Your original post was very public under a very well known brand - you have no expectation of privacy after that. People are going to respond to you publicly.
It's not about a privacy, but common courtesy. Especially after I gave them a heads up in DM about the post and offered to answer any more questions they had. They said they'd reach back out, then didn't, then posted this publicly? Really strange.
Looks like you need the "quiet part" said out loud:
Chances are, the company was fishing for (or at least wouldn't mind) VC investment, which requires things being built a certain (complex and expensive) way like the top "startups" that recently got lots of VC funding.
Chances are, the company wanted an invite to a cloud provider's conference so they could brag about their (self-inflicted) problems and attract visibility (potentially translates to investment - see previous point).
Chances are, a lot of their engineering staff wanted certain resume points to potentially be able to work at such startups in the future.
Chances are, the company wanted some stories about how they're modern and "cloud-native" and how they're solving complex (self-inflicted) problems so they can post it on their engineering blog to attract talent (see previous point).
Yes. Exactly. The company wanted to be "modern" in terms of tech stack and they kept getting buried in the thought that using serverless would keep them cool.
The PM was also close friends with the CEO so everyone blindly nods to him.
I love it. The UX is terrible but the visualization is very "outside the box". Experiments like this are important on the road to finding novel interfaces. Not everything has to look like a v0 shadcn app. Thank you for sharing!
The other comment articulates the points much better than I would have, but I have a large number of (tested) food and environmental allergies. It is a very logical explanation that the adjuvants in vaccines would cause the body to also train an immune response to other things.
There is also a massive profit motive for pharma companies and many hospitals, when you couple that with the revolving door between industry and government, it seems like a situation ripe for corruption.
I don't see the harm in removing aluminum adjuvants from vaccines (we all buy aluminum free deodorant!). I don't see the harm in not vaccinating children for things they are unlikely to come into contact with (i.e. hepatitis B). In fact, I think it would be good to make the change and see what the health outcomes are over the next 30 years. That is how we will learn.
I would guess people that don't know how stuff works or what they're talking about, but still feel entitled to disregard medical science progress because they don't see the effects directly.
Seeing my father in law daily is a very good reminder to me as to why we thought eradicating polio (and creating vaccines) was a good idea: his left leg is 30% the size of his right leg, and he's had trouble walking since he was 7yo (he's now 65), with no way of fixing it.
People don't understand what life used to be like before 60y ago because they didn't live through it, and even then they're tempted to dismiss the death or permanent complication rates because "nobody died"... that they knew/recall of.
It's true that in general better sanitation, clean water, better food availability have helped in reducing the death rates in general and also complications (because better prepared immune system, better symptoms management, ...), but vaccines allowed to eradicate stuff that killed or altered lives permanently on a regular basis.
I wouldn't call myself a vaccine skeptic, and I don't have a problem with anything else you said, but "feel entitled to disregard medical science progress" puts my back up. We are in fact all entitled to that.
I think a not insignificant part of the skepticism problem stems from well meaning authoritarians who believe they have the right to shoot everything that has a pop sci press release behind it into everyone else's bodies.
It's like the opposite of the naturalist fallacy: if it's man made and has a sciency name, let's assume it has no glaring flaws until we get the class action lawsuit recruitment commercials a decade later telling us we might be entitled to 5 dollars compensation if we're on our deathbeds because of some horrible complication.
Even better if your political tribe has tied its identity to the thing.
- Adjuvants. As a materials researcher I think it's nuts we inject nanoscale alumina in our blood.
- Regulatory structure. Why can't I sue a vaccine manufacturer? Limit awards, if you necessary, but if I cant sue I cant get discovery.
- Effectiveness. The flu vaccine's effectiveness is statistical artifact. See healthy vaccine bias
- Historical effectiveness. I had a civil engineer smugly point out that his profession had ended more diseases than biology. So I looked it up. Civil engineering did more to end communicable diseases than vaccines.
- General dishonesty of the medical profession. I don't expect my Advil to be 100% safe; I don't expect my vaccine to be either. I dont expect my medical health officers to lie about it though (see mRNA and the long dismissed myocarditis risk)
>Civil engineering did more to end communicable diseases than vaccines.
This is a cute statement but really shouldn't be part of the basis for vaccine skepticism.
Hand washing is also one of the most significant medical practice advancements... That doesn't mean we stop there.
Sure, civil engineering did a lot for water borne illness and the like. And I'll even grant that building design and HVAC systems can reduce respiratory virus transmission. But it's not doing anything for measles, smallpox, polio, ebola, hepatitis, HIV, Yellow fever, etc etc. I mean come on.
And if I do have to go to a place with worse infrastructure, I'll take that typhoid vaccine please...
Both - but primary the cloud offering. The main author (https://x.com/heyandras) is pretty open about the project revenue its sources. If I remember correctly they're at about 10k MRR mostly from Coolify Cloud.
I think trained knowledge is less and less important - as these multi-modal models have the ability to search the web and have much larger context windows.
I was about to say the same thing - I use Zulip at current employment - and after you get used to it it’s pretty great software that already solves all the problems struct aims to (without the AI nonsense)
Founder of Struct here. I looked at Zulip before starting Struct. And I'm sorry -- I don't think it's the same. Threads in Zulip are really sub-channels, and the idea of a unified feed like "All Threads" doesn't exist -- at least, that was my perception of Zulip. And just looking at the site right now, it feels the same as before. I could be wrong.
Struct is different. It's a reimagination of what a chat platform would look like if you were to completely give up the idea of chats in a serial log of channels (IRC, Slack, Discord), and embrace threads and feeds whole-heartedly. When everything is a thread, the platform can work remarkably well for users.
> the idea of a unified feed like "All Threads" doesn't exist
I believe it does. You get a feed of all messages; and still organized by a topic, quite conveniently.
I don’t use it, though, since from anywhere in GUI I can immediately jump to the next unread message, irregardless of topic or stream, simply by pressing “n” on keyboard (preceded by Esc if I happened to be typing; my draft is saved reliably).
I don't understand why I'd need or want this. I saw it in the video and was horrified. Multiple feeds updating as I'm watching them is just too much going on.
When I'm chatting, I don't want to pay attention to 10 different things at once. I'm most productive when I am working on one task (with a single topic), which may require me to refer back to Slack periodically.
Struct looks like it has two differentiating features: 1) it surfaces irrelevant distractions in the All Threads channel, and 2) it creates the tl;dr summary. The former seems actively harmful to productivity, and the latter seems like it could be useful.
You could create a focused custom feed. For example, I have one for "tasks assigned to me". That's what I set to when I'm focused working.
That's the beauty right -- you can control and filter what you see. As opposed to channel based interactions, where your boundaries are set in stone on channel creation.
Yeah, if I had known this would be how they would have handled a hypothetical shutdown, I would have very happily used the service. Instead I signed up for GeForce Now since I can buy games through Steam and play them there. The main thing that stopped me from going with Stadia instead was that I was pretty confident that at some point it would shut down and I'd lose access to $xxx worth of games. If they had promised up front to do this in case of failure, maybe it wouldn't have failed.
How is GeForce Now with Steam? I have a Steam link but find it to be a pain in the rear. It's also difficult / clumsy to use for non Steam games. Does GeForce Now solve this or is it just ... different?
GeForce Now gives you a Windows box with Steam on it, and you log into your Steam account on it. They pair it with a super fast cache of the Steam Depot so your first install is speedy. That way, there's no integration necessary, and Nvidia doesn't have to reinvent the achievement/launcher/licensing wheel.
It's probably just different. I don't know what the Steam Link is like. GFN streams the games from a datacenter, so the quality will depend on the quality of your internet connection. Also, GFN can't play all Steam games; publishers have to agree to allow their games to be played on GFN, and several major publishers don't agree (eg Bethesda, Rockstar). All that said, I'm happy with it. Usually I can't tell at all that it's being streamed, and it's cool to be able to max out every single graphics setting without thinking about it.
> publishers have to agree to allow their games to be played on GFN
Hrm. I have an "eclectic" mix of native Steam games, non-Steam games (added to my Steam library) and some emulators. I can't imagine those will be available, thanks for this info.
>it's cool to be able to max out every single graphics setting without thinking about it.
I certainly like this.
Do you use it with your TV? Do you need a Shield too for the controller?
If you have an Nvidia graphics card that supports game streaming, install Moonlight on the steam link and look up how to stream the entire desktop using Moonlight.
It works perfectly for non Steam games and usually works better for Steam games as well.
I would recommend a wireless keyboard and mouse to launch the games or if you just want to use a controller to launch your games the Playnight launcher.
I'm a Stadia user, and Google's handling of the shutdown of Google Play Music is what gave me confidence to purchase anything on Stadia (~$500 on a quick review). I actually thought we'd be sent personal links of our games, which would live-on in Google's white-list stadia product called Google Stream - they did something similar for GPM which merged into Youtube Music. I'm fine with a refund though.
Free at time-of-service (and as mentioned, of course you're paying with your privacy anyway) doesn't mean there's not very real costs to the customer if the service goes away though.
Most people's lives would be turned upside down if, say, gmail closed down. It would take dozens of hours just to migrate away the accounts that I care most about. Even though it's "free" I don't want to build my life around shifting sands like that.
Gmail of course is a key service to google that will never be shut down, but I'm starting to get nervous about having my life built around Google Voice. That one doesn't seem nearly as solid and again, it's going to be a major undertaking to migrate all my 2fa/recovery. I'm planning on doing it during my next phone upgrade... I'll put the phone on a second line for a month, transfer my google voice number to it, then migrate all my legacy 2fa/recovery (that wouldn't accept google voice as a cell number) from the underlying phone line to the google voice number (now with AT&T). Huge pain in the ass and would be really tough without a second line to handle that switchover, but I'm not 100% (or even 75%) sure that Google Voice is going to be here in another 5 years when I upgrade next.
So like, who gives a shit that it was "free" (apart from my privacy)? I am having to shape my whole life around migrating off this google service, it's a massive pain in the ass and will cost a decent amount (a couple extra months of service on a second line) even to migrate off "the cheap way" in a planned fashion, if tomorrow they said "oops lol it closes in 30 days" I'd be buying a burner or upgrading off-cycle just to get things migrated. The obvious takeaway as a consumer is "don't let these google services get too entrenched in your life", let alone as a business.
This is the exact reason that I don’t mind purchasing Amazon’s experiments. If it doesn’t work out, I get my money back and Amazon has more data for product dev
I'm really curious the calculation here. That's a lot of money, and I'm certainly glad they're doing it, but feels both out of character for Google, and I'm surprised they have the budget allocated to just "doing the right thing". What goodwill is this saving that they aren't burning by shutting down Stadia?
I think it saves a ton of goodwill. Yes, you’re taking a platform from people, but it’s much better to not take their money too. Nobody is losing their livelihood, it’s a gaming service that can easily be replaced.
Does it though? It doesn't seem to be in keeping with how the rest of Google functions with their general lack of care, customer service, or recourse on anything. It also don't paper over the fact that they killed a service that, just 3 months ago they said wasn't being shut down.
If there was some new Google paid service that I cared about coming out, I'd still be hesitant that this refund is some sort of fluke and not a standard practice, and avoid giving Google money for something they're likely to kill in a couple years.
I'm hesitant to claim exceptionalism, but history supports the claim that gamers are (a) quick to claim umbrage, (b) VERY vocal on social media, (c) have a LOT of free time to shitpost, (d) have long memories, and (e) are a younger demographic (aka future consumers).
Maybe that was communicated to Google leadership and "Let's pay to prevent everyone from hating us" was the cheaper option.
Perhaps, but I wonder if that class of gamers you're talking about is the target/actual audience for Stadia. The folks I knew who had/used Stadia were a lot more casual and non-traditional gamers, since why would you pay for an online streaming game service when you already own consoles or a robust PC?
It's not like Google has a good rep in that community already, given how much pretty much everyone on Youtube, and especially in its gaming community, complains about YT constantly. There's a reason most gaming folks are on Twitch more than Youtube and have to be bribed massively to move over to YT.
A lot of gamers are the sort of people that flame a developer of a bad game they never even bought/played in the first place. Attacking corporations is itself a sort of game they enjoy, having a personal stake in the fight isn't necessary for them.
Sure, but what I'm saying is that "lot of gamers" in my experience is the type to flame Stadia without playing or buying it anyway. I highly doubt the overlap of the population of /v/ and Stadia owners was that large, but maybe I'm wrong.
>why would you pay for an online streaming game service when you already own consoles or a robust PC?
Lots of reasons come to mind, but the biggest ones for me were portability (playing my games at max settings while traveling, at friends' houses, at work, at coffee shops, etc), the ability to play on whatever device I wanted (usually laptop or TV depending on the game when at home, but I also played a lot on phone/tablet while travelling), and to a lesser extent some smaller perks like using less battery life / hard drive space / time updating / etc than the native alternative.
In other words, if I have the choice between playing the same game on my desktop (strictly in my office) or on the couch (or wherever else I want to be), I'm always going to pick the latter.
If this is for goodwill, they have to start somewhere.
Google hasn’t remained the same company through its history. Like when that CFO came in and reduced moonshot projects and maybe general expenses a lot. Which was a radical departure from their past.
Maybe Google is realizing they can’t keep being this cold company forever.
Or! Just like you I agree this one time doesn’t get me to trust Google not shutting things down with no recourse. It would have to be done a few more times.
I don’t disagree with that, but I think it’s somewhat orthogonal. If you pay people back, the general reception is now “eh, assumed this was going to happen. Glad I’m not out hundreds of dollars.” compared to fire and pitchforks if there’s no refunds. Google already has the rep for shutting things down. This doesn’t really move the needle besides showing that they will at least financially compensate your loss.
2. Highest probability of any product shutdown of this exploding "don't even bother, Google will just shut it down in a few years" into broad public consciousness
3. It's an enormous market and they know they'll want to try again
4. Maybe it's relatively not that much money. I would be surprised if I knew more than one or two people who'd ever even heard of Stadia
It's not out of character. They did exactly the same thing for "Google Offers," the old Groupon competitor from a decade ago. They refunded ALL of the purchased deals, even the ones that had been redeemed.
12 years ago, Google offered to buy Groupon for $6 billion and Groupon declined. Those were the second and first dumbest business decisions I've ever heard of, respectively.
But if it wasn't that much money, then it wasn't that many people who would be upset about not getting a refund, which for a company with the cashflow that Google has feels like not worth not pissing off.
People were extremely cautious about stadia from day 1 because while Google may be the single most capable company of actually making cloud gaming workable, this specific product required a lot of money input that had a fairly good chance of being completely wiped out based on Google's track record.
With this, next time there's a product that has a similar risk to the consumer, people will be saying "yeah it might get shut down, but look at what they did with stadia"
I guess they're keeping the subscription fees for those who subscribed, not sure what percent of their revenue that would have been. All in all the total sales are probably paltry relative to the investment they've made in it (though surely they'll find other uses for the servers and tech), so it's not a big sacrifice to give that back to avoid anger and lawsuits
I dunno, Google has never really seemed to care about consumer anger and lawsuits. Like I said, it's a welcome change, and I'll be happy if they keep up this new pro-consumer attitude, but this feels a lot more like a weird one-off than a new policy or commitment.
The simple answer is that it's legal hedging. They don't want anything related to this closure of Stadia to lead to a lawsuit that might impact the concept of software licensing, particularly in the EU. This is a move out of pure self-interest (not that I see anything particularly wrong with that).
I bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia when it released. It was 60€ new, but there was a 10€ discount available at the time. I believe it was if you had never purchased anything on Stadia before. So, only 50€ for Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia.
Then everyone who ordered Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia could also get the Stadia Premiere Edition for free (retailed "normally" for 99€), which includes the Stadia Controller and a Chromecast Ultra (alone worth about 50€).
I actually sold my Chromecast Ultra for about 40€ shortly after I got it since I didn't really need it, which brought my purchase of Cyberpunk 2077 down to 10€ with a free USB controller on the side.
I’m surprised, but I’m also glad they are doing this. It could be to avoid class action lawsuits. I used mine for a total of 5 minutes before throwing it in trash. It is a very unfinished product they shipped thinking they’ll solve it. But the reality is, even with the best internet in the country, the games were barely playable. I’m talking 600mbps download and a 100mbps upload speed.
The problem with such statements is that game streaming services are INSANELY dependent on literally a century of cruft and how it was handled on a house to house basis. You can have great performance in your house, but your neighbor across the street could have utterly useless behavior.
Like this product literally depends on which godawful modem your ISP sent you when you first got service.
Speed alone isn't what matters here - latency and jitter are more important. A 100Mbps speed test over 30 seconds is meaningless.
I've played multiplayer FPS games on a home-made setup with an AWS VM with GPU and Steam streaming (using a VPN to make both machines appear to be on the same LAN so Steam streaming would work).
This worked well, but only because it was on an enterprise-grade leased line with consistent 1ms latency to the AWS datacenter, and all wired (good wireless gear might've worked too, but forget about trying that on garbage consumer-grade hardware like your typical router or mesh Wi-Fi setup).
Is it technically possible? Yes and it works well under optimal conditions.
Is it possible for the average user who doesn't have good equipment nor the budget for it? No chance - it's a recipe for disaster. Those who do have the budget are better served by just buying a gaming machine and running the games locally.
Games streaming can be a value-add to a good ISP (such as Google Fiber) whose network actually permits this, but don't expect it to work on the majority of residential connections. The vast majority of them suck (whether because of the ISP's network or the customer-premises equipment), people don't know they suck and have no easy tools to test that, so they'll end up blaming the game streaming provider when it inevitably doesn't live up to expectations.
Until good networking setups become commonplace, game streaming will remain limited to a very small niche that have serious networking setups but for some reason don’t have a local gaming machine.
Game streaming is great for casual gamers. A lot of games are perfectly playable even with 200ms tacked on, actually.
It's unacceptable even with a 1ms link (because of the extra 2-3 frames of latency that get buffered in) for hardcore players in some genres. Even if they can't see the difference, they'll feel it when they miss shots in FPS games and links/confirms/parries in fighting games
Unfortunately, most of the people here and in the industry making these streaming products are adults with real lives who don't understand how bad game streaming is for hardcore players
200ms?? it's really frustrating in my experience for every game (I had 180ms when Xbox Cloud Gaming connects server over pacific ocean for unknown reason).
Yeah, a lot of people play games with their TV not in game mode, which is a ticket straight to +300ms City
Not only that, but a lot of AAA games nowadays have super long animations, tons of post-processing slapped on the tail end of the rendering engine, etc, so you end up with 300+ ms from "button pressed" to "something happens"
I suspect most of those games played on TVs would be running on consoles which are much more forgiving as their games are optimised for that use-case and there’s built-in assistance for inputs (aiming with controllers is much more difficult without it).
My understanding is that Stadia and most other game streaming providers run PC games which are developed with the assumption of precise mouse/keyboard inputs where there’s no assistance.
Anytime I see an asymmetric upload bandwidth like 600/100, I assume the ISP is just advertising temporary burst speeds and does not actually allocate enough upload bandwidth to the neighborhood for people to sustain usage at 100Mbps.
It actually just means they're using DOCSIS to carry the signal, which has asymmetric bandwidth allocations for upstream and downstream. 600/100 is a standardized allocation too.
In practice, it is always a heavily oversubscribed network that never delivers sustained bandwidth for either up or down.
Contrast to whenever I have used a symmetric fiber connection that advertises 1Gbps/1Gbps, I can actually sustain close to both of those and at sub 5ms latency. Whatever the theoretical promise is, I assume non fiber non symmetric connections are simply low quality (in the USA).
I assume you mean same argument regarding download. In my experience, the download is always far less over-provisioned than the upload.
For example, Comcast over-provisions their upload so much they cannot even advertise what it is. They will sell you 2Gbps download and never tell you the upload. Which I assume, based on experience, is 20Mbps split over a neighborhood of 500 houses.
Consumer-grade Wi-Fi is also a major problem when it comes to latency & jitter. It doesn't even have to be game streaming, any real-time application such as calls suffer from it as well, despite not actually requiring much bandwidth at all.
Unfortunately there is no user-friendly tool to test for this. Most tests focus purely on speed, which can be tricked by various packet-loss-compensation algorithms, so you can score a "perfect" 1Gbps speedtest despite the connection cutting completely for a second.
I remember it using a Java applet. I think the reason none of the online test sites support it is because it’s hard to test latency & jitter in the browser as the lower layers try hard to compensate for it.
Speedtest for random server (servers listed on Ookla is quite random) is useful but ping for random server is a bit useless. Just ping for targeted server that runs service you use.
I'm somewhat surprised the 4 sibling comments as of this writing don't even mention the latency/jitter issue-- to me, that's always been one of the obvious biggest flaws with game streaming. Your average consumer has little to no awareness of it, it's beyond Google's control, and it has a very noticeable impact to anyone experiencing it. Not a good combination.
Edit: Nextgrid showed up as I was typing this and set the record straight. My faith in HN is restored.
I'd be shocked if their contracts/EULA wasn't structured to avoid risk of suit around something like this. Shutting down a live service feels pretty defensible as not a crime or tort, and they could almost definitely fight the lawsuit for less than this costs in refunds, which makes it all the weirder.
It's the most likely reason. We've seen plenty of cases were EULAs were declared void and that won't hold in a place like the EU. You can't sign away your rights as consumers here. They might be able to fight individual lawsuits in some places, but it might eventually escalate into an investigation by the EU. There's significant legal risk there that is being avoided by just refunding a few millions. It's the sensible move.
Honest curiosity, has that actually been proven in EU court? The sort of "licensing as a service" that Stadia did doesn't seem that different from the business models of something like Audible, or even iTunes in the DRM era. I totally agree that it's a predatory and anti-consumer model, but I wasn't aware that anywhere in the EU had successfully argued that removing access to something you were essentially "renting" access to was a violation of consumer protection laws.
These sorts of EULA arrangements are essentially the foundation of almost all modern media consumption - if anything Stadia is on better ground than most since it's not just a DRM layer like Steam or iTunes. If Steam disappears, I have a bunch of entirely playable game files on my computer that I can't use. When Stadia shuts down, you have a client for nothing. You're not paying $60 to own a copy of a game, you're paying $60 for an unlimited term license to play the game on Stadia's servers. Legally, it feels odd to claim in court that that should be the same as a purchase of the game in some other method. If Google had turned off Stadia, but transferred everyone's purchases to Steam or EGS, that wouldn't be providing the same service you purchased from Stadia.
It's also just a good marketing move. "they made people pay full-price for games and deleted them shortly after" is the kind of association that sticks around and even Google has an interest to avoid.
Does anyone have sales numbers on hardware and software?
If the actual sales were low (and that's part of why they shut down) then it might actually be (relatively) cheap, and perhaps buy them goodwill towards their next experiment. Maybe next time more people will try it, with the hopes that if it fails, they'll get refunds. And maybe it'll build momentum for them.
Not quite hardware/software sales, but a lot of people pegged Stadia somewhere between 2-3 million users around the beginning of the year. It's also unclear how many of those break down into recurring Pro subscribers versus bought-a-game-once-and-play-it-now users.
Kudos to Google for doing right by their customers without being prompted. They could’ve said “$5 off a Nest Thermostat” or some crap and instead they manned up.
It's a remarkable decision to refund! I'm assuming all the game developers are keeping their revenue from Stadia gameplay, so it's a meaningful net loss for Google overall. Maybe not that much though; I hope someone publishes an accounting.
I think hardware was a loss-leader anyway. They were generously giving them out for free. Games are probably the biggest loss for them as a majority of that money was handed off to publishers.
Not a lot, they were giving away Stadia Premiere kits (a controller and a Chromecast Ultra) a lot (I got 2 free ones, IIRC one from YouTube Premium and the other i don't recall), and all were manufactured in 2019. Which means they drastically overestimate how many people would buy their hardware.
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