Does anyone have a high resolution copy of Shishkin’s Brook in a Forest (Stream by a Forest Slope)? Wikipedia has the highest resolution I can find, but not nearly high enough to print at a reasonable size. I’ve already looked through the top hits on Google and Yandex in both English and Russian. Is this just a dead end?
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The difference between software engineering at large corporations and small ones will increase. Start-ups adopting practices of Google will look even sillier than before, because they can now build so much faster and with so much less constraints.
we produced our own conservative estimate, finding that the climate impact from 2025's use of NVIDIA'S AI products is on par with the state-owned Russian Coal company.
Google Workspace search no longer shows folders by default in its autocomplete - meaning I need to press "enter" even when typing out the folder name I want, just to see it as the top search result after I press enter
The US military is being run by a group that apes the Russians and not the Ukrainians—when we have in front of us one of the best statements of command principles I have ever seen from the latter.
the way you make a new Google is not by attacking them head on. You have to wait for things to change so much that their model is is obsolete and that's when you can do it. And that's what Open AI is.
the Trump administration's deferential posture towards Russia and China has alienated allies. But on the other hand, it has gained the United States nothing in the way of strategic stability.
While Western export bans have severed Russia from much of the auto market, they have not tempered the demand for brand-name SUVs and trucks. That has given rise to a sophisticated network of criminals that steals cars, hides them in shipping containers and sends them to Russia, often by way of the Middle East
However senseless it is, American rhetoric of the non-existence of Canada is concerning, because it resembles the way the Kremlin spoke about Ukraine, and rightly reminds Canada that their sovereignty is indeed the issue.
The Nordic-Baltic warmongering under the current conditions is therefore (i) irresponsible, (ii) hypocritical, (iii) immoral, and (iv) flirts with a disaster of immense proportions.
Such, indeed fragile, peace not only puts an end to today’s carnage, but leaves open a possibility of eventual long-term solution between Russia and Ukraine.
In other words, it is not harmless optimism to act like Trump might help Ukraine, it is falling for a deadly, pro-Putin maneuver that is and will increasingly lead to Ukrainian suffering.
It is not because it affects Russian morale, or causes inconvenience, it is because ultimately it is the best way to take away the one thing all war machines need—money.
common failure mode is picking the tech that gives you the fastest early ramp, riding that steep curve, feeling like you're winning, projecting that, you know, steep slope into the future and feeling like the sky is the limit, and then hitting the plateau, and discovering that the technology path that you picked actually flattens out way before the performance that is required by your product.
And just human organizations are complicated and it's very hard to have um to manage to aggressively prosecute 100 different priorities and to deal with all the issues and interference that arises among them and so forth. And so, you know, Google has done incredibly well in a bunch of specific places, but it's not like Google has done all the things even if in some kind of basic material sense, uh Google maybe, you know, had that ability.
Google, which led on benchmarks not that long ago, has fallen behind where it now counts: it has no leading frontier model and it has nothing close to Codex and Code.
cognitive function doesn't just decline sort of linearly or steadily with age. It goes down, you know, a little bit on average, but the biggest decreases sort of happen stepwise after periods of significant illness.
After the financial deplatforming of Western proles and foreign elites, of Canadian truckers and 145M Russians, it’s clear that digital finance is a weapon of war.
What is happening is that GenAI's climate harm comes from the system design, such as Google's AI overview triggering constantly whether users want it or not, in addition to significantly worse digital bloat tools dominating overconsumption.
I think Google has pretty much gone to on-sites at this point, back to the traditional whiteboard format. And they'll let you code on a laptop if you want to, as well, but it's going to be in person. Somebody's going to be watching you code, and you're probably not going to be able to cheat your way through that.
By resisting Russia, Ukrainians are defending what is perhaps most basic about decent political life: the idea that people should be who they choose to be, not whom they are forced to become.
One, you're surrounding yourself by failing states. You can look at Russia and China and they're surrounded by some of the most dysfunctional places on the planet and you go, "Gee whiz, are they unlucky or they complicit?"
It was a miracle of your lifetimes. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The problem for the likes of Putin is that this wealth producing trade was not happening at his house, but the houses of those vested in the trading order, not in extortion.
And Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector and neither one has stable government institutions.
You set them up to fail, you destabilize the rising, you ingest the failing, and you set up buffer zones in between, and you await the opportune moment to pounce and absorb. This is Vladimir Putin's game.
So you have a lot of smart Googlers. These people are brilliant. I mean extremely brilliant to the point where the hardest problem Google had in my opinion was what to build. Not how to build it, what to build.
Well, I love these markets and they're all around us where we think they're mature and over and they haven't even started yet. And that was search before Google. You know, Google was the 56th search engine. It was a mature, slow growth business. Google made us reimagine what search could be in our lives and obviously turned it into a trillion dollar company value.
we have a very clear definition and expectation of what it is at the staff engineer level because we benchmark ourselves to all the great company out there Google, Facebook and all that
And I feel like it's a very human way of doing web search, right? Because we enter things in the Google and we see all the like citations, the quotations part. But like why would we limit AI to that? If AI already visit a page, why don't just pull the entire page out?
Because Enthropic saw it before Google. And then Google had Nano Banano and Gemini 3 which caused their user metrics to skyrocket and leadership at Google was like oh and then they started making the statement of we have to double compute every is it 6 months or I don't remember the exact number that they said.
In fact, innovation died on the vine like all together and since I don't know, 2008, there has been no innovation from Google. It's all been acquisitions. They have they've created nothing new.
Like, if you think more globally, we are, we copied Google for agents. You have, like, a prompt, and, and then you have a chat interface. That, to me, very much feels like when we first created television and then people recorded radio shows on television and you saw that on TV.
Immediately cease trying to perform meaningful work via a chatbot (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini on the web, etc.). Chatbots have real value and are a daily part of my AI workflow, but their utility in coding is highly limited because you're mostly hoping they come up with the right results based on their prior training, and correcting them involves a human (you) to tell them they're wrong repeatedly.
Laszlo and his team at Google reinvented the role of human resources. This book is a terrific overview of what makes Google Google, from culture, to hiring, to making decisions.
Claire has been a senior executive at Google and Stripe. Here she offers up a guide to leadership that is both practical and inspiring. Suitable for leaders of all levels.
Levy was given unprecedented access to Google, and the result is what I consider to be an accurate depiction of how the company operates. A good overview of how Google product managers work.
Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front covers the clashes between Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire as well as the Austro-Hungarians against the Italians and the Serbs. Whereas the western front was essentially static throughout the whole war, the east was characterized by the sort of maneuver warfare that most generals had expected to fight.
used to be let's say in the Google world right I knew you were interested in shopping if you click the shopping tab I know you're interested in maps if you click the maps tab, we can measure clicks. Today, it's just all conversation. And so, it's actually harder for us to tease apart what is the user intent.
So Hitler receives this Dolantin injection, and he gets up, he goes into the meeting room, he dominates the meeting room, he feels great. He decides, you know, in front of everybody, no one is able to… no one overpowers him in that meeting. He was very good in the room. And the troops are split up. Like Leningrad is now a target. This weakens the general thrust towards Moscow. This is probably why they didn't take Moscow.
And that was not the British soldier, not the French soldier, not the Russian soldier. That was fatigue. He had been looking for a way to keep a soldier awake longer.
This is Russia's war. And it is Russia that should pay. This is why we need to work urgently on a new solution to finance Ukraine's war effort on the basis of the immobilised Russian assets. With the cash balances associated to these Russian assets, we can provide Ukraine with a Reparations Loan.
I think it's actually the opposite which is that everyone's kind of using the same data which is you need such an enormous amount of generalized text that the amount that Google has or that meta has is not actually enough to move to be a kind of fundamental difference in what you can train with.
Like it seems to me right now you could do like a double blind test of the same prompt given to Grock Claude Gemini um Mistral Deep Seek. Do a double blind test. I bet most people wouldn't be able to tell which is which.
I'm pretty sure people thought Microsoft had an advantage on the internet and Google and um Meta had an advantage on mobile and everyone thought IBM was going to win PCs. Like once IBM made a PC, that was it. It's all over now. And we kind of forget that like there were PCs before and then IBM made one and that kind of became the standard but then IBM lost it.
I initially started making Anki (well, Mochi) cards to keep track of Google DeepMind's LLM lineage—Gopher, Chinchilla, Gato, PaLM, Sparrow, Meena, LaMDA, Bard, Gemini, etc.
If you have a nation of 1 million people and you are ruling over hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, China, Russia, the Middle East, you do not do that through warfare. You conquer them initially through warfare, but you do not rule them through warfare. You've got to be offering something that they want, something that they like.
No other power in the history of the world has conquered Russia and China and Persia and Central Asia and Turkey and Korea. No power in the world has done that. Not Alexander, not the Romans. Nobody will ever do it again.
Yeah, these are great work that shows what's possible. The approach doesn't scale currently. Three days of Google's server time can solve one high school math format there. This is not a scalable prospect, especially with the exponential increase as the complexity increases.
So I do think scaling laws are working, but it's tough to get, at any given time, the models we all use the most, this maybe a few months behind the maximum capability we can deliver because that won't be the fastest, easiest to use, et cetera.
But the most important metric, and we carefully measure it is, like, how much has our engineering velocity increased as a company due to AI, right? It's tough measure, and we rigorously try to measure it, and our estimates are that number is now at 10%, right?
You can have AI give a lot of context, but one of our important design goals though, is when you come to Google Search, you are going to get a lot of context, but you're going to go and find a lot of things out on the web. So that will be true in AI mode, in AI overviews, and so on.
Look, I think news and journalism will play an important role in the future. We are pretty committed to it, right? So I think making sure that ecosystem, in fact, I think we'll be able to differentiate ourselves as a company over time because of our commitment there.
LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google.
And Russians will hate me for saying this, and I probably will get a whole load of bots on the back of it, but the truth is, it is not the street fighting that destroys Sixth Army, it is the encirclement, the subsequent encirclement.
The all-in cost of operating the Google Play Store, stocking it, maintaining it, the software, the entire ecosystem is around 6% of revenue. So in a competitive market, would a company whose cost is 6% be able to charge 30%? Absolutely not.
You kind of Google and you try to solve a problem in the language based on all of your previous experience. And so you don't have what makes that language special. You have what all the other languages make special.
But Google has never had that DNA of like, "This is a product we should sell." The Google Cloud, which is a separate organization from the TPU team, which is a separate organization from the DeepMind team, which is a separate organization from the Search team. There's a lot of bureaucracy here.
I think it's even more impressive what OpenAI did in 2022. At the time, no one believed in mixture of experts models at Google who had all the researchers. OpenAI had such little compute and they devoted all of their compute for many months, all of it, 100% for many months to GPT-4 with a brand-new architecture with no belief that, "Hey, let me spend a couple of hundred million dollars, which is all of the money I have on this model." That is truly YOLO.
a good overview of SRE at Google. For those who worked at places with oncall, much of the first part of the book will likely be very familiar. Keep in mind that your mileage might vary: what works at Google scale, might not be the ideal fit for your use case.
They could have shipped ChatGPT for example, I heard, in 2019. And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy. But they had everything. They had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers and they didn’t do it.
About Dry Grasses (Turkey, CC) 3.9 This is my favorite film directed by Ceylan, and that’s high praise. At times it feels like a long Russian novel. Engrossing from beginning to end, despite its 3¼ hour length. This one also could have been entitled “Evil Does Not Exist”.
You can set out to build a good business and it’s still fine. Maybe the long-term business model of Perplexity can make us profitable in a good company, but never as profitable in a cash cow as Google was. You have to remember that it’s still okay.
We would rather take a more dramatic position, that the best way to actually make a dent in the search space is to not try to do what Google does, but try to do something they don’t want to do. For them to do this for every single query is a lot of money to be spent, because their search volume is so much higher.
In Google, even though we call it 10 blue links, you get annoyed if you don’t even have the right link in the first three or four. The eye is so tuned to getting it right. LLMs are fine. You get the right link maybe in the 10th or ninth. You feed it in the model. It can still know that that was more relevant than the first.
What is the weakness of Google is that any ad unit that’s less profitable than a link, or any ad unit that kind of disincentivizes the link click is not in their interest to go aggressive on, because it takes money away from something that’s higher margins.
And so yes, the era when Europe bought its energy and fertilizers from Russia, had its goods manufactured in China, and delegated its security to the United States of America, is over.
Your product might be great, but how do you get it on the shelves of Walmart? Or how do you get it on the shelves of Google? Because if you're not on the shelves of Walmart, you're not on the shelves of Google, you might be invisible. And it's friction that kept you there, not some sort of merit contest.
But that was their official position, and that changed just two years ago when Putin gave a speech and he said that their position had changed, that they will no longer wait to absorb an attack.
First of all, we have 44 interceptor missiles total, period, full stop. Let me repeat, 44. Earlier we were talking about Russia’s 1,670 deployed nuclear weapons. How are those 44 interceptor missiles going to work? And they also have a success rate of around 50%. So they work 50% of the time.
there is an absolutely existential flaw in the system, which Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta confirmed with me, which is that our ICBMs do not have enough range. If we launch a counterattack against, say, North Korea, our ICBMs must fly over Russia. They must fly over Russia.
But a lot of people have tried to just make a better search engine than Google and it is a hard technical problem, it is a hard branding problem, it is a hard ecosystem problem. I don’t think the world needs another copy of Google.
So in historical terms and intellectual terms, what is happening today in the war between Russia and Ukraine is the vision on one level or another level that was formulated by the noble laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, half Russian, half Ukrainian.
And the Soviet collapse is continuation of the disintegration of the Russian Empire that started back in 1917, that was arrested for some period of time by the Bolsheviks, by the Communist ideology, which was internationalist ideology. And then came back in full force in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
So if NATO is the real concern, it would be probably not completely unreasonable to expect that if not every single soldier, but at least half of the Russian army fighting in Ukraine would be moved to protect the new border with NATO in Finland.
Russia and Russian identity was formed around the state, and has difficulty imagining itself outside of the state, and that state happened to be imperial for most of Russian history. Ukrainian project came into existence in revolt against the state.
So for him, the biggest tragedy is not the loss of life, the biggest tragedy is the loss of the great power status or the unity of those whom he considered to be Russian nations.
And oftentimes it's more important to them to have the public perception that they're good directors so they get the next best deal. If they have a reputation for taking on management too aggressively, word will get out in the small community of founders and they'll miss the next Google.
And so the only way to improve safety is to have an escape system. And historically, human-rated rockets have had escape systems. Only the space shuttle did not, but Apollo had one. All of the previous Gemini, etcetera, they all had escape systems.
The way you use nuclear weapons in that world is you use them for manipulation of risk purposes, demonstration effect. You put both sides out on the slippery slope.
There's no evidence he was interested in conquering all of Ukraine. There was no evidence beforehand that he was interested in conquering any of Ukraine. And there's no way that an army that had 190,000 troops, at the most, could have conquered all of Ukraine, it's just impossible.
Well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. And if we don't like great powers coming into our neighborhood, it's hardly surprising that the Russians did not want NATO on their doorstep.
My second point is if he doesn't remain in power and he's replaced, I would bet a lot of money that his replacement will be more hawkish and more hard line than Putin is.
Look, I think I would just recommend do not send the flower of Ukrainian youth to die in trenches, whether he talks to Putin or not, just don’t do that. Whoever goes on the offensive will lose massive numbers of people and history will not look kindly upon them.
Google’s the first — and often the last — place we go to for answers, so snagging top billing in a Google search results page is, approximately speaking, equivalent to being “true.”
Everyone who talks about AI talks about the button, the button to turn it off, right? Do we have a button to turn off Google? Is anybody in the world capable of shutting Google down?
the only ASIC that is remotely successful is Google’s TPU. The only reason that’s successful is because Google wrote a machine learning framework. I think that you have to write a competitive machine learning framework in order to be able to build an ASIC.
The phenomena of greatest scientific interest on Mars (gullies, recurrent slope lineae, intermittent methane sources, and underground water) will all be off-limits to astronauts.
Once again, I was wowed by Towles’s writing—especially because The Lincoln Highway is so different from A Gentleman in Moscow in terms of setting, plot, and themes.
I I would I would not say that about Google. I would just say that more generally like that is the incumbent temptation. Um it is is basically is basically go from attack mode to defend mode, right? Go from being the pirate to being the navy.
If you're curious how Google built it's culture and the processes thanks to their extremely data & engineering driven nature, this is a great book. What held it back was being ~100 pages too long and Bock didn't always understand where what they did only fit at a $100Bn+, mega-profitable company. Still, the insights on the studies on their 50,000+ employees is well worth the read since so few of us can get similar statistical significance to apply to our teams.
spending an increasing amount of my free time working with tools like Google Colab, Runway ML, TensorFlow, and Hugging Face to play around with machine-generated text, audio, imagery, and video.
When I'm writing articles etc that need to be shared with an editor, I typically write in Microsoft Word. I hate all word processing software, and anyone who insists that Google Docs is so much better than Word is a liar.
so we use Google Meet speakermics, which allow for full-duplex conversations, which makes conversation far more organic. That device turned Google Meet from something exhausting to something really good.
In terms of iOS apps, I use PDF Expert, which is a great PDF reader and annotator (using Apple Pencil), Notability as a virtual whiteboard (again with Apple Pencil), Google Docs for document editing, Google Calendar, and Gmail.
These were the notebooks that we worked on in Moscow and one realised that here was most of the raw material for Life and Fate which I think is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II.
For coding, I use Visual Studio Code. I use Git for source control, Photoshop for 2D art, Audition for audio editing, Premiere for video editing, and our team coordinates on Google Docs and Skype.
Now, almost everything happens in Google Docs, except for when I write straight into the Axios or Substack CMS. (Both of which are lovely, WYSIWYG, very simple and easy to use.)
To me, this book is an illustration of the power of names. Today, in the era of Google, if you know the name of something, you can find out about it with a simple search. But if you don't know of what you're looking for, it suddenly becomes much harder to find it. Having in the back of your head the names of common algorithms that help you solve problems is really powerful.
Google Chrome: What's a Web Developer without Google Chrome browser? The first thing I do with Safari is to get Google Chrome and install the latest version.
For writing code, I use emacs and Google's internal distributed build system (a version of which was open sourced as Bazel) and our version control system
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