6 ms·
I Fired Google
- CephalopodMD 5mo agoi really like Gemini Google home. The old software felt lobotomized by comparison.
- complianceowll 5mo agoThis was so spot on I felt like standing up and yelling, "Yes! Exactly!"
- ncr100 5mo agoI have a similar experience. Having used Google home assistant since it came out for all the things that it's good for, and watched its quality fluctuate, I find I really have to be more careful nowadays when I ask it questions because it can go overboard more easily. Is there a term in AI research where it underappreciates the specificity that is being asked for? Perhaps the AI could be default prompted, "you are a kitchen AI assistant and should tend to answer in facts and details and that are relevant to the current moment."
- nyeah 5mo agoThey've spent a lot of money on this technology, and what users want is just not that high a priority.
- complianceowll 5mo agoSame thing with Alexa. I ask what is the weather outside. She gives me the current weather, what tomorrow looks like, and asks me if I would like an hour by hour breakdown or a full forecast for next week (or something like that). So then I have to stop her mid-sentence and say, "Alexa, stop." Only for her to misunderstand what I said and say, "Now playing 'On the Rocks' by [artist name]." I'm in the process of going as analog as I can.
- itodd 5mo ago> Then I went directly to Amazon and ordered an Alexa. Dear lord.
- nativeit 5mo agoWell, now when she wants to know the symptoms of dehydration, she can purchase some sort of Gatorade really convenient like.
- reilly3000 5mo agoShe sounds addicted to toxic relationships.
- goopthink 5mo ago> I ordered it because when one superpower fails you, eventually you have to try the other one before they eventually ruin the thing that was working perfectly well before they tried to improve it in order to make enough money to be a trio of planets. When your options are a few competing BigCos and you don’t have incentive to try to build it for yourself because it straddles the annoying in-between space of “frustrating enough to do something” and “ not frustrating or valuable enough to actually solve the problem.”
- daveguy 5mo agoAnd how about this: > The closest I could get to punching Google in the ear and ripping out its nose hairs. As if giving more money to another shitty megacorp for another frustrating device is going to make any difference to the first shitty megacorp.
- kwanbix 5mo agoI sadly did the same as I didn't know best. The Google speakers started to have issues identifying the orders, so we bought some alexas, which we also use as speakers for our tvs. Do you have a better recommendation of a smart speaker that can play spotify, youtube music, or tidal?
- psanford 5mo agoI got rid of my Alexa devices after they would not shut up. "Alexa what is the weather for today?" "The weather for today will be ... By the way, did you know that you can set alarms? Just say ..." I do not care about whatever stupid feature you want to build engagement around. Do what I asked you to do and then shut up. And don't get me started on the Alexa Show that had the audacity to display ads.
- zf00002 5mo agoStopped after repeating the false claim that bmw charges a subscription for heated seats.
- bilekas 5mo agoIt was very much implemented by BMW. https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-commits-to-subscriptions-even-after-heated-seat-debacle https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-commits-to-subscriptions-e... https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscriptions-microtransactions-heated-seats-feature https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription... They rolled it back though afaik because the whole idea was a comically evil idea.
- gostsamo 5mo agoBMW actually piloted such a program, but the outcry was brutal.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mrhottakes 5mo agoIt's not a false claim, it's a true claim
- krabizzwainch 5mo agoI stopped reading your false claim about their claim being false.
- aliasxneo 5mo agoI don't really use our Google Home devices, but my wife does. Ever since the "update" I've noticed now that Gemini likes to ask her 2-3 follow up questions after each query. The first might be something like, "Would you like to know more about <X>?" My wife would answer "No" and Gemini would respond like, "Is there anything else you would like to discuss on the subject of <X>?" It's gotten to the point where she will start yelling "cancel" and "stop" to get it to shut up.
- delichon 5mo agoI talk to chatbots while doing yardwork, often with both hands full. Yesterday I tried to get it to shut up mid conversation and just could not do it with voice only. I had to wait through several minutes of blathering, restarted by every random noise, before I could put the chainsaw down and turn it off. I was amazed at my own level of anger at that. It was just a voice in my ears but I reacted to it viscerally like it was an assault. It didn't help that it was in the middle of a sequence of it telling one lie after another, like "yes, I can disconnect this conversation." Maybe what I had is a natural reaction to having a lying clueless asshole refuse to go away or shut up, which I haven't otherwise had to deal with lately.
- dminik 5mo agoThis is kind of funny, but very much expected. The interface into the LLM is tokens in and out (text, images, audio). And the harness generally doesn't understand what you're passing in. The LLM has nothing to do other than to respond with tokens and empty responses (eg. just a stop token) have been aggressively trained out of it.
- aNapierkowski 5mo agoi know it "has" to respond the way its set up but it feels like a robot trying to get the last word when youre just trying to stop it
- rogerrogerr 5mo agoThis would be great if it wasn't written so breathlessly.
- basisword 5mo agoI don't understand how anyone bothers with these things. Other than timers in the kitchen (where hands might be greasy) I've always found it faster to just pull out my phone and Google it. P.S. I hope that dehydration/headaches question was a poorly chosen example and not something someone over the age of 5 seriously needs an answer to.
- orn 5mo agoAnd her site spams you with soo many ads, I had to shut it down
- loloquwowndueo 5mo agoHey now you know how she paid for all those home assistant gimmicks.
- freediddy 5mo agoSorry but this page and site have the most obnoxious number of ads on almost any page I've ever seen. After reading a couple of paragraphs I closed the window, no content is worth subjecting myself to that many ads and trying to navigate which is real content and which isn't.
- cwnyth 5mo agoFirefox + ublock origin and voilà, no more ads.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoI can't fathom how anyone uses the web without an ad blocker these days. Especially shocking to hear on HN.
- krabizzwainch 5mo agoDon't forget a pihole! Sometimes I really do forget how obnoxious the internet is until I try to look at a website when I'm outside of my ad free setup at home. Which in a way keeps me from browsing around websites on my phone and wasting time in that way.
- cwnyth 5mo agoublock Origin works decently well on Firefox on Android. I think I saw that something worked on iPhones, but I never investigated it myself.
- krabizzwainch 5mo agoI have an old iPhone 14 Pro and I haven't been able to get too much working as far as adblocking outside of the pihole. Firefox for iPhone is bad and Mozilla has committed to simply not fixing it. But I want my bookmark sync so I'm stuck.
- cwnyth 5mo ago
- elbasti 5mo agoI have an android phone which means I use android auto fairly often. The sheer quality destruction it's experienced since transitioning to Gemini is incredible. I experience this mostly when asking for music. Before gemini, mistakes were common but deterministic. It was easy to understand where the query had gone wrong and so how to fix it. Example: "Hey google, play Blackstar" (Plays the album blackstar by David Bowie, not what I wanted) "Hey google, play "Blackstar by Radiohead" (Plays the right thing). Now: "Hey Google, play Blackstar by Radiohead" can result in playing... something vaguely semantically related with no way to course correct. In this exact instance (happened yesterday!) it played an album by the hip hop due Black Star. I will admit that there are some superpowers hidden in Gemini that were not present in the previous AI assistant. I recently discovered that Gemini can manipulate the navigation app, and a prompt like "Mute alerts" works, which is kind of cool. However like OP said, it's incredibly verbose, which is super annoying.
- RobRivera 5mo agoI wonder how much of it is them trying to minmax their revenue generating marketing algos for content discovery. (Willing to bet it's somewhat relative)
- treis 5mo agoPretty sure it just sucks. For years I've listened to Pablo Honey by Radiohead while going to bed. About a month ago it started to refuse to do that and instead start a radio from the first song on the album
- themythfable 5mo agoSame thing with Google homes. Pre-gemini, you knew what you would get, basically the structured snippets that would appear at the top of the search results. Now it's much more verbose. My biggest gripe is that it basically stopped listening to me, since "upgrading" to Gemini, which is frustrating because I've used it to control the Hue lights for the past decade. It listens to my partner though, so after it fails to listen to me, I have to ask her to ask Google to adjust the fing lights. Welp
- hylaride 5mo agoThe only things these "smart" speakers are good for is timers, adding to lists (especially grocery lists in the kitchen), and playing music. And even then they often stutter...
- francisofascii 5mo agoAgree, but they are very good at playing music. They are still useful even if the don't do anything else, just like a microwave just needs to cook food.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoThey can't do any of those three things anymore
- projektfu 5mo agoThe regular Amazon Echo Dots are fine, but I have one Echo Show that I thought would be useful in the kitchen. The damn thing must be mining Monero because it's almost unable to do anything else most of the time.
- Hugsbox 5mo agoI Fired theartofdoingstuff.com for extremely obnoxious ads - particularly the "Would you like to save this stuff?" one that greys out the rest of the article you're trying to read to... checks notes... ask if you want the article emailed to you? Who the hell thought that was a good idea?
- intrasight 5mo agoIt is ironic that so many articles calling out enshittification are themselves examples of the same.
- sqquima 5mo agoAnd a clearly AI-generated or at least AI-assisted post.
- tomasphan 5mo agoIt’s not clear to me. What makes you sure it’s AI assisted?
- shaky-carrousel 5mo ago> Google Home used to be one of my favourite gadgets. > Not because it was smart. > Because it was useful. I was half expecting "and that's bold" after that.
- deafpolygon 5mo agoIt might be quietly bold in a world of stunning declarations.
- warpfactor 5mo agoand load bearing
- input_sh 5mo agoI promise you that she went through the effort of putting less ads than what Adsense does by default.
- chymerax 5mo agoThe whole upgrade thing is stupid. For years I was able to tell my phone in the car: "Play this song on spotify" and it did it. Not any more. "Ok google! Set a timer for 20 minutes." -> "Sorry Bob, I don't have permission to do that". "Ok google, navigate home" -> "Navigating to Store@Home24!" (half a country away). I agree. I wasn't smart but it was useful in certain cases. Now it's just lobotomized.
- cmoski 5mo agoand it takes sooooo looooong to write a text message with your voice now.
- projektfu 5mo agoI am driving along, listening to a podcast. A notification pops up that my wife has texted me. I tap the notification. Google reads the message. "Would you like to reply?" "No." 10-20 seconds pass. "Okay." Podcast does not restart.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- bighead1 5mo ago> Nobody asked for cars that require IT support and 3 sub-menus to lower the air conditioning. (Screens are cheaper to install than buttons and knobs.) perhaps, but people did ask for cheaper cars.
- csunbird 5mo agoand we ended up with new cars being 2x expensive even after adjusting with inflation somehow
- runarberg 5mo agoBut nobody got cheaper cars. The shareholders on the other hand asked for a third yacht, and they got exactly what they wanted (after the car manufacturer fired the team which used to do usability testing for their interface)
- mrhottakes 5mo agoDid they? No one buys cheap new cars, at least in the US.
- fastforwardius 5mo agoI saw cost savings trickle down to customers only in an economy textbook.
- neogodless 5mo agoThis doesn't really track. Sibling comment pointed out that the average new car transaction price is massively higher than before knobs were replaced with screens. But more importantly... screens were put in more expensive cars first, and slowly trickled down to budget cars. It's a very weak argument that it was done for cost reasons. Screens are flashy and impress people during their 5 minute test drive. "Wow! Think of all the things I can do in my car that I couldn't do with a knob for changing fan speed." Sure, living with those screens tends to be a bit less enjoyable than those first impressions lead you to believe, but bright colorful animated screens helped to sell cars. If they're actually less expensive than knobs and buttons, that's just a bonus for the manufacturers. Also keep in mind, when screens first appeared in (expensive) cars, they weren't actually cheaper than the knobs and buttons they replaced. Technology is, sorry was getting cheaper per unit of performance over time. Screens became commonplace and inexpensive to put in cars, but I suspect they were ten times more expensive than all the knobs and levers they replaced when they started appearing in luxury cars.
- pipeline_peak 5mo agoNever understood why anyone would use Google Home or Amazon Echo when we all have phones. A DSLR camera is better than a phones camera, a voice assisting device seems replaceable however.
- advisedwang 5mo agoBasically a) because some of them have semi-decent speakers for music b) because it's nice not to have to pull out your phone (especially while cooking)
- speak_plainly 5mo agoThe quality of Gemini varies so much throughout the day, the week and the month that it’s hard to rely on it for anything. It feels like Google is trying to throttle costs but has completely missed the mark.
- trimethylpurine 5mo agoHey Google, write an article called "I Fired Google." (Although, based on the tone, I think it's Grok.)
- philipallstar 5mo ago> I don't need a four-minute explanation. I don't need context. I don't need a balanced discussion that considers multiple viewpoints and concludes with a summary. Karen, you mean you don't want those things. Stop confusing want and need. - The Manager.
- fiatjaf 5mo agoApparently you haven't fired Cloudflare, since this website forces me to go through a captcha in order to read (and I'm not even using a VPN or Tor).
- pwython 5mo agoI had Claude whip up a local solution for me using Gemma 4 26b-a4b on my Mac and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. It can do web search (valyu), file reading -- I have business & personal context stored in many markdown files -- weather, Apple reminders, and has cross-session memory. Streamline but capable agent that has been pieced together over a few weeks after using Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern, with bits of Hermes logic. Orpheus-TTS streams the spoken reply back with the first word usually landing in half a second. Voice input is openWakeWord for the wake word plus faster-whisper for speech-to-text, all on-device. I can run it straight on the Mac but I use it with the pi satellite and a cheap USB speakerphone (ConfCall MS13B). You can barge in by just talking over it rather than having to say the wake word again. Pretty handy Google Home replacement.
- ravetcofx 5mo agoDo you have a GitHub or something for the project? Sounds lovely.
- pwython 5mo agoNot yet, I have to decouple some of the specific/personal logic. When I do push it, it'll be here: https://github.com/alisorcorp https://github.com/alisorcorp
- jimbokun 5mo agoSounds like you could have a successful product.
- VBprogrammer 5mo agoI wondered how long it would be until someone took the obvious step of wiring a voice assistant up to a full blown LLM model. Seems like the thing I failed to consider was whether that was actually a good idea.
- Hard_Space 5mo agoThis is a chronic LLM style, particularly the multipart dramatic flourishes and the Haiku paragraphs. But at this stage, there's a good chance that LLM re-diffusion of this style is feeding back into human culture. God save us.
- jimbokun 5mo agoFun article, but the sea of pop ups and advertisements battling to distract you from the text ironically exemplifies the point being made about Google Home.
- data-ottawa 5mo ago> For years I could ask Google what song was playing and it would identify it. It was one of the most useful features it had. You'd hear a song in a store, on television or drifting over from a neighbour's backyard and Google would identify it in seconds. A huge pet peeve of mine is when I’m in the car and want to know what song is playing on the radio. I run Shazam and my phone mutes the stereo to activate a microphone. I have to disconnect from CarPlay then run Shazam, then reconnect — it’s a passenger only operation. Song recognition is built into both iOS and Android, the device should always use the internal mic instead of a CarPlay/Android Auto microphone over Bluetooth. Side note: is there a good “dumb smart speaker” I can have run with a wake word connected to my own API? Speech to Text and Speech to Speech are fairly well supported for local AI workflows now, it would be great to have my own Home device without worrying about where the audio goes. I’m sure it’s a very niche audience today, but I imagine giving this thing MCP for Wikipedia, a music app, and my recipes would be perfect.
- markbnj 5mo agoI feel like the author has another disappointment coming. Alexa has been annoying in this way for a long time now. Still very useful as well, but yeah, annoying. It has always been too proactive about suggesting things I don't want or need in response to simple questions like "What is the outside temperature?" ("It's currently 46 degrees, with a low of 32 degrees expected overnight. Did you know you can turn your lights on and off according to a schedule? Would you like to schedule turning some lights on or off?") But recent AI-oriented updates have just made it worse. Now its chatty and full of attitude, and having raised a few teenagers let me tell you, that's what we want more of in our lives. Chat. And attitude.
- adithyassekhar 5mo ago> Award winning actress Geena Davis is 70 years old. Thank you!
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoYes, and? Related from the last month: Google changes its search box https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370 Google Declaring War on the Web https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214449 Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266051 Google Hates You https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313538 You can no longer Google the word 'disregard' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238351 The IBM-ification of Google? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48230049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48230049
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago> Nobody asked for New Coke. I know nobody did, but seeing as I was too young (and maybe not even alive?) I have always wanted to try it. I'm a Coca Cola enthusiast after all. I wish they'd release a "Throwback Experimental Coke" batch out. I assume it was their attempt to flavor coke without the coca leaves?
- Henchman21 5mo agoIt was a ploy to use a cheaper form of sugar — HFCS — instead of sugar.
- joka88xj 5mo ago[dead]
- deafpolygon 5mo ago“An adblocker is preventing this page from loading.” No…, you are.
- josefritzishere 5mo ago[dead]
- fastforwardius 5mo agoGood to stop repeating actions making you unhappy, but how about going without assistants alltogether? From the examples given I haven't seen any meaningful life improvement with them.
- netsharc 5mo ago"Remind me [at datetime/in x hours] about Y." is very useful for handsfree reminders. I have an alarm clock that reacts to "Hey Google" so I just say "alarm at xyz" to set alarms. With the phone, "Navigate home" saves a few seconds compared to opening Google Maps and hitting the "Home" shortcut. I'm just waiting for Google to send the email with the title like "An update about Assistant's future" to make the clock e-waste. On the phone I tried Gemini but that's slower because it needs a brain for simple text parsing..
- fastforwardius 5mo agoFair point about the reminders! May your wait be long.
- krabizzwainch 5mo agoI think that this is a really good article for a reason that none of us are mentioning. This is not a tech blog saying this. This is a cooking/gardening/home blog. I use these terms jokingly, but we are nerds on hacker news and this blog writer is a normie. Regular people are getting fed up with how bad google is getting, not just the nerds. Companies don't care when nerds complain. We always complain. But when their normal user base starts jumping ship, then they could very well start listening.
- apatry 5mo ago[dead]
- yalogin 5mo agoGemini made me turn google off completely. There is no provision to not allow your chat data from being shared send for training - even if you pay. Clearly they don’t care about end users and I am guessing they are losing money on paid cunaumer tier as well. But that is not acceptable to me. I just turned off all Google services and finally switched to ddg as the default search engine.
- bruki 5mo agoI thought OP had learnt something and then I got to the Alexa part and closed the tab.
- ihaveone 5mo agoFYI; you can give Gemini default preferences which helps some of this. I use the caveman instructions and it applies anywhere I'm logged in, like Android auto. This fixed so many issues.
- trilogic 5mo agoGoogle is following facebook, they got an expiration date, born together, expired together, RIP https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-stanford-protest-graduation https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-ceo-sund...
- overgard 5mo agoI feel the comment about brevity. One of the things that annoys me the most using LLMs is I'll ask it a simple question and get like 2000 words back, or I give it a gentle correction and somehow it takes my one sentence clarification and expands it into 12 paragraphs where it agrees with me and summarizes the thing I just told it in agonizing detail. This is just a thing where I don't think LLMs are good at human context. A person can tell if my question needs a detailed response or a simple one, an LLM generally can't.
- baron3dl 5mo agoI wonder if this guy even realizes what these devices do and how he's consented to 24x7 audio surveillance by companies whose moral turpitude he turns into a sarcastic joke.
- jasonvorhe 5mo agoI'm so much happier since I abandoned all of Google. Photos are with Ente (shitty buggy apps but e2e & managed hosting), Mail, Calendar and cloud storage is at Proton, Keep notes were moved to Obsidian (best decision ever). Phone is a Pixel 9 Pro XL with GrapheneOS but I'm ready to ditch it once Motorola ships their 2027 flagships supporting GrapheneOS. I have maybe 3 apps that I still have to open Play Store with a throwaway account for. No idea how I managed to gaslight myself into liking Google products this long. I guess one just gets used to the overall brokenness, daily feature flag changes and the feeling of every interaction with their stuff being stored and analyzed forever.
- johnea 5mo agoExcellent! Firing goggle is a great way to demonstrate the art of doing stuff! I fired them years ago, and not just the kitchen countertop puck, every service they offer. Yes, that's right, I don't watch youboob, or use their search or gmail! And you shouldn't either!
- mdrzn 5mo agoAnd it's another AI article with the usual repetitions-of-three: "I don't need a four-minute explanation. I don't need context. I don't need a balanced discussion" "Not a philosophical question. Not a medical question. Not a legal question." "It was not a carefully considered decision, it was a primal gut reaction." it's not X, it's Y! "The telephone. The microwave. The Internet." "Google Home used to be one of my favourite gadgets. Not because it was smart. Because it was useful." it wasn't X, it was Y!
- thallavajhula 5mo agoThe irony is that this webpage is riddled with ads and it's ridiculous how many there are on that page. Wow. Couldn't even focus on reading the 1st paragraph fully.
- MaysonL 5mo agoIt blocked me, because I was running an ad-blocker. Then I got around the block. Safari’s Reader mode is often useful.