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Every single new Google product

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128 pointsvinnyglennon45 comments

Shipping their org chart.

Without a founder a the helm, VPs are pitting their product teams in a contest of survival of the fittest while laughing the bank and keeping Sundar occupied so he can’t fuck with their RSUs.

This is humorous though low quality... I don't think this ought to be an HN submission. It's far better suited on Reddit.

Google is pretty pathetic these days. They have become a parody under Pinchai.....he must be so proud of his legacy (hahahahahaha )

Google shows that you don't need skills or talent ..you just need money, and control.

Don't forget Bard. Some fine work there from DeepMind. I mean Google Brain. Actually I mean Google DeepMind.

Aren't those separate and in different countries? And one of them is an acquisition. This case makes more sense.

Try to keep up with the rebrands and reorgs. It's hard.

https://blog.google/technology/ai/april-ai-update/

You meant Gemini?

The meant Google Circles.

Or maybe they meant that project management tool... F - I cant recall what it was called, but we spent millions adopting it at Lockheed in 2007....

OH no they meant the google appliance for on prem google search?

Oh, wait you mean POSTINI that google bought to screen for spam on gmail... which had enterprise customers to anti-spam - then moulded that into gmail and killed it... but recently brought spam-to-inbox-as-a-service and this is why gmail is a dumpster fire of recent mem?

They probably meant Google+, but what they meant is Google Wave.

yep - it was wave and plus....

Jiminiy- I cant even recall names..

Wave was a stellar disaster...

You mean ?Bing? or no copilot.

and I cant interact directly out of the gate - it gives me this screen on prompt:

https://i.imgur.com/gMTnQv9.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/EVA8Qom.png

THIS?????? is how they think you should interact?

Anti-patterns on meth, wrapped in crack.

The results are actually good - but the UX is TRAILERPARK as FUCK.

If you work anywhere near this product experience. Delete your linkedin and move to florida now.

(I must be holding it worong.)

(( If you dont know why this UX is fn lame: say this outloud "Hey, Grandpa, go to Bing and ask it about world war two"

https://i.imgur.com/58FOuiN.png

So grandpa is going to be confused...

But lets say his grandkid wants to know about chemistry:

So they get a resultant they can understand:

https://i.imgur.com/jRW6GGu.png

and navigate.

So - what is the term for "temporal awareness in context"? (how old is this person asking and what is their assumed world view based on their exposure to the world during their lifetime)

READ THE FN PROMPTS.

"tell me about wwII" results in page slurry.

give me SINGLE PAGE SUMMARY OF CHEMESTaRY 101!!!

page slurry.

Its attempting to be google circa 2001

If youre not using heavor zoom at this [point in your tech his, you are an fn idiot

The company just made too much money from search. Thats it. Thats the whole problem, all of these random side google products are just because they have too much money. I bet search itself could be maintained by 10k people or way less at this point. 90% of that company is superfluous. The greatest business model of all time, that will now fail

> The company just made too much money from search

Do you mean ads?

They are pretty much one and the same thing at this point.

Yeah, but I think ads is bigger than search given that they reach people in other products (e.g. YouTube and things like Chromecast). I was going to say I didn't have any data to back this up but I just took a look at their annual earnings report [1] and they bundle these things as "Google advertising".

[1] Page 2, https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/20...

The problem isn't search, though, it's the financialization of attention and the utter perversion of search into a mass-manipulation and surveillance economy. Plenty of people, perhaps with a belief that advertising is fundamentally immoral, prophesied the decline of freedom and agency that the capital-capture of tech in the post-millenial period would yield.

And now we have new gods, far worse than the old ones, promising comfort and excess for the privileged-few willing to prioritize their simian self-interest and acquisitive avarice in exchange for developing these anti-human systems.

It was easy to see in the 90s that the growth of networked multimedia would fundamentally change society. Perhaps it was futile to dream that we could loosen concentrated-capital's grip on culture and build a post-scarcity society through the collective strength universal access to information and communication could engender. What is the value of life in a world which perpetuates misery to maintain a society of serfs and slaves in a paradoxical fugue of hypervigilant pursuit of a neurochemical facade that poorly replicates the stability, agency, and creation our wondrous biological machines crave?

We possess, as human animals, the ability to envision and build a societal organism that is driven by more elevated principles than "kill or be killed" and "got mine, fuck you." The notion that we can evolve beyond suffering as the default state, and that we should, is in conflict with the structures we built to reward the preferential displacement of suffering from those whose small, myopic desires of individual aggrandizement and domination drives their delusions, to those who would toil in search of survival through shared humanity.

There's still hope but I increasingly believe that humans can only survive long-term by removing our simian impulses from the control loop. When we reach that point, will we build a casino or a garden?

Would love a Google AI chat bot product that could help demystify some of these questions. However I fear that AI has not yet reached that level of information recall and reasoning.

Not if Google develops it.

It is a mess, but still megaparsecs ahead of how Sun named their Java related stuff.

J-whatever, beans, enterprise beans... most frustrating naming schemes ever.

You would type the letter J 100,000 times per day.

Whenever I see some Spring Boot, I see the name Beans brought up. Still have no idea what it means, but I do find it odd to name software things after seeds. I thought we already used Seed to mean .. Seed? Is Bean the same as Seed? Is it something else? Why not then legume, or pea?

Coffee beans.

Because coffee beans

and specifically their relationship to "java" (coffee)

Because java means a cup of coffee, and beans are also part of the coffee theme.

And a "eclipse" messes with the "sun".

Oh wow I'd never thought about the "block out the sun" naming for Eclipse. Fantastic.

Some say it's an urban legend and it has been debunked. Who knows.

I don’t think the naming itself is the point of the joke.

Don’t forget GSuite started out as “Gmail for your Domain“

That’s in the second screenshot.

So it is! It was cut off by the buttons on the bottom of the page on iPad OS Safari for me.

Okay that's pretty funny.

But the joke's on them because we all know GSuite paying customers can't use 90% of the other Google services with that login. We all have dummy gmail accounts for these purposes.

Google Wave, some of us don't forget you.

The history of chat products at Google is a case study in clutching defeat from the jaws of victory, but Google should get some credit for their AI naming. Google rolled out products very fast and definitely didn't get the initial naming right, but they are getting things straightened out now.

You're assuming Google AI product rug-pulling, renaming, product replacing antics are now over. These included even a layoff of the assistant team, guaranteeing that everyone on even the current Gemini team is looking for other options, to avoid finding their badge doesn't work one morning.

> You're assuming Google AI product rug-pulling, renaming, product replacing antics are now over.

You're right. It's a very dynamic area, so more change could come at any time. For now, I'm glad they've reduce the overall number of names being used.

> These included even a layoff of the assistant team, guaranteeing that everyone on even the current Gemini team is looking for other options, to avoid finding their badge doesn't work one morning.

The general consensus seems to be that for a long time Google employees were lazy/complacent/taking-it-easy. If it was as bad as has been said, I don't know what good options are for fixing that situation without layoffs. Ideally, Google would never have gotten themselves in that position.

> You're right. It's a very dynamic area, so more change could come at any time. For now, I'm glad they've reduce the overall number of names being used.

As for AI apps. There is "Assistant", "Gemini", "AI studio", "Gemma", "Natural language" (yes really, as in "Google Natural Language", not sure what it does), "Duet", "Duet for workspace", "Cloud Vision", ... This you call reducing names?

https://cloud.google.com/products/ai?hl=en

> The general consensus seems to be that for a long time Google employees were lazy/complacent/taking-it-easy. If it was as bad as has been said,

This would make sense ... except then I look at a bunch that I know were fired and I have to say, I don't agree these people were being lazy. Plus ... loads of people with exceptional skills, that found new jobs, in some cases even before the layoff announcement, and all but one I knew in less than 2 months. This, to me, does not sound like lazy people.

Besides, that wouldn't even matter. The problem with lazyness is that the choice is clear: what do you want? A very lazy expert? Or a very eager incompetent worker?

The truth there is simple: A lazy expert will perform between 0 and incredible. A very eager incompetent worker will perform between destroy the project entirely and slighly above 0.

And in my experience what works well for software is a mix. Lazy or not, medium to expert ... 80%, eager juniors 20% or so. And the juniors cannot be entirely junior (finished a decent education, capable of serious programming on day 1).

Is it a Twitter post with screenshots of Twitter posts?

No, it's a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

I guess we can officially shut down the internet.

Is this confusing? yea. Is there another company with a high volume of products that has an intuitive naming scheme across its products? I don't really think so...

I think the critique is about the high volume of products and incompatible replacement products. Naming is a downstream effect.

Apple

Naming schemes don't have to be intuitive if they are persistent.

Formerly known as

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