194 mentions · 154 chunks · 86 episodes
When Google.com burst onto the scene, it was 10x better than alternatives, but in a category that people already knew they needed. Search engines were an establi...
...at via anonymous aggregation to produce crowdsourced intelligence. For example, Google Search's ranking is largely powered by the clickstream and the querystream. As Tim O'Reilly has said, data is like sand. Not useful in small quantiti...
...I heard a legend about Baidu when it first rolled out. It didn't just look like Google.com's home page, it literally had the same HTML comments in the code. Comments, of course, don't actually change the behavior… but when they cloned i...
A tweet analyzing what Google is trying to do to OpenAI: "google is trying to do to openai what facebook ended up doing to snap which is to first decelerate growth substantially (...
...context where it can be deeply understood, it feels like a betrayal. That's why Google's data is a blessing and a curse in an era of LLMs. They're sitting on a trove of data for each user… but if they preprocessed everyone's decades of ...
Back in the day, Google used the money they made to fund the future. OpenAI is instead using the money they're going to make to fund the now. Significantly different proposi...
Google's A2UI is a Chatbot putting on a puppet show. The software itself doesn't feel alive.
This week in wild west round up: Google's Agentic AI wipes user's entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failure. "Cache wipe turns into mass deletion event as agent apologizes: "I a...
...stion is: how effective can the wall be between ads and organic? Newspapers and Google did it... but they didn't know every intimate detail of users. Chatbots can do a perfectly personalized pitch. At a certain level of quality, a pitch...
Google Search as a centralized service felt somewhat less scary to me than ChatGPT. But why? Both could have outsize impact from just a bit of bias given th...
...on the whole. See also The Ouija Board effect, The Tyranny of the Minority, and Google Bombing. Already true for motivated adversaries like Russia, now the toolkit is available to anybody!
...t just fine. A natural place to inject malicious prompt injection instructions! Google's new AntiGravity IDE has a number of data exfiltration attacks. I'm disappointed… Google normally has one of the best security teams in the industry...
... the tag picks one they think others will think to use to find it. Like the old Google image Labeler Game... everyone is trying to think of how other people will think to find it, and doing that, which is naturally convergent. By the ha...
Google is shipping dynamically generated little artifacts in the search results. It's impressive they can get them that quickly. Though there's likely some ...
When Gemini 3.0 was released, Google's stock dropped by 10%.[fz] It's the best model, and still not transformatively better. This is what it would look like if we were hitting the top of...
Google's Private AI Compute is a great development. It uses confidential computing for frontier Gemini models - hardware-enforced privacy, not just policy p...
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...
...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 ...
... 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. A massively profitable business when no one else was doing anything. Not the Microsoft s...