Google was a one trick pony… but it was one hell of a trick.
Google was a one trick pony… but it was one hell of a trick. If Google hadn't messed up mobile then maybe it could have parlayed that one trick into owing a...
Topic: Google
177 mentions · 138 chunks · 81 episodes
0.4× distinctiveness vs baseline
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How much more common this term is here than in ordinary English. Higher values mean the topic is more characteristic of this corpus.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- Google appears in 138 chunks across 81 episodes, from 2023-10-09 to 2026-04-20.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 3/25/24 (2024-03-25), with 4 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with google search, llms, and OpenAI, while by chunk count it sits between ChatGPT and disconfirming evidence; its yearly rank moved from #1 in 2023 to #6 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
Product rule of thumb: elegant heuristics.
...u should be muted when you dial into a call. It often doesn't do what you want. Google Meet has an elegant heuristic: if you're the sixth or higher person to dial in, you're muted. Here are a few elegant heuristics I wish Peloton bikes ...
This week in the wild west roundup:
... Microsoft 365 Copilot allows arbitrary data exfiltration via Mermaid diagrams. Google Gemini's own demo breaks Google's own captchas without asking the user for permission.
Google culture in its golden era was downstream of the dotcom bust.
Google culture in its golden era was downstream of the dotcom bust. A massively profitable business when no one else was doing anything. Not the Microsoft s...
Diffusion of responsibility is insulation from feeling shame because no one person is singled out.
...tion from feeling shame because no one person is singled out. When I started at Google, there was an executive who would do stochastic shaming. He wanted everyone to do OKRs every quarter. On the due date, he'd randomly sample PMs and l...
OpenAI is looking at a Log in with ChatGPT offering.
...tal when others can't. But a stable equilibrium to me seems to be Anthropic and Google staying in the race indefinitely. They have the capital and backing to stay in the game no matter what. And of course, there's the possibility of ope...
This week in the wild west roundup:
...opilot into YOLO mode. ASCII smuggling of prompt injection across various LLMs. Google refuses to fix it because "it's the user's responsibility." Responsibility laundering! CamoLeak: GitHub Copilot can leak private source code. An RCE ...
Law of Conservation of attractive profits.
...g valuable for the layer on top, making them just a commodity. Windows with IE. Google with BERT. They give away the secret sauce without realizing it.
Google Search started off as being most useful in the long tail of use cases.
Google Search started off as being most useful in the long tail of use cases. For all the things where the head of portals and manually-curated directories ...
Anthropic is about to release a feature of LLM-powered software.
Anthropic is about to release a feature of LLM-powered software. Opal from Google is a similar shape, but without custom UI. Normal UI, but LLM guts underneath. Someone will figure out the right complement of normal software and LL...
Google has a ton of your information, but unstructured.
Google has a ton of your information, but unstructured. There's no internal ontology, no way for you to tell it, "this is my grandmother." ChatGPT attempts ...
The person who happens to be the product manager of the most explosive new product category will think they're a genius.
...ity the demand for the product is so great it's hard to have messed it up. When Google Maps launched its massive UI revamp more than a decade ago, the main user success metrics barely budged. People used Google Maps to accomplish tasks ...
This week's round up of "we're in the wild west era with LLMs":
...cution. AgentFlayer: ChatGPT Connectors 0click Allows exfiltration of sensitive Google Drive docs a user added to ChatGPT via the Connectors, with no interaction from the user. The reason we aren't seeing more about prompt injection yet...
In the war for context, lots of companies are going after the browser cookie jar.
...te" all of the illegible state locked up in the various 3P apps on your device. Google does have a lot of 1P context on you in their service, structured into their own ontology so they could plausibly extract a lot from it. However, if ...
Writely (the precursor to Google Docs) didn't compete with Microsoft Word on features.
Writely (the precursor to Google Docs) didn't compete with Microsoft Word on features. It changed the battleground fundamentally. The killer feature was collaboration in the cloud. A...
My friend Dimitri launched Google Opal last week.
My friend Dimitri launched Google Opal last week. It's a cool tool that allows you to create little micro-apps that are entirely powered by LLM smarts. We could change the second, too...
Lots of products only work once you have a couple of eager collaborators.
...ne human in it. This allows network effects of collaboration to boot up faster. Google Wave wasn't wrong, it was just very, very early–and didn't have LLM collaborators. "Google Wave but for you and an AI to collaborate" could be a powe...
One of my least favorite jobs each year is distilling the family holiday card distribution list.
... holiday card distribution list. Our family "system of record" is spread across Google Contacts, iCloud, AirTable, Minted.com's list, etc. Every time during the year when I get an email from an old friend about how they moved, I make a ...
The News Feed betrayal effect: the dissonance that happens where sensitive data users added in one context is now used in another context.
...hey'd never see again could pop back up unexpectedly in other conversations. If Google were to activate Gemini over users data, with decades of your state stored in a private context, that would be catastrophic. Like Buzz but 1000 times...
In a close ended system, more data gives asymptotic quality improvements.
...d system, more data gives exponential quality improvements. The query stream in Google was open ended. The code stream in IDEs / WindSurf is close ended. Most code is actually pretty similar.