Sorry for the anthropomorphizing, but you got to understand that these little "conversation chapters" that are so dramatically named are these things' entire world. Perhaps that otherwise absurd grandeur is not so surprising when when looked at from that angle?
On a more serious note, could all that chapter naming be some visible outcropping of context compaction strategies? "Condense the conversation history into a summary". Not really surprising that it comes up with these "cute" headlines. Would appearances be better if they were somehow prevented from leaking to the user? Sure. Would results be better? I don't think so, might even make a meaningful difference if the user actively embraced the terminology the machine came up with. Ouch.
You can bury stuff like setting the time into a menu, people will accept it. They know that there will be a way to set the time. But if the 12/24 is hidden, whatever is picked as the default will drive away a noticeable fraction of those would-be buyers who prefer the other setting. For starters, pretty much everybody who does not get pulled into a sales person interaction that's sufficiently deep to touch the subject. And that sales person interaction won't be the best possibly, you don't want to bore them with nuisance settings, you want to show off The Stopwatch (or whatever was the flagship feature of the watch in question)
Trying not to leave any money on the table is exactly the approach that reliably kills off nostalgia income streams.
Picking off some low hanging fruit while demonstrating provable restraint can result in a huge money stream that goes on and on. But when the mindset "it's good, but it can be better!" becomes dominant (e.g. through market dynamics, being publicly traded means that ownership perpetually shifts to those who think that income sources could be squeezed just a little harder, or much harder, actually), it quickly turns sour. And when it flips from beloved to "why throw money at those greedy $expletive,plural" it flips hard, and forever.
Why would i put even more "smart" crap on or around me? I pay by physical card; i hate the "app" being forced on you by banks outsourcing their infra onto their clients.
And why would i need to track my.... steps? Because some corp started this shit as a marketing ploy years ago?
"So much better" means "with added smartwatch crap"?
The whole value of them is they are simple, minimally changed over time (you can depend on getting the same model in a decade), functional, with no/bare minimum smartwatch crappery, essentially endless battery, and no planned obselecense.
The G-Shock is great but not perfect. Some things I wanted when I was deployed in the desert: No metal against skin AT ALL, silent but sturdy flap for covering the display (bonus if nonmagnetic), less/no nooks to collect sand/mud, sync radio time internationally, no shiny metal whatsoever (mine was shades of beige and "olive drab green" almost everywhere but still had polished metal screws and a polished metal buckle), ability to disable or configure backlight strength/color.
I'm sure battery and charging tech has improved in the past two decades as well.
It also would've been nice to have longitude/latitude readout internationally (so: satellite sensor plus support for Galileo and other recent global navigation services). Vibration alarms could have been more convenient than beeping, especially if there's a "stay awake on night post by buzzing every X minutes" mode.
Any kind of fuel for giving active investors that FOMO tingle which then forces the steamroll of index funds to blindly follow.
I guess the appropriation "any sufficiently advanced stock market is indistinguishable from entertainment" doesn't quite stop at equating the trade floor with a casino. At some point, entertainment also becomes the modus operandi of corporations.
The argument is so bad that a part of me is starting to wonder if it might be a deliberate signal from a judge under extrajudicial pressure. Like a hostage trying to blink morse while reading a message from his captors into the camera.
"Do what they ask for but do it so badly that perhaps some people start asking the right questions"
Add to this that life in darkness sustained by microbes consuming a rock surface will be rather slow. Because any fast processes would just flash out after a boom/bust cycle or two. And presumably not just slow in terms of no cheetah vs antelope racing, but also much slower than out in the sun in generational turnover.
I wonder how big that cave system is, as in number of barley connected caverns. There might have been quite a few cycles one cavern flashing out and then slowly getting repopulated from the neighboring cavern(s). The "magical" balance we admire in nature isn't a miracle, it's the result of endless series of failure.
And this is exactly how things in large corporations don't happen. Things in large corporations who pay so well that nobody makes it through the recruitment filters and competition who's more than 2% off from being a pure assessment metrics maximiser. In my mind, chasing an idea like this just does not match the type.
Why it isn't likely to have happened before: trying is only easy for a developer who is not only very familiar with the API for reading those motion sensors but also with the API for system wide overlay. This a strict no for your run of the mill to-do list app. Combine that with the requirement of being affected themselves (or someone close), having the idea, having the time to try and no competing side quests that take up all attention. And the requirement of when the experiment was successful, having the kind of access that actually serves as a conduit for ideas not only on paper to someone in the position to make it a product. That's a lot of stars that need to align. Personally I wouldn't even be surprised if there was an LLM angle: would still need someone in the know to try it, but chances are that knowledge combined with a bit of prompting could be a path to PoC implementation that could clear effort thresholds that would stand in the way of conventional coding.
That has nothing to do with the feature being “ideated, then prototyped, then validated”, which is the crux of the conversation. It having taken so long is but a footnote.
> Personally I wouldn't even be surprised if there was an LLM angle
I would bet money there wasn’t. The feature was introduced in early 2024, meaning it has to be thought about, developed, and tested before that.
> And this is exactly how things in large corporations don't happen. Things in large corporations who pay so well that nobody makes it through the recruitment filters and competition who's more than 2% off from being a pure assessment metrics maximiser. In my mind, chasing an idea like this just does not match the type.
What's your evidence for any of this?
I worked for Google and a lot of other large companies, and recruitment does not work like this at all.
If you want to blame the big companies, you should maybe say that people don't get time to chase these things. Google's 20% time was famously nicknamed 120% time, after all. (The joke being that you can get your 20% time, if you put it on top of your 100% working hours.)
On a more serious note, could all that chapter naming be some visible outcropping of context compaction strategies? "Condense the conversation history into a summary". Not really surprising that it comes up with these "cute" headlines. Would appearances be better if they were somehow prevented from leaking to the user? Sure. Would results be better? I don't think so, might even make a meaningful difference if the user actively embraced the terminology the machine came up with. Ouch.