177 mentions · 138 chunks · 81 episodes
...k to keep an open source project illegible[zo]: have the README be in a private Google Doc. The README is the key that unlocks a project and makes it easy to dive in. It tells you what it's for, how to use it, orients you to the project...
...d 80%. This phenomena shows up in many situations. This showed up for Alexa and Google Assistant: grammar based trees of behavior that got increasingly expensive to author for real world scenarios. This shows up any time you try to capt...
... are implicitly combining them in their heads is because OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all have entrants in both levels. But this is more an artifact of the "vertical integration for proof of existence" phase of the new paradigm. It's n...
...at, and foreclose[adi] on other interactions. An alternate UX is kind of like a Google Doc, where you could hit Shift-Enter to ask the LLM to autocomplete from your cursor for as long as it wanted to. It is more of a "based on what come...
If you want Google to change a feature just for you, you're one speck out of billions. Of course they won't. They would only do it if one of the employees thought it wa...
The web was an overwhelming tsunami of information. But Google made it trustworthy, easy to navigate, tuned to what you wanted, more calm. The overwhelming cacophony of the web paired with a trusted personal guid...
Google-fu is a temporary phenomenon. When Google was a new thing, people could have "Google-Fu" who had developed a calibrated intuition for how to extract ...
...post heap? Like an ecosystem of friendly bacteria, a slime mold. At places like Google it's impossible to do this because although they have your data[akt], they would have to build, not grow, software. When you build software you need ...
A nugget of insight from an engineering legend at Google: "If you take a dependency on new infrastructure, it becomes your P0." Everything in the product–including just getting it to market–is now downstrea...
The Google Docs commenting tool is an affordance for nitpicking. Challenge yourself to give high level responses in a separate email or channel. That forces you...
...r.town as a tool for remote teams. Before using it, I didn't "get it." "We have Google Meet for VCs, why do we need this thing with a bunch of random cutesy features?" But trying to put it in a box was making me miss what it did that is...
... degree; it's possible to have something more or less multiplayer. For example, Google Sheets is multiplayer… and yet if two users edit the same cell at the same time, the last write wins. But because it's chunked down so small, it rare...
...r would have gotten the hard bite in the first place? The very first version of Google App Engine had a very odd development paradigm. The framework and datastore felt wildly unlike the traditional LAMP stack at the time. The benefit wa...
...t. Dangerous! Most users don't really worry about cloud providers peeking (e.g. Google looking into your VM). Cloud providers are contractually obligated not to peek. They're unlikely to bother with your small VM anyway. The real proble...
...era. What if that's not true? Everyone's implicitly treating LLM providers like Google or Facebook: an end-user aggregator that then gets significant leverage. This is partly because every LLM provider makes available an API, but also h...
...ywheel. The more any user uses it, the more the quality for all users improves. Google Search has this property. Notably, neither of these is true anymore for OpenAI. OpenAI is no longer the best model. OpenAI also doesn't seem to have ...
... their fellow players. Imagine the feature would require small tweaks to Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs, to tie them together. A PM who discovered this possibility on Gmail would need to convince a dozen or so other PMs to prio...
The podcasts from Google's NotebookLM are scary good. I know I'm late to the party on this, but I finally fed in some of my writing and got this podcast. I think this is argu...
...auch points out that with LLMs sometimes it's faster to create software than to Google it. What a time to be alive!
...yone else perceives everything. A Stanford ish late stage vibe: "I need to be a Google APM or I'm going to die" "I started 5 clubs in high school" (but didn't love any of them) "I've got a startup on the side" that they never actually d...