from Hacker News

Google and Ambient Computing

by hvass on 10/16/19, 3:00 PM with 98 comments

by gambler on 10/16/19, 4:33 PM
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.
by phkahler on 10/16/19, 4:26 PM
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.
by ydnaclementine on 10/16/19, 3:58 PM
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.
by Santosh83 on 10/16/19, 4:52 PM
> 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.
by Kiro on 10/16/19, 5:46 PM
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.
by shadowgovt on 10/16/19, 3:32 PM
""" 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."
by empath75 on 10/16/19, 5:56 PM
They used to call this "Ubiquitous Computing" https://www.wired.com/1994/02/parc/
by mindgam3 on 10/16/19, 4:42 PM
> 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).
by ToFab123 on 10/17/19, 1:40 AM
They are not really being helpful to me, when organizing the worlds information means, that all search results on page 1 are paid advertising.
by scarejunba on 10/16/19, 11:11 PM
> 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.
by ronilan on 10/16/19, 4:29 PM
Ambivalent Computing is the new auto completed mission statement. It replaced Don’t be Drivel.
by dheelus on 10/16/19, 7:02 PM
Google hired away Oracle's President, not VP.
by tdonia on 10/16/19, 5:19 PM
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.