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points by rdtsc 1 day ago | 0 comments

This model is not for you or me. This model is for Google AI engineers to put on their perf review at the end of the year. How you find or not find it, it doesn't matter. It goes into the "designed and developed Gemini 4 Carbon Ultra Pro" paragraph and people get a promotion, get to keep their jobs and hope to not get replaced by Gemini 4 Carbon next year.

[–] stingraycharles 1 day ago

That seems like an overly negative caricature of Google’s corporate culture, and unlikely to be the case here, given the stakes and enormous investments in AI.

It’s more likely what the grandparent was saying, I’m reminded of Steve Yegge’s rant from 15 years ago and it seems like not a lot has changed.

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

[–] ethbr1 20 hours ago

Bill Gates' Movie Maker flame (self-described!) would seem a more appropriate analogy.

https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...

Except I'm not sure Google has a Gates.

Nobody from the Google C-suite seems like they're ever trying to install their most important products, as a customer.

[–] WarmWash 16 hours ago

What gets me about that email chain is that Gates complains, but doesn't provide any guidance, instead leaving it up to the people who make the mess to try and fix the mess.

Compare to leadership likes Jobs, where he would spell out how it needs to function.

[–] ethbr1 15 hours ago

BLUF

>> I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues.

[–] whatisthiseven 1 day ago

The results are indistinguishable. Massive organisations tend towards self aggrandivizing work.

At some point, the metrics for delivering to customers runs counter to what the bureaucracy was building itself to actually deliver: jobs.

[–] etruong42 20 hours ago

Yeah - I'm not too sure what the discrepancy is either. "crumble under the weight of their own bureaucracy" and "How you find or not find it, it doesn't matter [because the bureaucracy incentivizes self-promotion and not user impact]" seem to be more in agreement with each other than disagreement.

[–] aand16 1 day ago

"The purpose of a system is what it does"

  - Some Guy

[–] pavlov 16 hours ago

Quote is from Stafford Beer, actually.

Interesting guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer

[–] shwetanshu21 22 hours ago

I think it was more of this one applicable? https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

They don't give a shit. You can use Argon on Pro but not that pro and no not on that app which we depreciated but on this new app which will be depreciate before you can install it.

It honestly is really hard to figure out what to use and where. It shouldn't be. A pro plan is a pro plan. It doesn't matter if you get it via x,y or z. If there is difference based on where you get it, then call it something else and not a pro plan.

They make something are feel like its the best thing in the world and leave users behind to experience it hiding it behind obscure docs and hiddens T&C with no support. And users have no clue what and how to do it.

[–] keeganpoppen 1 day ago

"overly"? surely not... maybe in the sense that it isn't "underly", but there are much more uncharitable caricatures of Google's corporate culture that I would freely admit than that.

[–] Keyframe 1 day ago

I wish this was a joke. Turns out, Google turned into a joke. I was really rooting for them; They had everything in place to be the top dog. From people to research to hardware to internet.zip (and video.zip and emails.zip and newsgroups.zip and code.zip and android.zip etc..). I don't want to sound negative and what they built is probably great in its own right, but what was expected of them and what they have delivered so far, I can definitely say that they blew it hard. They did manage to turn gemini into search 2.0 on google.com and it does work.. but, come on. Where's the google of yesterday? Seems they put a ton of weight that's not on the level of people that were there before and I don't want to offend anyone there, but it sure looks like that.

[–] stingraycharles 1 day ago

The same was true 15 years ago when the cloud started hyping up and Google missed that in similar ways as well, so I’m not sure whether the “Google of yesterday” is who you think it is.

This is the Google of yesterday, they didn’t change.

[–] Keyframe 1 day ago

Fair point

[–] hsaliak 1 day ago

A good % of the Google of yesterday is now in working in frontier labs, crushing it.

[–] miohtama 1 day ago

The only good products Google has ever built in-house are search and GMail. Everything else is acquisition or crappy product.

So we should ask “why would it be different this time.”

[–] ptero 1 day ago

IMO google maps and google earth were revolutionary when they came out. And maps stayed well ahead of competition for many many years.

[–] Keyframe 1 day ago

I'm one of those few that liked Google Wave!

[–] antonvs 1 day ago

There are ones of you!

[–] struant 1 day ago

Maps was originally an acquisition.

[–] gnothing 1 day ago

Both were acquisitions.

[–] mrheosuper 1 day ago

Youtube, hate it or not, is really good. The amount of data they have to handle everyday is on different level.

[–] afavour 1 day ago

For sure. It was an acquisition, though.

[–] adrithmetiqa 23 hours ago

Apart from search, what did Google make in house?

[–] masklinn 20 hours ago

Gmail? I don’t recall that being an acqui.

[–] transcriptase 1 day ago

Google finance was an incredible portfolio tracking and research tool. Until they released v2 which took away all the functionality and replaced it with a news feed.

[–] gcatalfamo 21 hours ago

And think that somebody designed it, and somebody else approved it.

[–] stingraycharles 1 day ago

Chrome was pretty great as well, it was desperately needed.

[–] nayuki 1 day ago

Google Chrome didn't start from scratch. Blink came from WebKit which came from KDE's KHTML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML

[–] socalgal2 1 day ago

Entirely irrelevant - Chrome really stepped up both security and speed over WebKit at that time.

[–] nayuki 1 day ago

The comment you replied to was: "The only good products Google has ever built in-house are [...]"

I don't have enough information to judge how much of Chrome was original work and how much was pre-existing work. Though I guess by now, after nearly 20 years, Chrome's codebase looks absolutely nothing like KHTML.

[–] baq 23 hours ago

It was the rare confluence of people needing the same thing the megacorp showing them ads needed. We all benefited, no hard feelings, but always remember to look at where the puck is going.

[–] stingraycharles 19 hours ago

I blame how things turned out more on Mozilla being distracted and forgetting about their own user base, to be honest.

[–] baq 18 hours ago

The fact that it made the browser itself impossible to monetize to fund development was a part of it. They were an antitrust insurance to Google and tried lots of stuff to improve its position. Granted they failed, sometimes quite spectacularly, but I still drive Firefox for personal use.

[–] stingraycharles 16 hours ago

The money earned with Firefox should have gone to Firefox but went to vanity projects instead. Firefox OS, Mozilla Social, Firefox Send / Persona, acquiring Pocket, etc etc. And all of it failed.

Nevermind the controversies of silly ad campaigns and CEO salaries and whatnot.

Mozilla should have just reinvested all the money into Firefox. Heck, they couldn’t even finish their rust-based rendering engine.

[–] raisedbyninjas 1 day ago

Isn't Waymo the state of the art?

[–] aardvarkr 1 day ago

They’re still the same price as an uber and there’s no way to actually order one, it’s all random. I don’t understand why… like I actively would prefer them. If they were available so instead I find myself reaching for the cybercabs instead at half the price.

[–] nhod 1 day ago

Uh, use the Waymo app?

[–] diegolas 18 hours ago

HN is hilarious man lol half the world runs on the office suite and drive, at all levels

[–] miohtama 14 hours ago

Workspace was acquisition.

Google acquired it from Upstartle (the company behind the online word processor Writely).

Writely was created in 2005 by Claudia Carpenter, Steve Newman, and Sam Schillace. Google bought Upstartle in 2006 and Writely became the foundation of Google Docs. Google then combined it with other acquisitions, such as 2Web Technologies for spreadsheets, and launched Google Docs & Spreadsheets in October 2006.

[–] etse 20 hours ago

Calendar is my fav.

[–] antonvs 1 day ago

App Engine was good for its time, and I don't think that was an acquisition. Similarly, Cloud Storage and Google Cloud in general are pretty good products.

I started using AWS when EC2 and S3 first came out, but was forced to switch to Gcloud by the most recent company I joined. I was pleasantly surprised. In many ways it's more techie-focused than AWS, which is more enterprise-focused. And their managed Kubernetes is second to none.

[–] FluffyPancake 1 day ago

> I was really rooting for them

may I ask why?

[–] pmontra 15 hours ago

I can't answer for another person but 30 to 25 years ago it was kind of Google vs Microsoft. The Don't be evil times.

[–] throw10920 1 day ago

Uh, proof needed for this outlandish claim.

[–] rdtsc 1 day ago

You want an executive to issue a press release about how dysfunctional and bureaucratic their company is and that’s why it’s so hard for users to actually use these new models?

[–] throw10920 17 hours ago

I think I see the pattern - you like just making up things that you believe that others are thinking and asserting that those are their beliefs.

[–] rdtsc 17 hours ago

Uh, proof needed for this outlandish claim

[–] throw10920 17 hours ago

> Uh, proof needed for this outlandish claim

Your sarcasm is as low-effort as your original post.

Anyone with a functioning brain can see how

> You want an executive to issue a press release about how dysfunctional and bureaucratic their company is and that’s why it’s so hard for users to actually use these new models?

...is intentionally assigning beliefs to me purely from your own imagination without any connection to reality.

Your childish pretending that you didn't say something that is literally on record immediately above is a tactic employed by kindergartners, caught by their parents eating a cookie, who claim that they're not eating a cookie.

[–] rdtsc 14 hours ago

> Your sarcasm is as low-effort as your original post.

Putting too much effort into sarcasm doesn't work well usually; it works because it's low effort.

> is intentionally assigning beliefs to me ...Anyone with a functioning brain can see ...caught by their parents eating a cookie, who claim that they're not eating a cookie...

Who is assigning what beliefs to you? What cookies? Not sure what you're after here but sounds like you're a bit upset.

[–] throw10920 14 hours ago

> Putting too much effort into sarcasm doesn't work well usually; it works because it's low effort.

Your comment is exceptionally low effort by the standards of sarcasm. llama-3-8b-level, in that it's trivial, uninteresting, unamusing, uninformative, not clever, and incorrect.

> Who is assigning what beliefs to you?

You did, in the comment that I quoted from you immediately before my statement.

> Not sure what you're after here but sounds like you're a bit upset.

We've established that you have either a severe lack of reading comprehension or are maliciously lying, given that someone with rather below average intelligence would be able to tell that your comment assigns a belief to me that I never held, by reading the two sentences immediately adjacent to each other.

Most HN readers are capable of this reading comprehension, so anyone reading this thread will be able to tell that you're wrong, and I can link to this in the future if you make similarly deceptive comments.

[–] gcatalfamo 21 hours ago

As outlandish as publishing 4.0 Argon, making people sub to Google AI pro/ultra, only to discover that Argon was not included into Antigravity

[–] WmWsjA6B29B4nfk 20 hours ago

It was included in Ultra from the start and in Pro one-two days later?

[–] throw10920 17 hours ago

Thanks for the fact-check. It's kind of wild the misinformation that people try to get away with online.

[–] VeejayRampay 20 hours ago

overly negative comment

maybe spend a bit more time on the numbers presented in the announcement, which are pretty great