I Fired Google
theartofdoingstuff.com134 points by speckx 4 hours ago
134 points by speckx 4 hours ago
I 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.
Before:
"Hey Google, call my wife"
------> Immediately calls wife
"Hey Google, call my wife"
--50%-> "Is that XXXXXX?"
--25%-> Immediately calls wife
--20%-> "I'm sorry, I couldn't find a contact saved as 'wife'"
--05%-> Immediately calls someone different from my wifeI feel like the song suggestions also vary depending on the music service. For example the other day, "Play cicada by Igor" got me Cicadidae by Igorrr on YT Music (this is what I wanted), but got me Igor's Theme by Tyler the Creator. ???? So I tried "Play cicadidae by I-G-O-R-R-R" and I got Cicada by Good Kid.
That said I feel like no matter the music service it's a 50/50 shot each time if it plays the song I want. No matter how many times before I've played it or asked for it.
The latest Gemini update for Android Auto also absolutely ruined the voice control for Waze. It was already bad, but now Android Auto is basically unusable by voice.
Even before the move to Gemini they've been on a downward spiral, 'skills' Google home used to have now don't work and it feels like they've been actively making it worse. I've not switched to Gemini yet but now I'm not too hopeful.
There was an Amazon UXR study that floated around ~8 years ago that said the only things people care about from a voice assistant are music, weather, and alarms.
PMs keep trying to make them "smarter," and it just makes the core user journeys worse.
Surely they think they're inventing cars when we're griping about buggy whips. But it really feels like voice assistants peaked ~10y ago for the things people actually want them for.
Considering the decade of poor results from doing anything other than music, weather and alarms I think we've all learned to avoid using them for anything else.
Don't forget recipes. They went and bungled up the only good things about it. Every day I suggest Google fire the whole division responsible for the product when it cheerfully says "I'm still learning" and asks me for feedback.
For a bit, our Amazon Echo's were pretty decent at doing things other than music, weather and alarms. Then there was a big regression, and we stopped trying to make it do more. I guess the exception is turning the lights on and off.
My wife and I both would love for the voice assistants to do more. They just won't. Even with weather, anything more than "what's the weather like today" will usually not get a good result. "When will it rain today?" gets OK responses.
As soon as I figure out how to put a decent GPU into my old rack server(s), I'll see how far I can get with HomeAssistant. I suspect it'll be some effort, but it'll be better at the end of the day.
I have a crystal clear memory of the day I stopped trying to make voice assistants work for me.
I use a timer every day to brew my coffee. With a voice assistant I can set a timer, but with the lack of a screen I can't see how much time is left. One day I thought, "I'm going to finally get around to digging into this voice interface and see what the options are," hoping for something like, "Hey Dingus, set a five minute timer and notify me when there's 10 seconds left."
Or better yet, "Hey Dingus, five minute timer, with notify at 10 seconds."
Notice that this almost maps 1:1 onto a shell command with option flags, just verbally interfaced: "$ timer 5m --with-notify 10s"
Notice also a complete willingness on my part to learn how the thing works and change how I'm using it accordingly. This is the opposite of end user laziness. I'm willing to invest effort in becoming a "Power User" of my voice assistant.
So I looked for documentation, ready to read and use my brain to understand it and do what it tells me in order to start and stop my timers with greater proficiency.
...I found none.
Literally, there isn't any. They don't have documentation. Nowhere is there, even for someone motivated and willing to learn, the ability to do so.
Ok, well that is understandable if these things are changing rapidly. Maybe there's the equivalent to a "$ timer --help" baked into the assistant itself. Maybe it can tell me what options exist so I can use them. I ask the assistant to explain itself. "What are my options when setting a timer?"
It can't parse my question. Literally, it doesn't know what I'm asking for. Because nobody ever considered that a user might ask that question or even want to know that information.
At that point, on the spot, I gave up. Clearly this thing is not designed or intended to be a thing that one could gain skill with. It's an utterly unserious product.
I would very happily learn an entire verbal DSL, a whole pidgin dialect of English, purely for interacting with my voice assistant. "Hey Dingus, five minute staged timer: thirty seconds, two minutes, one minute, one minute, remainder, with countdown from five seconds" is not "natural language" anymore. But you can bet you'd hear me saying it, if that's all it took to make the voice assistant run my coffee brewing recipe with nothing but my voice. And then, hey bonus, let me bind that to a personal shortcut so all I need to say is "Hey Dingus, coffee timer" and I don't even need to reach for my phone.
But you can't do that. It literally does not support being taken seriously. Or, if it can, the design is utterly hostile to me discovering how. So I've never even tried to do anything, since that very day, other than turning smart lights on and off.
My point is: I didn't fail the technology. I came to the table with willingness to tinker and experiment, willingness to change my expectations to suit the design as I discovered it, willingness to work to make it a part of my routine. The technology failed me.
I don't disagree with what you said, but as a workaround, why don't you just set your timers for 4 minutes and 50 seconds?
I don't really use Google products except Youtube, but their auto-subtitler (closed captions) have really taken a weird turn lately. It used to try sounding out the words so even if it didn't pick the right word, it was at least close to right one. But now it substitutes entire phrases and sentences based on what is most likely to appear in a conversation even if it has no bearing or similarities to what was said.
Same 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
Like being the one who brought the dog home from the shelter and feeds it, and the dog still prefers your partner.
Since android auto transitioned to Gemini, whenever I try to reply to a message by tapping the reply button, it now states "Sorry, but to do that, you'll need permission from your Google Workspace administrator." The stupid part is, if I listen to the message first, then say yes when it asks me if I'd like to reply, I'm then allowed to reply. There's countless articles and posts about this but no one seems to have found a reliable solution yet. Has been going on since at least December.
It also now seems to trigger its own barge-in about 50% of the time. It'll start reading the first syllable of a message, apparently confuse itself talking for me saying something, then just follow that with silence "listening" for my response until I physically have to hit the back button on the car.
Perhaps Gemini's been training on sources too young to listen to Radiohead.
Similarly, Siri was arguably better a decade ago when it has deterministic intents that you could trigger with certainty, now it is all seemingly random at time.
I 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)
Pretty 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
Soon it will be like Jack Black in High Fidelity, preventing you from listening to music that’s currently too hip for you.
I 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?
Why would you even browse the web without using an ad blocker?
The site hides its content after a few seconds when using an ad blocker (on mobile Safari), showing a modal prompt asking to disable the ad blocker.
Of course there are ways around this, but at that point I don’t bother which such blogs anymore. It is a bit ironic given the subject of this blog post.
So that you would notice sites that are serving obnoxious ads, and remember not to visit them in the future.
Maybe you are saying "the whole internet is like that now, it's impossible to find good sites without obnoxious ads", but I don't think it's that bad yet (hacker news is a good counterexample). But if everyone keep visiting user hostile sites, the site operators will see no incentive to change.
The "ad" as described in my comment isn't really an ad in the typical sense, it's baked into the website. But the real reason is, I'm on my work computer and unable to install browser extensions.
You should urgently contact your IT department. Not enforcing ad blocking extensions is a security liability.
I'm in the IT department. Unfortunately massive global corporations routinely make extremely misguided decisions and don't particularly give a shit about what people like me have to say on the matter.
How about the FBI https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2022/PSA221221 or CISA https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/services/adblock ?
I'm well aware of all this, but I think you folks might be underestimating the hubris of gigantic corporations and how little my input as one IT guy at one little factory in one little part of the world means to the people who actually make decisions. Even if I wanted to bring these things to their attention, there is absolutely zero chance they'd ever so much as open an email from me. Whatever the company decides is gospel, only a fool would question their genius.
No good options on Android right now. You can use Firefox, but there are a lot of tradeoffs.
I'm curious what the tradeoffs are, I exclusively use FF and any time Chrome auto opens via a link I immediately baulk at the experience.
Save page, speed, battery life, bookmark sync, tab sync, and password sync are all slightly better in Chrome.
I used Firefox on Android for probably 11 years before switching to Dolphin (RIP) and then stock Chrome when Firefox made it a huge pain to install extensions. I keep waiting for someone to fully enable extensions on Chrome for Android.
And a clearly AI-generated or at least AI-assisted post.
It’s not clear to me. What makes you sure it’s AI assisted?
> 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.
I promise you that she went through the effort of putting less ads than what Adsense does by default.
It is ironic that so many articles calling out enshittification are themselves examples of the same.
I 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.
Do you have a GitHub or something for the project? Sounds lovely.
Not yet, I have to decouple some of the specific/personal logic. When I do push it, it'll be here: https://github.com/alisorcorp
> Then I went directly to Amazon and ordered an Alexa.
Dear lord.
I 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.
> 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.”
I 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?
Well, now when she wants to know the symptoms of dehydration, she can purchase some sort of Gatorade really convenient like.
And 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.
I 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.
The 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.
> 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.
I 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.
This 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.
Gemini 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.
Google is following facebook, they got an expiration date, born together, expired together, RIP
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-ceo-sund...
The 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...
Agree, 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.
> 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?
I'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.
FYI; 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
This 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.
i 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
Good 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.
"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..
The 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.
> 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.
This 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.
I saw cost savings trickle down to customers only in an economy textbook.
and we ended up with new cars being 2x expensive even after adjusting with inflation somehow
But 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)
Fun 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.
i really like Gemini Google home. The old software felt lobotomized by comparison.
And her site spams you with soo many ads, I had to shut it down
I thought OP had learnt something and then I got to the Alexa part and closed the tab.
I 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.
This would be great if it wasn't written so breathlessly.
> Award winning actress Geena Davis is 70 years old.
Thank you!
I 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.
Sorry 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.
Firefox + ublock origin and voilà, no more ads.
Don'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.
ublock Origin works decently well on Firefox on Android. I think I saw that something worked on iPhones, but I never investigated it myself.
I 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.
I can't fathom how anyone uses the web without an ad blocker these days. Especially shocking to hear on HN.
“An adblocker is preventing this page from loading.”
No…, you are.
Apparently 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).
Hey Google, write an article called "I Fired Google."
(Although, based on the tone, I think it's Grok.)
This was so spot on I felt like standing up and yelling, "Yes! Exactly!"
I 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."
Same 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.
They've spent a lot of money on this technology, and what users want is just not that high a priority.
Never 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.
Basically
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)
I 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.
Yes, and?
Related from the last month:
Google changes its search box
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370
Google Declaring War on the Web
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214449
Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266051
Google Hates You
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313538
You can no longer Google the word 'disregard'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238351
The IBM-ification of Google?
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Stopped after repeating the false claim that bmw charges a subscription for heated seats.
It was very much implemented by BMW.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-commits-to-subscriptions-e...
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.
> 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.