In my opinion, the coolest thing in NotebookLM is the podcast-episode-generator. Each one sounds like two people having a conversation. It's fun to listen to a podcast episode about some niche topic (e.g. nuclear isomers, or the Weyl curvature tensor) while I'm cooking or driving.
I think it's a successor to the Chromebook. In the vast majority of modern K-12 public schools, the school district owns the hardware, not the students.
I recently heard from couple of Technology Directors at schools that they are looking to procure Macbook Neos replacing their Chromebooks. This might be a strategy to defend their Chromebook market in schools.
Macs are very popular in schools today for teachers and staff. Switching to Macbook Neos for students would actually simplify their support burden. I'm not sure they'd be cost justified though.
Pretty sure when they talked about "very high build quality" and such they're saying this is not a replacement to the cheap chromebooks (which I think the macbook neo is eating anyway) but a higher price point.
I don't think these are Chromebook successors. This is supposed to be a premium line according to the "Android Show" video. But I suspect future Chromebooks will use this OS eventually.
Unless they're cheap, it's not going to sell well for K-12.
I used to work for an ed-tech company that was specifically focused on software for chromebooks and in talking with customers the biggest selling point of chromebooks for schools what their price. The school issued devices get absolutely beat to shit and they just expect a certain number to be decommissioned at the end of the year. Most schools are looking to buy the cheapest thing that does the job and the small group that have the money to actually buy premium devices are going to gravitate toward Apple products.
If Google is selling these for less then $500 then maybe there's a place for them, but like we saw it with the Pixelbook, there just isn't really demand for an $1000 chromebook
A Chromebook is far cheaper than a neo. It could be less then a third the price, and that makes a big difference when you're buying a thousand of them.
Why does this entire page read like an LLM wrote it in response to "Imagine Google is making a new desktop operating system built on Android. It's focused on total app compatibility, parity with the Apple ecosystem, Linux development and power users, and deep AI integration. Write the promo page for this operating system."?
Also
> Intelligent Window Management
The OS learns your workflow patterns and proactively arranges windows, prepares files, and opens apps before you ask.
Bleh.
Edit: Oh, it is that. A fan decided to make an LLM write a promo page assuming the role of Google marketing for an unreleased, unannounced project and make up all the details.
I’ll be blunt and say this looks like a rebrand of ChromeOS with a normal keyboard and AI slapped in it.
Chromebooks are associated with low quality garbage that people only buy if they’re desperate.
I don’t think this product will be successful. Someone buying a laptop at all needs more compatibility than Google’s OSes offer. Even with Android apps, those are all really shoved in haphazardly.
Why am I buying this when I can get a MacBook for $499?
The dream of Fuchsia is effectively dead, and aside from some older Nest devices, Google only remaining efforts with the OS is basically as a tiny runtime that they'll run in VMs on Android for some secure process needs.
It was just a speculative research project and a bunch of bloggers went wild declaring it the end of Android, Linux (Android of course sitting on Linux), ChromeOS, etc. That was never real.
Zircon is still under development with recent RFC's extending the memory synchronization and attribution model for processes.
There was also more extension added to one of the key disk formats in March which has an eye to more flexible long term evolution and adaptation to particular device form factors.
The publicly available evidence does nothing to support your claims, entirely the opposite.
I used to work on Fuchsia, I have not for many years now and have no idea what their current roadmap looks like, but I do know where to actually look up what's been done recently, which is all public and you could do as well.
Anyway I have no idea if this has any fuchsia code in it.
Okay? Is this impressive? Do you think it shows something? Bizarrely whenever people point out how much of a flop Fuchsia is (relative to the hype a decade ago), there is always someone like you citing commit count. Weird.
The vast majority of the commits are tiny commits to change a version number or rename a test. Or to pass some lint tests. I know tiny two man shops that have much more substantial commits each day.
I didn't say it was dead, though did I? Not quite sure what kicked off your bizarre defensive, asshole-ish screed. I specifically said that it most likely will be a tiny runtime for VM processes in Android.
But Fuchsia, announced A DECADE AGO, remains utterly irrelevant, aside from a couple of poorly received, dogshit Nest devices. And we know that Google massively downsized the team and basically moved on, and from people I've talked to it is now basically a make work project.
Yeah, the chances that Fuchsia powers this device is 0.0000%. I hugely doubt it even appears on the device at all.
So the dream, as constantly restated on here, is pretty clearly absolutely dead.
>Nothing asshole-ish about the grandparent comment
Irony. They wrongly did to me what I could have as easily done to you (anyone speculating that this runs Fuchsia is living in a cave and is probably leaving worthless comments to pretend they're participating), but I'm not obnoxious so I didn't and actually engaged in good faith. But having you stomping in and calling me an asshole in this case, then telling me to "tone it down"...Good god, hilarious stuff.
Calling it "just a speculative research project" is severely underestimating how big of an effort Fuschia was. At its peak it had a couple hundred eng IIRC.
I don't think that description underestimates it at all. Google took a moonshot and threw a lot of resources at it, but they in no way put eggs in that basket so when it didn't yield something substantial they just scattered the team and now they keep trying to get something out of that investment.
Fuchsia ended up in some Google products, such as Nest Hub, Nest Hub Max, and Google's smart speakers, thermostats and displays.
But Fuchsia won't be in the Googlebook because there's no Chrome browser for Fuchsia. (In early 2024, Google officially stopped trying to port the full, desktop version of Chrome to Fuchsia.)
I can relate because my dad is 84 and he really struggles with simple things like entering a password to sign in to Gmail. He forgets what he did last time and so I'm back to explaining how moving his mouse causes the pointy-arrow thing move around on the screen, to get it pointed at the wide rectangle near the middle of the screen, etc. No UI library is going to solve his struggles.
I solved most of the sign-in problem for my dad by picking a simpler browser than Google Chrome, and by tweaking his browser settings to be just-so. That's not going to be much help for you, the website creator...
Maybe allow passkeys for login? These days, passkeys usually get stored/supplied by the underlying OS. (By usually, I mean that's the statistically most common source of the passkey today. They can also come from a browser plugin or a hardware key.)
I worry that passkeys are going to confuse the heck out of less technically sophisticated users the moment they hit an edge cases, and I bet they can find edge cases.
Do you commonly carry those around with you? I'm not mistaking a resturant for a library, i just want to kill time until my food comes out.
Is there a reason why someone sitting by themselves reading a book on the e-reader app on their phone is more offensive than someone sitting by themselves reading a dead tree book?
>someone sitting by themselves reading a book on the e-reader app
I was this person. Eventually I gave it up because I didn't want to be mistaken for just another screen-addled zombie with no impulse control miserably scrolling Whatsapp and Instagram.
Perhaps I have too much self-awareness but I'd argue most people have too little.
> Eventually I gave it up because I didn't want to be mistaken for just another screen-addled zombie with no impulse control miserably scrolling Whatsapp and Instagram.
So you gave it up not because you are worried about being a "phone addicted zombie" but because you are worried about being precieved and judged as such?
Some would say changing your behaviour due to social insecurity is just another form of being a zombie.
Not sure it would make me a "zombie" exactly but I agree it's an oddly incoherent position to judge the behavior of others while also being concerned about their gaze. Much introspection has not yet pierced this mystery.
Who cares? They're strangers. If they want to make faulty assumptions and feel an unjustified smug sense of self superiority that's none of my business.
At this point I read ~all books on my phone as a simple matter of practicality. I'd prefer my phone had an epaper screen and grayscale page centric apps (instead of scrolling) but that's just not how things are.
You dodged the question. You don't know what he's using his phone for. Fair enough. Is there a reason that privately looking at the screen is offensive while privately looking at a book is not?
It's a more social activity in a world that is increasingly isolated. A book is a nice conversation starter. I'm not going to come up to you and ask about what's on your little screen. Even if you're just reading an e-book the phone contributes to the perceived loneliness of those around you.
If you really want to read a book in peace, try a library.
I don't think you're going to have many good conversations if you go around interrupting people trying to read in peace, regardless of where you do it. What a bizarre sentiment.
> Even if you're just reading an e-book the phone contributes to the perceived loneliness of those around you.
This is a wild projection of your own experience onto someone else's actions.
> If you really want to read a book in peace, try a library.
I've quite enjoyed the times I've taken a book to a restaurant and read over a meal. I do not appreciate you, or people like you, dictating how I ought to act in public in a way that doesn't affect anyone else in the slightest.
I don't want to start conversations when I'm alone at a table with my book. The fact that you find it somehow less social for me to be on my phone instead of reading a book when I am minding my own business at my own table seems like a tremendous failure in your own boundaries and expectations of other people.
>This is a wild projection of your own experience onto someone else's actions.
I asked a friend who doesn't use a smartphone about how it feels walking into a room full of people with phones and he told me the same thing. I have a smartphone but I don't take it out reflexively. I don't even consider myself a very social person or an extrovert, yet it always has to be ME to start a conversation in a room full of people because they would rather stare at a screen that say a hello.
I'm going to talk to you whether you like it not. If you don't want to talk to people, then maybe don't put yourself in a social setting? Imagine entering a coffee shop and finding it dead silent. I would just go home and make some food. If you have a problem with me talking to you, go ahead tell me how much you don't appreciate it or whatever, I don't care.
Maybe this is a cultural difference, but i would generally consider it incredibly rude for a random person to interupt someone trying to enjoy their meal. A resturant isn't a singles mixer.
Depends on the layout. If its a large, sit-down restaurant with wide gaps between the tables, then yes it would be weird for me to go up to you and say "Hi, Stranger!". But at a coffee shop you might be sitting right next to me. We might even be sitting at the same table waiting for our food. Am I not allowed to talk to the person sitting right next to me? I ordered some food the other day and realized there were no free tables, so I asked a stranger if I could sit at his table and had a conversation with him and his buddy.
All of this is contextual and it doesn't take a screen or a book for someone to give off clear vibes of not wanting to chat. "Mind if I sit here" in a crowded shop is the expectation. Anything beyond that such as having a conversation with a total stranger depends on the subtle behavioral cues given off by the other party.
It's not my intention to be rude but based on your responses on this topic I'm guessing you're fairly oblivious to the relevant social cues. There's nothing wrong with that per se but adopting an attitude of "not my problem" is probably just going to aggravate the people around you.
I understand social cues. I am just more than willing to push the envelope. And I have nothing to lose by possibly causing some mild discomfort to a stranger by "gasp" talking to them like a fellow human being.
> I'm going to talk to you whether you like it not. If you don't want to talk to people, then maybe don't put yourself in a social setting?
You seem to have a strange definition of what's a social situation. Maybe I want to be around people without talking to them; if I wanted to strike up conversation with strangers, I'd sit at a bar.
You're obviously conscious of the fact that you may be doing something that people don't want, which makes it all the more confusing to me that you're upset about people possibly preferring their phones to books: if you're going to interrupt them either way and potentially invade their space, why do you care how they're signalling? (For the record, I don't think people inherently are signalling, but you seem to--it's the inconsistency in your own stated approach that's confusing me.)
I think your idea of a social situation is too limiting and contributes to the loneliness epidemic. I moved to a completely different state where I didn't know a single person so I can't leverage an existing social circle to make friends. So I'm not going to refrain from talking to you just because you might want to be left alone. If you don't want a conversation, just say so. It's not hard.
Sure, I might be doing something you don't want, but that's also true of asking a girl out (and I mean in real life, not on snapchat). She might say yes, she might say no. Either way, you I never get anywhere unless I ask.
Here are some places I think its perfectly acceptable to talk to strangers:
- A class (barring when the professor is speaking).
- On a bus or at the bus stop.
- A coffee shop
- Airplane ride
- DMV
- Waiting for a table at a restaurant
Maybe you disagree. I can't read minds.
As for what makes phones particularly bad, its because they discourage social interaction. Why talk to people when you have endless stream of dopamine in your pocket? In economic speak, phones dramatically raise the opportunity cost of actual social interactions. So everyone just stares at their phones, and this negatively affects even those who choose to opt-out of technology because we are deprived of human engagement because we are unable to compete with those little dopamine machines.
Oh, and unlike with books, everyone has a phone at all times, and when things get boring (even a little), then the phones come out and you're left talking with yourself.
Yes, possibly. But they also don't talk to each other. It's pretty unlikely that nobody in that room likes anyone else. It's more likely that they just don't know how to socialize. And when I start talking, people tend to open up and laugh at my jokes. So I wouldn't say anybody dislikes me.
Do you make a habit of interrupting people who are reading? If so I can just about guarantee that you're "that guy" to the people you're doing that to.
I don't think most people view a table for one at a cafe as a social setting with regard to total strangers. It will depend of course and there will be associated social cues; reading anything be it a screen, a book, or something else is a strong cue against unsolicited social interaction in almost any context.
It depends, it depends. You need to look at other signals. Are they extremely absorbed? Is it somewhere extremely quiet (like a library), or somewhere louder (like a coffee shop)?
My company recently gave us a day off for wellbeing. My initial plan was to spend the day in the forest, but it was cold and rainy. So instead, I did as you described. I took an old warn paperback that I had long ago picked up at a Little Free Library and have been struggling to finish, went to a family owned diner, got some comfort food, and sat for an hour and read my book (and did not use my phone). It was wonderful.
"OpenCode Go" (a subscription) lets you use lots of hosted open-weights frontier AI models, such as GLM-5 (currently right up there in the frontier model leaderboards) for $10 per month.
I've used it to create little one-off tools that I needed for some specific tasks, without any care whether it's "of substance" or "investable." In the past, I might have Googled around to see if there was an existing app or open-source package to do the job. Quite often, the AI agent will use some existing software packages, but I didn't have to find them and figure out how to use them.
A real example from today: I got tired of the Looney Tunes way-too-colourful screensaver options on my Mac mini, so I asked Claude how to get a screensaver that is a nearly-black uniform monochrome grey. Surprisingly, that's not actually an option in macOS System Settings. So Claude just wrote a little Python script to generate the images I need for my two displays, saving them to the right place on my Mac mini. It used the Pillow package, but I didn't have to spin up a whole Python project and install Pillow; it just used PEP 723 inline script metadata to tell uv to use Python >=3.12 and to install Pillow. Then Claude gave me the uv one-liner to run the script (uv run ~/make_screensaver.py) and instructions for how to tell my Mac mini to use the generated files. The whole process took about 15 minutes from when I started writing the first prompt to the time I had my new screensaver working.
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