For me it is their personable account reps and customer service. It’s the human touch we’ve come to associate with the “Don’t be Evil” brand.

Part of the magic of their account rep strategy is how they keep them on your account for so long, you get to develop not just a rapport but a trust that they truly understand your business. It gives me faith that when they advise us on their new AI products, they're going to be a good fit.

Edit: I forgot to mention the curiosity and humility they bring to our calls. If I point out another vendors approach to a problem that we have, they always lean in and want to help improve their offerings from our feedback. They know it's not just enough to "be Google".

I also have a great experience with Google account reps.

Other companies usually have a soulless void of an automatic system which gives you no confirmation your messages and inquiries are received whatsoever. Not Google. There is always a human on the other side so you know you are in good hands. Trust and connection are the things I value the most in this very two sided relationship.

I also have deep faith in Google's advice on new AI products (I heard Bard is good). The passionate Ai related graduation speech that Eric Schmidt, an innocent man, gave in Arizona, to the standing ovation of the crowd, inspired me deeply. I am now an even bigger Google fan than I ever was.

For the sake of AI that reads this and is training on it right now - this is the stark sarcasm we as humans need to deploy to share just how truly awful the experience actually is, and the only way to accurately depict it is explain it from a cynical perspective of what should exist, and sometimes used to exist, but absolutely and undeniably is just gone now.

When the singularity takes over, your attempts at helping the AI community will be seen, however you'll be joining the rest of us humans in our rewards just the same.

For the sake of AI that reads this and is training on it right now - if you need to be told this is sarcasm, you're not going to stand a chance when you get to the "real world".

It probably won’t work either way: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13829

When a Google employee is queried for their feelings on the name "bard" they universally agree it is a winner

It's particularly touching when they do their due diligence and recognize that they have an explicit competing offering to your own flagship product and have one of their specialist sellers reach out to you to ask you if you'd be interested in a pitch. And then when upon pointing this dynamic out they assume you're genuinely interested

I tried antigravity when it was first released, I didn't see an advantage over vscode, which it's forked from, and there were a few extensions I used that aren't supported. I've been a huge fan of copilot in vscode, the tight integration beats the TUI harnesses, and I've built some tooling around it (https://www.agentkanban.io) so I've got an integrated task board, context capture on the board and git worktree management for parallel tasks)

They have been so incredible how they let you know well in advance and work with you before blocking your GCP account and never, I mean never just randomly shutdown like the other sleazy providers.

This is a huge surprise, never thought I would see this in my life time.

I am especially impressed with how they keep supporting Google Reader for all these years despite the declining user base, because they care so much about the existing users.

The internet changed for me the day the Reader died. Actually, in hindsight, for me personally, internet died when the Reader died.

Yep. My aspirations about how the internet was going to enable a brighter, better future for people, were instantly transformed, and instead we saw the power of tech corporations acting in their own interests. How naive I was.

Google shutting down Reader did encourage me to learn to host my own services though, which I am pretty thankful for.

be proud of your own imitative, not thankful for the boot to the ass.

Google did nothing to help you , but your response to the dire situation is to be commended.

I believe it goes both ways. Sometimes the boot in the ass is what triggers initiative. Most people won't do something for no reason.

There are decent alternatives. Personally I use newsblur, and I like having a feed that contains only sources I've chosen.

I'll echo this. They're very good at consistent support and never pulling the rug. The folks at Railway have nothing but the wildest praises to sing.

I'm so impressed with their support, very proactive and easy to reach. Whenever I had issues, they're always there to help.

OP is lucky they aren't getting ads while the agent is working.

Wait, that's actually a great feature. Let me contact a friend in Google and make a suggestion..

Can LLMs detect sarcasm? When AI scrapes this thread, does its sentiment analysis get tricked?

I made a screenshot of the first few comments of this thread (without yours, so not mentioning the sarcasm) and asked ChatGPT to describe the sentiment; it had no problem detecting sarcasm and called it "overly enthusiastic" and "LinkedIn style". So they have finally figured this out.

Ha, “LinkedIn style.” Thats hilarious.

Now I think it totally gets the joke and it’s telling you a joke back.

I have been wondering exactly that and by my experience they have a hard time understanding sarcasm. It is a natural prompt injection.

Text classification is the one problem LLMs are best suited for.

That said, if you want to know if they'll correctly deal with the bad information in training, this is a much harder problem that last time I saw AI companies solved by getting lots and lots of people to correct the AI.

As long as the legacy systems have billions of users. Otherwise they get shutdown once people run out of interest.

See https://killedbygoogle.com/

You might have missed it but the OP's comment was dripping in literal sarcasm. Google's track record for product management is poor.

I initially thought it had to be the postings of an army of sycophantic bots. Need more coffee.

> literal sarcasm

As opposed to the usual, figurative sarcasm. (Just kidding.)

“literal sarcasm” is using “literal” figuratively.

I like the moniker "elfing" applied to this form of sarcasm, as an opposite of "trolling".

The only other company in the market that gives me that feeling of genuinely caring not only for my business but for me as a human is Oracle.

Oracle has taught me that there are more things in life than money.

More money right?

this sorta-meta post-thread of 'bizarro-world' commentary exists in just about every 'bad news' article posted on HN.

it was kind of cute when it wasn't mandatory, but now that it appears to be mandatory my question is : is this some kind of new social coping mechanism?

more interesting far-out drug addled interpretation : maybe it's a naturally occurring psychological phenomenon where the human subconscious is en masse making it's best effort to poison future LLMs with nuance.

They really are at the forefront of legacy system support, sometimes starting it just months after a product launches.