I'll take 80s dystopian cyberpunk over this crap any time of the day.
Google can't change that.
At least the money from those adware products goes toward deep tech r&d. It could be worse.
But if people choose these products because the convenience is worth it in their estimation, revealed preferences and all that.
Maybe this suggests a counter-product? An offline, all data is local, product opportunity. Who will build it?
I’d love to see a counter product but more than that I’d like to see more standardized and short/brief lay person understandable policies. Maybe like a nutrition label but for consumer data.
"is worth it" requires people to be fully aware of what's going on.
I've described what some of these devices are doing based on product announcements, patents, investigative news stories, and that sort of thing. I've had numerous people tell me that I'm wrong. That they don't believe companies are doing this.
This has caused me to come to the conclusion that people aren't aware of the trade-offs or what is going on.
That lack of understanding concerns me.
It sounds like walking through a forest of ferns.
For ambient computing, my favorite things are my Apple Watch and iPods. True enough, using Siri and these devices is using black box devices, but for now I am OK with them. I trust Apple, for now.
It would be even cooler if a certain percentage of the rate was a "designate your target" that allowed you to directly fund things like google reader etc.
It's also kind of crazy they dont have some kind of pricing sheet that shows me all the subscriptions available to me, along with some bundle options. I have to search out each product to see its price. It's like they dont want me to look for ways to give them money.
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.
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.
It's actually not "insanely complicated", and there are resources around, like https://pages.mtu.edu/~shene/COURSES/cs3621/NOTES/spline/NUR... and https://www.amazon.com/NURBS-Book-Monographs-Visual-Communic...
> 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.
That isn't the first time this happens either. It's extremely frustrating to not be able to locate a page that you know is out there.
That kind of thing hasn't worked in... god, at least a decade, at this point. Not just because the Web is larger, but because search doesn't seem to work like that anymore and also everything got way spammier. "Clever" searching is a skill I was once (judging by people's reactions) notably good at but that is entirely obsolete, but not because the function it served was replaced by something better—it's just gone now.
https://computergraphics.stackexchange.com/questions/340/spl...
Maximizing profits (and innovation) over time may mean closing something profitable now, and focusing on new potential profits. Thats great.
I'm more than happy to wait for years if I have to in case something develops accidental mass market traction in which case Google will likely support it long term.
I wonder if Google realizes how much this works against them, without 'early adopters' you don't have much chance of success, even at Google's scale. Burn your early adopters often enough and you'll end up with unused new services.
I am rather curious about Stradia's longevity.
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.
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.
Edit: Not sure how this is even debatable down-voters?
- 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.
The goal derives from the mission statement; it's an implementation strategy for "universally accessible and useful."
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).
Literally everything there ships in a month, dude.
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.
The first thing I do with a new phone is turn Siri off because I don’t want to use my phone that way. So it doesn’t matter to me which is better or which is worse.
However privacy is important to me so I use that as a driver of purchases.
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.
