5 ms·

I stopped caring about I/O when it became just corporate talk

by ugjka 3y ago

jefftk 3y ago
When was that? (I expect whatever year you give other people will say it was already just corporate talk before then)
- tjpnz 3y ago
  The Android presentations in the early 2010s were something to get excited about.
- packetlost 3y ago
  I would say roughly around when they killed their Nexus line.
  - jefftk 3y ago
    Ooh, I thought we were going to be arguing about an earlier time. The last Nexus (pretty sure) was the 6P, released 2015-10 and discontinued 2016-10. I remember this complaint from the IO 2013, when I was there representing mod_pagespeed.
    - packetlost 3y ago
      I mean, you could argue that it was earlier, but I think that's the point where most people would agree the magic was dead.
  - gjvc 3y ago
    Yes. This is when I felt they had veered from the path I was following and supporting. Nexus 5 was a great phone!
- clnq 3y ago
  Around 2013 is when I/Os became less about showing technological progress and more about corporate talk. Examples of I/O topics before 2013: Android, Maps API, App Engine (cloud), Chrome, AJAX for their APIs, real-time collaboration/Wave, Google TV (early predecessor to Android TV), Chromebooks, Chrome Web Store, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Glass, Gmail updates, Google+, YouTube updates. Most I/O topics after 2013 revolved around marginal improvements on a lot of things, like individual Android features and apps. And naturally, when there is so little to talk about, corporate speak fills the void. There were still some interesting topics after 2013, especially if you follow some specific developments in the Android ecosystem. But there were very few groundbreaking topics. Google will probably talk about Bard this year, which has not been a huge success, but at least it's something bigger that harkens back to pre-2013 days.
  - kordlessagain 3y ago
    Bard needs API access.
    - verdverm 3y ago
      There is Vertex AI, which some people are getting early access to (what i hope is) PaLM2 | ULM. The GCP offering only contains tools for your own models, what everyone wants is an alternative to ChatGPT, a pre-trained LLM from Google accessible via API and fine tune-able in Vertex. There is this in the meantime: https://github.com/acheong08/Bard https://github.com/acheong08/Bard
      - verdverm 3y ago
        This aged well :] APIs are available since the middle of the presentation!
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      They are providing API access to at least some models in the same family underlying Bard, but explicitly (while its in preview) prohibiting production/commercial use — not disclaiming liability and advising against it as is common for pre-release products, but actually prohibiting in the ToS. Google is taking an hypercautious approach around “AI safety” issues that amounts to “we should not release products and if we do they are just demos that no one should be permitted to use for any serious purpose” which is going to hurt them in the marketplace but also does nothing meaningful to deal with either the real and immediate issues with AI or the mixture of other (some real but less immediate but largely science fantasy) issues that typically are referred to under the “AI safety” umbrella (and that’s even more true if you consider from the pov of assuming that the more science-fantasy-ish of those risks are real and serious.)
  - vesinisa 3y ago
    Almost all of the topics you listed have sessions in this year's Google I/O. There are 35 different sessions tagged "Android" alone: https://io.google/2023/program/?q=android https://io.google/2023/program/?q=android There might be no sessions for stuff like how to use web APIs because these are already mature and well-documented technologies. I/O is about showcasing new stuff after all.
lordswork 3y ago
Which one of these talks from ML/AI at I/O 2022 would you describe as "just corporate talk"? https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQY2H8rRoyvyY0AsvPIkb7rg7ogc5dgXW https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQY2H8rRoyvyY0AsvPIkb...
- danielscrubs 3y ago
  I understand him. Maybe Im cynical but everything I see on your link looks like something a technical sales person would come up with… How easy is it to onboard people? Easy! Are we helping save the world? Yes! Can we build it ethically? Yes! Are those questions really what’s on the mind of the developer? Where is the: we have a way to revolutionize the debugging experience when doing ML(for people with PhDs) talks? I know it wouldn’t sell to the masses but that was kind of the point if you want jaded devs on your side.
  - lordswork 3y ago
    I think you are quick to judge the talks by their title. They are all technical from what I can tell, and many cover topics that are of interest to PhD researchers. For example, the distributed large model paper covers several papers' worth of research done at Google and how to utilize their implementation in JAX. ML debugging is just one topic among many. I wouldn't dismiss the entire lineup because Google didn't have any big announcements in that space for that year.
    - danielscrubs 3y ago
      Sounds good, I’ll check it out. Is it the “ML tips and tricks” one?
- revelio 3y ago
  Maybe "A journey to protect the Great Barrier Reef using ML"? The video is five minutes long, is basically a nature advert complete with stirring music, has a bizarre cartoon in the middle of it and is all about an attempt to control the reef's population of starfish. We're told that the starfish are doing great thanks to there being fewer predators and more nutrients in the water, but that this is bad because "it's quite a nasty animal" and it eats coral. The goal is to find starfish "outbreaks" using ML and enable teams of divers to kill the starfish as quickly as possible. They appear to think this is a stirring example of protecting nature. There's even a diver at the end who breaks down in tears at the way the reef has degraded over his lifespan. Fortunately since the video was made it was discovered that the reefs are now at record-breaking coverage levels despite the starfish, so apparently they didn't need AI driven death-from-above. Also it's not really clear why Google wants to help implement mass animal culls in a place where people don't even go. Why are corals better than starfish? This seems like a very arbitrary judgement. Corals and crown-of-thorns starfish have been co-existing in nature for far longer than people have. So: 1. Not for developers. They use batching and quantization, that's as deep as it goes technically. 2. Essentially a long ad for their cloud ML services. 3. Consists mostly of people talking about how meaningful, awesome and filled with hope they feel.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
yazzku 3y ago
And the wokeness of the "diverse" cast of speakers.

I stopped caring about I/O when it became just corporate talk

by ugjka 3y ago

I stopped caring about I/O when it became just corporate talk

jefftk 3y ago

When was that? (I expect whatever year you give other people will say it was already just corporate talk before then)

tjpnz 3y ago
The Android presentations in the early 2010s were something to get excited about.
packetlost 3y ago
I would say roughly around when they killed their Nexus line.
- jefftk 3y ago
  Ooh, I thought we were going to be arguing about an earlier time. The last Nexus (pretty sure) was the 6P, released 2015-10 and discontinued 2016-10. I remember this complaint from the IO 2013, when I was there representing mod_pagespeed.
  - packetlost 3y ago
    I mean, you could argue that it was earlier, but I think that's the point where most people would agree the magic was dead.
- gjvc 3y ago
  Yes. This is when I felt they had veered from the path I was following and supporting. Nexus 5 was a great phone!
clnq 3y ago
Around 2013 is when I/Os became less about showing technological progress and more about corporate talk. Examples of I/O topics before 2013: Android, Maps API, App Engine (cloud), Chrome, AJAX for their APIs, real-time collaboration/Wave, Google TV (early predecessor to Android TV), Chromebooks, Chrome Web Store, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Glass, Gmail updates, Google+, YouTube updates. Most I/O topics after 2013 revolved around marginal improvements on a lot of things, like individual Android features and apps. And naturally, when there is so little to talk about, corporate speak fills the void. There were still some interesting topics after 2013, especially if you follow some specific developments in the Android ecosystem. But there were very few groundbreaking topics. Google will probably talk about Bard this year, which has not been a huge success, but at least it's something bigger that harkens back to pre-2013 days.
- kordlessagain 3y ago
  Bard needs API access.
  - verdverm 3y ago
    There is Vertex AI, which some people are getting early access to (what i hope is) PaLM2 | ULM. The GCP offering only contains tools for your own models, what everyone wants is an alternative to ChatGPT, a pre-trained LLM from Google accessible via API and fine tune-able in Vertex. There is this in the meantime: https://github.com/acheong08/Bard https://github.com/acheong08/Bard
    - verdverm 3y ago
      This aged well :] APIs are available since the middle of the presentation!
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    They are providing API access to at least some models in the same family underlying Bard, but explicitly (while its in preview) prohibiting production/commercial use — not disclaiming liability and advising against it as is common for pre-release products, but actually prohibiting in the ToS. Google is taking an hypercautious approach around “AI safety” issues that amounts to “we should not release products and if we do they are just demos that no one should be permitted to use for any serious purpose” which is going to hurt them in the marketplace but also does nothing meaningful to deal with either the real and immediate issues with AI or the mixture of other (some real but less immediate but largely science fantasy) issues that typically are referred to under the “AI safety” umbrella (and that’s even more true if you consider from the pov of assuming that the more science-fantasy-ish of those risks are real and serious.)
- vesinisa 3y ago
  Almost all of the topics you listed have sessions in this year's Google I/O. There are 35 different sessions tagged "Android" alone: https://io.google/2023/program/?q=android https://io.google/2023/program/?q=android There might be no sessions for stuff like how to use web APIs because these are already mature and well-documented technologies. I/O is about showcasing new stuff after all.

lordswork 3y ago

Which one of these talks from ML/AI at I/O 2022 would you describe as "just corporate talk"? https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQY2H8rRoyvyY0AsvPIkb7rg7ogc5dgXW https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQY2H8rRoyvyY0AsvPIkb...

danielscrubs 3y ago
I understand him. Maybe Im cynical but everything I see on your link looks like something a technical sales person would come up with… How easy is it to onboard people? Easy! Are we helping save the world? Yes! Can we build it ethically? Yes! Are those questions really what’s on the mind of the developer? Where is the: we have a way to revolutionize the debugging experience when doing ML(for people with PhDs) talks? I know it wouldn’t sell to the masses but that was kind of the point if you want jaded devs on your side.
- lordswork 3y ago
  I think you are quick to judge the talks by their title. They are all technical from what I can tell, and many cover topics that are of interest to PhD researchers. For example, the distributed large model paper covers several papers' worth of research done at Google and how to utilize their implementation in JAX. ML debugging is just one topic among many. I wouldn't dismiss the entire lineup because Google didn't have any big announcements in that space for that year.
  - danielscrubs 3y ago
    Sounds good, I’ll check it out. Is it the “ML tips and tricks” one?
revelio 3y ago
Maybe "A journey to protect the Great Barrier Reef using ML"? The video is five minutes long, is basically a nature advert complete with stirring music, has a bizarre cartoon in the middle of it and is all about an attempt to control the reef's population of starfish. We're told that the starfish are doing great thanks to there being fewer predators and more nutrients in the water, but that this is bad because "it's quite a nasty animal" and it eats coral. The goal is to find starfish "outbreaks" using ML and enable teams of divers to kill the starfish as quickly as possible. They appear to think this is a stirring example of protecting nature. There's even a diver at the end who breaks down in tears at the way the reef has degraded over his lifespan. Fortunately since the video was made it was discovered that the reefs are now at record-breaking coverage levels despite the starfish, so apparently they didn't need AI driven death-from-above. Also it's not really clear why Google wants to help implement mass animal culls in a place where people don't even go. Why are corals better than starfish? This seems like a very arbitrary judgement. Corals and crown-of-thorns starfish have been co-existing in nature for far longer than people have. So: 1. Not for developers. They use batching and quantization, that's as deep as it goes technically. 2. Essentially a long ad for their cloud ML services. 3. Consists mostly of people talking about how meaningful, awesome and filled with hope they feel.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

yazzku 3y ago

And the wokeness of the "diverse" cast of speakers.