177 mentions · 138 chunks · 81 episodes
...mple: Microsoft's Cairo in the 90's, which gave COM, Plug-and-Play, and others. Google Wave, which gave Operational Transform. Google Turquoise These kinds of high-profile failures are like a whale fall, a bonanza for scavengers. Lots o...
...thers. Social systems of norms are alive, and shockingly resilient. An example: Google's peer bonus program. It allowed any employee to give a $200 bonus to any other employee for just about any reason. There were a few limitations: No ...
Someone reminded me of some wisdom from the Google SRE book about satisficing vs maximizing. When there are metrics everyone defaults into assuming maximization of them, but for the majority of them, ...
...struggles with the details, and has all the time in the world to help you." For Google Maps Augmented Reality Walking Navigation, we experimented with flowing particle streams where how diffuse the particles was was an indication of our...
...ncluded everything I could think of ever working, including "Smartphone AR with Google Lens," "Snapchat World Filters", "Specialized limited-function Googles", and for completeness even "Direct Neural Links". Each idea had a ton of head...
...t in the system. But it is not a given that it has to work this way! Consider a Google Search result where one of the ten blue links is clearly not a good result. It's not nearly as viral, Google isn't vouching for it as strongly. Going...
...ia? A similar dynamic: a few years ago I worked adjacent to User Street View on Google Maps. Users could upload panoramas they took, and in limited circumstances they'd show up in Google Maps. There was one example where a particularly ...
...hatGPT doesn't feel like formulating a query, it feels like talking to a human. Google is extremely impressive at figuring out how to interpret your query. It almost feels like it intelligently understands your query. But it doesn't! It...
... believer in bottom-up innovation as the wellspring of a company's vitality. At Google we called it 20% time. But I think a way to frame it that is more natural in other contexts is "120% time". These are not frivolous things you get to...
When I was on the PM hiring committee at Google, I was looking for the "two unteachable skills" in candidates: 1) That the candidate saw that the world was not black and white and one dimensional, ...
...elf when optimizing for metrics. A real world example, a second hand story from Google Maps. When viewing a place page, there's a button to get directions, with a big obvious icon. The text beneath the icon used to be how long it would ...
...e technology. When Max picked him up from the airport, Max navigated home using Google Maps on his phone. His friend looked at the phone and asked, "Is this AI?" Perhaps the answer isn't as straightforward as we think.
...aces you see this self-hoisting quality: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) Google Search's quality coevolving with user's expectations. Dunbar's Social Brain hypothesis, where massive increases in intelligence were driven by each p...
...o, we'll be fine. Civilization will endure. Blaise Aguera y Arcas - VP of AI in Google Research This was the most mind-blowing talk for me. Intelligence is a prediction of the future based on the past. He built a simple self-bootstrappi...
A conversation I had a few years ago at Google with a VP who had joined from outside straight into the Office of the CEO. "Let me guess how you see Google. You were told that this was a place full...
...of the whole requires some reduction of agency of the individual components. At Google, I saw how the perf-driven goal to "demonstrate a compelling vision that others are drawn to" (that is, a leadership frame that emphasized agency) en...
At Google, Search Quality was a center of excellence. We knew it was where the core of the value in the company came from. That team was known to be high perfo...
... is X and unless we have more confidence in that we shouldn't change our plan." Google Docs has an amazing comment feature that allows people to make concrete comments about specific runs of text. Google Docs comments are great for deta...