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Google abandons work to move Assistant smart speakers to Fuchsia
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoThis was because the code was being worked on by multiple teams who ended up working on code stored in the following directories: fuscia fucsia fucshia fuschia fushia fuchia Trying to unravel and integrate all the code has proved to be too daunting a task. EDIT: Spellings taken from https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
- warent 3y agoThe sad thing is I'm not even sure this is a joke
- Gigachad 3y agoI can never remember how to spell or pronounce this word.
- tonyg 3y agoIt clicked for me when I learned that the plant the colour is named after was itself named after a Dr. Fuchs. So now I remember the name, and tack "-ia" on the end. In German, Fuchs sounds something like "fooks", so it's "fooks-ee-ah".
- timeon 3y agoThat is general problem with English's language vowel shift.
- veave 3y agoReminds me of everybody saying "mastadon". Let's just agree, Americans can't spell :P
- codethief 3y agoI've never been able to make sense of why people are having such a hard time spelling Fuchsia correctly[0] but this still made chuckle. :) [0]: Just think of a popular four-letter word starting with "fuc". Replace the last letter with an "h". (The "ch" in German "Fuchsia" is pronounced exactly how that four-letter word ends.) Then append "-sia".
- spicyusername 3y agoNeeding a paragraph to describe a mnemonic for remembering how to spell the word is why.
- yencabulator 3y agoIn the context of Google projects, I propose fucks-ya. As in, will screw you over.
- foooorsyth 3y ago>the Fuchsia team’s approximately 400 members ...what? There were FOUR HUNDRED people working on this thing at G? Quite literally the opposite of the anecdote from the "Androids" book where the Sony (?) execs were confused when the Danger, Inc guys told them Brian Swetland wrote all the code for the T-mobile Sidekick by himself (whereas Sony (?) had teams and teams of people for the same stuff in their offerings).
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoThese numbers often get inflated because the people in change count every part-time worker as a full team member (bigger headcount = bigger promotion!). But it's still a crazy number. At every level everyone is incentivized to bloat the headcount as much as possible.
- dylan604 3y agoIt’s basically “I caught a fish this big” story where each telling increases the size
- azemetre 3y agoI don't think part time work in SWE is common at all. Especially at Google. The 400 number is likely including product owners, business analyst, designers, etc into those numbers not strictly being SWEs (happy to be proven wrong).
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoThat's not what I mean. At Google you can be 50% on one project and 50% on another.
- tylerhou 3y agoYou can but it’s not common either (across orgs).
- canucker2016 3y ago
- jefftk 3y agoSeems relevant: For more context: we have historically required the crypto instructions because 1. We make heavy use of sha256 in blobfs, where such content-hashing is on the critical path of loading all binaries, and we believe that in the absence of hardware acceleration, product owners will likely find that their performance requirements are difficult to attain and may seek to resolve those issues by compromising core security invariants, which we do not wish to encourage 2. For protecting mutable storage, both reads and writes go through AES-XTS, either in zxcrypt or fxfs-crypt. For similar reasons, we want AES instructions to be accelerated, so that protection of user data is not something that we are motivated to compromise for performance reasons. 3. In any product, we expect to do TLS for a variety of purposes (software updates, time sync, communications with servers, etc.), and don't want poor TLS performance to be a reason that people are later motivated to avoid TLS/use weak ciphersuites/etc. Since we do not want product owners to be motivated to disable fairly fundamental security features of the system, we have endeavored to ensure that the hardware baseline is likely to adequately support performance requirements, including through the requirement of the ARM crypto instructions on such boards. -- https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/c/fuchsia/+/808670?tab=comments https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/c/fuchsia/+/808670?t... marking the relevant CPU as not supporting crypto instructions.
- telotortium 3y agoWhy wouldn't they catch this before they started work on porting this device to Fuchsia? Why isn't this a problem with the existing OS (Android? ChromeOS?)?
- MBCook 3y agoPerhaps they didn’t think the impact was going to be as bad as it was and it turned out it just wasn’t possible to meet their standards as they had hoped w/o requiring crypto hardware. Or, perhaps, they simply changed their minimum security standards and had to raise requirements as a result.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
- 7e 3y agoAnother project designed to get L7-9s promoted at Google. Ambition and the ability to wave hands are all you need. I like cool stuff, like capabilities, as much as the next person, but nobody needs a new OS. Linux will evolve sufficiently anyway. A new OS isn’t compelling for users.
- edgyquant 3y agoIf people followed this logic there would be no Linux to “evolve sufficiently”
- lmm 3y agoHuh? Linux solved a real problem, at the time there really wasn't an alternative (386BSD was under a lawsuit cloud, GNU didn't run, Minix didn't perform well enough for daily driver use and was opposed to the kind of changes that would be needed to fix that).
- calderwoodra 3y agoAgree on the first point, L7+'s are often looking for technical ways to transform the business. Fuchsia and Dart are still big technologies though touching many other projects, so back-tracking on speakers doesn't quite mean fuchsia is a failure/not necessary.
- hollerith 3y ago>A new OS isn’t compelling for users. I'm a user (and in particular a Linux user) and a new OS which has Chromium ported to it is compelling to me because I expect that Linux will never evolve to be secure enough.
- kelnos 3y agoLinux security (another desktop user here) is... fine? You can get pretty great security on it, if you want, by running Wayland instead of X11 and running all your apps via Flatpak or Snap (assuming you only choose apps that aren't intentionally allowed to break out of their sandbox). And none of these things require Linux (the kernel) to change all that much. Hell, Android has decent security by running all apps with different user IDs and restricting the parts of the filesystem it can access. Obviously your default Linux desktop install doesn't work like this, but some motivated individuals could do it, if they wanted. Writing an entire new OS is hardly necessary. Google just wanted something it could control, when it comes to Fuchsia. And they're the last company that I would trust to build an OS that doesn't end up being user-hostile.
- lockhouse 3y agoOff topic, but I hate the name Assistant. It is the most uninspired name imaginable. There's no personality to it and no fun. When did Google get so boring?
- kelnos 3y agoHasn't Google always been pretty boring? GMail, Reader, Docs, Sheets, Drive, etc. aren't exactly inspired names either.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoI’ve mentioned this before, but this is actually a godsend feature in their named product offerings in GCP. Amazon’s product names make no sense and it’s impossible to keep track of everything if you aren’t working with it all the time. Conversely, GCP’s product name is literally just what the product is. Nothing more. Google Cloud DNS vs Route 53. Amazon RDS vs Google CloudSQL. Cloud Pub/Sub vs SNS/SQS. Etc etc
- codethief 3y agohttps://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoThis is great. This one in particular got me: > Device Farm - Should have been called Amazon Drawer of Old Android Devices And another one > Mobile Analytics - Should have been called Spot on Name, Amazon Product Managers take note
- mcbain 3y agoGoogle CloudSQL Enterprise vs Google CloudSQL Enterprise Plus.
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- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- andrewstuart 3y agoSomeone must have written somewhere about the concept of the corporate concentration span. Surely some companies have ADHD.
- chupchap 3y agoThe A in Alphabet stands for Abandon
- parker_mountain 3y ago400 FTEs. Totally Abandoned.
- jvolkman 3y ago> Importantly, the Nest Hub series of smart displays are entirely unaffected by this change. Those devices will continue to run Fuchsia under the hood and will continue to receive updates as normal.
- helf 3y ago[dead]
- pier25 3y agoOff topic but... What's the future of Fuchsia? Years ago it seemed like it would replace Android and ChromeOS but time passes and we haven't seen any results other than the Nest hub running it.
- flangola7 3y agoWhat even is it? What does it do that existing operating systems don't?
- fendy3002 3y agoIt isn't running in java IIRC
- re-thc 3y ago> Off topic but... What's the future of Fuchsia? To keep engineers that would otherwise leave Google for competitors engaged.
- ehsankia 3y agoI don't think it was ever meant to replace Android/ChromeOS, but rather the layer below (linux).
- pier25 3y agoIIRC it does have a GUI and application layers. There was a video a couple of years ago of a user logging in and launching Chrome.
- pests 3y agoThese are technically different projects. The kernel is named Zircon and the operating system is Fushia. The user interface and applications are written in Flutter which uses Dart.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoI've been assuming for several years now that they will never end up killing either Android or ChromeOS in favor of Fuchsia. The reasons aren't technical but business related. The business reason for this is that this would alienate the OEM ecosystem. The likes of Samsung want less Google influence, not more and they're really invested in Android. Without Samsung on board, Google's choice is letting them take over Android or keep control on their side. It's that simple. There are also various Chinese manufacturers that already cut loose from Google for legal reasons that are running Android forks. Amazon has its own fork. So, Google has their work cut out forcing that ecosystem in the direction of Fuchsia. With ChromeOS, they have a similar issue. Lots of OEMs and it's actually a relatively successful platform. IMHO they should push to merge the ChromeOS and Android ecosystems more. Fuchsia does not solve a problem any OEM has. It's Google's big not invented here syndrome. They started doing an OS because they had some technical concerns with Linux. Instead of working with the Linux community to address those concerns, they've been building their own OS for years now. They'll ultimately probably do the easy and obvious thing which is to write off the whole effort. At best a lot of the components (minus the kernel) might find their way into Android/ChromeOS and their UI frameworks (jetpack compose and flutter).
- vaxman 3y agoUnder Fuchsia, the system wears a headset to operate you!
- tehjoker 3y agodoes this matter at all to customers? i assumed fucscia is just some IP/vendor lock in play but I might just be cynical since i dont know the details
- jwrallie 3y agoIs it just me or Fuchsia sounds more and more like vaporware the more I read about it? Did Google never consider that Fuchsia might become to Android what Plan 9 is to Unix?
- ulfw 3y agoUtter lack of Product Leadership who actually is allowed and able to lead.
- dvh 3y agoIs flutter next to be axed?
- datadeft 3y agoSurprise surprise (not really). Fuchsia had great potential but Google being Google.
- otikik 3y agoSo, do we need to add this to https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ ?
- MisterTea 3y agoHere's the story behind Fuchsia told to me by a Google employee: One day a bunch of senior engineers wanted to quit. Google asked them why and they answered "we're bored." So google asked them "what would you rather work on?" and they replied "write an OS" and so google said "here's more money. do whatever you want." Fuschia isn't a serious project. It was busy work to keep top employees from leaving for competition. I was also told that no one inside google seems to know or care about Fuchsia. It only ever was used in the smart speaker. And reading through the API and syscall interface its clear no one is serious about writing an real OS.
- rvba 3y agoIf those engineers that Google wants to keep are so good, then why they cant deliver anything? Or do they just game google and will spend years doing nothing
- MisterTea 3y agoWell just because they were good at one thing doesn't mean they are good at another. I'm sure google was initially confident in their assertion but the current state shows that it is a dead end.
- pch00 3y agoIn that case can I please have my 1st gen Nest Hub back on the pre-Fuchsia OS please? Ever since the "upgrade" it's been more laggy and requires semi-regular power cycles, as if there's a memory leak somewhere.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoWhen it launched, we shipped it with an HTML/TypeScript based UI. It sold well, and got excellent reviews So of course a few moments later it was insisted that the whole thing had to be rewritten in Flutter/Dart. Because reasons. But of course Flutter didn't exist for the platform. So that had to get written too. Which also meant somehow writing things like screen reader, and other accessibility features, which are services provided normally by the OS for other platforms (Android, iOS) that Flutter ran on. And which we had just finished porting to Cast OS from Chrome OS. And of course they insisted that because, I dunno, Flutter was native or something it would just be faster than that dodgy HTML stuff. Nevermind that thousands and thousands of engineering hours have gone into the Chromium graphics stack, and my coworkers had made it perform very well on the little old outdated cheap SoC in the thing... And while this was all happening, simultaneously people were working off in Fuchsia land with seemingly unlimited headcount, hoisting the whole thing into Fuchsia. And claiming they'd be done any minute now. But then, of course, late for multiple years. All along the Cast OS team was deprived of product roadmap or headcount, to maintain the existing thing... which we had shipped into customers homes successfully and gotten excellent reviews. Anyways, I wasn't central to this or anything, most ephemeral. But ephemerally flabbergated and frustrated. Happy to hear you enjoyed the earlier experience :-)