- Oh wow, I appreciate this post as vivid reminder for how I grew to loathe being an EM at Google. Folks like this are pervasive in the org these days.
- https://www.tabomagic.com
I've been obsessed with making it easier to handle tab overload in the browser without requiring any sort of active "tab management".
I have a working extension that replaces the "new tab" page with a clean view of all open tabs, along with simple ways to search and select which tab to switch to, including search over bookmarks and history. There are also some simple tools to allow for creating and reorganizing tab groups.
For a small group of people, it revolutionizes the browser experience. I'm still trying to decide if there is a widely-useful product there, or if it's just a niche use case.
Any and all feedback welcome!
- Krapivin's work was a result of his study of the Tiny Pointers paper; his paper has already been linked in another response.
- This is a fun read, and, unlike a lot of material on the Labs, goes back a lot further than 1947.
As a software engineer, my favorite book on the topic is "Unix: A History and a Memoir" by Brian Kernighan. It tells many of the same stories that are told elsewhere about the modern history of the Labs, but through the first-person perspective of someone who was there, for whom the characters are not just historical figures, but friends.
- This post reflects an insidious anti pattern in the practice of setting OKRs: "shipping the roadmap" is not the objective, it is a means to achieving some other underlying objective.
With a well written objective / key result (ex: "grow DAU by 30%"), you can abandon your entire roadmap two weeks into the quarter and still hit your OKRs. They enable you to respond to new information and lessons learned, rather than locking the whole team into a rigid plan for the entire quarter.
- You might like my extension: https://tabomagic.com. Bookmarks are hidden by default, but as soon as you type something into the search bar, all matching bookmarks show.
- I built a chrome extension to optimize this workflow, because the address bar search in Chrome is terrible (as in: it requires you to @-mention what kind of thing you're searching for.)
Ctrl-T opens a new tab page, <tab> highlights the search bar, and then I get instantaneous search over open tabs, bookmarks, and history. Everything stays 100% local.
- I once had Brian as an "intern" on my team. It is definitely -not- a hard G.
- Every hiring manager with any experience should anticipate that candidates are likely to negotiate.
Therefore, any offer should be backed by logic of the form "we want to hire this candidate for $Y or less. We will make an initial of $X (X < Y), so that we have room to negotiate upwards when they ask."
In my experience, usually Y==(X * 1.1).
- > Google codebase is arguably one of the most curated, and iterated on datasets in existence
I spent 12 years of my career in the Google codebase.
This assertion is technically correct in that google3 has been around for 20 years, and all code gets reviewed, but the implication that Google's codebase is a high-quality training set is not consistent with my experience.
- All great feedback, thank you!
Adding the ability to view the full title is an easy fix, I'll include that in the next push.
The history and bookmarks point is a good one. It's possible to specify those as optional permissions for the extension, so users could decide whether or not to enable them. One idea that motivates the project is that it's easier to close tabs when you know you can always get back to them quickly, so history and bookmark search are necessary to enable that mindset. I'll ruminate on this one a little more.
The idea of using it without replacing the "new tab" page had never occurred to me. Let me think about that one, too.
Thanks again!!
- Thanks for the positive feedback! I'm testing interest on chrome, and, if it finds traction, I will definitely port it to be browser-agnostic. It _should_ be pretty straightforward.
- Please tell me any thoughts you have! If email is better: tabomagic22 at gmail.com
- I've been obsessed with developing ways to make it easier to handle tab overload in the browser without requiring any sort of active "tab management".
I have a working extension that replaces the "new tab" page with a clean view of all open tabs, along with simple ways to search and select which tab to switch to, including search over bookmarks and history. There are also some simple tools to allow for creating and reorganizing tab groups.
I'm very early and looking for feedback from anyone who suffers from tab overwhelm like I do! You can try it out at http://bit.ly/tab-o-magic!
- Continua AI | ML and Systems Engineers | NYC, SF Bay Area, Seattle | http://continua.ai
Stack: Python | C# | GCloud | HuggingFace
Continua was founded in April 2023 by a Distinguished Engineer from Google Research to reinvent how people interact with information, with services, and with each other.
We're very early; after building several prototypes in our first few months, we’ve developed conviction about an MVP, and we’re building like mad to bring our ideas to users. This is an opportunity to join and help set the product and technical direction of this brand-new company! ML engineers at Continua work on new approaches for knowledge representation, multimodality, and personalization under computational resource constraints. Systems engineers at Continua work on a wide variety of secure and reliable backend services and data pipelines to power our products.
We’re backed by tier-1 VCs, and we’ve already assembled a team of six engineers with backgrounds at Google, Microsoft, Slack, SpaceX, CourseHero, and Stash. We have a limited number of additional spots available on the team for engineers who are excited about building innovative products that leverage the latest advances in ML.
If you are passionate about building innovative new products, and you’re eager to work in a dynamic startup environment, we would love to hear from you. Please apply via https://www.continua.ai/careers and let's embark on this exciting journey together!
- Brian Kernighan's "Unix: A History and a Memoir" is an excellent read on the computer systems achievements of the labs through the eyes of someone who was at the center of it all.
- Continua AI | ML Engineers | NYC, SFO, SEA | http://continua.ai
Stack: Flutter | Python | C# | GCloud
Continua was founded earlier this year by a Distinguished Engineer from the Google Brain team to apply the latest innovations in ML/AI and reinvent how people interact with information, with services, and with each other.
We're very early; after building several prototypes in our first six months, we’ve developed conviction about an MVP, and we’re building like mad to bring our ideas to users. This is an opportunity to join and help set the product direction of this brand-new company!
We’re backed by tier-1 VCs, and we’ve already assembled a team of five engineers with backgrounds at Google, Microsoft, Slack, SpaceX, CourseHero and Stash.
We have a limited number of additional spots available on the team for engineers who are excited about building innovative products that leverage the latest advances in techniques like Transformers, RLHF, and LoRA. If that sounds like you, we would love to hear from you.
Please apply via https://www.continua.ai/careers and let's embark on this exciting journey together!
- Brian Kernighan's book, "Unix: A History and a Memoir" paints a compelling picture of just how open-ended research at Bell Labs can be.
FAANG do a lot of research, but the budgeting for those efforts is much more tightly controlled and connected to corporate strategy.
They had to run it for a few years before they realized CS kids who did poorly in the class dropped the major - the implicit signal being "you don't know how to think like a computer scientist".