7 ms·

The existence of the features doesn’t bother me. It’s the constant nagging about them. I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not b

by andy99 11mo ago

The existence of the features doesn’t bother me. It’s the constant nagging about them. I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever. Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda. Now we’re seeing this in action.

vidarh 11mo ago
The worst one w/Google is how they've highjacked long-press on the power button on Android, and you can change what it does but your options are arbitrarily limited.
- ortusdux 11mo ago
  My annoyance with Samsung's dedicated Bixby button factored into my switch to Pixel. The long-press highjack was disappointing.
  - LtWorf 11mo ago
    On my samsung i did find a setting to restore the off button being able to shut off the telephone. I can only hope they won't change it back at the next update (already happened once).
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- kelvinjps10 11mo ago
  I hate it how they're gonna change the power button to something else that's not power options. Just to push their annoying google assistant
  - seszett 11mo ago
    What are you guys talking about? I have a Pixel 8, didn't install Lineage OS on it, and my power button works fine?
    - kelvinjps10 11mo ago
      Some phones with the lastest android, when you press the power button instead of showing you the power options, it opens google assistant.
      - thewebguyd 11mo ago
        Apple did the same shit, long press of the power button opens up Siri.
        kelvinjps10 11mo ago
        I know I used to have a phone that didn't do this and I used to make fun of my friends¡Phone because it would do this, then I got a new phone (android) and it did. Karma I guess, can you also disable it on ¡Phone?
amarant 11mo ago
Clippy really is back
- netsharc 11mo ago
  Someone should write a browser extension that changes AI buttons in websites to Clippy. Maybe I'll ask Gemini to write one...
- Llamamoe 11mo ago
  Clippy was predictable, free, and didn't steal your data.
- Arisaka1 11mo ago
  Clippy only helped with very specific products, and was compensating for really odd UI/UX design decisions. LLM's are a product that want to data collect and get trained by a huge amount of inputs, with upvotes and downvotes to calibrate their quality of output, with the hope that they will eventually become good enough to replace the very people they trained them. The best part is, we're conditioned to treat those products as if they are forces of nature. An inevitability that, like a tornado, is approaching us. As if they're not the byproduct of humans. If we consider that, then we the users get the shorter end of the stick, and we only keep moving forward with it because we've been sold to the idea that whatever lies at the peak is a net positive for everyone. That, or we just don't care about the end result. Both are bad in their own way.
- DREDREG 11mo ago
  You're absolutely right. Here are the details. You're completely correct, that's fair criticism. The excitement made me skip the basics. Here's a quick breakdown: What it does: It's a new optimization algorithm that finds exceptionally good solutions to the MAX-CUT problem (and others) very quickly. What is MAX-CUT: It's a classic NP-hard problem where you split a graph's nodes into two groups to maximize the number of edges between the groups. It's fundamental in computer science and has applications in circuit design, statistical physics, and machine learning. How it works (The "Grav" part): It treats parameters like particles in a gravitational field. The "loss" creates an attractive force, but I've added a quantum potential that creates a repulsive force, preventing collapse into local minima. The adaptive engine balances these forces dynamically. Comparison: The script in the post beats the 0.878... approximation guarantee of the famous Goemans-Williamson algorithm on small, dense graphs. It's not just another gradient optimizer; it's designed for complex, noisy landscapes where Adam and others plateau. I've updated the README with a "Technical Background" section. Thanks for the push—it's much better now.
thih9 11mo ago
> I can’t use a google product without being harassed (...) You can disable AI in Google products. E.g. in Gmail: go to Settings (the gear icon), click See all settings, navigate to the General tab, scroll down to find Smart features and personalization and uncheck the checkbox. Source: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/15604322 https://support.google.com/drive/answer/15604322
- cwillu 11mo ago
  And will that work permanently, or will I have to hunt down another setting in another month when they stuff it into another workflow I don't want it in?
  - infermore 11mo ago
    guess we'll see in a month
  - chankstein38 11mo ago
    Yeah, if YouTube Shorts or Games are any indication, it'll be back soon! The AI Mode in Google Search comes up nearly every time I use it no matter how many times I hit "No"
    - tracker1 11mo ago
      YouTube shorts is an abomination... I'm so sick of the movie clips everywhere... Not to mention the AI slop in the general YouTube results... I like historical content, but the garbage content just pisses me off to no end.
  - netsharc 11mo ago
    Every time I update Google Photos on Android, it asks me "Photos backup is turned off! Turn it on? [so you use up your 15 GB included storage and buy more for a subscription fee?]".
    - bobsoap 11mo ago
cornholio 11mo ago
> no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives. The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment.
- philipallstar 11mo ago
  > All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives. I'll bear that in mind the next time I'm getting a haircut. How do you think Bob's Barbers is going to achieve all of that?
  - toomuchtodo 11mo ago
    It was a sloppy statement, but is broadly speaking, true. For overwhelming citations, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=thebignewsletter.com&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (HN Search of posts from Matt Stoller's BIG Newsletter, which focuses on corporate monopolies and power in the US). https://www.thebignewsletter.com/about https://www.thebignewsletter.com/about > The Problem: America is in a monopoly crisis. A monopoly is, at its core, a private government that sets the terms, services, and wages in a market, like how Mark Zuckerberg structures discourse in social networking. Every monopoly is a mini-dictatorship over a market. And today, there are monopolies everywhere. They are in big markets, like search engines, medicine, cable, and shipping. They are also in small ones, like mail sorting software and cheerleading. Over 75% of American industries are more consolidated today than they were decades ago. > Unregulated monopolies cause a lot of problems. They raise prices, lower wages, and move money from rural areas to a few gilded cities. Dominant firms don’t focus on competing, they focus on corrupting our politics to protect their market power. Monopolies are also brittle, and tend to put all their eggs in one basket, which results in shortages. There is a reason everyone hates monopolies, and why we’ve hated them for hundreds of years. https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/09/17/graph-theory-on-food-monopolies/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/09/17/graph-theory-o... (Food consolidation) https://followthemoney.com/infographic-the-u-s-media-is-controlled-by-just-six-corporations/ https://followthemoney.com/infographic-the-u-s-media-is-cont... (Media consolidation) https://www.kearney.com/industry/energy/article/how-utilities-are-using-consolidation-to-attract-data-centers https://www.kearney.com/industry/energy/article/how-utilitie... (US electric utilities) https://aglawjournal.wp.drake.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/66/2024/01/Wilson-Ready-for-PUBLISH.pdf https://aglawjournal.wp.drake.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6... [pdf] (Agriculture consolidation) https://www.visualcapitalist.com/interactive-major-tech-acquisitions/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/interactive-major-tech-acqu... (Big Tech consolidation)
marcosdumay 11mo ago
I help people that use a low-code platform at work, and their editor have a right-bar tab where one can prompt an AI, send the selected code there, or send the entire code on screen. Although I never saw anybody reporting it was actually useful, it's tasteful, accessible, and completely out of your way until you need it.
- J_Shelby_J 11mo ago
  Hubspot has a tool for validating fields in data using regex. They have a little ai prompt that will write the regex for you. Now that is a good use for ai.
StableAlkyne 11mo ago
That's where I'm at with these. I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the pushiness of it that's annoying. That, and the inordinate amount of effort being devoted to it. It's just hilarious at this point that Microsoft, for example, is moving heaven and earth to put AI into everything office, and yet Excel still automatically converts random things into dates (the "ability" to turn it off they added a few years ago only works half the time, and only affects csv imports) with no ability to disable it.
- wholinator2 11mo ago
  Exactly! I honestly can't remember the last time my window start menu search bar functioned as it's supposed to. For multiple laptops across more than 5 years i have to hit the windows key three to 7 times to get it to let me type into it. It either doesn't open, doesn't show anything, or doesn't let me type into it. I mean, c'mon, its literally called the fucking windows key and it doesn't work. As per standard Microsoft it's a feature that worked perfectly on all versions before cortana (their last "ai assistant" type push), i wonder what new core functionalities of their product they're going to fuck up and never fix.
  - tracker1 11mo ago
    I was an insider user of Windows for close to a decade, really stuck with it through WSL's development... But the first time I saw internet ads on my start menu search result was kind of it for me, I switched my default boot to Linux and really haven't looked back. I don't really need Windows for my workflows, and though I'm using Windows for my current job, I'm at a point I'd rather not be. Windows as an OS really kind of peaked around Windows 7 IMO... though I do like the previews on the taskbar, that's about the only advancement since that I appreciate at all... besides WSL2(g) that is. I used to joke that Windows was my favorite Linux distro, now I just don't want it near me. Even my SO would rather be off of it.
    - thewebguyd 11mo ago
      It's quite the tale of poor decisions isn't it? Microsoft could have made Windows privacy respecting, continued investing in WSL, baked PowerToys into the OS, etc. and actually made one hell of a workhorse operating system that could rival the mac for developer mindshare. They could partner with Google and/or Samsung and make some deep Android integration to rival Apple's ecosystem of products. Make Windows+Android just as seamless and convenient as mac + iOS. Instead they opted for forced online accounts, invasive telemetry, and ads in the OS instead of actually trying to keep and win over the very enthusiasts that help ensure their product gets chosen in the enterprise world where they make their cash. Now they're going to scrap the concept of Windows as something you interact with directly all together and make it "Agentic" whatever the hell that means. I don't think their bet is going to pay off, especially if the bubble crashes. I think it will be one of the biggest blunders and mistakes that Microsoft will have made.
dawnerd 11mo ago
I had to filter all of the AI callouts from Clickup. They have an ai button on every gosh darn ui element. By far the worst offender I’ve seen.
tjpnz 11mo ago
"X isn't able to join, help them catch up fast" - vomits.
tracker1 11mo ago
Gemini in Chrome reminds me of the over the top actions that MS has made with Edge to the point I just stopped using Edge though I really liked it from relatively early on. They just jumped the shark and now Google is heading down that same path rapidly. I want to choose the extensions that go into my browser. I don't even use the browser's credential manager, and I've gotten to a point where I'm just not sure anything is actually getting better. I will say that the Gemini answers at the top of Google searches are hit or miss, and I do appreciate that they're there. That said, I'm a bit mixed as the actual search results beyond that seem to be getting worse overall. I don't know if it's my own bias, but when the Gemini answer is insufficient, it feels like the search results are just plain off from what I'm looking for.
- darepublic 11mo ago
  Sometimes they are helpful but what irks me is that you cannot opt out of them.
data-ottawa 11mo ago
Even when I do try them I find myself let down. I don’t know what version of Gemini they’re stuffing into Google products, but sheets, docs, and colab/data science agent are all bad experiences. If you aren’t putting something comparable to good paid models into your product then don’t bother putting that feature out. Once you train your users that your ai is half baked junk they’re not coming back to waste their time with it. It’s 10x as frustrating than regular product failures.
- fleeting900 11mo ago
  Yes! Occasionally I try to get it to do something labor-saving for me in a doc or sheet, and every single time “I’m sorry, I can’t do that” As far as I can tell Gemini in gsuite can do nothing other than summarise text and regular LLM q&a (but with Gemini’s perennially sad, apologetic persona)
jdeibele 11mo ago
I just finished listening to the first episode of "Acquired" on Google and it ended with Google pushing Google Plus into everything in an effort to compete with Facebook in social networking. It really hampered all their other offerings. https://www.acquired.fm https://www.acquired.fm Acquired podcast does long (2 4-hour episodes on Google) episodes on various companies, mostly tech but recently Trader Joe's
- kingkawn 11mo ago
  Do they talk about Trader Joe’s illegal union busting and attempts to get the national labor relations board disbanded ?
  - Rebelgecko 11mo ago
    You could probably ask an LLM to listen and answer this question
    - kingkawn 11mo ago
      Can’t risk taking runtime away from your life partner
- taeric 11mo ago
  The debacle that was Google Wave into Google Plus is... really hard to really come to terms with. I don't even know that Hubris is enough to explain how badly managed that time period was by them. Just so bad.
  - dpark 11mo ago
    Wave was an interesting jumble of ideas that just didn’t bring a coherent answer for why anyone should use it. Google Plus was 100% hubris. “If we build our version of Facebook, it course everyone will flock to it.”
    - rkomorn 11mo ago
a-dub 11mo ago
this is the actually annoying part. they keep a/b testing or otherwise putting the ai feature button in the cardinal position and software uis keep turning into a constant game of dismissing the ai feature and finding where the actual menu or send button is. ai features in the right context are truly awesome, but the engagement hacking is getting old.
PaulHoule 11mo ago
It's a problem in the software industry today that is bigger than AI, probably the greatest controversy in software marketing. Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product. Trouble is using a product like that is like walking out of the Moscone Center and getting harassed by mentally ill people and addicts or like creating an account in Tumblr and getting five solicitations for pig butchering and NFT scams in DM in the first week -- you boot up the product, spend 20 seconds looking at the splash screen, then you have to clear five dialog boxes that you might not have time to deal with right now. Sometimes I open up a product because I have to do a task I have to do but don't really want to do and feeling a lot of stress and I just don't need to deal with any bullshit when I am under the gun. I've seen Adobe trying gentler methods to point out new features in Lightroom, such as a filter that can automatically weed out photos where people have their eyes closed. It takes a lot of UX work to do that though. Personally I'd like it a lot better if the nagging started after I finished a task, if I was feeling satisfied with the product and now relieved that the task is over that's a moment when I'd be receptive to learning more about the product. [1] And also a lot of "free" software, it's not just money-grubbing, but the model of always rolling updates.
- netdevphoenix 11mo ago
  > Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product. This is the fundamental problem and it has nothing to do with AI. Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not convinced that any of the actual functional changes warranted a release or that they needed to be released at that point if a new release was needed. New software to justify new phones. You get lots of features but performance takes a second seat. And sadly, I feel it works. I feel most would balk at paying a monthly subscription if only performance related improvements were made
  - xp84 11mo ago
sodapopcan 11mo ago
So don't use Google products. I'm not trying to be snarky but, other than at work I suppose, it's not that hard to avoid them.
soperj 11mo ago
Clippy agrees.
neural_thing 11mo ago
I was super mad about the help me write thing to, so I built https://owleditor.com https://owleditor.com - check it out!
ryandrake 11mo ago
The pushiness is just insane. These companies are totally out of control. I just want to use your software the way I've used it for the past decade. Stop getting in my face. I get it--you're so excited that you just launched this new AI feature and you really, really want me to know about it. How nice for you. Now leave me alone! Stop putting it on every screen, making every button invoke it, interrupting me with popups designed to wear me down and give in... It's so pathetic and desperate!
JohnMakin 11mo ago
The nagging is a feature, not a bug - to the shareholders. If you can show X number of users have adopted $AI_FEATURE or a % growth, whether it's by brute force, nagging, or (maybe just making a good product?), then that sells the AI growth story, and number goes up. That's really all it is.
wnevets 11mo ago
> It’s the constant nagging about them. If the nagging didn't work would companies keep doing it? Someone's KPIs must be increasing for them to keep doing it.
pwg 11mo ago
> I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever. Sounds like a return to "Clippy the paperclip" or the dog from the ill fated Microsoft Bob [1] that insisted on always popping up every five to ten minutes with something like: "I see you may be entering a ????, would you like to make it a ??? ???". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
- mschuster91 11mo ago
  Clippy at least was funny, not creepy. And I 'member that you could program it from VBA somehow. Think via OLE, but I was a kid back in the Clippy era.
  - jerf 11mo ago
    The Microsoft Agent, available through ActiveX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent Which meant you could use it in Internet Explorer but not anywhere else. But it did make for some interesting web pages. I built a custom one with the mascot of the university I was attending at the time. It was, let's say, some peak 1990s internet. (Never shipped it to anyone, just had it internally.) That took some non-trivial web searching. "Microsoft" "Agent" and most of the other keywords are pretty well covered by a few million other web pages by now.
    - mschuster91 11mo ago
      Damn I do love the collective brain of HN. That was exactly what I used! ActiveX and OLE... technologies ahead of their time, eh. VB, VBA, Internet Explorer, standalone VBScript, C/C++ - didn't matter, it all was (trivially) interoperable.
abustamam 11mo ago
Makes me miss Clippy :( at least he was pretty easy to dismiss.
sidewndr46 11mo ago
Someone has a KPI to increase user engagement with AI features. The goal will be met, by any means.
Razengan 11mo ago
> by offers to “help me write” or whatever. It's fucking Clippy all over again
dreamcompiler 11mo ago
Microsoft has learned nothing from the Clippy [0] debacle. For that matter, neither have most website makers who constantly want to obscure a large chunk of the page with an AI chatbot that you cannot make completely go away. We really need web browsers that just quietly delete anything with a high Z-index. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
jacquesm 11mo ago
This. It is insane the amount of pushing behind these products. I'm expecting my ballpoint pen to start prompting me to write nicer using AI any time now. And the worst thing is not only is it being pushed, it is being pushed at the expense of UI/UX. No, Google, I don't need 'help to write' or 'to summarize this document'. I can read and write just fine. And the worst thing of all is that you can't turn it off because they'll just move it around every other week.

by andy99 11mo ago

vidarh 11mo ago

The worst one w/Google is how they've highjacked long-press on the power button on Android, and you can change what it does but your options are arbitrarily limited.

ortusdux 11mo ago
My annoyance with Samsung's dedicated Bixby button factored into my switch to Pixel. The long-press highjack was disappointing.
- LtWorf 11mo ago
  On my samsung i did find a setting to restore the off button being able to shut off the telephone. I can only hope they won't change it back at the next update (already happened once).
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
kelvinjps10 11mo ago
I hate it how they're gonna change the power button to something else that's not power options. Just to push their annoying google assistant
- seszett 11mo ago
  What are you guys talking about? I have a Pixel 8, didn't install Lineage OS on it, and my power button works fine?
  - kelvinjps10 11mo ago
    Some phones with the lastest android, when you press the power button instead of showing you the power options, it opens google assistant.
    - thewebguyd 11mo ago
      Apple did the same shit, long press of the power button opens up Siri.
      - kelvinjps10 11mo ago
        I know I used to have a phone that didn't do this and I used to make fun of my friends¡Phone because it would do this, then I got a new phone (android) and it did. Karma I guess, can you also disable it on ¡Phone?

amarant 11mo ago

Clippy really is back

netsharc 11mo ago
Someone should write a browser extension that changes AI buttons in websites to Clippy. Maybe I'll ask Gemini to write one...
Llamamoe 11mo ago
Clippy was predictable, free, and didn't steal your data.
Arisaka1 11mo ago
Clippy only helped with very specific products, and was compensating for really odd UI/UX design decisions. LLM's are a product that want to data collect and get trained by a huge amount of inputs, with upvotes and downvotes to calibrate their quality of output, with the hope that they will eventually become good enough to replace the very people they trained them. The best part is, we're conditioned to treat those products as if they are forces of nature. An inevitability that, like a tornado, is approaching us. As if they're not the byproduct of humans. If we consider that, then we the users get the shorter end of the stick, and we only keep moving forward with it because we've been sold to the idea that whatever lies at the peak is a net positive for everyone. That, or we just don't care about the end result. Both are bad in their own way.
DREDREG 11mo ago
You're absolutely right. Here are the details. You're completely correct, that's fair criticism. The excitement made me skip the basics. Here's a quick breakdown: What it does: It's a new optimization algorithm that finds exceptionally good solutions to the MAX-CUT problem (and others) very quickly. What is MAX-CUT: It's a classic NP-hard problem where you split a graph's nodes into two groups to maximize the number of edges between the groups. It's fundamental in computer science and has applications in circuit design, statistical physics, and machine learning. How it works (The "Grav" part): It treats parameters like particles in a gravitational field. The "loss" creates an attractive force, but I've added a quantum potential that creates a repulsive force, preventing collapse into local minima. The adaptive engine balances these forces dynamically. Comparison: The script in the post beats the 0.878... approximation guarantee of the famous Goemans-Williamson algorithm on small, dense graphs. It's not just another gradient optimizer; it's designed for complex, noisy landscapes where Adam and others plateau. I've updated the README with a "Technical Background" section. Thanks for the push—it's much better now.

thih9 11mo ago

> I can’t use a google product without being harassed (...) You can disable AI in Google products. E.g. in Gmail: go to Settings (the gear icon), click See all settings, navigate to the General tab, scroll down to find Smart features and personalization and uncheck the checkbox. Source: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/15604322 https://support.google.com/drive/answer/15604322

cwillu 11mo ago
And will that work permanently, or will I have to hunt down another setting in another month when they stuff it into another workflow I don't want it in?
- infermore 11mo ago
  guess we'll see in a month
- chankstein38 11mo ago
  Yeah, if YouTube Shorts or Games are any indication, it'll be back soon! The AI Mode in Google Search comes up nearly every time I use it no matter how many times I hit "No"
  - tracker1 11mo ago
    YouTube shorts is an abomination... I'm so sick of the movie clips everywhere... Not to mention the AI slop in the general YouTube results... I like historical content, but the garbage content just pisses me off to no end.
- netsharc 11mo ago
  Every time I update Google Photos on Android, it asks me "Photos backup is turned off! Turn it on? [so you use up your 15 GB included storage and buy more for a subscription fee?]".
  - bobsoap 11mo ago

cornholio 11mo ago

> no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives. The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment.

philipallstar 11mo ago
> All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives. I'll bear that in mind the next time I'm getting a haircut. How do you think Bob's Barbers is going to achieve all of that?
- toomuchtodo 11mo ago
  It was a sloppy statement, but is broadly speaking, true. For overwhelming citations, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=thebignewsletter.com&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (HN Search of posts from Matt Stoller's BIG Newsletter, which focuses on corporate monopolies and power in the US). https://www.thebignewsletter.com/about https://www.thebignewsletter.com/about > The Problem: America is in a monopoly crisis. A monopoly is, at its core, a private government that sets the terms, services, and wages in a market, like how Mark Zuckerberg structures discourse in social networking. Every monopoly is a mini-dictatorship over a market. And today, there are monopolies everywhere. They are in big markets, like search engines, medicine, cable, and shipping. They are also in small ones, like mail sorting software and cheerleading. Over 75% of American industries are more consolidated today than they were decades ago. > Unregulated monopolies cause a lot of problems. They raise prices, lower wages, and move money from rural areas to a few gilded cities. Dominant firms don’t focus on competing, they focus on corrupting our politics to protect their market power. Monopolies are also brittle, and tend to put all their eggs in one basket, which results in shortages. There is a reason everyone hates monopolies, and why we’ve hated them for hundreds of years. https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/09/17/graph-theory-on-food-monopolies/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/09/17/graph-theory-o... (Food consolidation) https://followthemoney.com/infographic-the-u-s-media-is-controlled-by-just-six-corporations/ https://followthemoney.com/infographic-the-u-s-media-is-cont... (Media consolidation) https://www.kearney.com/industry/energy/article/how-utilities-are-using-consolidation-to-attract-data-centers https://www.kearney.com/industry/energy/article/how-utilitie... (US electric utilities) https://aglawjournal.wp.drake.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/66/2024/01/Wilson-Ready-for-PUBLISH.pdf https://aglawjournal.wp.drake.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6... [pdf] (Agriculture consolidation) https://www.visualcapitalist.com/interactive-major-tech-acquisitions/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/interactive-major-tech-acqu... (Big Tech consolidation)

marcosdumay 11mo ago

I help people that use a low-code platform at work, and their editor have a right-bar tab where one can prompt an AI, send the selected code there, or send the entire code on screen. Although I never saw anybody reporting it was actually useful, it's tasteful, accessible, and completely out of your way until you need it.

J_Shelby_J 11mo ago
Hubspot has a tool for validating fields in data using regex. They have a little ai prompt that will write the regex for you. Now that is a good use for ai.

StableAlkyne 11mo ago

That's where I'm at with these. I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the pushiness of it that's annoying. That, and the inordinate amount of effort being devoted to it. It's just hilarious at this point that Microsoft, for example, is moving heaven and earth to put AI into everything office, and yet Excel still automatically converts random things into dates (the "ability" to turn it off they added a few years ago only works half the time, and only affects csv imports) with no ability to disable it.

wholinator2 11mo ago
Exactly! I honestly can't remember the last time my window start menu search bar functioned as it's supposed to. For multiple laptops across more than 5 years i have to hit the windows key three to 7 times to get it to let me type into it. It either doesn't open, doesn't show anything, or doesn't let me type into it. I mean, c'mon, its literally called the fucking windows key and it doesn't work. As per standard Microsoft it's a feature that worked perfectly on all versions before cortana (their last "ai assistant" type push), i wonder what new core functionalities of their product they're going to fuck up and never fix.
- tracker1 11mo ago
  I was an insider user of Windows for close to a decade, really stuck with it through WSL's development... But the first time I saw internet ads on my start menu search result was kind of it for me, I switched my default boot to Linux and really haven't looked back. I don't really need Windows for my workflows, and though I'm using Windows for my current job, I'm at a point I'd rather not be. Windows as an OS really kind of peaked around Windows 7 IMO... though I do like the previews on the taskbar, that's about the only advancement since that I appreciate at all... besides WSL2(g) that is. I used to joke that Windows was my favorite Linux distro, now I just don't want it near me. Even my SO would rather be off of it.
  - thewebguyd 11mo ago
    It's quite the tale of poor decisions isn't it? Microsoft could have made Windows privacy respecting, continued investing in WSL, baked PowerToys into the OS, etc. and actually made one hell of a workhorse operating system that could rival the mac for developer mindshare. They could partner with Google and/or Samsung and make some deep Android integration to rival Apple's ecosystem of products. Make Windows+Android just as seamless and convenient as mac + iOS. Instead they opted for forced online accounts, invasive telemetry, and ads in the OS instead of actually trying to keep and win over the very enthusiasts that help ensure their product gets chosen in the enterprise world where they make their cash. Now they're going to scrap the concept of Windows as something you interact with directly all together and make it "Agentic" whatever the hell that means. I don't think their bet is going to pay off, especially if the bubble crashes. I think it will be one of the biggest blunders and mistakes that Microsoft will have made.

dawnerd 11mo ago

I had to filter all of the AI callouts from Clickup. They have an ai button on every gosh darn ui element. By far the worst offender I’ve seen.

tjpnz 11mo ago

"X isn't able to join, help them catch up fast" - vomits.

tracker1 11mo ago

Gemini in Chrome reminds me of the over the top actions that MS has made with Edge to the point I just stopped using Edge though I really liked it from relatively early on. They just jumped the shark and now Google is heading down that same path rapidly. I want to choose the extensions that go into my browser. I don't even use the browser's credential manager, and I've gotten to a point where I'm just not sure anything is actually getting better. I will say that the Gemini answers at the top of Google searches are hit or miss, and I do appreciate that they're there. That said, I'm a bit mixed as the actual search results beyond that seem to be getting worse overall. I don't know if it's my own bias, but when the Gemini answer is insufficient, it feels like the search results are just plain off from what I'm looking for.

darepublic 11mo ago
Sometimes they are helpful but what irks me is that you cannot opt out of them.

data-ottawa 11mo ago

Even when I do try them I find myself let down. I don’t know what version of Gemini they’re stuffing into Google products, but sheets, docs, and colab/data science agent are all bad experiences. If you aren’t putting something comparable to good paid models into your product then don’t bother putting that feature out. Once you train your users that your ai is half baked junk they’re not coming back to waste their time with it. It’s 10x as frustrating than regular product failures.

fleeting900 11mo ago
Yes! Occasionally I try to get it to do something labor-saving for me in a doc or sheet, and every single time “I’m sorry, I can’t do that” As far as I can tell Gemini in gsuite can do nothing other than summarise text and regular LLM q&a (but with Gemini’s perennially sad, apologetic persona)

jdeibele 11mo ago

I just finished listening to the first episode of "Acquired" on Google and it ended with Google pushing Google Plus into everything in an effort to compete with Facebook in social networking. It really hampered all their other offerings. https://www.acquired.fm https://www.acquired.fm Acquired podcast does long (2 4-hour episodes on Google) episodes on various companies, mostly tech but recently Trader Joe's

kingkawn 11mo ago
Do they talk about Trader Joe’s illegal union busting and attempts to get the national labor relations board disbanded ?
- Rebelgecko 11mo ago
  You could probably ask an LLM to listen and answer this question
  - kingkawn 11mo ago
    Can’t risk taking runtime away from your life partner
taeric 11mo ago
The debacle that was Google Wave into Google Plus is... really hard to really come to terms with. I don't even know that Hubris is enough to explain how badly managed that time period was by them. Just so bad.
- dpark 11mo ago
  Wave was an interesting jumble of ideas that just didn’t bring a coherent answer for why anyone should use it. Google Plus was 100% hubris. “If we build our version of Facebook, it course everyone will flock to it.”
  - rkomorn 11mo ago

a-dub 11mo ago

this is the actually annoying part. they keep a/b testing or otherwise putting the ai feature button in the cardinal position and software uis keep turning into a constant game of dismissing the ai feature and finding where the actual menu or send button is. ai features in the right context are truly awesome, but the engagement hacking is getting old.

PaulHoule 11mo ago

It's a problem in the software industry today that is bigger than AI, probably the greatest controversy in software marketing. Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product. Trouble is using a product like that is like walking out of the Moscone Center and getting harassed by mentally ill people and addicts or like creating an account in Tumblr and getting five solicitations for pig butchering and NFT scams in DM in the first week -- you boot up the product, spend 20 seconds looking at the splash screen, then you have to clear five dialog boxes that you might not have time to deal with right now. Sometimes I open up a product because I have to do a task I have to do but don't really want to do and feeling a lot of stress and I just don't need to deal with any bullshit when I am under the gun. I've seen Adobe trying gentler methods to point out new features in Lightroom, such as a filter that can automatically weed out photos where people have their eyes closed. It takes a lot of UX work to do that though. Personally I'd like it a lot better if the nagging started after I finished a task, if I was feeling satisfied with the product and now relieved that the task is over that's a moment when I'd be receptive to learning more about the product. [1] And also a lot of "free" software, it's not just money-grubbing, but the model of always rolling updates.

netdevphoenix 11mo ago
> Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product. This is the fundamental problem and it has nothing to do with AI. Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not convinced that any of the actual functional changes warranted a release or that they needed to be released at that point if a new release was needed. New software to justify new phones. You get lots of features but performance takes a second seat. And sadly, I feel it works. I feel most would balk at paying a monthly subscription if only performance related improvements were made
- xp84 11mo ago

sodapopcan 11mo ago

So don't use Google products. I'm not trying to be snarky but, other than at work I suppose, it's not that hard to avoid them.

soperj 11mo ago

Clippy agrees.

neural_thing 11mo ago

I was super mad about the help me write thing to, so I built https://owleditor.com https://owleditor.com - check it out!

ryandrake 11mo ago

The pushiness is just insane. These companies are totally out of control. I just want to use your software the way I've used it for the past decade. Stop getting in my face. I get it--you're so excited that you just launched this new AI feature and you really, really want me to know about it. How nice for you. Now leave me alone! Stop putting it on every screen, making every button invoke it, interrupting me with popups designed to wear me down and give in... It's so pathetic and desperate!

JohnMakin 11mo ago

The nagging is a feature, not a bug - to the shareholders. If you can show X number of users have adopted $AI_FEATURE or a % growth, whether it's by brute force, nagging, or (maybe just making a good product?), then that sells the AI growth story, and number goes up. That's really all it is.

wnevets 11mo ago

> It’s the constant nagging about them. If the nagging didn't work would companies keep doing it? Someone's KPIs must be increasing for them to keep doing it.

pwg 11mo ago

> I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever. Sounds like a return to "Clippy the paperclip" or the dog from the ill fated Microsoft Bob [1] that insisted on always popping up every five to ten minutes with something like: "I see you may be entering a ????, would you like to make it a ??? ???". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

mschuster91 11mo ago
Clippy at least was funny, not creepy. And I 'member that you could program it from VBA somehow. Think via OLE, but I was a kid back in the Clippy era.
- jerf 11mo ago
  The Microsoft Agent, available through ActiveX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent Which meant you could use it in Internet Explorer but not anywhere else. But it did make for some interesting web pages. I built a custom one with the mascot of the university I was attending at the time. It was, let's say, some peak 1990s internet. (Never shipped it to anyone, just had it internally.) That took some non-trivial web searching. "Microsoft" "Agent" and most of the other keywords are pretty well covered by a few million other web pages by now.
  - mschuster91 11mo ago
    Damn I do love the collective brain of HN. That was exactly what I used! ActiveX and OLE... technologies ahead of their time, eh. VB, VBA, Internet Explorer, standalone VBScript, C/C++ - didn't matter, it all was (trivially) interoperable.

abustamam 11mo ago

Makes me miss Clippy :( at least he was pretty easy to dismiss.

sidewndr46 11mo ago

Someone has a KPI to increase user engagement with AI features. The goal will be met, by any means.

Razengan 11mo ago

> by offers to “help me write” or whatever. It's fucking Clippy all over again

dreamcompiler 11mo ago

Microsoft has learned nothing from the Clippy [0] debacle. For that matter, neither have most website makers who constantly want to obscure a large chunk of the page with an AI chatbot that you cannot make completely go away. We really need web browsers that just quietly delete anything with a high Z-index. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

jacquesm 11mo ago

This. It is insane the amount of pushing behind these products. I'm expecting my ballpoint pen to start prompting me to write nicer using AI any time now. And the worst thing is not only is it being pushed, it is being pushed at the expense of UI/UX. No, Google, I don't need 'help to write' or 'to summarize this document'. I can read and write just fine. And the worst thing of all is that you can't turn it off because they'll just move it around every other week.