek and so on, and I can easily imagine not even noticing this kind of user error after a couple of minutes. Even if the screen burst out in simulated blue sparks when the person on the other end reached past the camera, I think that… probably doesn't break the immersion?

You "just" need conversation to be truly real-time, seriously low latency, and with really good audio and visual quality. Once you've got those, I can easily imagine crossing the threshold where you're speaking through a magic pane of glass rather than into a screen. Think of how you might find interacting with a literal magical artefact that did this.

I can't quite tell if they're doing this in the video, but you can project things out of a 3d display. You just have to avoid the object touching the sides of the screen. With that, you could have participants feel like their hands are in the same place without hitting glass.

You can see a bit of the visual degradation and artifacts when reaching toward the 'screen' in the video at 1:46/1:50, as the woman with a baby on her lap reaches her palm toward the screen.

"We want you to make a video all about this amazing thing we've made, but don't demonstrate it. Just show people talking about how awesome it is."

It is a very cool idea. Also seems possible to DIY in a less tech advanced way.

Eye contact seems like the hurdle for making it feel real. With a screen that large, it may feel like someone is looking below the head, which may feel off.

So... it's 8k, a big display ... ok I see they are doing something with depth modeling. Is that kinda like a 3d tv then?

Yeah that's how I'd describe it. 3D TV with 3D cameras. Looking forward to reading about the tech specs.

The new UI overhaul looks interesting:

https://www.theverge.com/22439777/android-12-design-features...

The privacy changes are a step in the right direction.

Here's hoping the privacy stuff is present in AOSP and not dependent on Play Services.

Haven't heard much positive feedback from other people testing 12 on their pixels when it comes to the UI changes. I'm still kinda on the fence but a lot could change by release. The privacy changes seem to be the only benefit to 12 so far personally. Which of course makes it worth the move.

If they've been using the Android 12 public DP, then they haven't seen this new UI yet.

The beta with UI overhaul was rolled out today I think.

They could win me over by putting in a rounded-corner slider. It looks like it would default at 11/10.

The new Material stuff feels to me like a gimmick. Basically just color skins on your screen the same way you can pick your own skin for your phone case.

Sure, people will use it, but it's not very clever and won't make anyone more productive.

Don't underestimate how much lay consumers value colors and personalization.

you know, on some level I enjoy the abstract graphic design in this UI change, but I get the sense this resembles a kind of fast fashion more than genuine progress towards better UI design.

(Not that the iphone is any different here, if anything, apple often seems to move further from their professed design principles to pursue a kind of tech fashion.)

Apparently Tizen and Wear OS are merging, curious to see what it means in practice.

Regarding Android, the usual kind of keynote as if everyone would be getting the last Android version.

So true. I remember how big a bummer Android keynotes were when I did lots of mobile dev. "Oh, cool, that'll be fun to use... in three or four years".

Their Java bloat was borderline for a constrained device that is a smartphone, always needed double the memory/cpu/battery than iOS alternative, it couldn't scale down to a smart watch, they are stuck and went with a partnership with SAMSUNG, what a shame

Some people are even saying they are about to fully embrace tizen with Dart & Flutter as a 1st class citizen, some are even saying they'll use it as a foundation for their next gen Android smartphones

Tizen has first class support for .NET in case you missed it.

And it isn't like they are that good with their C coding efforts.

https://www.theregister.com/2017/07/12/samsungs_tizen_no_lon...

So I am curious what the merge means in practice.

https://github.com/flutter-tizen

the people in that repo are working for samsung, need more evidence? :D

Tizen.NET has surface API for .net, it's totally different

TizenRT is where the core lives, and that is what Google is talking about, coming months will be interesting

The assistive technology showcases are super impressive and inspiring. Is there like a website to get an overview of these efforts?

A password manager that doesn't support sharing passwords? Why would I bother importing passwords from another password manager for less functionality?

Sundar is perhaps the most uninspiring CEO from any major American tech company when presenting. He's talking about amazing tech like quantum computing, but he sounds like he's talking about a Ford Taurus.

Is this just his external-facing persona, or is he like this internally too?

I find most of the Apple speakers overproduced, overwrought, to the point that it comes off as in-authentic. There's only so many Johnny Ive superlatives you can layer into a talk -- beautiful, magical, amazing, incredible, etc before it becomes a meme, a joke.

I prefer the good old days of I/O, even before I/O, Google Developer Days, when geeky engineers did the presenting. When they got excited about something, it was unscripted and actually real excitement.

(I'm a Google employee), and I feel they are following in Apple's footsteps too much, especially the MadeByGoogle presentations. I/O still retains some of that authentic, geeky, cringe factor that makes it seem more connected to developers as opposed to consumers.

Do you think that's your bias speaking?

I find him to be very approachable, honest and calm presenter both internally and externally.

Yes, I'm sure it's a personal preference.

Musk and Page and Bezos all present with a bit of giddy schoolboy energy. It's clear they are all super excited to be building the future and can't wait to tell you about their cool new tech. They aren't polished presenters, but it doesn't matter.

Cook and Nadella are both very polished and calm, but still manage to convey a lot of excitement about their companies.

That leaves Zuckerberg and Pichai, who are, in my view, too flat and robotic.

Panos Panay is the best at this. I think he even beats Apple execs at exuding earnest excitement for the products he's demoing.

+Jensen Huang in the former category

I'm sure, and he's an effective speaker. But that's not the same as being inspiring, charismatic...stuff you need to be an effective leader. May be Google employees can pitch in?

I like that he isn't particularly charismatic. Neither are Larry or Sergey of course.

I like how authentic Sundar comes across (also true for the other speakers). I think the live format helps.

Far preferable to the "product manager over-emoting and constantly gesturing while trying to be genuine reading a script that was written for them" that characterizes most of the rest of the presentations, IMO.

Haha. This is my feeling. And using words they would never use! Max emotion, max buzzword blah.

Maybe he's just down-to-Earth, honest in his emotions, and doesn't like artificially hyping things up? Sounds good to me.

As a non-American, I have a different perception. For me, Sundar is one of the few CEOs that doesn't sound like a maniac robotic snake oil seller. I find it refreshing and inspiring to get a CEO that talks line a normal human being addressing normal human beings.

I think it's just a cultural thing. When it comes to level of histrionism, Americans are on one extreme of the spectrum while some Asian cultures are on the opposite one. Sundar seems to me to be in the exact sweet spot.

Tim Cook?

Tim Cook sounds like someone who is genuinely excited to tell you about a Ford Taurus.

Sundar spends most of his internal facing time talking about racial equity and less about actual business.

Source: Googler friends.

That's ridiculous. There are a handful of emails about the former topic and there are numerous hour long events where Sundar talks about other aspects the business.

Meh, the outrage crowd in Hacker News is ridiculous. Any level of effort to make a company more inclusive as criticized as the company being 'too woke'. Meanwhile, Google's market cap has exploded in recent years.

Lots of people too scared of 'cancel culture' (read: being caught and having to pay the consequences) around here.

Not a Googler but I think that's great, personally. Google has already found a stable business model and racial equity is a problem.

This is why I've turned down a couple recruiters for Google. It's just not worth it anymore for me.

Would you consider working at Apple? They are also quite vocal about issues like racial justice. They still seem to be praised as an employer, though.

I thought Apple was looked down as a cult secret culture kind of place. Not sure I've heard any praise by anyone aside from large pay and fun to work on cool products.

Both of those things apply to pretty much every big company. As far as reputation as an employer goes, Apple is certainly ahead of Facebook and Amazon.

In what regard is Apple better? Pay / Options / Wfh / office parties, freebies, offices, 20% personal projects?

When inflation sets food prices skyrocketing, cafes and microkitchens will look better than ever as part of the benefits.

Really? Externally Google gives the appearance that it doesn't care about racial equity.

https://about.google/intl/ALL_uk/commitments/racialequity/

Meanwhile, Google's market cap has tripled during his tenure as CEO.

Maybe being flashy and showy isn't all that important after all.

Since he became CEO, the company has gone up 234%. The S&P500 has gone up 101%.

But Microsoft went up 364%, Apple went up 320%, And Amazon went up 420%.

So if you're just looking at market performance, while he outpaced the S&P500, he underperformed his biggest competitors.

Meanwhile, Satya Nadella isn't flashy and Jeff Bezos hasn't been involved in any kind of keynote speech on anything related to Amazon in years.

So my point stands: flashiness doesn't correlate with performance.

If the top priority is to satisfy Worthington's law, sure. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Worthington%27s_law

You make the mistake of believing that market cap is the only or most important way to measure the success of a business. It isn't. Not even remotely.

Starting off with new collaboration tooling integration is pretty on target for 2021!

Getting a big vibe of yesterday's "Slack Destroying American Companies"[1]. I didn't actually click through & read, which would have lead me to finding out it's Matt Taibbi having a discussion with Antonio Garcia-Martinez (who personally I am not interested in hearing from). But the title reminded me of a part of Ezra Klein interviewing Cal Newport about his new book, "A World Without Email"[2]. In the interview they spend quite a while discussing how it seems like the whole world is presently stuck with Slack, how there's so little visible mainstream competition. Cal has been engaged with this question of workflow & tech & collaboration for a number years, often from a somewhat anti- standpoint, with books such as "Deep Work" and "Digital Minimalism". Hearing two sharp minds talking about collaboration was incredibly enriching to me.

Notably, the collaboration tools shown at the beginning of IO are for explicit collaboration times. They're not marketed as always on communication devices, not a replacement for slack. But they both are about modern tech-enabled collaboration, which is an interesting topic, and one that seems like we're only just starting to really dive into. Long long long after Engelbart's Mother of All Demos (52.4 years after).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27191181

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...

They still haven't launched a lot of the Google Workspace features they announced last year. Don't hold your breath. Some of the features, loke Meet in Docs, are just the same features they announced last year just announced again.

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