Linked List: September 12, 2022

Monday, 12 September 2022

The Overlook Hotel in Lego 

Terrific work. At a glance, the men’s room and Colorado Lounge look like stills from the film.

Google Pixel Popularity 

Re: my question earlier today asking what’s the best new consumer product from Google in recent years, their Pixel phones came to mind as my personal answer. I last bought a Pixel 4; I might buy a Pixel 7 this fall. But while successful, in some sense, that success is clearly very much as a niche product. I’m linking here to a story from Ars Technica a few weeks back about Pixel market share hitting ... 2 percent in North America:

That sounds incredibly successful, but this is Google’s tiny hardware division we’re talking about, so it’s all relative success. The company is now at 2 percent North American market share, having shipped 800,000 devices for Q2 2022. Along with last quarter, Google is now regularly hitting whole-digit market share numbers. That’s good enough for fifth place, behind Apple (52 percent), Samsung (26 percent), Lenovo/Motorola (9 percent), and TCL (5 percent).

When you need to more than double your market share to catch TCL, you don’t exactly have a hit product line on your hands. 2 percent market share in North America is not a Google-scale success story. Yet the Pixel phones really do seem to me to be the most interesting consumer products (or services) Google has released in years.

Diffusion Bee 1.0: Easy to Install Stable Diffusion for Apple Silicon Macs 

Divam Gupta:

Diffusion Bee is the easiest way to run Stable Diffusion locally on your M1 Mac. Comes with a one-click installer. No dependencies or technical knowledge needed.

Runs locally on your computer no data is sent to the cloud (other than request to download the weights and checking for software updates).

Stable Diffusion is the hot new AI image generator that you can download and run on your own computer. It’s been a bit tricky to get running on Apple Silicon Macs, because (among other factors) the Python situation is complex. Diffusion Bee makes it as easy as downloading a disk image and copying an app to your Applications folder.

Be warned if — like me — you have a busy week ahead. These AI image generators can be a real time sink.

‘Google Employees Alarmed That the Company Suddenly Expects Them to Do Work’ 

Maggie Harrison, writing for The Byte last month:

The company is clearly pushing its workers to increase productivity. In an all-hands meeting a few weeks ago — shortly after disappointing quarterly earnings were announced — CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told employees that “there are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have,” and “we should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity.”

While Google has yet to announce any workforce cuts, its Googlers are worried that performance ratings might inform any pending layoff announcements. And considering that a screenshot obtained by Insider reportedly showed a manager explaining that if next quarter sales “don’t look up, there will be blood on the streets,” those fears, uh, definitely check out.

Month-old story, but I hadn’t seen it until today. Just as a quick “does this ring true?” check: When’s the last time Google came out with a major new product or update to an existing product? From a consumer perspective, it really does seem to me that they’ve stagnated.