organization · 263 episodes · JSON
- Defaults and threat-model.md; Making a toaster, but societal institutions … Drawing not only on her experience managing and being an IC at places like Google, Twitter, and Lyft, she shares the wisdom from interviews with PMs, Designers and …
- It’s all vibes, until it’s not … Drawing not only on her experience managing and being an IC at places like Google, Twitter, and Lyft, she shares the wisdom from interviews with PMs, Designers and …
- What if they’re all right?; I didn’t make this; I write because … Drawing not only on her experience managing and being an IC at places like Google, Twitter, and Lyft, she shares the wisdom from interviews with PMs, Designers and …
- Technology is a tool and we have choices to make as a society; It’s magic … with Marcin Wichary on Friday 21 August 2026 Marcin Wichary, who started his career at Google working on internal tools, the search team, the doodle team, and the …
- Trinity … Marcin Wichary started his career at Google working on internal tools, the search team, the doodle team, and the HTML advocacy team. He later spent time at Code …
- Tools are easy now, data is hard; Background culture; Tingly is a decision I have to live with; Uniqueness Index … Drawing not only on her experience managing and being an IC at places like Google, Twitter, and Lyft, she shares the wisdom from interviews with PMs, Designers and …
- It Was Supposed To Be Different; Reading Material … Fitbit was a startup -- now acquired by Google and essentially dead as a brand now, its software officially rolled into Google Health as of earlier this year. Nike …
- The Irritating Aspect of Spiciness; Improving Pharmacies Somewhat … And! You, the store or pharmacy operator, I bet you could share that data with Google and Google could figure it out for you because Google Maps and …
- It's (not) the economy stupid; gaining convenience at the expense of agency … I use Apple Maps because it’s honestly good-enough and cleaner than Google Maps. But this September with the next release of iOS, Apple are going to …
- The Collapse of Form … Another example here is the story about kids these days not knowing what filesystems are and instead throwing everything into the Google Drive blender and just searching for …
- What Does it Mean to be Friends? … Google Chrome uses different, er, window chrome colors to distinguish between different ur-Google Accounts (my work account in Chrome is purple, my personal one a sort of …
- Efficiency Gains; I Understand You, But Could Never Be You; Can You Teach A Machine To Be Human? … I mean, Google apparently got rid of a whole layer of management (a third!) and, well, things are complicated! Maybe things are fine! Maybe some of those people …
- Decide What’s Important; Tacit Admission … what’s Amazon’s definition of “frequently”? You get the benefit of this newsletter being literally typing-out-loud, so fine, let’s go Google and of course …
- Kill Your Gods … and Reimagine, the machine learning-powered image editing and image generation built into Google’s latest phone, the Pixel 9. Go read Jeong’s piece, it’s a …
- Sure, Fine, Crushed It; Smarts … it ‘missed the mark’ | Ad Age ( archive.is ), Tim Nudd, Ad Age, 9 May 2024 ↩︎ Google launches new Home APIs and turns Google TVs into smart home hubs …
- I Don’t Know, A Skateboard Or Something … making cars is hard making [good] software is hard and that people who think that making good software is possible “if you do it like Apple or Google …
- What does it take to trust?; The Young Lady’s Illustrated Tour Guide … Google released its Gemini assistant, and I will not make fun of Google’s issues in Naming Things, which to be fair is one of the Two Hard …
- The Great Social Network Heist … ve built an ersatz FourSquar…" - Mastodon ( archive.is ) ↩︎ GTFS Realtime Overview | Realtime Transit | Google for Developers ( archive.is ) ↩︎ XMPP | The universal messaging standard ( archive.is ) ↩︎ XMTP: The web3 …
- How old things keep living; Impossible AI; Look, just call it AI … There’s the argument that slurping up everything that’s out there is totally fine (stupendously simplified) because Google does it and it turns out we let search …
- Rude; A Financial Services Social Network?; We Should Improve Attribution and Sourcing Somewhat … James to Host First Ever Statewide Gun Buyback on April 29 ( archive.is ) ↩︎ Google antitrust case spurs question: Why don't we change default settings? ( archive.is ), Matt …
- Not Up and To The Right; Just Deeper, Really; Better Wording Faster; Tools for Remembering; A Centaur for Caring?; Of Course They're Art … Scripto as not a word processor but a word-collaborator, in the way that I suspect Google Docs is still half in the Word Processor world and the …
- Just Put A Fucking Warning Label On It; A Sort Of Qualified Immunity; Doing a Spreadsheets is Coding; Rotate 75 Degrees Around The Vertical … AI indemnification | Google Cloud Blog ( archive.is ), Neal Suggs, VP Legal, Google Cloud; Phil Venables, VP TI Security & CISO, Google Cloud, 12 October, 2023, Google Cloud Blog ↩︎ No …
- The Torment Nexus Section; RFPs, man. RFPs. … Partnership [2] Seeking to Control Costs, Amazon Eyes Sale of Twitch Streamer to Google, as Workplace Struggles to Find Relevance with Younger Employees Microsoft Team demos Discord-First …
- Substack's Thin End of the Quora Wedge … It's what happens when you search for something on Google and, if Google hasn't rewritten your query to be something slightly more profitable for them, the …
- Free-range, Organic, and Natural; The Original Promise … needed to increase, too, to the extent that we've just learned that Google will rewrite your search query just to make a little bit more money. That …
- Tech Journalism, But Not Tech Journalism; Sounds More Like A You Problem … Back in April, The Washington Post analyzed the Google C4 dataset with the Allen Institute for AI to understand the sources for that data, as well as providing …
- I too aspire for my memory to be safe … Barroso was known for lots of things -- he's credited with reinventing the data center at Google -- but one thing of his that caught my attention was his …
- Marks on Flat Planes … your regular "document management is search now" argument; insert the regular rant about Google Drive. Everything from the terrible latency of Google Drive's browser interface through to …
- The Best To-Do List or Project Management Software Is The One That Works For You Right Now … m forced to by other people), Things, a spreadsheet (of either Microsoft or Google gender) (but not Airtable, still, sorry) and so on. Which is to say, well …
- Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town; Streaks Broken; Aigg on your Face, Big Disgrace … 1.3 Aigg on your Face, Big Disgrace I parodied Sundar Pichai's announcement of Google Bard [6] by making it about Torment . I should probably write that …
- Building and Documentation; Making New Mistakes; Eternal Tumblr; Governance in the Early Days of a Better Nation … This is an excitingly delicious possibility, and it's an inversion, I think, of what's previously happened with reader-aggregator applications like Google Reader and what Google …
- Platform Exclusivity: Microsoft / Activision Blizzard … I can buy something on Google Play and it'll appear in my iTunes Library, for example. Only obviously the sticking point for all of this is the …
- Congratulations, Your App Has Apps In It Now … But the smart people who make Zoom realized that Zoom was also being used by people to look at whatever multiplayer Google Doc or Jira or Miro or …
- It was only a receipt; It's a social problem, not a technology problem; Stupid smart lights … There's a particularly interesting comment in Bray's Mastodon thread about the article from someone working in the area of search at Google that I can effectively …
- Just Because We Can Doesn't (Necessarily) Mean We Should: Mastodon and Social Networks Edition … you can get in now, which'll be fairly expensive, or you can wait, and pay someone else to do it, much like you pay Google or Microsoft …
- A Proposal for News Organization Mastodon Servers and More … support.{ apple , microsoft,[ google ](https://support.google.com), playstation }.com. So for certain user-facing services that happen, in these cases, to be served over https, purpose-named …
- What it means to be PlayStation with Netflix in the room; What's Simlish for Metaverse? … PlayStation also hasn't shown up in the leisure-anywhere-that-includes-videogames market, which is basically "mobile games" and Apple and Google act as a gatekeeper, and …
- Dying Slowly, and then All At Once; Scrollytelling … Again, not Apple or Google either. I should point out that I don't how Twitter decides a link is unsafe (they don't say), or what sources …
- What is it like to be a PlayStation, Netflix/Everyone Else Edition … kind of? It kind of matters? Google and Apple don't quite compete on differentiation through user experience. Facebook (and everyone else who feels at threat) tries to …
- What is it like to be a PlayStation: Software Defined Brands; Gerrymandering Autocorrect … This is part three of an impromptu series of what does PlayStation do when console hardware sales growth has peaked ? Google Stadia, or, Winning at Videogames What is …
- Google Stadia, or, Winning at Videogames … 1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention Google Stadia So let's talk about Google Stadia. Or, rather, I'm going to talk out loud about Google …
- We can hallucinate it for your wholescale … Visual Basic But For AI I am now reasonably convinced that Google Colab is some sort of Visual Basic successor in the ML/AI space. This is why …
- I Am Reasonably Jet Lagged … Here's a bit of code that gives you audible feedback on how much your browsing sends packets to Google and it is probably worse than you expect …
- Google Slides is a Feature, not an App; Choices; Here, take one of these … 1.0 Things That Caught My Attention 1.1 Slides is a Feature, not an App Google Slides is terrible but, you know, in that Unix is terrible …
- Conan, What Is Worst In Life, And Why? … Google/Android has a campaign site to pressure Apple to adopt RCS and it's notable to me because you don't normally see this kind of sophistication …
- Wait, it's just a guess?! … doctor is ready to interpret them, allowing me to slowly freak out or Google hypochondriac myself if anything looks weird. Okay. A difficult day today. How are you …
- Things that I wish existed; HIG but not Hygge; Stages of Digital Transformation, Again; Good Enough Digital Transformation … organization starting out but expecting to attain competency to the degree of a Google, which at this point has had a good twenty-odd years), and then an …
- Actually, It's About... … It is tremendously unfortunate, unethical and irresponsible to be doing so in such an inefficient way, and I'm kind of proud that searching Google for "transaction-per …
- ... for the mind? … what's so different than giving people a bunch of Apple Cash or Google Pay credit that you can use at any merchant that accepts credit card payments …
- News; More News … You write in Google Docs, you don't need to learn any Markdown, you do all your formatting as usual and then they use Google Apps Script and …
- Basement, flashlight, etc. … I give you James Grimmelmann on NFT ownership . "Prompt engineer" for large [AI] modes is going to be a legitimate profession , said @hardmaru, a Google ML research scientist …
- Five Short Things, including Google Vibe … Google announced this thing, Immersive View , for Google Maps, which is basically "what if maps and 3d engines and data, but not too much yet". It combines things …
- Yellow Means Get Ready To Go; Middle Class Administrative Burdened; Google’s Fault … Google’s Fault See this tweet about shitty websites ? Did you know there are sites that plagiarize article and replace random words with synonyms? The existence of this …
- We Should Increase Science Funding For More Advances; Properties and Affordances of the Natural World … icons that have not been accessed more recently than n months. [ Tweet ] A Google Drive/Docs update that adds dynamic curling pages and yellow tint to the icons …
- I Learned It From You … syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM in Command line code on line 1 The end result being one of the most common Google searches relating to PHP was …
- The Social Safety Net and... Financial Services? … wow, look at all those self-organizing groups using Google Docs! ... that seems horribly inefficient, Google Docs doesn't really support structured data, there's so much useful …
- Didn't Organize, Only Moved; Context Collapse … This is not a new idea! If I search Google for "context collapse twitter" , which is called "doing research", one of the top hits is a paper from …
- Oxo Grips for Software and Vexatious Litigation … One example might be Google Drive as a bag-of-files that you're just supposed to search through, but if you're an old you can keep …
- Metalabels, or: Geocities Brands, and Old Mode … Feed For Me Mode for Old Internets who keep going on about some "Google Reader" and "RSS" and can't handle intrinsically algorithmic/recommendation-powered feeds like TikTok …
- Five Things … Ambient notifications Google's done another experiment into how ambient notifications could work, this time called Little Signals [2] . This one's six objects, covering off air, a …
- A Method for Efficient Exploration of Search Space … nVidia is happy because you buy more flop/s and Google is happy because you use more Google Cloud TPUs and Apple is happy because... something something Neural …
- Okay, just hear me out … Now Dan, you're going to say, Miro already has integrations that pull in live data from Google Sheets, you can use them to populate cards or whatever …
- A Short Conversation About NATO … into the past from OpenAI, the great great great great grandchild iteration of Google's DeepDream [1] (now 7 years old!). It takes a text description of something …
- s11hiatus05/05: umbra … Walking around Google’s campus, you might see a life-size dinosaur skeleton or a replica of the first commercial sub-orbital spaceship; walking around Facebook’s campus …
- Words and how to use them to achieve and convey your intended effect and meaning? … people, here is a Twitter microfiction/thread of some magical technology realism about Google Maps by @grahamvsworld . My friend Leigh Dodds has a good thread on data stewardship …
- Getting unstuck, spotting bullshit, and explaining like I'm five … non-existent. (I am not, I should note, talking here about scores of Google Product Managers attempting to out-compete each other on the launch of chat apps …
- The Games Google Plays … And then just this week, the pivot of Google Stadia to a Google Cloud product became complete (see: Ars Technica [4] , The Verge [5] etc) in the launch …
- In Which I Continue To Make Software Speak, But Only Metaphorically, Not Make Software Actually Speak, Because People Are Actually Doing That And It's Not Going Great, Bob … what Google Drive: but the mess doesn't matter You: it "doesn't matter" Google Drive: nope You: why Google Drive: because of search You: but Google Drive …
- Forget about infrastructure, I just want my tea … Organizing the world's information is hard, let's go shopping! So here's a tweet about what Google Lens which is Google's thing that uses lots …
- A short conversation with a bank … Google Drive, where you do copyright takedowns on files containing just the number "1" google product manager: ... you: Google Drive, where you do copyright takedowns on files named …
- Three and a Half Short Pieces … based on a corpus of Google News). In other words: guess the word based on how close your guess is to the target word, based on meaning . I …
- This is an Excel system, I know this … there are bits and pieces of how you might see the competition working. Google Sheets lets you import data via API, and Microsoft kind of lets you do …
- Fifteen Minutes Or Less … Michael Tsai collected together the evidence that Google Search is dying [3] , roughly based on the argument that Google's front page is full of either explicit ads …
- 3D engines eating the world; Jobs for computers; Digital Transformation by Degree … But wait! What happens if I search for "guild of function point analysts"? "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search," says Google. In …
- New clouds; Spreadsheets; Half-lives; Snow Crashing chapters 17 and 18 … The whole thing is about using Google Sheets (a collaborative working environment! That allows multiple users to work together in real-time!) to do IA, design and content …
- Point, Click, Adventure … and one that requires a lot more context, then Blogger (21 years) and Google Docs (15 years) both qualify. Good (provocative?) comparisons, maybe, in conversations where the word …
- Cats; Writing on the Internet; the Moon; OpenDoc and Componentized Software … technical? I'm hesitant to bring up Google Reader again (frankly I'm somewhat proud that it's taken this long in this Thing to get to it …
- Vestigial; Unions; Weird; and Snow Crashing - Chapter 15, part 2 … undisciplined) Googling doesn't reveal Chief Innovation Officers for unions (you have to get rid of all the credit unions, which... don't count in what I'm …
- The Device Becomes The App? … multiple sources and (sigh, ok, depressingly sometimes) creating a Word Doc or a Google Doc or a PowerPoint or Keynote based on all of those things. The way …
- Cursed Takes; Multiplayer Figma and Low Ping Bastards; Digital Isn’t Better Than Paper … already experienced in terms of a bunch of people messing around in a Google Doc/Spreadsheet etc. It’s an interesting experience. The massively multiplayer connection isn’t …
- Mist, everywhere … named for You Only Look once), it feels like the kind of thing Google wanted to see people do with its AIY kits ( Do-it-yourself artificial intelligence …
- Blockchain buzz buzz buzz … running automated tests like Google’s Lighthouse to see how quickly state covid vaccine websites load. This is good! More like this! How big, really? You may be …
- The One Where I Don't Want To Talk About Substack Just As Much As You Do, And Yet … Yes, this is kind of rehashing one of the use-cases for Google Glass and augmented reality (look, this prompted me to unintentionally recall a certain photograph taken …
- Three Things … One of the better known examples of a tech moat is Justin O’Beirnes piece from 2017, Google Maps’s Moat , comparing how far Google Maps was ahead …
- Eleven things, and I'm still terrified about that Twitter one … Real-time collaborative text editing and Google, Again I did not know, or did not remember, that SubEthaEdit [ website ], a real-time collaborative text editor I first encountered …
- How can I help you? … Google Here’s a Google example: You can have lots of different kinds of Google account — a personal Google account, a G Suite (or whatever it’s called …
- Despairing sisyphean absurdity … says, staring at the unfinished too-long-for-an-op/ed version in Google Docs). Anyway, here are some of the beats, but I encourage you to read …
- The Defensive Patent Pool … Irani had pointed to a Google patent [US9037455B1, 2015, Limiting notification interruptions ] that in her words was “for a device that delays notifications by listening to whether there …
- On The Precipice, supporter edition … In about ten years.) Gowalla kind of came out before Foursquare (2009), which itself was preceded by Dodgeball (2000-2009, killed, of course after being acquired by Google …
- On The Precipice … In about ten years.) Gowalla kind of came out before Foursquare (2009), which itself was preceded by Dodgeball (2000-2009, killed, of course after being acquired by Google …
- An amateur with opinions … Lots of typing and writing and then getting rid of it and a Google drive folder that is, honestly, a mess. But! The last few months worth of …
- The Location-based Pokemon Game Company … We had a high-level partnership with Google, so Renny Gleeson, my several-layers-above boss as head of global interactive strategy traipsed us down to LA to …
- They Write Software That Kills People, Don't They? … You also get all the Visual Basic style applications and Excel spreadsheets, or Google Forms lashed into Docs that are the desperate makings of employees and staff just …
- An Institution at the Intersection of Technology and Society … I can imagine institutions like the Harvard Kennedy School bringing together government and technology to avert a further, insular, Apple/Google end-run around sovereign, democratic governments, but …
- This Is Your Regular Reminder … 2009] This is your regular reminder that speech recognition used by Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft on average misidentified words around 35% of the time for African …
- Aren't we all just so tired … senior product strategy and product management games, especially massive-scale, internet native games, like Google Stadia (but not traditional AAA! Something more interesting than that!) and location-based …
- Take your time reading this one … Therefore, we threaten to legislate for this system-level access and essentially force Apple and Google into complying as a condition for legally operating in our country. Australia …
- Titles, am I right? … This is just like when I realized that I needed to create a specific Google account to use with the Apple TV’s YouTube app so the kids …
- *gestures at the world* … we call Enterprise computing, well, Enterprise computing? Techcrunch makes a compelling case using Google Books ngrams that Riker telling us to “ monitor your entire Enterprise from a single …
- The ATCR Boundary … Somewhat amusingly, while googling for Flickr’s patent, I found… myself writing about Flickr’s interestingness and serendipity back in 2014 in a much earlier episode of this …
- Software from trauma, or, fingers crossed the only blockchain episode of 2020 … I’ve had a fondness like many others for things like the Nabaztag that I feel Google and Amazon are still grasping toward with their ambient information always …
- Learning the world … I’m not making the live-by-Google-die-by-Google point here, that’s a whole other topic. I’m grabbing on to the behavior. It feels …
- Tattletales, or, OK Google, what do you have on me? … Generally speaking, if your traffic is encrypted—and much web traffic is now, especially after Google introduced its policy of using https as a ranking signal in search …
- Ambient information radiators; butter trucks; trains … 1.1 Rise and shine, information radiators So there’s a Google Assistant smart alarm clock made by Lenovo. It is called the Lenovo Smart Alarm Clock and …
- Little things; Snow Crashing Ch 14 part 1 … Instead, the Librarian can do something a little bit like Google’s snippets, and can summarize in natural language metadata — structured data it either has, or can infer …
- What Kind of Day Has It Been … Which is pretty cool! And, kind of loops back to a feeling about Google throwing TensorFlow at stuff to see what sticks. People in tech have no idea …
- Cynical, me?; Snow Crashing Ch 13, part 3 … You can use a Google thing to record some stories and then someone else can play them back by using the magic phrase “Hey Google, talk to My …
- Personal Data Gossip Networks … Not just “what data Google has about me”. I want to know who’s buying and who’s selling and who’s giving it away for free in …
- Snow Crash Ch13, Part 2; Everything Is Political … For regular people, we pay for Google Earth through some sort of privatized life-logging service where Google gets to store and understand more of our location-based …
- Yet another extra bit … Anyway! It turns out that I could do pretty much everything I needed to do on the trip -- which included put together a whole set of Google Slides …
- Snow Crash’s Graveyard Daemons and … The Metaverse were rendered server-side and streamed to his computer a la Google Stadia, GeForce Now or... Netflix), but he can go into his office(!) because that …
- “With the word POLICE on it” … game Hey Robot (via many people), a sort of Taboo but with Alexa/Google, is, well, genius because of how it will get people to interact with and …
- Dunbar’s Goose and the Pump Handle … Now, I have no idea how Google are going about this internally. I have no idea if there are people like Google’s former Chief Ethicist [sic] raising …
- No, not a mid-life crisis; Snow Crashing … How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework [Google Books]. You say Flight Simulator I say na-naaaa-nanananananana It has …
- Snow Crashing … calls Roadkill using an elementary Siri or OK Google because “the telephone remembers” and to me, this feels like an interesting choice. I know I’m obsessing a …
- Tireless five year olds … Developing and testing a street audit tool using google street view to measure environmental supportiveness for physical activity. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity , 10(1 …
- Snow Crashing … Although now I come to think of it, perhaps the Street is more like Google's AMP. A thing that a whole bunch of people end up using …
- Stop Using Nouns … From that, Tom had the idea of “ Representative Alexa/Siri/Google Assistant ”): which basically means that when you unbox an assistant it provides you with three and only …
- Jeremy Bearimy … which is the view we get from looking at what’s wrong with Google Maps, or what valuable features could be added to mapping products. The underlying user …
- Safer Routes Home? … I wish Google Maps had a "I'm walking home by myself at night" mode that would show you a way with well lit paths and open spaces …
- Breaking the rules … also have to think about because it Costs Money, and is irritating because Google even called their thing hangouts and it was not entirely like hanging out . Jay …
- What’s the target? … This Time I saw that Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg is reporting Essential Products (Andy Rubin’s thing after running Android at Google) are developing a new phone …
- The One With The Uneven Mid-Season Two-Parter … lots of typing and looking at documents that mainly have white backgrounds, like Google Docs and PowerPoints and Word Documents. I am not, apparently, a professional who needs …
- Change your organization, or change your organization … Anyway, the idea that people in the Potterverse would yell at portraits in the same way that we yell at Alexa and Siri and, uh, OK Google, was …
- You're The Mayor of Terminal B Airside at SMF Airport! … Then Google followed suit because they know what they need for, say, AI training (big data sets, fast) and AI inference (low power, less data) and it’s …
- As at Batman, I want a Batcomputer so that I can remain unchallenged as The World’s Greatest Detective … Then, in “ The tweets that stopped Google in its tracks ”, Newton covers what happened when Brin and Pichai addressed Googlers’ concerns about Google operating in China and observing …
- Nobody expects the hiatus newsletter … a) “smart”, b) connected to the internet and c) thusly Alexa/Cortana/Siri/Google-enabled. Oh and I guess maybe Bixby too? So just from the ads I …
- Division by Infinity … Trust me, it all fits together.) So why do AFGAM (Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft) - and some of these more than others - persist in pushing their vision of …
- Welcome to the Churn … What's (somewhat) astonishing to me (not really) is that after the NSA leaks, Facebook and Google et al all started freaking out, in a way, about state …
- Fully Connected, Feed Forward … Or they suborn Google's network. You know. Apparently those two things are easier to do. (Ha, no, they're not *easier* to do, but the (externalized and …
- End of Process … Or, if you're Google, "optimize the heating and cooling of a data center" because a car's pretty much the same thing as toggling outputs. If my …
- I'm OK … Second, Adrianne Jeffries wrote on The Outline about Google's Featured Snippets, those one-box type answers that you get when "Google" "thinks" it can answer a search …
- You can't say no … and mental health of a gajillion interactions that slowly chip away at agency. Google Analytics doesn't have a tab for that. We're not interested in solving …
- So, What'd I Miss? … to the snippet of text that counts as advertising these days if you Google it, a television show about "A tech billionaire. A Chicago cop. Giving justice the …
- umbra … Walking around Google’s campus, you might see a life-size dinosaur skeleton or a replica of the first commercial sub-orbital spaceship; walking around Facebook’s campus …
- Random Walk; Black Design … Apple TV discovery feature in the offing - Six Colors [1] Google Fiber Blog: Advancing our amazing bet [2] Jamboard — the whiteboard, reimagined for collaboration in the cloud [3 …
- The Generative Surplus … We can do with that project what Google did with Deep Dream and create a *generative* network that works, well, upside down and can run iteratively to make …
- Tiny Brains Mewling In All The Things … or practical!) to implement an iTunes-like easier-to-pay-than-search-Napster-Google-Images for *legally* purchasing licensed media to use in whatever bullshit PowerPoint knowledge workers …
- Something is better than nothing … mean? Correlate? Cause? So I've got lots of reading to do in Google Scholar. 1.0 TKTKTKTKTK That's a joke for people who know more than …
- OVERNIGHT SUCCESS … he'd built Keyhole, turned it into Google Earth and then pretty much made Google the dominant force in consumer mapping when, well, there wasn't one unless …
- It Looks Like You're Trying To Write A Newsletter … so (ad agency voice) what if we turned on that front camera while you were using Google Maps or Apple Maps or whatever? What would we see? Would …
- Things That Have Caught My Attention … Speaking of which! The LSTMS that Google and Apple use now to help us write "simple" replies to people are *totally* the types of things we thought we …
- SMALL MOVES, ELLIE … Facebook and Google can only theoretically max out at 7bn daily active users. If you design stuff for other artificial intelligences, though, then the sky's the limit …
- Funny, I've always believed that the world is what we make of it … I've also managed - somehow - to continue the trend of naming newsletter episodes after quotes from Contact[0]. [0] Contact ( Amazon US , Amazon UK ) 1.0 Google's …
- This Generation's Commodore 64 … which as we all know just means sitting in front of an empty Google Docs window and banging your head repeatedly against the keyboard until the blunt force …
- ROUND HOUSE … yesterday Greg and I spun up a Google Docs spreadsheet, Greg worked some magic turning the CSV into some json and used tracery[2] and cheapbotsdonequick[3], some …
- The Surface Area of Being Consulted … Internet of Things start-up that was acquired by Nest (itself acquired by Google) back in 2014. Nest is dealing with all of this consolidation by predictably sunsetting …
- Patterns in the noise 0.0 Station Ident /* ** COGNITIVE WARNING ** THERE ARE NO APRIL FOOLS IN THIS EPISODE */ 2:42pm on Friday April 1st, also known as That Day Google Reminded Everyone …
- Portions Of This Consciousness Are Copyright … Enough rambling for today. [1] Bot Framework [2] Microsoft Cognitive Services [3] Google Cloud Machine Learning at Scale — Google Cloud Platform [4] IBM Bluemix - Watson [5] McCann Japan …
- Deep Dream for Depression; Unconscious Bias Prophylactic … We remember the Google Deep Dream images from last year. The cthulu-esque nightmarish images of puppies and slugs[1]. At a macro level, this is how those …
- Black Design … have become increasingly in vogue amongst both Silicon Valley style companies like Uber, Google and Facebook, as well as more traditional companies like General Electric and financial firms …
- GUT; Sixteen Theses … I get that Google Android versus all the Not Google Androids is an interesting thing but even so THIS IS NUMBER ELEVEN AND THERE ARE FIVE MORE. 12 …
- Coffee; Brands; Stream, Stock and Flow; Paperless … one of the teams that I'm working with has never been able to use something like Google Docs before, so their traditional method of collaborating on a …
- Robots; Other things … Googlebot # all Google services Disallow: /secret-feelings-journal/ # don't index my secret feelings journal but instead for a robot exclusion protocol for processing or understanding or some …
- Politeness … I've written about this before in terms of how social interactions with agents/characters/personalities/services like Siri, Google and Alexa are *designed*, because we have to …
- The Product Wars; Emergency _________ Hologram … I went an tested the Google OneBox response for "what maternity benefits do I have" and the answer was: a) there's a onebox for it, and b …
- Hello babies; Post-Apocalyptic Duolingo; Recreational Capitalism … It's this kind of thing that makes Google's Project Sunroof[7] look so good: I can't even figure out what Google's angle is here …
- Uncanny Valley; Network Du Jour; Streaking Considered Harmful … So what stack me from some problems and the last ten year old Google and I think I might be clear to more so you can't just …
- Battlesuits; Simulations and Puppyslugs; Scratchpad … If all that was a bit hard going, here's a short story I wrote based on the Google Barges[2] (remember those!) and the day they opened …
- The Watsons; 2015 (2) … 2015/07/hackers-can-disable-sniper-rifleor-change-target/ [3] https://plus.google.com/+google/posts/QY1c97V25Tz [4] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chief-keef …
- On Advertising. Again. … Or Google, for those text ads. Or YouTube for not having a rich enough advertising platform. But then there's all these upstarts. These silicon valley companies with …
- Everything … concept that is over seventy years old? I mean, on the other hand Google Photos just rolled out a *phenomenally useful* search engine for All Your Photos Ever …
- Typing, Continued … have noticed that I didn't spend today swearing in various capacities about Google Docs: because I wasn't using it. Track changes in Microsoft Word, my friends …
- Never Forget; OK, One Thing Google Apps Does; Weird Notes … 2.0 OK, One Thing Google Apps Does It was pointed out to me that one thing Google Apps - especially Docs - *does* do, is transparent, seamless sync and …
- Use Google Docs, They Said; Digital Media; Force Touch; Product + Practice … Take all of this with the regular grain of anecdata, but in my head, as I'm using Google Docs and Google Slides and Google Drive and Google …
- "Everybody"; The Webb Scale; Algorithms … today) I tweeted that Google Apps Is Down is the new Dog Ate My Homework. And, related: this *is* happening more and more, and there will be more …
- Compiling Consciousness.dat; No Apple TV; Negging, but for A.I.s … The second bit Borenstein wrote me about involved some more background on the Google DeepMind work. This work, if you recall, is super exciting because a thing is …
- The Humane Calendar; Government 3.0; Digital Public Space … I still maintain that something like Google Calendar is only a "less shit Exchange" in that it's a) less expensive, b) supports professional/business calendaring and c …
- The System Of The World; Hard Takeoff … There was a while when we thought Google was the command line for the internet, and now it's kind-of the command-line for the internet, but …
- Episode One Hundred and Ninety Five: … to me, so I don't mind paying for an RSS reader (thanks, Google) and I certainly don't mind supporting someone like Kottke, who's made something …
- Bureaucracy Is An Algorithm; Vapourware; No New Ideas … Are startups and Facebooks and Googles that inevitable take on the trappings of bureaucracy (inevitably once they start hiring adult supervision) really the best example that we've …
- When Things Listen; An Unproductive Argument; Process; Until It Turns Into Writing … Which makes sense, and is how a lot of these technologies work unless you own a lot of the stack, in the case of a company like Google …
- The New Normal … traditional companies* - ones that are pre-internet, might even be most at risk. Google gives a shit about your security, even from a principled point of view. Microsoft …
- Snow Crashing (10); How The Web Works Now … And, most likely, something that you can't reproduce with a convolutional neural network running on Google's data centers. Juanita's in the latter camp, an "irrational …
- Videogame Tourism; Principles for 21st Century Government … Which as we've seen from Google Maps and streetview - at the opposite end of the entertainment/utility spectrum, is *totally* a thing. But what if Assassin's …
- Our Crap Connected Future; Oh My God More Advertising; Echo … Sure, a bunch of opsec people at Google are super pissed and bits of the internet are becoming more encrypted, but hey, this is AMAZON we're talking …
- The Thing About Brand Advertising … On the one hand, Google's going to slowly and quickly (as things are wont to happen) fade away because it's not going to get a bite …
- It's Too Hot; Monitor This … But then Jam is described on Google as "a social media marketing agency, and part of Engine. We create award-winning social media communication strategies for brands." I …
- Web Directions South; A Thousand Songs In Your Pocket; Odds … Getting ready for my talk yesterday, showing Tom Armitage the recently released Google Fit and railing at its dashboard of charts, getting a little righteously indignant and having …
- Week One; Universal Basic; Karen … and drawing and sketching and setting up laptops, wrangling Dropboxes, getting Yet Another Google Apps^WFor Work account, flexing github muscles that haven't been touched in *years …
- The Mezzanine; Doing The Job; Minimum Viable Whimsy … At the same time, you can look at something like Slack and something like Google's ill-fated Wave and see that they both are pointed in the …
- Space; Other Dyson Products; Not Yet, But Soon … Make sure you have permission from the landowner first, and as more of your friends and neighbours install Google Neighbourhood Watch on their property, your neighbourhood will benefit …
- The Networked Lens; Twitch; Sufficient Density … John Gruber asserts that we're missing the silent benefit of having automatic backups[4] with services like iCloud and Google+ Photos - but this strikes me as being …
- Car!; The Robots Work For Tim Ferris; Diversity; 2014 (6) … or you don't need to subscribe to the newspaper anymore because of Google News or you don't need to pay for cable any more because...), then …
- Here In My Car … Follow the model that Google have done - find a city with lots of young people with disposable income and do build-out city-by-city. Get people to …
- Yes, And... … Or if anything, it's someone like Hari Seldon, who finally cracked the nut with psychohistory. (If I worked at Facebook or Google, I would totally as a …
- I'm a Barista; More "Valley"; More Uber; They Create Jobs, Don't They?; Dumb Telcos … I don't let Google store my location history. I pay for Pinboard. And I try to buy things instead of relying upon free, advertising-supported services where …
- Up To Code; Science Fictional Network Security; Notes on Infrastructure; Response; 2014 (5) … Where can you build infrastructure where no-one's looking? No one was looking when Google bought up all that dark fiber - remember when Google bought all that …
- Email; Snow Crashing (10); 2014 (4) … getting hijacked or Embraced and Extended - and everyone here is shiftily looking at Google and what they're doing with Gmail here[5] - the whole "don't use …
- Essentially Walking Sensors; Recorded For Your Safety; More 2014 … how is instrumenting workers in this way - that raises privacy concerns unless explicitly dealt with up-front, like we've seen with Google's roll-out of Glass …
- The Exoskeleton of the Internet; The Web Created the Modern Camera; Data Has Replaced God … We are made in its image, it reflects ourselves back at us, imperfections and Google searches for wart removal treatments because it knows that we have those, too …
- Usborne's Future; Phase Change; OK Google, Dismantle Barge … It's now an entry in Google Drive. * Each component of the barge has been tagged with a unique RFID and Google are releasing the barge into the …
- Digital Watches; Stay In Control; Unreasonable Empathy; Odds … I say ecosystem, but it's the corporate route - whether it's with an ad agency or with a Google or Apple or whatever incumbent, it's building …
- Another Way; Bottom-Up; Oh, Is That The Time … But if anyone at Google wants to chuck me one to play with... -- Signing off until tomorrow, and send me notes, because I read them. Best, Dan
- To Serve; Odds … data extracted under gag or cover of darkness from companies like Facebook or Google because something might blow up, but for longer-term infrastructural threats or weaknesses like …
- Solving The Problem … Its second-order benefits in terms of everyone-else-who-doesn't-wear-it are more soft, along the lines of the more Google knows about the world …
- When You're Tired Of Cities … But do you see any particularly good innovation coming from civic or local leaders *on the same scale*? It takes Google to offer to Fiber up Portland and …
- A Real Hunger; Will The Real Blue Ant; A Category Error … We shouldn't just take Upworthy's word for it though, because they're kind enough to link to a combined Google/TNS and Ogilvy study (uh-huh …
- Dark Value; The Latest Attempt; Five Eyes … The collapse of the newspaper industry means that "news" is now a substitutable good, with a free version now available - ie news.google.com, or any online news …
- Mundane Blue Ant; Press Square To Hack … What's appealing, in contrast to something like Google [x] is that Blue Ant is out there discovering the edges, peeling back the fog of war. What's …
- The Material (5) - What It Wants; Transmedia Is Dead! … 1.0 The Material (5) - What It Wants This is me, not writing (directly, at least) about Go Pro cameras and Google Glass. This is me writing about …
- The Material (4); More Ways Of Seeing … It feels like part of where this is illustrated is in an emerging philosophical difference between the way certain Google and Apple services have been designed. Google's …
- Manifest Destiny; A Little Bit Desensitized; The Material (2) … towns in Geocities and filled up the directories of Facebook, been spidered by Google, now that all of that has happened - it isn't a frontier anymore. So …
- The Material (1) … Just that there's a new marketplace that (as we're figuring out) works like every other marketplace out there, modulo the will of Apple or Google, for …
- Probationary Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; The Blog Unbundled; A World of Connected Objects … There are real people behind those subscriptions, and, with a little Googling, I can find out who they are, should I wish. Used to be, the only way …
- If You Want To Make Products; Enterprise Driven Software Development; Odds … I mean that is fucking *brilliant* compared to the "Ok Google, Get Me A Car" stuff that we saw at I/O. Also, I don't think this …
- Meat Puppets; The Circuit … You might point to the botched introduction of Google Glass as an example of an empathy gap - the benefit of having a constant connection to the internet (and …
- The New Jobs; Disrupting Bitcoin; Protect Us; The Full Stack Is Better?; Dumb Screens … Portland, Oregon, is a step closer to getting Google Fiber now that its council has voted through granting a local broadband franchise to our favourite mathematically inspired conglomerate …
- Recurring; Better, But Not Best … a blank look and a request for an address to be input into Google Maps. To be fair, this happens fairly often with any of the Uber levels …
- Taking Stock; And The New … Again, this should be a differentiating moment for Apple and Google: I would expect (but given the recent WWDC, am prepared to be proven wrong) that Apple are …
- Engineering Serendipity; Genuinely Useful People Personalities; Hubris … Do you want interesting stories to tell? In this way, asking for serendipity in terms of a "most interesting route" from Google is giving up a bit of …
- Building Together; Beautiful Shooty Things; Software For Eating; The New Toys On The Web; Take It Seriously; And Finally … New Toys On The Web Boris Smus, an emerging user interface researcher at Google, dropped one of his latest projects on Monday, a full-screen in-browser live …
- (Re-send w/formatting fix) Episode Ninety Eight: Engineering Serendipity; Genuinely Useful People Personalities; Hubris … Do you want interesting stories to tell? In this way, asking for serendipity in terms of a "most interesting route" from Google is giving up a bit of …
- That Most Killer Of Deals; Need To Know … Briefly, while the strong AI academics were busy not fulfilling the promises they'd dangled in front of us for the last forty-odd years, Google quite quietly …
- Health; Smart Cars; Odds … it's not clear what Google was going to do with Google Health. It's kind of clear what Microsoft were - are - trying to do with HealthVault, because …
- Email Is Still A Killer App; Dubya Dubya Dee Cee … And yes, there's the argument that Google killed RSS when it killed Reader and that newsletters are where blogs are going but that's not really true …
- Disruption; Supply Chains; The Good Bit … First, some data points: - Uber obviously wants to replace all of its drivers with self-driving cars[1] - Google is designing self driving cars / autonomous transport units[2 …
- Smarts; The Real Internet … It comes through in there being more talk of people moving their email hosting from Google to a service like Fastmail, not just because it's (potentially) more …
- Robots; Smart Things; College; Wintermute … So perhaps there's another story? The counterpoint to all of that of course is the uncovering of a Google SEC filing that only recently became public[1 …
- Solid 1 of 2; Requests: Cities and Technology … So what the rallying calls sound like from people like Astro Teller of Google[x] when he proclaims that to solve physical problems, we need to make physical …
- Day One; Google Everything … what type of content does Google's pagerank algorithm favour, because the truth is that we have a content ecosystem that *in some pockets* (cue: Not All Googles …
- Board-Level Algorithms; You Speak GIF, Right?; Intent; Odds … I wrote in a previous episode[2] that Astro Teller's designs for Google X - a sort of sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from a do-what-I-mean …
- The Internet of Safety; Invisible Technology; Like A Dog Whistle; Odds … People want connectivity and communication, not Verizon or Comcast, which is why they're entirely happy to jump ship when Google comes to town and offers fiber. If …
- Recall; ATMs; … service hanging off a sirsi.net URL; c) one of the reasons why Google Maps is so horrendously bad is that when you search for "Vancouver Community Library …
- Cities; Disruptive; Still Brittle … they work, whilst at the same time, clamping on exo-suits to them, Google-Glass style in the form of smart nodes like Nests and CCTV systems here …
- Symptom Masquerading As Disruption (2); The Model Is The Modeled; Labour Not Employment; Superstar Ratings, Here We Go; Not Swarm … Of course, the counter-argument is that "Tweet" is a verb now and so is "Google" and we don't seem to have much of a problem with …
- The Book and The Library; More Responsive OS … And then you cut a deal with Google, who's trying to work out where to build fiber networks, and you say: hey, as a condition of getting …
- Apple and Nike; Critiquing Everyone Deserves Great Design; Odds … In this case, Noursalehi's exemplars are Google and Facebook, because they are "relying on 'poor' users in developing countries as significant sources of revenue." Would that were …
- On Design; New Aesthetic Zeitgeist Bingo; Odds … Service as actually solving problems for people with design), at the very least Google's Chromecast Photowall experiment[3] solves a problem experienced by *some* people, and while …
- Disbanded; The Responsive OS … Dropbox, Evernote, Uber, Tesla, Square and Jawbone, or a dominating one, like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter and PayPal, then you need to be a Responsive Organisation. The key …
- Why Is This So Hard; Dependency; Chief Empathy Officer … I come back to the essay I wrote when Google bought Nest. You could look at a house right now and say: how many of the objects in …
- Critical Infrastructural Vulnerability; Cultural Adaptation; The Bitcoin Moment; Carousel … speech or so that a Palm Pilot can understand our writing or that Google's service understand what we're searching for is that this is acculturation: cultural …
- a16z Strikes Again; Xbawks; Inside Baseball; The Continuity Field … the algorithm to fit the people[1] in a London Tube ad about Google Voice Search for mobile (and we all remember learning Graffiti so Palm Pilots could …
- Kill Hollywood; Not That Worried; Healthbook; Webring! … Google - bizarrely, for Google - gave up with Google Health, but I think Microsoft still has HealthVault lying around somewhere, if only because they think there might still be …
- Cities; Snow Crashing 5; More Television … Parallel to all of that you have the requirements Google is making of its next candidate cities for Fiber[4] and they're the kind of things (placement …
- Living In An Immaterial World; Snow Crashing 4; Odds … How do you have an open, non-walled garden standard that allows for the required level of data and intent gathering (Google levels of intent or higher, right …
- Building Better Worlds; Mobile; More video … From my naive and external viewpoint to both international development *and* the machinations of the internet gods of Google and Facebook, all three of whom organisations undoubtedly and …
- Snow Crashing 3; Video is a Content-Type; Blame Your Tools … at some point, Google will turn on "good enough" machine transcription and suddenly every YouTube video will have a searchable transcript. At some point, Google will turn on …
- Station Ident; Snow Crashing 2; Computers, AMIRITE?; A Book on your Face … And again, you can be sure that if Google (or even Microsoft!) had announced the acquisition the reaction would be different. So no, it's not really like …
- Snow Crashing; danah boyd; Facebook and Oculus Rift … So when you're vision driven, look at Facebook the way you look at Google. One way of looking at Google is that they want to organise the …
- Wearable Reckons; Mirror Neurons; More Google … 3.0 More Google It's a surprise that there isn't more fiction about or inspired by Google. At least, it is to me. They're such …
- OK Google, Initiate Singularity; Random 1.0 OK Google, Initiate Singularity I give Google a hard time. It's easy to, and that's perhaps a lazy position to take, to knock the …
- IP and the Federation; A Thousand Digital Hubs In Your Pocket; Your Server Recommends … In a sense, it means that Apple's future is in PADDs - their future rooted in devices just as surely as their history was - and that Google's …
- On Creativity; But What Is The User Need; Universal Service … they want. Comcast, I feel, does not know what the user need is. Google Plus, I feel, does not know what the user need is. Or at the …
- On Advertising; On Schmidt; Shorts … Californian Ideology In the continuing series of "can these guys really be serious," Google's chairman Eric Schmidt took to the stage at SXSW a few days ago …
- BBC Heaven; Shorts … here's a paper on a gigantic neural network built (more accurately, built and trained) by Google to recognise numbers to help parse Streetview data. Remember that Google …
- The Machine; Route Around Failure; The Most Expensive Selfie … And probably sponsored by Google. [1] https://twitter.com/flaneur/status/441795244611231746 2.0 Route Around Failure This thinking about machines got me on to another point about …
- Everything's Made Of Blocks; How The World Works; Advances In Quantification … Now, this holds true because for now, we don't have self-modifying goal-oriented programs (right?) - because even when Google accidentally builds a neural visual system that …
- The Difficulty … We do not have, at the moment, this level of customisation in our interaction with services like Google Now or Siri. What we do have, instead of a …
- This Inexplicable Future, Where Did All The Agents Go, Brittle … Siri and Google Now are not, in any way, going to fool us into thinking they are as smart as Baker. Fred Scharmen wrote to point out that …
- Infrastructure, The LCARS App Store … It's not necessarily about Google being able to map the inside of your house and retaining that data (that feels to me the absolute bottom layer), but …
- Net-Native Storytelling, Selling The Future, Always On … Nest, with Google behind it, will surely embark on an advertising campaign for Smart Home Appliances. Ads featuring a pseudo-intelligent, voiced personal assistant are now an actual …
- The Job To Be Done, The Ethics, The Good and The Practice … The Ethics Board On Google's acquisition of Deep Mind Technologies, yet another deep learning artificial intelligence startup, one of the side notes of news was that the …
- The Inevitable Apple TV Episode and Algorithmically Induced Sadness … And for Google to know that my parents had cancelled their trip - there's no UI for me to tell (at least, not that I saw) Google to …
- The Auto Show, Learning to Code and Niggling Thoughts … Two Niggling Thoughts 3.1 What's the video-on-demand equivalent of Google getting better at design faster than Apple's getting better at software? The perception …
- Attention, Star Trek and Cars … interface has about as much personality as an extremely focussed and un-chatty Google voice search. In fact, the computing infrastructure of the 24th century is so bizarre …
- My Followers, Friends and Social Objects … And then, poof, ten years later, we have Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat and Google Plus and and and. Words mean things. Okay, that's a …
- Everything In Silos, Forever and Ever, Amen … Just Good Enough means that a company doesn't have to produce a useable site that provides easily findable manuals or reference for its product, because Google will …
- Rate All The Things … I said on Twitter that I didn't have an opinion about Google's Motorola disposal, but the wonderful thing about this newsletter is that I don't …
- Dreaming Invisible Dreams … And then, of course, news from Google[3] that they have a smart contact lens in development for diabetics that can perform continuous blood glucose measurement. The backlash …
- Happy Birthday and Connections … Better Living Through Data I wrote this morning, that "If the 1980s were DuPont's through Better Living Through Chemistry, then the early C21st is Google's through …
- The Desire To Fix Things … style (an entirely unsurprising move given the Gawker media background) and internet titan Google becoming the whipping boy for the simple crime of trying to make life easier …
- The Beginning … Google, the next conglomerate? After Google bought Nest last week, there was a lot of a) speculation as to what it meant for Nest, and b) speculation as …