4 ms·

I know marketing folks prefer poetic names, but I wish we had consistent naming like v1.0, 2.0 etc, instead of renaming your product line every year like Apple

I know marketing folks prefer poetic names, but I wish we had consistent naming like v1.0, 2.0 etc, instead of renaming your product line every year like Apple and Xbox does. Confusing and opaque.

ethbr1 3y ago
Amazon's jungle convinced me there's two valid solutions to string naming. 1: Trying to design and impose an ontology, echo that in naming, and then keep it coherent in perpetuity. 2: Accept that definition cannot be solved at the naming level, expect people to read the docs to dereference names, and name it whatever the hell you want. Honestly, as long as they don't suddenly repurpose names, I have no problem with either approach. They both have their pros and cons. PS: And jungle does have the benefit of keeping developers from making assumptions about stringN+1 in the future...
r00fus 3y ago
Apple does it properly - version + moniker. Searching google/etc for specific issues related to version numbers alone is a disaster, so monikers have a use.
- lunyaskye 3y ago
  I used to work for them, and I agree. It seems confusing from the outside but internally they maintain a pretty consistent system. Many third party partners don't follow this system properly, in my experience.
- OkGoDoIt 3y ago
  Really? Other than the iPhone and Apple Watch which do have clear series naming, I find it basically impossible to determine if any particular Apple product name is the latest version or several years old. The iPads especially, and the MacBooks were pretty confusing until recently. The Apple TV and AirPods are also a bit of a mess. I wish they would just do for all of their products what they do for the iPhone, it would make things so much simpler. But even then, the iPhones are not clearly labeled on the products themselves. If someone hands you a random iPhone, it’s impossible to tell what model is unless you have encyclopedic knowledge of the exact differences between all the different iPhones, or you have the unlock passcode and can get into the settings>about menu.
kergonath 3y ago
> renaming your product line every year like Apple and Xbox does. Apple is famous for not updating product names. This year’s MacBook Pro is just “MacBook Pro”, same as last year’s, and so on since the beginning. You have to dig to get actual names like “M3, nov 2023” or the less ambiguous Mac15,3. That said, I agree with you. Navigating the jungle of LLMs all over the place with utterly stupid naming schemes is not easy.
chaxor 3y ago
What's wrong with the Google names? It seems pretty clear, they started with Bert, to borrow from AllenAIs Elmo, then Big Bird, and made some friends with Palms along the way. So of course Bard would make sense and is a natural next name. Then it gets even simpler really, by switching Bard to Gemini it really streamlined the naming. Gemini nano < Gemini Pro 1.0 == Gemini Advanced Then after that Gemini 1.5 Pro, but that's still worse than Gemini Ultra 1.0 which is still better than Advanced. They have made it a bit easier now though with Gemma, which is worse than all of them, but still a little bigger than what you want to run on a phone, which is a great reason to introduce Germa X. I'm mostly excited for Germa X2 version deXbox though. That's when we finally get a decent model for desktop boxes.

I know marketing folks prefer poetic names, but I wish we had consistent naming like v1.0, 2.0 etc, instead of renaming your product line every year like Apple and Xbox does. Confusing and opaque.

ethbr1 3y ago

Amazon's jungle convinced me there's two valid solutions to string naming. 1: Trying to design and impose an ontology, echo that in naming, and then keep it coherent in perpetuity. 2: Accept that definition cannot be solved at the naming level, expect people to read the docs to dereference names, and name it whatever the hell you want. Honestly, as long as they don't suddenly repurpose names, I have no problem with either approach. They both have their pros and cons. PS: And jungle does have the benefit of keeping developers from making assumptions about stringN+1 in the future...

r00fus 3y ago

Apple does it properly - version + moniker. Searching google/etc for specific issues related to version numbers alone is a disaster, so monikers have a use.

lunyaskye 3y ago
I used to work for them, and I agree. It seems confusing from the outside but internally they maintain a pretty consistent system. Many third party partners don't follow this system properly, in my experience.
OkGoDoIt 3y ago
Really? Other than the iPhone and Apple Watch which do have clear series naming, I find it basically impossible to determine if any particular Apple product name is the latest version or several years old. The iPads especially, and the MacBooks were pretty confusing until recently. The Apple TV and AirPods are also a bit of a mess. I wish they would just do for all of their products what they do for the iPhone, it would make things so much simpler. But even then, the iPhones are not clearly labeled on the products themselves. If someone hands you a random iPhone, it’s impossible to tell what model is unless you have encyclopedic knowledge of the exact differences between all the different iPhones, or you have the unlock passcode and can get into the settings>about menu.

kergonath 3y ago

> renaming your product line every year like Apple and Xbox does. Apple is famous for not updating product names. This year’s MacBook Pro is just “MacBook Pro”, same as last year’s, and so on since the beginning. You have to dig to get actual names like “M3, nov 2023” or the less ambiguous Mac15,3. That said, I agree with you. Navigating the jungle of LLMs all over the place with utterly stupid naming schemes is not easy.

chaxor 3y ago

What's wrong with the Google names? It seems pretty clear, they started with Bert, to borrow from AllenAIs Elmo, then Big Bird, and made some friends with Palms along the way. So of course Bard would make sense and is a natural next name. Then it gets even simpler really, by switching Bard to Gemini it really streamlined the naming. Gemini nano < Gemini Pro 1.0 == Gemini Advanced Then after that Gemini 1.5 Pro, but that's still worse than Gemini Ultra 1.0 which is still better than Advanced. They have made it a bit easier now though with Gemma, which is worse than all of them, but still a little bigger than what you want to run on a phone, which is a great reason to introduce Germa X. I'm mostly excited for Germa X2 version deXbox though. That's when we finally get a decent model for desktop boxes.