I/O 2022
blog.google
blog.google
When Google IO started it was a nice fun tech presentation with a lot of side classes showing devs how to work with these new google technologies.
Now, it's mostly just google introducing new products to the press.
What went wrong?
There's a popular and cynical meme that people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are just marketing bullshitters that don't actually do anything useful. It's laughably false and easily disproved. And yet it seems to comfort cynical/pessimistic/unhappy/ignorant people, of which many exist, and so it prevails.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517707521343082496?ref_...
With great power comes great responsibility.
I find him genuine, funny, atypical and giving a hard time to people that want him to conform.
Progressives hate him. I’ve never seen any logic behind it. It is just that Elon doesn’t share their vision of scarcity driven, alarmist, stagnant, crime ridden, woke, depopulating, unionized and equal-outcomes based society.
The entire progressive platform has been hijacked, not the Obama era left-wing. Obama was pro-Elon Musk and privatization of Space industry.
IMO there are no leaders that inspire more than Elon and late Steve Jobs.
So here… I laid out the entire problem in plain words why people hate Elon. 100% political.
Provided you with reasons why I find him inspiring and others don’t.
While Apple has achieved some moderately useful advances you have to divide the amount of progress given by the amount of money captured. Apple has an almost negligible ratio in that regard. Musk has achieved even less.
What kind of evidence would convince you? Wikipedia has summaries. Of course, they necessarily lack the context required to deeply understand the topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Innovations_and_des...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Business_career
> Apple has an almost negligible ratio in that regard. Musk has achieved even less.
I challenge you to give evidence for these assertions. I would be convinced if you explained how you came to this conclusion and explained how you calculated the terms of this ratio.
> It's laughably false and easily disproved.
Then disprove it, instead of relying on an ad hominem assumption of what's going on inside someone else's brain. As it stands all you've done is claim that a criticism exists and that the people who state that criticism have moral failings, which does not make them wrong.
That would presume we're talking about people with approximately equivalent knowledge that simply come to different, but reasonable, conclusions.
But this is not the case. What I see in this meme is people betraying their ignorance and motivated reasoning at every turn. There's nothing knowledgeable or reasonable about their assertions. It's always highly vitriolic and dismissive toxicity. It's not that they're simply mistaken about certain facts, and can be corrected, it's that they're transparently ignorant and/or acting in bad faith.
For example, it's extremely uncommon, maybe even unheard of, for someone with a deep knowledge of technology history to agree with these kinds of dismissals of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. I've never seen someone able to discuss the topic at a high level that won't readily acknowledge their contributions, even if they can be very critical of them in certain ways. As one example among many: historian and professor Walter Isaacson wrote well respected books about Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. He is currently writing one about Elon Musk.
But c'mon. You're really just playing dumb. We all know what SpaceX/Tesla and Apple have done, and (I think) we all know the role Musk and Jobs played in their success. And the reason we all know these things is precisely because of how important what they've done is. It's self-evident.
So, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that you're not acting in good faith. And that's why I answered indirectly.
But, okay, what "proof" would you find convincing?
Until then, it’s like the stuff Boeing, Lockheed, ULA etc. have spent even longer developing and have also not reached orbit with.
I doubt you or anyone else would bet significant money that Starship won't reach orbit. If so, I'd be happy to accept.
For the record, I don't think you can point to any project even remotely equivalent in terms of capability or progress from Boeing, Lockheed, or ULA. I'd be happy if they were doing nearly as well as SpaceX.
My other examples: Starlink, Tesla, and Dragon have clearly been "built" and shipped. Starlink is the hands of consumers, is actively helping Ukraine for military and humanitarian purposes, Tesla has shipped millions of vehicles, and Dragon Crew had another successful rendezvous with ISS days ago.
I could spend a lot more time providing examples but consider these to be more than sufficient to disprove the claim that Elon Musk's companies haven't "actually built anything he announces" in "years".
True, but it isn't as if SpaceX doesn't have a track record for hiring some pretty ambitious targets with their progression of Falcon 1 →Falcon 9 →Falcon Heavy. Admittedly, Starship's planned use of the new Raptor engines seems risky, but the DOD did fund a prototype-and-test contract that presumably concluded successfully a few years ago. While the results of those tests aren't public, there have been no leaks to the contrary, at any rate, and no changes in the planned use of Raptor have been announced (and SpaceX hasn't generally been at all shy about announcing changes to their plans).
I think it's a pretty safe bet right now that Starship will launch and that they will get it working reliably, and that they will have to blow up a few along the way to make those things happen.
Now since they have run out of problems to solve they are inventing problems so they can solve them.
I don't watch the Google presentations, but I'm an avid consumer of Apple's.
That said, even I'm disappointed with the state of technology today. There's still plenty of fruit to be harvested at all levels.
But all I ever see from Apple and Google is variations on "How do I get together with a bunch of people I already know for Thai food in an area that I can walk to?" Or "How do I get through my morning, which is completely predictable and never varies in even the slightest way from one day to the next?"
Here's a softball for both of them:
Using their maps app, allow me to choose a starting point, a destination, and a departure time. Then show me all of the coffee shops within x distance of that route that will still be open for one hour when I pass that location.
(Spoiler alert: it's not)
And a lot of the seemingly groundbreaking announcements then don't go on to pan out either (I'm thinking of Magic Leap here). If you don't care about realism/follow-through, then you have very exciting announcements; just don't expect anything announced to ever pan out.
The only exception is the last announcement which is them trying to re-enter the race for AR/XR glasses which again some thought they gave up.
This acquisition is the reason why they are trying again: [0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/google-acquires-north-augmen...
Is "XR" a typo for VR, or is there another new R that I should learn about?
They should name them more like cars where you can always expect there to be the latest revision each year, but you never expect it to be something completely new that you need to upgrade to.
We need the iPhone (2023) and the Pixel (2023). You would just say you have "an iPhone" and if for whatever reason it is necessary you could say it is a 2023 model.
They tried this with the iPad 3 IIRC. Was just "The New iPad" but they then reverted back the next year.
It's a phone. It does phone things.
It's likely the tech industry copied them.
I think the fact that they are in those high numbers already shows that they "stopped pretending like it is going to be an exciting brand new product every single year". The numbering there is pretty straightforward compared to e.g. the Macbook namings, or the convoluted naming of other brands with stacked variation signifiers, like the "Xiaomi 11 lite 5G NE".
I'm confused, while Apple has silly naming conventions for their operating system, the Macbook line doesn't have that at all. It's just the Macbook (and the Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air), Apple doesn't even give them different names or years.
Am I missing something that isn't incredibly straightforward about the Macbook naming?
Just that it isn't. The "(new) MacBook" (without any addition) most recently existed 2015-2019, and I personally found it very confusing, as it was thinner than a MacBook Air and with that breaking the previous expectations that were set up by the product line naming.
Placing all the blame on the naming of the MacBooks is probably overblown, but I feel like the individual lines of MacBooks have had a expectation/consistency problem for 10+ years now and throwing in the "new MacBook" into the mix for some time didn't help it.
I like the version number being explicit and visible. You know what you’re getting. Pretending versions don’t exist just reminds me of OEMs swapping out components but keeping the same model number, making it impossible to know whether you are buying one built to the original design or to a cheaper design.
Yes. I haven't yet watched talks from this IO, but it was exactly my impression from last year's IO and Chrome Dev Summit. There are some speakers, mostly dev rels, who clearly love speaking and are great at it; but most of the speakers were just woodenly reading from the screen. As if they are unaware that written language is different from spoken language, and it takes rare skills to write a speech and then read it back to the audience in such a way that would sound natural and engaging.
As long as Chrome and the NDK stay around, I am good and don't care anymore whatever version I can only use 5 years from now with already deprecated APIs.
Most people are bad. Really. Sorry to be blunt, but it is what it is. A bit of training and a bit of rehearsal would go a long way. I am shocked that big events like this one do not try to invest more in preparing the speakers. It wouldn't take much.
Look at Elon's keynotes, they are TERRIBLE from a public speaking perspective, but excellent content that generally is interesting. Also no one perceives them as inauthentic, just off-hand-ish. It works.
That would be a "wannabe" professional speaker, not an actual one, imho.
the pros are cheesy as hell.
[1] https://twitter.com/jasonbosco/status/1524483471988727809?s=...
Did they really mess up skin tone recognition that bad that they needed three different solutions to it? (I feel like I missed some major fuckup on their end)
https://blog.google/products/assistant/assistant-io-2022/
https://blog.google/products/search/monk-skin-tone-scale/
https://blog.google/technology/research/ai-monk-scale-skin-t...
"People think we're lumping them into racial categories. But we're actually lumping them into slightly narrower racial categories!"
imagine trying to explain to aliens from another planet 500 years from now why 500 years ago we decided to a.) include skin tone modifiers to begin with and b.) only allow for the gradation of skin colors that we do. beyond ridiculous.
EDIT: I forgot to mention how insanely ridiculous it is that we have these skin tone modifiers, but they don't even work for all "people" emoji, because of the obvious issue of rendering cartoon human faces in a way that isn't considered a racist caricature for many races. this makes sense of course, but I can't understand why, when this argument came up, they didn't just choose to scrap the whole idea instead of implementing it and restricting it to a subset of "people" emoji.
(No idea why you think other skin tones can’t be added later).
because why would we add further bloat and implementation complexity to something that is already bloated and complex to implement?
This is kind of how I felt when looking at the scale just now, because none of the 10 really look like me. Maybe it's supposed to be a round-down/up sort of thing, or maybe I should calibrate my display?
Given the history, one could make an argument that they represent Asians rather than Caucasians (it's always seemed odd to me that we ended up with this name for white(r) people, but such is life).
It's a very nice technology and is an example of permanent whole body genetic mutation via epigenetics.The issue is that it is irreversible.. The converse, a whitening substance does not exist yet but could exist in theory, by antagonizing the melanin receptors.
[0] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-LEGO-minifigures-have-yellow-he...
then you take the history of emoji into account and you see that that doesn't really work as an explanation at all. it's like you (and everyone else who makes this inane argument) are trying to make something that's not white-people-centric, white-people-centric, just so you can complain about it being white-people-centric.
It is how Lego originated. See discussion at [0]. Early on they had a limited palette and would use yellow for caucasians and asians and at times used black for POC and red for native americans. The time where everything was yellow is also quite limited - and there was pushback from non-cacuasians until they were forced to include skin colours in NBA sets.
[0] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-LEGO-minifigures-have-yellow-he...
1978-2003 is hardly a limited timespan in the history of LEGO!
> and there was pushback from non-cacuasians until they were forced to include skin colours in NBA sets.
right, because this is when they decided to make minifigs look like real people, instead of imaginary, race-neutral-ish, yellow people, once they got into licensing the appearance of real people for their minifigs!
The longest running cartoon show in history (The Simpsons) uses yellow to represent white people, while POC are brown and black.
I guess you missed the day Yellow Peril was covered in history class.
Its an emotionally appealing but logically nonsensical justification for bigotry. And particularly appealing to people who are more interested in power than actual equality.
It would be pretty terrible if a historically "dominant" demographic felt persecuted because of equal options with emoji colors.
>Excluding skin color and gender is being blind to prejudice, not fighting it.
Which implies that historic and current prejudice must be corrected with more prejudice. Which is inconsistent with inclusiveness and equality. And we've all seen how this works in practice - certain races and one gender in particular are expected to prejudge other participants and cede their vaguely defined, unilaterally assigned and assumed privilege to create concrete prejudiced privilege for others in the "inclusive" group. And given that personal circumstances are irrelevant, this the definition of prejudice. While you may refuse to acknowledge this explicitly, logically your approach to solving racism is more racism. Which leads me to conclude that at least the loudest among the D&I camp are only using claims of equality as a thin disguise for powermongering.
>It would be pretty terrible if a historically "dominant" demographic felt persecuted because of equal options with emoji colors.
And here, ironically, you are proving my point. To correct historic injustice we are obligated to immediately dismiss any grievances from white people, bonus for snark and sarcasm. When minorities complain, all claims are immediately valid, but if whites (and sometimes Asians, when politically expedient) raise legitimate concerns, they're just being fragile. That's prejudice, my friend. And the degree to which it has become casually acceptable in increasingly larger circles is concerning.
By the way, I don't think anyone is concerned over the expanded color pallet itself, its the insistence that injecting divisive racialism into a race agnostic communication tool is the solution to prejudice. Even assuming that minorities are offended by a single yellow option is racist, much in the same way that latino people don't actually care for the similarly misguided "latinx" designation.
I'm not sure why having different colored emojis has triggered an essay to redefine inclusivity as persecution for some hypothetical "dominant" demographic, but you are proving my point.
By using weak words to avoiding naming the demographic you feel is actually persecuted here, you're turning a blind eye to centuries of prejudicial conflict and injustice - context that defeats your attempt at semantics.
You didn't even read my post.
>Equality feels like persecution to those hold all the privileges
This is carte blanche to be racist to anyone defined as privileged by the socially/politically dominant group. You're playing with fire. Only a matter of time before, as in the past, the ire is directed at you and the people you think you're fighting for. How far down the privilege totem pole are you?
It's marxism through and through, except the proles and bourgeoise have been replaced with racial classes. I encourage you to at least read the communist manifesto and see the direct parallels, right down to the language of "oppression".
s/petite bourgeois/white adjacent/g s/proletariat/minority/g
Don't forget, they also usually have a little discussed special category for lumpenproletariat, where competent true believers go when they outlive their usefulness.
It's largely a generational thing.
The new generations (Millennial, Z) were taught that "celebrate diversity" is the goal. Which means to highlight all the different races, creeds, colors, etc...
Previous generations (X, Boomers) were taught that being "color blind" was the ideal. Which means to treat every person the same, and disregard their race, creed, colors, etc...
Both groups are using the same language for the goal: To end racism. But the ways they were trained to do so are the exact opposite of each other.
Being blind to race means being blind to acts of racism. It discredits the reality of those who experience race- or gender-based discrimination because the systemic blindness won't acknowledge the differences even exist.
Prejudice still happens even if the aggressors have good motivations or think they're "good" people.
No, it doesn't. That's a lovely slogan, but nothing more. People have the capacity to both treat everyone equally, and also notice when some people have not, currently or historically, been treated equally.
Prejudice still happens even if the aggressors have good motivations or think they're "good" people.
Mirrors are very useful tools.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.05887.pdf
My explanation is that The Simpsons trained us to view yellow cartoon characters as white.
Got fed up of trying to negotiate with the bastard thing and bought a Nikon mirrorless instead. Absolutely no regrets.
It brings me to a pretty forlorn place, that there is such high & mighty technology, but delivered in such preconcieved, packaged products. Technological goods have become much better distributed, but the art of technology keeps evaporating upwards. Subliming up into the cloud.
Part of the allure of the personal computing era (RIP) was that it invited in the spirit of Man The Toolmaker. There was a dignity to mastery & development that was visible, we could form a close & knowing relationship with our systems. That spirit has been returned to the gods, fire returned back to Hephaestus's workshop. Which is now HQ'ed in Mountain View.
(I haven't always felt this way about Google. My perception is there had been a bigger focus on helping advance the web & making available APIs. That Google was creating new starting places.)
As technology matures, the underlying systems that drive it increase in complexity, but the user experience improves and simplifies. A mechanical pocket watch is much more complex than an hourglass or sundial, but vastly more useful.
Do most gearheads go there? No. Is it available for all vehicles? Absolutely not. But there's an enthusiast community & a serving of it where it is absolutely recognized as a pinnacle of belief that keeping humans in the loop, giving them options & control, is the only acceptable path, that falling from grace is not an option.
Generally I dont think you are entirely wrong per se, but the degree to which modern computong technology has precluded, prevented human engagement is unbelievable. To chase your analogies again, almost no one will be compelled to go understand their mechanical pocketwatch. But they could. A decent repairman could fix it. In contrast, the technology we entreat with is 100% alien, a far off remote force we cannot observe, cannot learn about, ensconsed in behind impreginible firewalls: we cannot ever begin to understand the vast realms of computing we are innundated with, we have no stance at all, are regarded as nothing.
This is against the human spirit, this is the ultimate infernal device, and we should smash it to pieces, resist, with everytbing we have, with every joule in our souls.
Microsoft, with their BUILD conference a couple years ago, actually had the best implementation of a COVID-era virtual "conference" that I've seen-- lots of actual live content (and live chat interaction), and to some extent some of the content was actually superior to a real-world conference because the online format (taking questions via chat) makes Q&A more feasible than it would be in person.
I’m not at Microsoft anymore (tho I might still do some stuff for Build this year, since I’m at GitHub), but being part of the team that got Build 2020 across the finish line is one of the things I’m most proud of. Microsoft was the first to do a tech conference in the pandemic (Google canceled, Facebook might have too), so we really didn’t have anything to base it off of.
Apple, naturally, just knocked it out of the park with the production values, but I’ll always love the scrappy nature of Build 2020.
Google relentlessly copies every other company in the industry, and it's been going on for years now.
>You can look at Google’s entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don’t have innovation in their DNA any more. And it’s because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers.
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-gra...
Apple has copied tons of features from Android, Chrome, and Maps over the years, mostly ignored, but as soon as Android gets a feature iOS had, Apple fanboys make a huge deal over it. Apple's been playing this game for decades, all the way back to the era of constantly accusing Microsoft of copying "Redmond, start your copiers!"
Apple literally stole Spotify's entire business model for Apple Music, and then turned around and used their platform ownership to punish them. Apple Fitness copied Fitbit and Peleton. Apple TV+ basically followed everyone else getting into streaming. Hell, it appeared at one point, they were even going to copy Tesla by making an EV.
All major tech companies have a 'copy, acquire, kill' strategy for competition. Apple is not different.
The Apple ones were exciting, because they'd usually announce a bunch of OS and development-related stuff we could start using very soon.
The Google ones were kind of a bummer, because the (appropriate and justified) mood in the room was "well, this feature might be cool to use... in five years or so." The only people who got excited about them were the hardcore Android fans who weren't excited about dev-facing features, but because they'd always buy whatever new Pixel or whatever that was announced, ASAP.
At which point they'll deprecate it within a year or 2 in favor of their flashy new thing that will replace it
Edit: watching the livestream and they've just announced an Android tablet! Honestly this déjà vu is getting ridiculous
I laughed when the Pixel guy (before announcing the tablet) said they don't usually announce products so far in advance. Has he seen Google I/O?
gLighting
I was not even aware Google I/O was today
Apple does the best job of anyone in the industry (imho) of building awareness and excitement over their events, developer or otherwise, but I think it is important to note that the WWDC keynotes (not the State of the Union), are also treated as proper consumer-facing product events, not just a developer keynote. As such, the audience is going to be much larger.
Back in the day, when Larry and Sergey were running things day to day, I/O definitely had more of that energy (they year Sergey jumped out of the plane and then walked on stage was bananas) and could pull Apple-like numbers, but that’s not what I/O is anymore.
40k concurrent for virtual conference that could be a series of blog posts and pre-recorded talks is actually pretty strong, IMHO.
These days Apple and Google use developer conferences as pseudo-consumer product soft launches.
IMHO, consumer end user launches should do done at consumer conferences.
Still, compared to Apple, Google's keynotes still contain more stuff of interest to developers like PaLM, LaMDA models, and a change to play with them. Apple's WWDC keynotes are usually so dumbed down, their graphs don't even have numbers of axis labels.
Importantly, this is where the race for AR/XR glasses starts and begins to be interesting. They needed to show off something tangible in the end to still show that they are still in the race.
Maybe Apple already started years ago and are waiting for others to do it wrong (again) and will try to time it again.
We'll see.
It took 10s to load on my M1.
For me the lighting jack on the iphones actually has fantastic latency. Does anyone know how that works? Much better than USB-C (ie, you can use as a monitor for a multi-track recoding very comfortably)
I'm really just looking for a good camera, a headphone jack, and a good battery.
They seem to be great phones, the price tag is just crazy to me (as with all other flagships tbf).
I use it with an iPhone 12 Mini (which has good enough camera/battery for me) and it solves the wired headphone problem, albeit with adding some extra steps. I would prefer to support manufacturers that are keeping the jack, but at a certain point I felt like I was sacrificing quite a bit in terms of other aspects of my smartphone experience to do so.
A friend of mine swears by the MagSafe experience, but I’ve yet to try it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Xperia_1_IV
Only two years software upgrades though.
Of course, my 5a will only be paid off in another 19 months, at which point a hypothetical Pixel 7a will presumably be available for upgrading, hopefully also with a similar subscription plan, but meanwhile whether the 6a even has a subscription plan is an indicator of what the offerings will be in another year and a half.
I am glad that the 6a has a Tensor chip (that's the one significant limitation of the 5a compared to the rest of the current lineup), so whatever else, I can be reasonably certain that the phone upgrade will have one too.
I find the urge to conduct kremlinological analysis somewhat annoying, but given that my subscription agreement just says that I will have an opportunity to upgrade at the end of the payment plan, with no indication as to the price or value of that upgrade, it is hard not to worry.
It is interesting though that the present value of a subscription hardware purchase is now hinging in part on the future upgrade opportunity (and in the sense of replacement with a new version rather than expansion with add-on hardware) just like software.
That said, even if that future upgrade opportunity turns out to be crap, I'll only be disappointed rather than feeling burned. After all, a sizable discount and an interest-free payment plan on a solid mid-level phone was a decent deal regardless.
I may just opt to keep the 5a until the security updates stop coming, especially if the Adaptive Charging works as advertised to preserve battery capacity.
One less hole for water to enter is also a good thing (speaking as someone who has managed to drop phones into puddles, toilets, pools, and pots of soup).
You know, their large portfolio of industry leading services that are used by billions of people every day. That kind of thing.
Judging how Google Images and Google Maps have evolved over the years, I kinda wish they'd stop.
https://blog.google/products/maps/three-maps-updates-io-2022...
my nest hub reboots most times I go to try to use it