[px43]

I feel like Google used to be really big on the "release early, release often" mantra. At some point they turned more into Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. You can look in the windows and see them doing cool shit, but it never seems to make it to the general public.

Of course, most egregiously, they invented transformers like 6 years ago, and they've had LaMDA for over a year, and only let people see small glimpses of it. Also, Waymo has been around for almost 15 years, and seems to have some really neat tech, but people can't actually use it. Calico has apparently made some massive breakthroughs with ISRIB treatments, and bought up all the patents so they have exclusive access to it, but seem to be keeping everything to themselves.

I feel like Google Code could have easily dominated over GitHub, but then they just let Microsoft have it.

Google does so much cool stuff, and I'm grateful for the services that they offer, many of which I pay for. It just sucks that they've gotten so stingy lately about what they release. I hope that changes soon.

[fidgewidge]

Waymo is usable if you live in the right parts of the USA, right?

[px43]

My understanding is that in the bay area, they do silly demos from time to time, and let people ride in them for free, but it's not an actual usable service anywhere. Like I said, basically Willy Wonka. If something has changed I'd be interested to know about it. This article is only a few months old though, and it seems to be saying the same thing.

https://sfstandard.com/transportation/how-you-can-ride-new-w...

[fidgewidge]

I thought they were running a sort of taxi service in Arizona.