Thread

1. steveBK123 · 1790699705 · focus · HN ↗

   Extremely sarcastic take but - shouldn't the 10x productivity boost of LLMs like their own in-house Gemini make maintaining software easier?

   Nothing in terms of feature release / quality / maintenance I am seeing out Big Software would lead me to believe there's been any productivity increase.

   1. 20k · 1790700709 · focus · HN ↗

      Apparently, you aren't meant to use data, measure anything, or look at the actual end result of how software is really being released. Line Go Up
   2. doomslice · 1790700720 · focus · HN ↗

      Google's internal tooling for this is actually way behind what's available to the general public (they just got access to Claude though!)

      1. nicce · 1790702067 · focus · HN ↗

         Imagine Anthropic for using Gemini internally and anticipating for it
      2. underlipton · 1790702728 · focus · HN ↗

         Uh oh. I watched Person of Interest, I know how this goes down.
      3. mahboi · 1790727240 · focus · HN ↗

         And their internal stuff is hard for public LLMs to understand
   3. phoghed · 1790701292 · focus · HN ↗

      There would still need to be money to make from doing so and a will to do it.

      My company has a shitty old defunct group management portal that has been twice superseded and is finally getting shut down. But we have LLMs, why not maintain it in perpetuity? Because it's shit, nobody likes it, there are other options, it would still cost someone's time just to follow all the processes we have to do releases and keep things running, security testing, yada yada.

      Adding more years of support to some shitty old thing is certainly going to cost them more than it makes them.

   4. macoslulz · 1790704528 · focus · HN ↗

      They can't even add "respect the user's preferred language" to the AI assist prompt in Google Search - I've reported it countless times. Turns out, looking up local places/names/etc, does not mean I speak that language. They can't seem to add light/dark support to Gmail despite prefers-color-scheme CSS media feature being present in browsers for at least 6 years). I have zero remaining faith in Google's ability to do anything.

      1. sidewndr46 · 1790705404 · focus · HN ↗

         Gemini answers me in Mandarin quite often. In case their is any wonder about me: I grew up in the US and my first language is English.

         1. GuestFAUniverse · 1790781099 · focus · HN ↗

            It anticipated the outcome of the Taiwan conflict. /S
      2. gherkinnn · 1790705863 · focus · HN ↗

         Google appears to be especially bad at this (looking at you, auto-dubbing YouTube) and countless others fail as well.

         What is it though? Is it a harder problem than I think it is or is Conway's law getting the better of the G?

         1. nicbou · 1790739735 · focus · HN ↗

            It probably reflects incentives within the company
      3. joquarky · 1790732029 · focus · HN ↗

         Google doesn't hire people who actually enjoy doing maintenance.

         In fact lately it seems like nobody hires for this.

   5. TiredOfLife · 1790705121 · focus · HN ↗

      Gemini is good only at benchmarks. In actual usage it sometimes approaches chatjimmy in quality
   6. Ferret7446 · 1790712970 · focus · HN ↗

      I assume the support range is determined by firmware updates. I know ChromeOS struggled with supporting devices whose components no longer received support.
   7. MikhailTal · 1790713690 · focus · HN ↗

      No. If your engineers can produce more ROI working on another product, it does not matter that now they are 10x more efficient. They will also be 10x in the other, more worth it product
   8. 0x073 · 1790741451 · focus · HN ↗

      Extremly sarcastic take but - shouldn't the LLMs in 6 year not powerful enough that every user can maintain ChromeOS support themselves?

      At least when we get monthly news about how powerful the new models of the openai and anthropic are.

      Maybe in 5 years we're all sitting in water tanks producting energy for the ai machine's like in matrix.

   9. port11 · 1790754668 · focus · HN ↗

      Google will now make 10x the vapourware they have no intention of maintaining.

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