If they aren’t going to charge for access otherwise then I don’t think being ad supported is such a bad thing. Much more honest than subscription pricing and ads in my opinion.

Whats crazy is Hangouts is still going (in the form of Chat and Meet). I’ve had the same group chat going with a few buddies on it for years and years now. And it is still better than anything outside of Signal in my opinion for messaging.

I still don’t understand how Google thought it had a chance at success. They had the same model as Onlive had 10 years prior. It ended up failing for much the same reasons.

I wouldn’t be able to find a use for Alexa if they were paying me $10/month to use it.

Dunno how it is Apples fault that he didn’t take the time to understand how the tools that he uses work.

If I plow my car into a crowd of people because I mistake the gas for the brake that is not GM’s fault.

I mean Android, and Samsung in particular, borrow from Apple all the time as well. Hell Samsung frequently bad mouths Apples for the anti-consumer choices one year then follows suit and does the same thing in a year or 2 themselves.

These kinds of takes are not the flex some seem to think they are in my opinion.

But they did use their mouse for valid company business, so it is all OK.

Well yeah, its using the same dataset as MS copilot.

Spitting out inaccurate (I wish the media would stop feeding into calling it something that sounds less bad like hallucinations) answers is nothing something that will go away until the LLM gains the ability to decern context.

I wonder how long it will be before they start giving discounts on tickets for interacting with the ads a certain number of times during the flight.

The real game now is how long will it last before the hype and with the the floor falls out of “AI” and a good chunk of their stock gains with it.

The most damning thing to call it is “inaccurate”. Nothing will drive the average person away from a companies information gathering products faster than associating it with being inaccurate more times than not. That is why they are inventing different things to call it. It sounds less bad to say “my LLM hallucinates sometimes” than it does to say “my LLM is inaccurate sometimes“.

All of these types are articles always leave out the calculations of what your time is worth to you and the maintenance costs of spare hard drives and other equipment. The TCO is not just the initial investment in hardware/software alone. Unless you plan to host something unreliably and value your time at nothing. In which case I hope you don’t get friends or family hooked on your stuff or everyone will have a bad time and be back to Google Drive/Docs and Netflix within 5 years.

The reason they leave it out I feel is because once you factor all of that stuff in the $10/month your paying for Google Drive storage or the ~$25 your paying Netflix starts to make a lot more sense when pared with a decent local backup from a Synology NAS for the “I can’t lose this” stuff like baby pictures of your kids. Which blows their entire premise out of the water.

More likely they will just slowly rebrand search to more AI type things. Then slowly retire the non-AI parts in the background.

Then it sounds like the “web” tab should be the default and the AI Overview should be the optional tab the user has to choose to go click on.

If you have to constantly manually intervene in what your automated solutions are doing, then it is probably not doing a very good job and it might be a good idea to go back to the drawing board.

Never worked for one of the big tech firms, but I have been in the working world for ~16 years and one of the few things anyone that has been around for awhile can and will agree on is you don’t talk about salary within earshot of the boss, you don’t badmouth company decisions within earshot of the boss, you don’t talk about politically charged topics, and you certainly don’t combine 2 of those 3 and protest company decisions on politically charged issues literally in the office.

You also don’t do those things on company provided equipment, software, or services. If you want to bitch about something the company is doing, you go out to lunch or do it after hours, preferably without written or video evidence.

While I think it is gross that Google fired them for this, given the history of the company almost encouraging such things, I can say these people just got a hard lesson that most of us learn about the corporate world long before we make it to working for the likes of Google.

Rightly or wrongly freedom of speech, assembly, etc protects you from the Government, not your boss. And your boss is a petty little ego maniac that controls your livelihood, so best to stay out of his gaze on matters you know he/she would view negatively where at all possible.