And, similarly, I don't think this is unique to hands. It is just that most people don't know what their "dominant" foot or eye are. (I'm now curious to know about dominant ears. That is almost certainly a thing?)

My question is largely one of curiosity to know when the dominance fully sets in.

In particular, I would expect the influences to be somewhat counter intuitive. With things like having to use the left hand to hold a caregiver's hand in early walking preferencing the right for accessory use. At infant ages, it would be neat to see if preference of holding a baby on a side influences things.

My contention would be that none of those narratives is a lie. But none would be that useful on their own, either.

Again, I am not meaning this as a knock on their strategy. It is valid and is producing real results. I just don't think their unified IDE is a meaningful contributor to it. The equivalent of boots on the ground is far more of a contributor there.

I had similar complaints about AWS back in the day. It wasn't a lack of ML offering in AWS that made Amazon Photos less useful than Google's photo offering. Despite what some internal folks would say.

They have become a financing company that is looking for where to spend money to make money. That they are spending a lot of money on developers will only last as long as that makes them money.

Again, this is not, necessarily, bad. I just don't trust them to make a software product that will survive outside of their garden.

Do they largely make this work for them internally? Seems so, yes. But taking on any sort of dependency to Google is something you can only do if you can keep up with their very large developer base.

Do these also take a lot of effort to keep going? Absolutely! But that doesn't change that they acquire a ton. They just acquired Wiz this year.

I do question a lot of the focus on a unified IDE when it comes to this strategy. It is not surprising that there is a specific "discontinued google acquisitions" page in wikipedia with that in mind.

AI is an odd example. For one, a lot of the research there is from acquisitions. Somewhat feeding back to my first point. They also were seen as tripping up on a lot of the current AI race, no?

So, sure, lots of spots for software there. But still nothing that would make me think of them as a software company. Or, worse, a lot of software that I don't have a strongly favorable view on. :D

So, again, are they that much more successful at software than other companies? They have more hilarious flops than any other company.

Don't get me wrong. I still use some of the stuff. I don't hate them. I don't even think they are particularly bad at things. I just don't think they are any more successful than other software companies. Specifically at the software side of it.

Consider that they spend more on trying to build up and support this central IDE than most companies dream of losing in productivity to not having this.

I do think Google will continue to get results out of their tooling, as long as they are investing in the tooling. But that is not zero cost. Is it worth it for what they are doing? Largely seems to be.

But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software projects than any other company? They are still largely an ads company, no?

Copying from Merriam-Webster for them:

  Today: tə-ˈdā  
  Friday: frī-dā
  Yesterday:  ˈye-stər-dā

Regardless, fun reading. And please don't take this as a criticism of your pronunciation!

This got particularly bad when we realized that our kid's school was not teaching phonetics, but that the special tutor we hired was running a basic phonetics routine. And that that is really just 44 flashcards for them to work through.

To your point, Spanish generally has 24 phonemes. This is why they can map it to the 26 letters much more straight forwardly. Though, I'm a touch surprised it can map to German so easily, they have more phonemes than English, if I'm not mistaken.

All of that is to say, I'm glad you found the discussion interesting! Apologies if my pet peeve came on too strong. :D

I am curious, btw, I don't understand what you mean about "yesterday" sounding like either "today" or "Friday" The "day" on both of those sounds the same to me?

But, that "external" part is what trips up a lot of people. Few things are confined to only exist within the database. Such that sometimes you can't do locks that accurately portray what we can order outside of the computer system. Think legal clawbacks and the like.