It’s interesting that the big tech companies are all in the hilly Bay Area and yet the native mapping apps are fairly ignorant of hills impact on travel times.
Sure Apple Maps tells me there’s qualitatively that there are hills on my walking route, but the estimated walk time seems hilariously optimistic once I start walking around a hilly city. For reference I’m a fast (15min or less per mile NYer) walker normally.
For example I just input a 1/2 mile walk down a steep hill and the return walk. The estimated walk time was 10min down and 11min up. These estimates are far too close to each other and far too close to default flat walk estimates in Apple Maps.
Google Maps' time estimations seem to somehow take the elevation into account. I've definitely had it give me different time estimates going uphill versus downhill in SF.
The challenge with cloud has always been the selling point of “infinite scaling” vs the flip side “infinite billing”.
It’s not in their interest to make cost controls work well.
Ideally you’d be able to set something granular like “allow this service to scale up only 10x, measured at an hourly level, and alert me when it happens. Drop all requests that exceed 10x”.
And then you are mostly in a throttling situation until the burst clears or a human can review & accept increased usage is ok/increase thresholds. I’d rather have services go slow during excess load (like a real server) than go dark for remainder of month.
This seems a lot better than brute force “turn everything off at $X level of monthly billing” or “no limits you can charge me infinity dollars”.
Extremely sarcastic take but - shouldn't the 10x productivity boost of LLMs like their own in-house Gemini make maintaining software easier?
Nothing in terms of feature release / quality / maintenance I am seeing out Big Software would lead me to believe there's been any productivity increase.
They can't even add "respect the user's preferred language" to the AI assist prompt in Google Search - I've reported it countless times. Turns out, looking up local places/names/etc, does not mean I speak that language. They can't seem to add light/dark support to Gmail despite prefers-color-scheme CSS media feature being present in browsers for at least 6 years). I have zero remaining faith in Google's ability to do anything.
No. If your engineers can produce more ROI working on another product, it does not matter that now they are 10x more efficient. They will also be 10x in the other, more worth it product
I assume the support range is determined by firmware updates. I know ChromeOS struggled with supporting devices whose components no longer received support.
There would still need to be money to make from doing so and a will to do it.
My company has a shitty old defunct group management portal that has been twice superseded and is finally getting shut down. But we have LLMs, why not maintain it in perpetuity? Because it's shit, nobody likes it, there are other options, it would still cost someone's time just to follow all the processes we have to do releases and keep things running, security testing, yada yada.
Adding more years of support to some shitty old thing is certainly going to cost them more than it makes them.
I don't even think this is an extrovert/intropvert thing completely, so much as what people are used to/how they were brought up.
Some people are very concerned with appearances and therefore uncomfortable with people in their homes (in either direction - too shabby, or flaunting).
Other people (with some overlap with above) are too OCD? about planning and so they turn hosting into such an ordeal they are overwhelmed by it.
In general I find that while I am an introvert, hosting a group isn't really a big deal. I find 2:2 with another couple to be more draining than a group of 10 in terms of being able to step away and catch a moment of calm. Further, as a host .. I get to select who is coming in the first place!
The problem with all implementations so far is they are slow, verbose, and clunky.
People working on these projects should study pre-digital forms of non-written communication. Commodities exchange pit floor hand signals. Pilot-ATC comms. Military radio. Etc.
If I want Audio AR, I want it to be like a co-pilot flying a jet with me. Crisp, concise, zero fluff.
Make it a slider for people who want to get chatted up vs those that don't.
More things in memory also leads to making more connections / recognizing more types of patterns more easily.
There are things that you just see/know/recognize that are not easily searchable/promptable because the fact that you should be searching/prompting would not occur if you had not seen the pattern before.
One could argue "experience" is just the accumulation of memory such that you can recognize more patterns more rapidly, short circuiting bad decisions before they are made. With LLMs its even more important to have a well tuned "what should be getting built" mental framework if that becomes our primary job.
> Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.
Fundamentally due to product lifecycle expectations, I wouldn't even want that!
I hope a fridge will last 10+ years.
Unfortunately any SaaS/cloud-connected piece of hardware is going to have some combo of firmware/OS/security/app update deprecation well before 10 years is up. The last people I expect to maintain software that long is the maker of a fridge.
CalDAV has been a standard for nearly 20 years. This feature could be done in a way that doesn't require to to talk to their servers, you could just put in the URL for whatever calendar you already have.
There's so many companies reputation-tarnishing themselves by doing this "we sell a lesser line thats actually terrible" thing. Why do you think I will now trust you with more money for an upgraded model? You've just made me skeptical of your brand entirely.
I've sworn off Bosch appliances after a 2 year fiasco of service calls with one of their dishwashers. The thing was still about $900 plus install. At what price point am I to believe it's not the worse-on-purpose line, as they cheapen the product every year. They seem to have models from $700 to $2000.
A bad $900 model sours me on gambling that the $1200, $1500 or $2000 model is the good one this year.
The Bosch 800 series dishwashers are god-tier, or at least they were as of 5 years ago, when I last bought one. I've had one in the last 3 houses, and went so far recently as to swap my new house's dishwasher (I think a Whirlpool something-or-other) with my old house's Bosch 800, because it was a cross-town move, and I could.
There is SO much of this in IoT / smart / 2010s-2020s tech.
Recent household BS: music playing out of my thermostat.
Wife tried playing music out of Sonos, but the clunky app was laggy and had also signed her out of Spotify. No problem, you can also just play direct from Spotify app into Sonos speakers. She opens Spotify, selects "Living Room" and next thing you know our THERMOSTAT was playing music.
Neither of us know this was possible, neither of us enabled it, apparently it's existed for years but for some reason Saturday was the day that "Living Room" thermostat beat out "Living Room" Sonos in the Spotify sort order.
There were product managers on both sides of that decision to prioritize enabling such a stupid feature.
I'd pay for it to not be possible. I'd disable it on either/both ends if they had a toggle, which of course they don't. MVP baby.
> There were product managers on both sides of that decision to prioritize enabling such a stupid feature.
Probably not. And that is why it happened - nobody thought about this at all until everything working as designed fails.
That is the thermostat probably is an off the shelf tablet with a speaker that they put other things on to make it a thermostat - this is the obvious thing to do and a lot cheaper than making your own completely custom hardware for this job. The software on the thermostat is likewise off the shelf (probably android) which has spotify in the base install and nobody took it out. Then you set the thermostat to be in the living room - again because that is the obvious thing to do. Finally your wife plays music and spotify sees two devices in the living room and picks one - which happens to be the wrong one but they have no way to know that.
The above is entirely likely and at no point (until know when I point it out) has anybody thought of it.
I also experienced this, albeit deliberately. I saw that it was possible, and out of morbid curiosity, enqueued a song to play through it. I immediately questioned why anyone would want it, stopped play, and disabled it. There are settings on the thermostat you can change such that it isn't used for playback or recording.
Sorry, I was unclear / misunderstood your statement. I haven’t tested this with Spotify, but disabling the thermostat’s mic (Settings / Device Microphone) disables Alexa and Siri implicitly, and also seems to remove it as an AirPlay target, which is primarily how we stream music to Sonos.
Sure Apple Maps tells me there’s qualitatively that there are hills on my walking route, but the estimated walk time seems hilariously optimistic once I start walking around a hilly city. For reference I’m a fast (15min or less per mile NYer) walker normally.
For example I just input a 1/2 mile walk down a steep hill and the return walk. The estimated walk time was 10min down and 11min up. These estimates are far too close to each other and far too close to default flat walk estimates in Apple Maps.
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