
Google and Ambient Computing - hvass
https://stratechery.com/2019/google-and-ambient-computing/
======
gambler
A handful of oligopolies coercing me to use overcomplicated always-connected
gadgets that are orchestrated by "AI" that I don't control, can't train, and
whose main objective is to manipulate my behavior and siphon as much of my
private info to its corporate master as possible. All of this to solve
"problems" that I never had, while a choir of corporate shills drones on and
on that problems I _actually_ have are not real or not important.

I'll take 80s dystopian cyberpunk over this crap any time of the day.

~~~
amelius
Isn't it time that Google grows up and becomes a true tech company? I consider
products containing adware to be "half-broken" and I don't understand how
Google engineers can feel proud of their work. As an engineer I want my work
to be paid for because my users like my products, and I certainly wouldn't
want any of my work to be used to serve anyone other than my users.

~~~
dvdbloc
Do you have an example of a “true tech company”?

~~~
nopriorarrests
Oracle fits this description nicely. :)

~~~
amelius
No that's a law firm :)

~~~
rdc12
And a strip and gut, tech acquisition company.

------
phkahler
Google is failing to organize the world's information in a way that is useful
to me. I wanted to look up how to split a NURBS surface in half. You know, the
math behind computing the new point and weights. All I got was a bunch of
stuff from CAD vendors talking about how to manipulate NURBS in their own
tools.

Since then, I've seen more of this trend. It's hard to find information about
how anything works now because most the results are commercial - SEOed to be
high in the rankings.

I'd like an option to screen out commercial results in favor of more
informational ones. They're supposed to be helping me find information right?
But in reality they've shifted to feeding me marketing information.

~~~
VikingCoder
Splitting a NURBS surface "in half" is an insanely complicated operation, and
the way you do it almost certainly depends on your intended use case.

If you can't find a library (or engine) in your domain that has the operation,
then you're kind of S.O.L., and have to start from first principles.

I don't blame commercial results and SEO for this. It's not like you used to
be able to see a menu of rich choices for this, and now they're lost in the
noise of companies with a mission.

~~~
jlarocco
> Splitting a NURBS surface "in half" is an insanely complicated operation,
> and the way you do it almost certainly depends on your intended use case.

It's actually not "insanely complicated", and there are resources around, like
[https://pages.mtu.edu/~shene/COURSES/cs3621/NOTES/spline/NUR...](https://pages.mtu.edu/~shene/COURSES/cs3621/NOTES/spline/NURBS-
knot-insert.html) and [https://www.amazon.com/NURBS-Book-Monographs-Visual-
Communic...](https://www.amazon.com/NURBS-Book-Monographs-Visual-
Communication-ebook/dp/B000U0OXHG)

> It's not like you used to be able to see a menu of rich choices for this,
> and now they're lost in the noise of companies with a mission.

I mentioned just yesterday that DDG results are better for me, and this case
is an example. "NURBs splitting algorithm" turns up a bunch of results.

~~~
VikingCoder
> It's actually not "insanely complicated"

Hi, your first link talks about NURBS curves, not NURBS surfaces. Cutting a
surface in half is significantly more complicated than cutting a curve in
half.

And your second link is to a commercial result, an entire book. Presumably
because the topic is complicated enough that people are willing to pay $69 to
$78 to understand the challenge well enough.

If your DDG search for "splitting a NURBS surface in half" are successful, I'd
love to see the results.

~~~
phkahler
>> Cutting a surface in half is significantly more complicated than cutting a
curve in half.

No, it's actually the Exact same thing. Just applied independently to each of
the curves in one direction.

But none of that is really important. 15 years ago it would be trivial to
learn how to do it with a Google search. Today not so.

Also, a book result is still better for me than the commercial tool links
which contain no math or theory what so ever.

~~~
VikingCoder
> No, it's actually the Exact same thing. Just applied independently to each
> of the curves in one direction.

I can easily imagine situations where I would not be happy with that result.

If that works for you, that's great.

> Also, a book result is still better for me than the commercial tool links
> which contain no math or theory what so ever.

Searching Google for "NURBS Book", "NURBS Course", "NURBS filetype:pdf" all
work great for me.

At a guess, most of the people who use Google are using tools, not making
them. Yes, Google favors results that make the majority happy. I see that as a
feature. If I'm in the minority, yes, I do need to become a more sophisticated
searcher.

------
ydnaclementine
It seems like google has the unfortunate culture of just releasing a bunch of
new services, not maintaining them, and allowing them to die. (Remember all of
their chat apps?) I think I’ve read it’s due to google’s promotion process and
needing to “release” something to move upward. I expect the majority of these
service to no longer be around in 5 years.

~~~
codingslave
They can't innovate, despite all of their "talent"

~~~
dmix
Innovation usually takes a much longer timeline than just launching something
and killing it with a year or two when it’s not sufficiently Google scale.

The world would have a lot less great products if this is how it was always
done.

This is why startups continue to be the primary innovation source. They are
willing to go through the hard grind to find product/market fit over multiple
years.

Most of the products purchased by the big guys are at least 5-7yrs old
(WhatsApp, YouTube, Waze, Looker, etc). There are some rare exceptions like
Instagram and Android which were both 2yrs old at acquisition.

~~~
v7p1Qbt1im
Isn‘t that exactly what X is doing though? Waymo started as a project in 2009
I believe. It wasn‘t anything commercial until recently.

------
Santosh83
> Our users tell us they find the Google Assistant to be smart, user-friendly,
> and reliable, and that’s so important for ambient technology. Interactions
> need to feel natural and intuitive. Here’s an example: if you want to listen
> to music, the experience should be the same whether you are in the kitchen,
> you are driving in your car, or hanging out with friends. No matter what you
> are doing, you should be able to just say the name of the song and the music
> just plays without you having to pull out a phone and tap on screens or push
> buttons.

This may be an unpopular sentiment, but at least for me, I find a certain
indefinable pleasure in manual tasks, to a certain extent. Slipping a CD into
a player or a cassette into a deck or having to browse through a shelf to find
the book I want. I don't think people will realise the "ambience" of these
minor things we do hundreds of times a day almost unconsciously until
practically everything becomes voice/thought activated and almost anything you
want is delivered right to where you are. I believe that there is a certain
happy medium between entirely manual and being too automated. Obviously this
will be different for different tasks but we must keep in mind that the aim of
corporations will always be to make them fully automated because that way they
and their services become indispensable for the world. Our aim should be to
try to tread the happy medium where automation makes significant difference
but does not turn us into instantly-gratified, grown-up children.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
You raise a valid concern, but I think there's a stable equilibrium here. It
seems to me that the current goals of ambient computing pretty much match the
canonical utopian scifi vision; you can order the computer to look up
information or play/display whatever media you want, but there are no little
robots bringing coffee to your armchair. I don't think we risk automating so
much that people (or, well, wealthy people at least) never have to stand up.

------
Kiro
People really hate Google here. Look at this thread and the other about Soli.
Not a single positive comment about Google. No wonder Google engineers have
stopped posting on HN. Maybe Google truly is evil but I fail to see it
personally.

~~~
m463
It's a symptom of an underlying problem.

\- companies used to respect us.

\- computers used to belong to us.

The equation changed when companies found a way to charge advertisers big
money by inverting these equations.

Google is just the poster child for all this, but there are lots of other
players that have cashed in.

~~~
mav3rick
You are free to not use their services. People acting offended for using free
services. Before you say "free" is not free, well no one pays for most web
services. So this is an inherent human problem not one these companies
created.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Well. How does Wikipedia survive? Or Archive.org? Or Open Streetmap? Maybe the
people/haters don't even care so much about advertisements in general, but the
sheer mass of them, which degrades the usability, and maybe some of the
services aren't that good anymore in general, while having been better before?
I remember the days i happily used Altavista Search instead of the Yahoo.
Because Yahoo was spammed to death, while Altavista at the time wasn't.

It feels the same with Duck Duck Go vs. Google since at least 5 years now? I
don't really care how it is financed in the background, i care about how much
hassle it is to find something, or even being able to find it at all. Google
fails there massively for me, and i wonder why that is? Maybe because it is
Anglocentric? Or even US-centric? But then the same should apply to Duck Duck
Go, which isn't the case, because it works fine for me. I know it's using
inferior indices, but it doesn't matter when the better ones are so overblown
that i fail to find the needle in the impossibly large haystack. I'm even
using other search engines before i fall back to Google, in case of not
finding something. Google has gone from something good to last ditch only for
me.

That was for general search. Now to the maps. With the exception of
satellite/air-imagery it leaves much to be desired, and that is the labeling
of places. Which fails worldwide. That algorithm is just crap on higer zoom
levels. At first i thought it would be because of my location, some country
far away over the Atlantic in old Europe, but it's not. I recognized that
while reading something about the history of building railroads trough the
Rocky Mountains, and the Googlemaps made no sense at all, because it either
omits small places altogether, or puts the labels where they absolutely don't
belong. Bingmaps meanwhile were a joy to use, everything was there, at the
right places, and it ran even faster! _LOL?_

Then there is this thing with business listings and reviews in the map which
is useless in my locations. I don't read them anymore, because any i have read
were wrong, or did otherwise not meaningfully apply. I don't know why that is,
is it just vandalism from random people, coercion of services like Yelp, or
whatver? I don't care anymore, because _USELESS!_

Then general accuracy about what is where, and how to get there in my favored
modes of transport. In my locations Open Streetmaps wins. _EVERY TIME!_ (I
know that is not applicable in general, because coverage/accuracy thereof
varies regionally)

What else? Hm. Youtube. What can i say? Expect to get dirty if walking into a
market for stupid pigs. Though it has not only some rare, but many pearls.
Just difficult to find them in all that stinking shit. Apart from that, what
are they thinking if i'm listening to some ambient psychill/progressive
psytrance mix which goes about 1 to 2 hours and they are interupting that with
at least 4 adverts per hour for stuff which is totally unrelated and i have no
interest in? Who thinks of something like that? Are they on crack?

Is there anything i like about Google? Yeah, i like EARTH. Glorious! My
digital globe. Great. But i don't need that, it's more of a toy for me.

So, emperors new clothes for all the gaslighted androids, anyone? :-)

------
shadowgovt
""" So “being helpful” is the company’s goal, not its mission statement. """

The goal derives from the mission statement; it's an implementation strategy
for "universally accessible and useful."

~~~
gowld
But Google isn't making iformation "universally accessible and useful"
anymore. Now they are "slurping up all the information in the universe, and
doling out in controlled ways to maximize user engagement metrics and
advertising revenue"

------
empath75
They used to call this "Ubiquitous Computing"
[https://www.wired.com/1994/02/parc/](https://www.wired.com/1994/02/parc/)

------
mindgam3
> So the devices aren’t the center of the system, you are. That’s our vision
> for ambient computing.

The vision is correct but the naming is off. Something like “embodied
computing” would convey the key difference better than “ambient”, namely that
the user is at the center. And yes this is a fancypants way of saying
wearables.

But this is a nice attempt from google to paint the future as an extension of
something it is good at (managing lots of ambient cloud-like things) while
downplaying that what we’re really talking about is wearables (not really a
strong suit for Big G).

~~~
v7p1Qbt1im
I wouldn‘t say wearables. More like device-agnostic. You are giving commands
to a system. That system might literally be your surroundings in the future.
Wearables, like contact lenses, might be a part of it. But so could sensors in
a road or a smart window you walk past.

------
ToFab123
They are not really being helpful to me, when organizing the worlds
information means, that all search results on page 1 are paid advertising.

------
scarejunba
> The first thing that is striking about this list is how many of the
> announcements won’t ship for quite some time.

Literally everything there ships in a month, dude.

------
ronilan
Ambivalent Computing is the new auto completed mission statement. It replaced
Don’t be Drivel.

------
dheelus
Google hired away Oracle's President, not VP.

------
tdonia
as someone who switched to an iphone yesterday after having using google
flagship models since the nexus one, i agree that this is an important
direction for google's product strategy, but i think they're playing catch up
from far behind.

i remarked to my wife last night that the biggest difference in the ux between
the two was that my android was always a phone, and this iphone has become a
platform/ux that's larger than a single device, a whole set of humanistic
little devices -- airpods and the home ipad in my case. i'd always thought i
couldn't switch because i use google services, but those are largely
commodities now -- i've got a wide range of good enough options for
photos/music/email/cal/etc. -- the google android apps are a little better,
but not enough so to make a difference. even siri has been good enough so far,
though my queries aren't especially complicated.

~~~
mav3rick
Assistant is so far ahead.

~~~
dawg-
If Assistant is that far ahead, then it's really funny because assistant is
very disappointing. These companies are pushing voice onto the general public
before it is ready to be actually useful. I got a free google home with
something and half the time I try to use it I end up closing the conversation
with something like "hey google you are completely useless".

When it comes to voice recognition and language modeling we are still rubbing
sticks together to make fire. But Google and Amazon are marketing their voice
products like it's a zippo lighter.

They really have a chicken and the egg problem. They need more data input to
train their AI and make the service better, but they need the service to be
better before more people will adopt it and feed data to train the AI.

~~~
mav3rick
Assistant easily recognizes voice and even has continued conversation mode.
One data point isn't going to change that. If these weren't ready people
wouldn't buy them in troves.

~~~
akhilcacharya
More people buy Alexa devices

