200 mentions · 161 chunks · 90 episodes
... 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 ...
...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...
...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.
... faster for all employees to use an IDE with .md files + git instead of Notion, Google Docs or Office."
...nd tries are very hard to get to the bar of viability and then improve. Compare Google Search and (spoken) Google Assistant interactions. With Google Search, as long as the answer is in the top 10, it's fine. Formulating a query is fast...
... they are open ended. You can get them to do crazy things, like insult you. The Google Assistant (and other assistants of that era) are close ended. All of the things they can say were curated grammars of possibility written by employee...
...e in my post-war AirBnB in Manhattan this week. That could have never worked in Google Lens, but it worked great in ChatGPT. Only an open-ended tool could do that. Now that we have approaches like LLMs it's impossible to see how Google ...
...more often a "twiddle" on top. If this weren't true, then at the very beginning Google wouldn't have been able to get so far so quickly with PageRank as the main innovation. This means that systems where most people can agree on a basel...
...gravity well of incentives into competing for users' attention. Many years ago, Google Search and Ads had a wall between them. Not any more. The wall was not bulldozed by any instantaneous force. It slowly eroded in the sandstorm of A/B...
...g that sounds even vaguely plausible. I remember back in the day hearing often "Google's biggest cost is opportunity cost." Throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, and then whatever subset happens to stick, pretend that was the plan all...
Imagine: the last system of record you ever need. Could start as Google Keep but coactive and turing complete. From there it could grow to cover everything.
... an example vibe-coded app that was a dream journal. You could log in with your Google account and mark dreams you stored as public. I went to put in my dream and thought… wait, why would I do that? Whoever the anonymous person who crea...
...e their model for their own 1P product. Other leading models from Anthropic and Google likely would have done the same. But luckily we live in the world where OpenAI had already released their API before ChatGPT got big. Because they se...
The right context makes for magical experiences. The original Google Now was wonderful. The actual features were mostly 20 or so simple hand-created little recipes for UX and when to trigger. "If the user searched for ...
...ther lose: all of your government-issued photo identification or access to your Google account? I imagine a lot of people would rather lose their government issued ID. It's kind of wild how much of our lives revolve around such a centra...
Google has added AI to a lot of their products, but in an almost perfunctory way. Because in those kinds of aggregator contexts, users have to have a theory...
...orrected its error and said that it's brown M&Ms, which I then confirmed with a Google search. A great example of the gullibility problem!
Assistance (ala Alexa, Google Assistant) used to be gated on reasoning and sensing. Now with LLMs, it's only sensing that's left. That is, what things might matter to you in your ...
Overheard: Working on AI at Google today is like being on the web team at IBM in the 90's.[us]
...ons and then build the tech behind it" "LLMs just give you the answer, unlike a Google, which there was a two-way relationship [with the publisher]. Yes, we're pulling the information from you, but we're also giving you traffic. So ther...